Where You Come From

I didn’t get much of a chance to write before now, but I am safely home, and quite happy to be so. 

I’m reserving the right to be lazy, so this won’t be the pic entry, but I promise the next one will likely be.  So this time, I’ll just describe the last two days.

The night at the motel wasn’t so bad, and to be honest, I’d have almost rather stayed there the whole time, based on how the whole "stay with Minnie’s cousin" thing worked out.  I originally agreed not to go into great detail about this, but by the end Minnie decided she was unhappy enough with the whole fiasco that she told me to say whatever I needed to to make me feel better about it. 

Don’t, at this point, let me make you think we didn’t have a good time.  We did.  But before I get ahead of myself, I’ll just pick up the narrative as we headed into Birmingham from Leeds, neatly skipping all the showering and checking out of the motel that probaby wouldn’t be entertaining to read anyway. 

Minnie really wanted to find this pastry shop run by three French guys that supposedly exists in the city, but all our internet searching didn’t bear fruit.  We did, however, find a nice little German bakery where we had a delicious breakfast and I got a real cheese danish… and I gotta tell ya, Hostess has nothing on the real thing.  From there, we went directly to the zoo.  I had a freaking blast.  I’m a kid at heart, mostly owing to the fact that my formative years were quite devoid of fun things like zoos and toy stores, so anytime I encounter these kinds of things, I tend to go all wide-eyed.  I would like to point out that this was only the second time I’ve ever been to a zoo.  I won’t go into every little thing, since the pictures will do that job nicely later on, but I will mention a couple of things that we got no pictures of.  I got spit on by a llama, and Minnie got pooped on by a lorikeet, which is a brightly colored little bird roughly the same shape as a parakeet, though a good bit larger.  The llama was in the petting portion of the zoo, and the lorikeets (possibly my favorite part of the whole zoo experience) have a rather special role– for $1.50 you can take a little cup of "nectar" (just a sweet, amino-acid containing drink for the birds) into the enclosure to be mobbed by the lorikeets.  They perch all over your arm and shoulders, fight for a chance to drink a little of that sweet, sweet nectar, and generally use you as a perch until the cups are empty and you toss them into the air and leave. We also got some great pics of an alligator snapping turtle (that guy had to weigh 100 lbs), and some terrific shots of a young male Indo-Chinese tiger, who obliged us by stalking right up by the glass where we were, then settling in the grass a few yards away and vocalizing (roaring, basically) a good dozen times. 

Then things went downhill for a few hours.  Minnie’s cousin, who had, the previous night, said she’d be home around noon, leading us to believe we could get her address and just go on by.  We left the zoo at around one and called her, to discover that she was around 30 minutes away from her house, but that she’d head from Odenville to Leeds "now" and meet us at Walmart so she could show us how to get there (since we were having some trouble convincing the Garmin that Borrough Road existed. Turned out it was actually Dorrough Road. The trouble was that "b" and "d" sound a lot alike on the phone).  So we hurried the 20ish miles from Birmingham to Leeds and waited in the Walmart parking lot.  I could, at this point, narrate the living hell out of our time in said parking lot, but instead I’ll just say how long we waited and narrate the hell out of what followed.  We were definitely there by 2pm. At around 4:15pm, Jennifer showed up. Driven by the friend she’d been with in Odenville.  With all three of her children.  And they all got in our car so we could drive them back to their apartment on Dorrough Road.  After they got into the car, she revealed that she has no car currently.  Why? Oh, because somebody that lives in the apartment complex smashed the back window with a brick… for starters.  The next day, they set her fucking car on fire.  So, afraid to even leave the car in the parking lot, we (I should probably point out that I was afraid– Minnie was really nonchalant about that aspect) went in to drop off our luggage before trying to find something else to do.  Turned out that the bed we were to be sleeping on was kind of broken, because one of the kids had jumped on it and disloged the planks that support the box spring, so it was less a bed than a ramp.  Oh, and they hadn’t actually been there in two weeks, opting instead to stayin Odenville. 

After turning down an invitation to go back to Odenville for a party with this friend, we went to the mall… which turned out to be more or less closing when we got there.  It was, after all, Sunday.  Luckily, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary, but still, if we could have actually dropped off our luggage at around 2 like we thought we would, we could have gone on to the mall like I wanted and had a couple of hours to mess around.  Anyway, after the mall we ate at a restaurant called Stix, which has a Japanese hibachi-style side and a Chinese side.  We ate Japanese, so I can’t say anything about the other option.  Hibachi restaurants are always great, and as usual we had way more food than one person should ever need.  We left there, and luckily Jennifer had not gone to this party, but needed us to come on back so she could "talk to us about something."  Oh boy.  This requires a new paragraph.

As soon as we walked in the door, Jennifer said, "What I wanted to talk to you about was, can you drive me over to (youngest son’s) father’s house?  If I don’t have him home by 8:30, I’m violating my custody agreement.  Oh, and also, it turns out there’s no water for some reason."  So we drove her back to fucking Odenville, then back to the apartment to sleep… but not before we fixed the bed.  We couldn’t get the planks to cooperate, seeing as how they’re only about an inch longer than the bedframe is wide, so I suggested we could just put it on the damn floor, which we did.  Again, Minnie was nonchalant, this time about the lack of water, saying that if it wasn’t back on we would just go buy jugs of water to flush the toilet and wash up.  Guess which happened?  Yep, after a night of sleeping on a broken bed in a shitty apartment with a chance of having our car burned down, I got to wake up and wash my hair in a fucking sink.  With bottled water.  Ever wash you hair with bottled water?  Not easy.  I had to use four of them– one to wet my hair, the other three to rinse the shampoo out.  I’ll skip the trip we took to a place called America’s Thrift Store, which was like a giant Salvation Army and sucked.

After a trip back to Odenville to drop our "host" back off at the home of the friend with whom they’re staying (not every day you get to be chauffer for the person who’s lett

ing you stay with them three hours away from home), we went back into Birmingham for one last trip to the mall before heading home.  Didn’t do much, just bought a Ralph Lauren suit at Macy’s.  Not kidding– Minnie says she wants me in a suit for our wedding, no matter how big or small a service we have, so she took the reigns on the "spend $300+ on an early Christmas present for your fiance" tradition I started when I bought her an iPod two years ago, and bought me a black with grey pinstripes suit.  After alterations it will be sent directly to my house, so I’ll soon be the proud owner of a real custom-tailored suit.  Now I just hope I manage to find plenty of excuses to wear the thing… So, anybody know where I can get an awesome set of cuff links for $30 or less?  The stuff you can get in regular stores are a little bland.