November 14, 2000

One year ago: Jim and I want to buy a house. Some things never change. Hey, did I tell you guys our landlord moved out? Our new neighbors are so quiet. It's like a blessing. I still hate our apartment, but at least we don't have the upstairs neighbors from hell anymore.

You can tell it's been a while since I updated by the Halloween pictures I haven't put up yet. Anyway, the pumpkin on the left is Jim's and the one on the right is mine. I didn't think it turned out too bad considering I did it in about ten minutes while hoping no kids would show up at our door. I needn't have worried -- we had a total of four trick or treaters. Jim was mad because I gave them all the "good candy".

Do you ever feel like all I do is go to weddings? Yeah, me too sometimes. Anyway, I had another one this past weekend. My good friend Brenda got married. Molly and I headed home on Thursday for the bachelorette party. Our friend Gretchen was flying in from Atlanta as she was a bridesmaid. That's Gretchen in the picture. You kind of have to know her to know why that picture is so funny. Gretchen is always grouchy and bitchy -- we used to call her Groucho. But we all love her anyway. In that picture, I can tell she's pissed about something. I wish I knew who she was looking at.

Anyway, we all met up at one girl's house and Brenda got dressed for the night. Since I'm from out of town, I wasn't privy to all the preparations, but they had made Brenda a T-shirt and they pinned candy all over it. She had a belt with suckers hanging off it. She had a giant phallic hat. It was crazy. The limo bus arrived and we all piled on to go out to some bars in the city.

I soon found out the point of all the candy. The other girls charged strange men for the opportunity to eat candy. It was something like $2 to eat a piece pinned to the shirt and $3 for a sucker. She had a candy necklace on too, but I don't know how much that cost. Anyway, it wasn't really my bag, but the other girls had all done it when they got married, and Brenda ended up making something like $130, so more power to her. I think I would be too embarrassed to do such a thing, but everyone had fun harassing the strange men.

Everything went well, and many drinks were had by almost all. The trouble began when we made it to one of the final bars. We had just come from a really crowded dance club and were looking for a less-crowded bar with a dance floor and maybe some '80s music. We stopped at one place and sent in a runner to see what was doing. She reported back that the place was dead. The doorman came out and begged us to come in. He told us there was no one downstairs, and we could have the whole place to ourselves, and they would play any music we wanted. Sounded good to us! We all piled in and walked down this precarious spiral staircase to the basement. There was no music. There was a full bar but no one behind it. So we took matters into our own hands and grabbed a few beers. Hey, we would have paid for them if they asked us to! The doorman came downstairs and told us that we would have to go to the bar upstairs if we wanted drinks. At this point, there were about twice as many of us downstairs as there were upstairs. I don't know why they couldn't have opened a register downstairs -- we would have given them a lot of money! Just when things seemed to be settled, one of our party went behind the bar on a dare to grab a bottle of vodka -- and the owner walked in. Oops. He kicked us all out. We were there a total of about ten minutes. I didn't even get to finish my free beer!

Other than that, things were pretty tame. No one threw up, even. I guess we're all getting old. It was fun but we didn't really have enough time in the limo -- the best part is hanging out in the limo and listening to music and singing along, and drinking and eating! I didn't care if we went in the bars at all, but Brenda had to in order to make money! Tomorrow: the rehearsal dinner.