The Happiest New Year

What an incredible weekend I had! I'm absolutely exhausted today, but it's well worth it. It started out on Friday when I dislocated my shoulder while going down a slide. I don't work on Fridays, which is great obviously. Last Friday though, shit hit the fan and I was required to work for a few hours. KB didn't have to work but he had to pick up his check. KB's work and my work are very close together so he gave me a ride down to the office on his way to get his check. After we were all done KB bought me lunch and we went to the park to eat. I wanted to play a little on the playground when we finished eating, and KB joined me. I went down the slides a couple of times and climbed around a bit. I went down the tunnel slide again, KB was standing on top of it, and something went terribly wrong. I suppose I was going too fast and I was slammed against the wall of the tunnel slide with incredible force. I ended up coming out of the slide head-first with a horrific pain in my right shoulder. The look on KB's face I will never forget. He was really worried, as was I, because I couldn't move my arm. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do if my shoulder was broken. KB asked if I wanted to sit down and I told him that I just needed to walk it off. Suddenly I felt the bones in my shoulder shift and everything just popped back into place. I've never dislocated anything before and it was the grossest thing I've felt when it popped back. Friday night we had an impromptu gathering with a few friends. Suffice it to say, tequila was consumed, fun was had by all, I passed out on the floor sitting up against our friend KB's legs. Husband eventually escorted me to bed without incident.

The next day Husband had to work. We've been putting off getting firewood for several weeks now so KB and I decided to go while Husband was gone. Several miles down an unpaved, muddy, bumpy road lives KB's friend Mountain Man. Mountain Man started building a house a few years ago and has not finished it yet. It is a very cool house. It's three stories and all of them have a deck the entire way around. MM lives on five acres and has a couple of horses and lots of dogs. One of the dogs, a hound, had puppies four months ago and they are the cutest pups I've seen. They're a mix of hound, lab and husky. KB and I took our dog and our friend's dog to MM's, so all told there were seven or eight dogs running around. It was great. They all got along really well. The pups loved playing with Ben, our dog. The mom seemed to be sizing Ben up, figuring out if he'd be a good dad to them. Unfortunately for her, Ben's chopped.

MM also has a huge tractor thing. I know it's not a tractor, it's a frontloader or something. That thing makes really quick work of getting wood. It pulls the trees out in seconds. The hardest part, really, is finding trees to cut up. There's all sorts of rules about what kind of wood you can take out of the forest, so you have to be mindful of them. KB took me to see an amazing view of the canyon and the mountains. The sky was just beginning to darken so it had an almost purple hue. The mountains, now snow covered, peeked over the top of the canyon ridge. They looked so close you could touch them. It was a calm evening, barely a breeze.

We ended up with both of the trucks full of wood and made our way back home in the dark. Husband was home with the rest of our crew. Most of the guys played a game of Risk and we just hung out for a while. We ended up playing music and drums and singing into the night and stayed up way too late. We had to get the house ready for the New Year's party the next day. So we had a slumber party in the front room, I think four of us ended up sleeping out there, and woke up blurry-headed and unmotivated to clean house.

The party was planned on very short notice. One of our friends from down in the valley called a couple of weeks ago to find out what we were doing for New Year's. Husband said, "I don't know, I guess partying with you guys." And then we were having a party. Roommate had a couple of friends come from out-of-town and we were expecting a bunch more from the valley.

Roomates friends, goodness, what can I say about them? Rough around the edges to say the least. We'll call them S&T. S is a study in human development. I'm sure that she could be studied for years and the researchers would still have unanswered questions. S is an extremely apologetic person. She says she's sorry for everything. I have trouble with this kind of person because at some point, they're not really sorry. You can't be sorry for everything, it's impossible. Being sorry indicates that you are at fault for something. I hate it when people use words to the point of rendering them useless. Anyway, she's sorry for everything and likes to tell extremely detailed stories. I like detail as much as the next person, and I obviously like to tell stories. The difference is, I'm writing something that people can choose to read or not. I don't corner people at a party and tell them, in excruciating detail, about the death of my parrot and how it related to my bad marriage, divorce and subsequent move. And I don't keep repeating myself while I'm telling the story. So we have one sorry repeater, if you're keeping track.

