Ship in a Bottle

My high school buddy Andrew moved back to Missouri this weekend on Saturday, his birthday, the day before mine. He’s done with the Navy, now he and the Mrs. Are setting up shop in Columbia. Columbia is about an hour from home and I usually go there when I want to do some serious Internetting. With them in town permanently, the property value just went way up in Columbia.

So we’re both 28 years old now. My birthday was unremarkable. It was just a Sunday hanging out with my parents. We had barbecued pork steak.

Monday I tagged along to Columbia. Andrew’s whole family was there, doing numerous moving-related tasks before the moving van arrives tomorrow. I just want to say for the record that I hate Sam’s Club. Eventually, we even recruited his sister, once she got off work. Her apartment has a zebra-striped rug that prompted me to say, “The 80’s called… they want their rug back.” It was straight out of the hotel suite from Alternate 1985. And people made fun of my old apartment… but I digress.

Why did I “tag along,” you ask? Because I didn’t notice that my driver’s license expired. Oops. So now I have a hot new picture, the sort of mug shot only a registered sex offender can pull off. In addition to the new driver’s license, I also had to pay for two tuxedos. My “Kansas City Reloaded” fund is rapidly shrinking. As the good Captain would say, “I’ve been hemorrhaging money this week.”

I might be house-sitting for them the first week of August, just prior to my weekend in KC. This weekend, I will either be in Kirksville, St. Charles, or watching bad movies with the Captain and the Amazing Brando.

Meanwhile, I am rereading the seventh Harry Potter book, which finally came out on paperback (only took ‘em two years after the hardback release). I enjoyed the sixth movie immensely, and might have more to say on the matter of film adaptations later.

For now, I just wish I could be reading it at a coffee shop in Kansas City. I am not looking forward to August, when I have to go back to subbing. I am dreading it. I miss having a life, too. I miss it a lot these days. My world is awfully small at the moment, but at least everyone else is moving around, repositioning themselves into a new environment for me. I can see it through the warped glass of this bottle. This bottle… of Jim Beam? I wish.

Perhaps soon enough.

Let’s see… a brief, itemized synopsis of the week’s minor changes in the status quo (anecdotes optional), an obscure reference, a dose of bleakness, and a quote from the Captain… all that’s missing is a listening list, and I have myself an old-school blog post…

But I don’t really want to spark a string of comments about Nicholas Hooper—not for this post, anyway. So I’ll leave it at that. Tuxedos are expensive, Harry Potter is fun, Columbia sucks just a little bit less, and I have a serious yearning to slip out of the noose before school starts.