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Three weekends ago, my friend Christine graduated from OSU. There was a big celebration, and her family came down from Idaho. We all ate at a Stillwater restaurant called Tokyo Pot - it's an interesting idea: each table has two pots of boiling broth in the middle, with optional flavorings that each customer can pick. The food is served raw and sliced extremely thin; the idea is that you pick up the raw meat, dip it in the boiling broth (it only took a couple seconds to fully cook), and then ate it with rice and various vegetables that were also cooked in the broth. Frankly, it was an awful lot of effort to go into a restaurant meal - but it was definitely tasty!
But my friend Daniel, Christine's husband, also had family there. Including a little 5ish-year-old nephew who I wound up playing with for a lot of the visit. I was Batman (because duh?) and he was Iron Man. There were many epic struggles. The funny thing is, now both of their families know me more as "Batman" than as "Chris" :p
One of the best parts of the night (imo) was when Christine's dad bought a $194 bottle of 18-year-old scotch to celebrate the occasion:
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Her dad, Daniel, and I shared it. Oh. My. God. I can't even put into words how good it was, aside from the fact that it was the smoothest scotch I have EVER tasted, by orders of magnitude. But after hanging out at their place for a while, Christine went bar-hopping, and I was her 'designated walker'. "Bar-hopping" might be a generous term for it - I bought her a couple shots at Stonewall, and then we walked down the Strip and had mostly water :p But it was still lots of fun!
They're both moving to Missouri this coming weekend. I would be more sad about that, except the Mustang is almost paid off in full, so I'm pretty close to having enough money to just drive up and visit them pretty much whenever the hell I feel like it :p
On the Sunday after the graduation, my parents came to Stillwater to help my sister move some of her stuff back to Enid. We all ate at a taco shop in Stillwater called Fuzzy's (which is also on the Strip) - REALLY good food, and even cheaper than Qdoba! I'm looking forward to going back.
Two weekends ago was Mother's Day weekend. I took my friend Stephanee and her son out to Nagoya, another Japanese restaurant in Stillwater (sushi ftw, although they also have a really great hibachi there). We also went to Blue Spruce, the gelato shop that opened up in Stillwater not all that long ago.
The next day, I went to Enid to be with my mom. I got her an acoustic guitar for mother's day (she's wanted one recently), and we took her out to Chili's to celebrate.
On an unrelated note, my Mustang passed 30k miles on the drive back to OKC:
The 34.2 mpg is accurate: that's 1900 RPM at about 72mph on the highway, with the windows up and AC off (because it was a nice day). So it *was* a 'best-case-scenario', but still: 34 mpg in a muscle car with 305 hp!!
Wednesday of last week, my friends Michelle and Ryan got married. I'm not a huge fan of weddings personally, but hooray for them in any case! The reception was held at a park in Stillwater, and OH MY GOD THE FOOD. Insanely good. I even ate (and enjoyed!) both the red velvet wedding cake and the red velvet cookies Christine brought.
By the way, the kiddo I'm holding above belongs to my friends Carle and James - Carle is one of Michelle's friends, too.
Last weekend, my friends Stephanie, China, Ryan, and some others celebrated Ryan's birthday by going to the annual Renaissance Festival in Muskogee, OK (it's one of the biggest in the country, FYI). We saw many of the same attractions as last year, but I really can't imagine it will ever get old. My parents want to visit it too, so I'm going back in a couple weeks. The photo above is of when I was called on-stage during the "Tribal Circus" act with two other men, to help hold the giant unicycle steady while the performer climbed to the top. That was pretty neat!
After the Fair, we all went back to Stephanie's house out in BFE. I learned a new card game called Munchkin:
It's a card game sort of like Dungeons & Dragons, or Magic: The Gathering, but it's designed to be a funny parody of those games, and easy enough to pick up and learn in a short period of time. "Easy" being a relative term, it still took me an hour or so to nail down most of the rules. But even so, and even though I kind of sucked when I played (in part due to bad luck), I really liked the game a lot! I'm going to buy my own copy of it soon. I wound up helping Stephanie win by teaming up with her, after making her promise that we would all switch to Super Smash Bros. Brawl afterward :p (Which I then dominated at - it is my all-time favorite video game, after all.)
The next morning, we all went to a restaurant called, I shit you not, "Sam & Ella's Chicken Palace" in Talequah, OK. By the way, the place had nothing to do with chicken, aside from the decor. But it DID have some of the best pizza I've ever had - I would put it somewhere in my Top 5, somewhere behind the giant gooey slices at OSU's student union and the cheese pizza with fried crust I had in Italy.
The coming weekend looks to be pretty crazy, too. I'm spending Friday night with my parents and sister in Stillwater, because first thing Saturday morning, we're helping her move into her new apartment there. Hopefully on Saturday night, I'll be hanging out with one of my friends here in OKC. On Sunday we're having a truck-loading/going-away party for Christine and Daniel. After that, I'm driving back to the eastern side of the state to hang out with Stephanie and everyone again, possibly to drive go-karts and swim, although that plan might get replaced with something else entirely.
And if you think these weekends sound fun, just wait until my Mustang is paid off. Because (a) I'm throwing a huge party and going on a huge spending spree, and (b) all bets are off.
