The Weekend

It’s Monday, which means you all get the weekend update. This past weekend found me in St. Cloud for the majority of the time. I went up to visit Kristin as this was probably the only weekend we’d get to see each other until Warped Tour on the 28th of June. We are both busy with work, improv (me), karate (her), road races (me), and camps (her) so it’ll be tough finding time to visit, but I think we’ll survive.

I headed to St. Cloud right after I got done with work on Friday afternoon and high rush hour traffic like you wouldn’t believe. It started at the 494 West and 35W north intersection where traffic slowed to a crawl (and often was stop and go) and it stayed that way almost all the way to Albertville. Anyone who ever has to traverse the cities knows that that takes forever. I was in traffic in the cities for well over an hour, all the while contemplating how I could blow up the world without it somehow killing me in the process. I didn’t come up with many good ideas, which is probably a good thing because I was frustrated enough to probably try to blow this big ‘ol rock up.

Anyhow, the rest of Friday night was spent hanging out at Kristin’s house. Saturday we went shopping in the early afternoon only for me to be confronted with another frustrating situation. My mom had recently gotten a gift certificate to Electronics Boutique in the mail, so I had planned on using it while I was in St. Cloud as that is the closest one (barring the ones in the cities, but I won’t shop at any of them because they all employ dicks that don’t know crap, but that’s another story). I forgot the actual card at home, but my mom gave me the gift card number to use so all would be fine……or would it?

It turns out that to use the gift card in the store you need the actual card so they can swipe it. They can’t just type in the number like any other store in the mall. They called their customer support line, but they were basically no help at all. Pretty much, they just told me too bad even after I had told them that I lived 175 miles away and probably wouldn’t be back for who knows how long. What really gets my goat, though, is that if I want to order anything off of their website and pay for it using a gift card, you type in the gift card number with your order. Why the heck can’t they do the same thing in the store? Un-frickin-believable.

Anyhow, the rest of the day was a lot of fun. We went to the gardens in St. Cloud (I forget their name, but they’re famous and stuff) to go for a walk and play some disc. It was nice and relaxing. Later we went to see a local ska band, Fred Savage & The Unbeatables, at the Java Joint. They’re made up of a bunch of Kristin’s high school friends. I know a couple because they go to SJU and they’re cool enough guys.

They put on a pretty good show, although most of their sound is very derivative. The ska sound they have seems to be copied right out of Reel Big Fish and Buck-O-Nine’s playbooks. One of their lead singers also sounded like he was trying to sing exactly like Weezer (a band that I really don’t think is all that great). They also had a couple of Sum 41 moments where they rapped over punk music. Been there, done that, many times before. They were still a fun band to watch, don’t get me wrong, but they just weren’t too original.

Sunday I went to church with Kristin and her family and then drove home. I was going to go to my cousin’s graduation party but they had recently moved and no one had told me where they live. I tried calling some people to find out where they live but no one was around.

I got home and headed to our church league softball. Much unlike last week’s game, I didn’t suck. I knocked out my first left handed home run of the season and had a one-bouncer into the field right handed, so I was happy. I also didn’t field too bad, whereas last week there wasn’t a ball that I could catch.

Well, that’s my weekend in print. I’m kind of tired of typing as I’ve been adding some information to some of the release notes here at work, so I’m going to end here. I hope all of your weekends were as fun as mine!