All Roads lead to Trenton

The second part of our weekend. This is the happy part. Click here to read the sad part.

We joined a large group of people from the church for lunch, and then went down to a previously scheduled visit with our friend Bob down in Trenton. Bob is a really great guy. I should revive the "My friends are awesome" series for a post about him. He's a professor of military history and we don't see him nearly as much as we'd like.

The trip down was very smooth right up until the last half mile, when the GPS told us to make a quick U-turn on to an unlabeled street. We missed it and took quite a while to get turned around.

His dog Rosie nailed me right in a sensitive spot as soon as I got in the door. When I was done writhing around on the floor, I was all like, "Oh, yeah. Bitches sure like poking me in the crotch!"

Bob grilled like the madman he is. He had prepared an insane spread for us, Peruvian-marinated roast chicken,  smokehouse style sausage and ribs,  grilled Tandoori-style prawns, corn on the cob rubbed with sea salt and olive oil.

The table looked like a Food Network Food Porn show.

Also present were Phil and Frederick, each with his family, Bob's girlfriend Miss Cleo.

Obligatory

 


and a friend of hers.


Phil and Frederick brought Lego minifigs to trade with Lily. She brought her collection in the plastic ball she uses to house them.

Na,na,na,na,na,na,na,nanananana Katamari Damacy!

She had a really good time. She played with Danny again and ran back and forth to show me Lego Superman's head on top of the wedding dress body. (Which was just lame and weaksauce, though it was funny when I put BATMAN's head on the wedding dress body five minutes earlier.)

Lame

Hilarious

 













She also helped Danny draw some pictures of Superman being teased by Batman. I got a lot of ribbing because I was the only Superman partisan in attendance and she had a good time playing along. She does like to tease and be silly and be the center of attention, and these were all satisfied by her activities.

And she's usually good about not teasing someone who doesn't want to be teased. She'll stop if she thinks she'll really hurt someone's feeling and I was laughing as much as anyone. However, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, and after the initial joking died down, she said that she would draw me two pictures of Batman crying and being teased by Superman. (I told her I'd rather have pictures of Superman being happy.)

I don't know what moved her to make the offer exactly, if she felt compelled to make amends or if she just wanted to show some solidarity because it seemed I was all alone in my opinion. It was a nice effort.

It was an extremely nice visit. I like all the people there quite a bit. We set out to head home at a little past 9:00 PM and a sudden squall erupted in front of us. We didn't get four miles before the road was blocked by a fallen tree branch. We tried a detour, but that was also blocked by another fallen limb, and then we tried a second detour and that one was blocked by flood waters. We texted  a warning to Bob and headed back to his place to regroup, and we almost didn't make it, because there was a street lamp down across the highway.

I wondered aloud when this visit had turned into the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but Bob engaged in no more depravity than was the norm for him and quickly found us an alternate route home. We rolled in around midnight, and I'm really glad we made the trip. It was exhausting and invigorating all at once.