T and S are together but not married. T is a one-upper, class A one-upper. He's not only done what you've done, but he's done it better, faster, longer, more often, whatever. Not only is he a one-upper but he fancies himself to be quite the comedian. And here's another one of my peeves, people who make themselves laugh. Now, I'm known to be a laugher. I love laughing, love making people laugh, I love being funny. But if you're talking and you say something that only you are laughing at, it's probably not that funny. And when you do this like every two minutes and you also have this maniacal, high-pitched, insanely annoying laugh, I don't like you. Yes, just like that, right off the bat, you and I will never be friends. That's not to say I'm going to kick you out of the house, I'll be polite. But you are not my friend.

Eventually we rallied and started cleaning, which actually went fairly quickly. Husband and our friend Stretch went to the store to get supplies for the party. My request? Snacks to feed people since I wasn't making dinner or anything. While the rest of us were cleaning Husband and Stretch were really doing a great job on stocking up with necessary supplies. They did bring back beer, enough beer for a good party. Their snack of choice? The snacks they figured would feed at least 30 people who were driving for over an hour to get to our house? A single, small box of Chicken in a Biscuit. I'm sorry, come again? Yes, that's right. A small box of chicken flavored crackers. So I though of various serving ideas for the Chicken in a Biscuit, perhaps putting them individually on trays with a sprig of parsley and passing them, very classy. We managed without many snacks, thankfully. People brought stuff with them and there was enough for everyone to eat. I made two pans of "special" brownies so that helped.

The fun really began once people started showing up. There were many people from the valley we haven't seen in a long time. There were new people we'd just met that night. It was a great group of people though. Everyone got along and there was no drama. That's all I cared about. At some point during the night I was talking with an old friend from the valley when I thought I smelled poo. I looked at the carpet and saw what appeared to be poo. I asked the valley friend, "Cas, does that look like poo?" The lights were down and it was hard to tell what it actually was, but she thought it had the potential to be poo. So I grabbed my CSI flashlight and lit it up. Sure enough it was poo, not only in one spot, but tracked through the entire living room in a neat little line. Door to door poo line. Of course, it had to be cleaned up. After I picked up the big chunks, I got the cleaner and a towel and then S decided she wanted to clean it up for me. She made a big production about how she was cleaning it for me and pretty much stopped the party to clean up the poo. Me, I probably would have kept it more on the DL, but what do I know? After the poo was cleaned up I announced that we were having a poo crisis and could everyone please check their shoes so we could avoid another poo emergency.

Not ten minutes later I looked down and saw another suspicious brown spot on the carpet. Could it be? Yes it was, more poo! After cleaning it up I finally found the source of the poo. There was a big glob of it on the front porch. Why I was the only one to find this is beyond me. After removing the poo from the front porch I was confident that we'd have no more poo disasters. But no, my friends, there were four more poo incidents that night. Periodically I would scan the room with my CSI flashlight and on each occasion I was face-to-face with more poo on the carpet. Between the poo and all the people spilling beers I was cleaning most of the night. At one point late into the night, KB spoke up and announced, "Okay people! You all need to start checking your shoes and stop spilling your beers. This lady needs a rest!" Of course all of these incidents were highly amusing and I could hardly contain my laughter long enough to scrub poo out of the carpet. It was funny, or at least we made it funny.

The night climaxed with a lengthy drum circle session, it was awesome. I'm sure the neighbors weren't thrilled, but it was great. Husband was playing his harmonicas, there were like five or six drums being pounded on, the energy was amazing. Roommate was out of his head on miscellaneous drugs and alcohol and fell into the fire pit outside. Lucky for him there was a metal cover on it so he only got badly burned rather than char-broiled.

All-in-all the party went off without a hitch, well except for the poo, and everyone said it was the best one yet. Who knows, maybe we'll make it a tradition. I hope you all had a great New Year's and you're ready to take on this one. Cheers 'till next time!