The last free weekend

Blast, that was a freakishly fast month. Of course, any amount of time that I'm off of school seems to go by like lightning. I guess that's kind of the nature of having fun. My last relatively free weekend before getting back into the grind was fun, though.

I took the day off on Friday, and Kerry was off as well. We brought Gwen in to daycare in the morning (mua ha ha) and enjoyed a breakfast at a local greasy spoon. It was overwhelmingly delicious. The place we went to serves ridiculously large portions, so my omelet took up my entire plate. We gorged ourselves. Yum.

In the early afternoon on Friday we went to Southdale and took in a matinee of the Golden Compass. For those of you that haven't read the book, I'm gonna do my best to not post spoilers here. The movie would have been much better if it was longer, but I think the American public is getting sick of 3+ hour fantasy epics, so this one came in under 2 hours. The result was a kind of choppy telling of the tale, with a lot of changes and characters being merged and whatnot. If they release an extended edition DVD I'll buy it, but not as-is. Another gripe is that they cut the movie off well before the book ends. BOO I say! Either way it ends in a cliffhanger, I guess, so it doesn't much matter. Whatever. I was still happy to get to go to a movie with my wife. That experience has become rather rare.

Unfortunately, this weekend our refrigerator decided to completely crap out. I got an email from Kerry while I was at work, informing me that all of the items in our freezer were melting. Great fun. So, we went off to Sears and ordered a new one, which was delivered on Saturday morning. In the meantime, our "refrigerator" was two coolers in the office, and the "freezer" was a cooler outside. I'm glad we don't live in Arizona or something. Yay, none of our food spoiled!

My girls and I went out with our friends Megan and Kristian on Friday night. We had a good dinner and then went back to our house to play some Wii. The 4-player tennis extravaganzas get pretty wild with the four of us, and many a game was played. This all took place during our wonderful lack of a fridge, so all of our libations were kept cool via the back doorstep method. Once again, MN weather provides refreshment.

I went skiing with Ryan and Reuben on Saturday. It ruled. However, it was interesting on a lot of levels. First off, I brought both my snowboard and my skis, planning on doing a little of both. I was going to ski first. So I put my ski boots on and started walking toward the chalet. I heard a loud CRACK and looked down. I had completely cracked the plastic on not one but BOTH of my ski boots. So yeah, that idea was out. I switched into my snowboard boots, threw the skis back into the car, and took off.

Snowboarding proved to be more than I could handle on Saturday. I could ride just fine, don't get me wrong. But sitting down to buckle and unbuckle my back binding gets a little tiring for me and a LOT tiring for the skiers that are waiting for my snowboard-strapping ass. So I decided to rent some skis.

Ryan and I met Reuben at the bar. He ordered two pitchers of beer. After one glass I promptly got up to go and rent my skis, which surprised him because he thought that there would be three of us drinking this bounty of beer and I had left the two of them with basically a pitcher each. By the time I got back, the pitchers were empty. I knew then and there that the day was going to get a lot more exciting.

I hadn't been on skis since first purchasing a snowboard in 1996. It was just like riding a bike, though. My muscles had memory of what was going on, and it was nice to be back on two planks, even if only for the sake of being able to keep up with my friends and not having to buckle myself in. I had a great time. Ryan managed to bowl over a fence. It was amazing. I'll leave that story for him to tell. Needless to say, his "stop on a dime" powers may have been diminished by Amber Bock.

Sunday was relaxing, but I didn't really do anything worth mentioning. I had to study, which sucks. Alas, I have to go to my first Income Tax class tonight, and I'm not really geared up for excitement or anything. It's pretty boring stuff. We'll see if the professor can make it interesting.