It’s all a blur in my mind today, but I know I had a good time this weekend. I had several good times, really. Let’s set the Way-Back Machine, Sherman, and I’ll try to cover the highlights of the days:

Thursday: (Yes, Thursday. It’s my weekend, I’ll start it whenever I damned well please. So there.) Dinner date with Lilith. Lots of conversation both mundane and meaningful. Teasing, flirting, all that good stuff.

Friday: Work closed down early, so I took off to the Greyhound station to help Hanson-Kun greet Kylanath and ayagi. (Side note – I accidentally blew off Dalemar for this. Bad ducky.) Ended up dining… correction, nibbling fondue and waiting and then dining… at Gustav’s. On Sandy, not the other one. (Another side note – Hanson-Kun and Kylanath both have pretty good write-ups for the weekend.)

Saturday: Up way way too damned early so I could make backup tapes on the AS/400 in time to head downtown to Powell’s and meet up with Lance and Isaac. Completely on a whim I called up Lil’, who coincidentally also had the same destination planned at a convenient time. So I was saved the trouble of waiting for a bus, and granted the boon of a bit of Lilith’s company before the major part of my weekend began. She teased me mercilessly, but she does that anyway. I just keep telling myself it’s part of her charm…

After mistaking the coffee room for the magazine room, I finally met up with Isaac and then Lance. We headed to the gathering place by way of Just Be Toys (because you can’t get too many opportunities to drool over imported toy-like goodness). We learned exactly why Lance owns a Dodge Ram instead of a ground-hugging sedan.

The afternoon and evening were spent eating, drinking (no, not that kind of drinking), talking and playing console games. By which I mean Soul Calibur 2. Exclusively. As always, Raphael is my main man. I successfully defended myself against all comers Saturday, until I finally got tired of stabbing controller buttons with my thumb. Besides, a guy’s gotta sleep some time, right?

Sunday: After getting almost no sleep (so much for that idea), we piled into vehicles to journey coastward in search of a campground suitable for fine picnic dining. We took the straight shot out Hwy 26 and found ourselves at Ecola State Park. (“Eeeee-co-laaaaa!”) We took the left fork and enjoyed the view from the promontory bluff. There’s nothing quite like seeing puffy clouds scudding by mere dozens of feet overhead. It was that kind of day at the Oregon coast, friends.

Pictures were snapped, sandwiches ingested, and a few brave souls adventured down to the (barely) available beach. I wasn’t in the right shoes for such activity, sad to say. So much for getting my feet wet, eh?

My bright idea for getting some beach time for all of us involved taking that right fork. We tried, but in vain. We don’t know why the gentleman with the STOP sign and the bright orange vest was detaining vehicles along that road but we didn’t wait the half-hour it would’ve required to satisfy our collective curiosity. Oh well. We decided to pack it in and head homeward-ish.

Which would’ve been more fun but for the fact that Hwy 101 was being partially detoured through “downtown” Cannon Beach. On a Sunday afternoon. On Labor Day Weekend. Yes, you can imagine the snail’s-pace action. At one point I looked out the right-side passenger window wondering who would be walking alongside our car, only to realize it was Isaac, who’d been riding in Lance’s truck but decided to amuse himself for a minute or two. Hilarity ensued as he then jogged across the street to go grocery shopping and was almost lost to us since traffic started moving faster at the same time.

Once back on the highways I started nodding off again. Stupid lack of sleep. And I can’t really sleep in a moving vehicle or I get dangerously motion-sick. Nodding off was bad enough as it is. The trip back wasn’t all bad, of course, and the detour to Fry’s was quite welcome.

Mind you, not that I should be allowed in that building at any time. I’m very good about only buying games that are at least a year old and have been drastically marked down. No way am I spending upwards of $40 on computer games. For $20 I picked up the Baldur’s Gate 2 set (original and expansion), which oddly enough was placed just down the aisle from a $20 copy of just the original game. Go figure.

That night saw a mild resurgence of Soul Calibur 2 gaming, but generally we just all wanted to go to sleep. Those grandiose plans of being on the road by seven o’clock didn’t pan out very well, though. Heh.

Monday: We all peeled ourselves off the floors and chairs and prepared to give Hanson-Kun his house back, more or less the way we found it. Wendi drove out and brought me home so I could mind the rugrats as she did a gig. I took the opportunity to introduce the kids to Baldur’s Gate 2, which (of course) Erica mastered and surpassed the boys at after a mere hour of watching how I played it. Damn but that girl’s smart. Her big brother’s damned smart too, but sometimes Erica really surprises me. I did train Alex on how to install the game, which he did all by himself on the “little computer” and he’ll be doing for his mom’s computer at some point soon.

One last hurrah for my weekend was a surprise “lunch dinner thing” with Lilith and Dalemar. A couple of hours with those two over the fine dining available at My Father’s Place is the perfect way to wind up a mini-vacation, I’ll tell the world. And I even got some fun reading material out of it. (My thoughts on the Spider Robinson “Callahan’s Place” fare will appear in a later entry, mark my words.)

And that about covers it. I’m sure there are bits and pieces of anecdotal fun that I’m forgetting, and I may just make silly little entries out of them in the days to come.

So, how was your weekend?