Happy New Year!

Again, no photographs.

It may be a good thing....

Anyway, myself and two of the church guys decided to spend New Years Eve at L's house in Mineral Wells... a mere 67 miles from my house, and I had to work New Years Day at the flea market, so I would just spend the night there and drive to work from Mineral Wells. OK.

So we had an OK time. We played dominoes. We played scrabble. We watched movies.

L & H drank beer. (we're a drinking, cussing kinda church... anything but holier-than-thou) I was drinking Mikes Hard Lemonade, because I never could choke down beer and I wasn't up to vodka. But nobody got drunk, we were just chilling.

L's parents, who live on the same block also stopped by, I think they wanted to get a look at the guys that their son has been hanging around at church, just to make sure we didn't have pentagrams tattooed on our foreheads or something.

Anyway they are one of those country style couples that you don't see much of anymore. They talk at the same time as the other, carrying on completely different conversations and you're supposed to keep up with both of them. And they're both about as deaf as a stump.

L's father wanted to discuss his days in the navy, and was telling a rather amusing anecdote about a rather drunken trip to Juarez, Mexico when his mother broke off from discussing the merits of various cornbread recipes and shouted... "Why don't you tell them about the green stamps?" Of course, this interjection didn't warrant so much as a eye blink and he continued his stream on consciousness...

"THE GREEN STAMPS. Oh you wouldn't tell them about THAT would you now?" and something along those lines several times through.

And he continued despite it all until she finally just couldn't take it any more and finally blurted out, "He was in a Mexican bordello, and he was trying to buy a prostitute with green stamps!"

At that point, L's father stood up with full military posture and announced, "It was nice meeting you boys, but I think it's high time we moved along and let you have your fun..." and marched out the door.

H & I were both about rolling on the floor, laughing so much it hurt, and L was saying, "Y'all, don't make fun of my parents!"

Make fun of them? Hell, I wanna adopt them.

So, after the ball dropped, I went to sleep and woke up in plenty of time to get to work, and since I didn't wanna bang around a strange kitchen making coffee, I said to myself, "Self, why don't you just stop and get one of those jumbo coffee's from 7-11 or Racetrack or someplace on the way in... you got plenty of time."

So off I go, and stop at the first convenience store I see, and they haven't got any brewed. Neither did the next. Or the next. And they're looking at me like I'm requesting caviar.

It's 8 AM, on January the 1st, after a very large percentage of the population has been intoxicated, and nobody has any blasted coffee!

It wasn't until I got to Weatherford, about 17 miles down the road to Ft. Worth, that I finally walked into a convenience store that has one of those giant walls with a dozen coffee dispensers, and one, count them.... one... of those blasted coffee machines actually had hot coffee in it.

I swear, I could have scored heroin easier.

Finally got some caffeine in my system, and got to work, and it was actually a decent day.

And one of these days, I'm going to actually post that I had a boring uneventful week and everybody who reads my blog will have an aneurysm.