What a fantastic time I’ve had since my last blog entry! Huzzah! Let’s start with the Great Lord of the Rings Adventure first. As I mentioned previously, Chris and Stephen showed up. Steve arrived first, and unfortunately he had to witness the chimichanga disaster. You know how we had planned to have mexican food? Well… Mom pulled the wrong meat out of the freezer. Turned out she grabbed the bag of sloppy joe meat, not the lovely shredded beef chimi meat. Oops. We had a good laugh about that, then she went back to the freezer and grabbed another bag of meat. That wasn’t the right bag either. That turned out to be some weirdly awful smelling curry concoction that none of us ever remembered making. I hate to say it, but I now suspect there’s an Indian family hiding out in our house somewhere… and they can’t cook. If I could find them I’d help them out, but nope, all they do is hide and stick stinky food in our freezer.

Anyway. 🙂 Mom ended up making ground beef chimis and some enchiladas, so that worked out alright. Kevin came over for dinner as well, but unfortunately Chris hit traffic and didn’t make it until around 8:00pm. It was great seeing him again. We all ended up sitting around the table, laughing like mad, and generally killing time until it was time to leave for the movie. Around 10:30 we were wandering around the house when suddenly my cell phone rang – I answered it and it was my friend Sujit saying, “How’s your line?” I was baffled, so I made him explain – he was standing in line outside a theatre in New York, waiting to go to a midnight showing up there. With that bit of news, we rushed out the door to go to our theatre to see if we were going to have to stand out in the cold as well. We met up with another friend – Angela – there and thankfully the line wasn’t too long. We ended up standing outside for about 15-20 minutes before we all got inside and settled. I had a backpack full of candy, Chris bought popcorn, we were ready.

What can I say about Return of the King? Amazing. It has to be the biggest collection of the most beautiful images I have ever seen in my entire life. If that movie doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Picture, then I will officially have a fit. The art was mind-blowing, the effects were astounding, the acting was phenomenal, and all together, it made me laugh, cry, cheer, clap, everything. Full range of emotions. You *have* to go see it, it’s history in the making! I really hope the projections are right and they make tons of money off of it. It so deserves to break the records.

The rest of the week was equally fantastic. After all the excitement – and not to mention, staying up until 4am – Chris and I couldn’t get up until about 1:00 the next afternoon. Soon after we woke up, we set off for Washington, DC to visit a sister of his that lives in DC. We met up with her and her fiance and had a wonderful time. We got to tour the grounds of a huge house near Foxhall Road (cause of his sister’s job), we went to Best Buy and a really fun used CD stores! I *love* used CD stores! There was a great one I used to go to all the time when I lived in Tucson – Bookman’s – they had the coolest stuff and it was always so cheap. I was seriously missing that place, and then Chris’ sister suggested going to a used CD store and I got all excited. I ended up buying four CDs there – well, actually, Chris took the CDs from my hand in the store (I thought he was just looking at them), but then he refused to let me pay for them. Instead, he whipped out cash and refused to let me pay him back. He’s sweet that way. In fact, he wouldn’t let me pay for anything while he was here. I tried really hard to hide some money in various places – his coat pocket, his shoes – but he kept finding it and giving it back. I’ll get him next time, I swear it! 🙂

After the CD store, we went out to dinner, then went back to his sister’s place to watch ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’ You know what’s nice? Holding someone’s hand while watching a movie. It was just lovely. In fact, I kind of miss it. We drove back to my house around 9:30ish, but obviously weren’t very tired since we had woken up around one in the afternoon. So, it was time for another movie – Jurassic Park 3. I think that movie’s meant to be scary, but we just ended up laughing at it. But that was fun too. As was the thumb war that ensued out of boredom when Mom switched the TV to ‘Changing Rooms.’

The next day we went shopping for a while, then went to Wendy’s for lunch. I tried to pay for that, but this time Chris was in cahoots with the lady working there. Both of them ganged up on me and wouldn’t let me pay. After that it took about fifteen minutes just to get out of the parking lot because of the mad holiday shopping rush, so we decided just to go and watch another movie. Traffic was hideous, we only had about two and a half hours before he had to go, so there really wasn’t any other option. We ended up watching Star Wars: Episode Two, which I also found highly funny. Why? Because Senator Amidala gets all miffy with Anakin because he looks at her “like that”, but then she goes prancing around in skimpy little dresses. For some reason I found that very funny at the time. She shouldn’t be complaining that she’s getting that kind of attention from a teenage boy if she’s wandering around with her entire back exposed. Hehe.

Finally, Chris had to leave so he’d make it back to North Carolina at a somewhat reasonable hour. It was sad – we were having fun, dang it. Stupid geography, always gets in my way. He made it home safely, though, so that’s good.

After all the excitement died down I kind of went through a little funk where the headaches came back pretty strongly, kept spiking fevers between 3:00-5:30am. Needless to say, that really threw off my sleeping schedule. I’d be awake until 6:30am, then felt too icky to wake up before three in the afternoon. Thankfully I worked myself back on track due to having to wake up for church on Sunday, and then waking up at 7:00am (ack!) this morning for a very interesting meeting.

I had an appointment with Deborah Sams, the CEO of First Star, a very lovely charity that Peter Samuelson is the President and Co-Founder of. As I’ve mentioned previously at some point this week (but at the moment I’m too busy doing happy dances to go back through the archives and give you a link to the pertinent post), I wasn’t really sure what they wanted me to do, but they all seemed quite keen to talk to me. So this morning at 8:00am I boarded a bus that took me to the train that took me to downtown Washington, DC. However, the trip didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would and it turned out I had an hour to kill. So, I wandered down Connecticut Ave. and ended up taking pictures of the White House. It was great. I’ve never been along the backside of the White House before. Mostly because almost every time I’ve been there before it’s been blocked off, and then the last few times I’ve just forgotten about it. It was nice to come up to it, the sun shining, a nice crisp chill in the air. A nice patriotic feeling came over me as I stared at it. And then that was that and it was time to go. I hiked back up Connecticut Ave (in heels, no less!), back over to where the First Star office is, and up I went.

I must say, I’ve met a lot of North Carolinians lately. Do you think someone’s trying to tell me something? Ms Sams has to be one of the nicest, though. We talked for almost an hour, went through a lot of topics, and ended up coming up with some great things to work on together. I’m not going to get into details, though, because well, that’s just not kosher. 🙂 Needless to say it was a fabulous meeting, I had a great time, and I even did a happy dance (not during the meeting, obviously.)

And now I need to cut this short because I’m heading out the door to go see Return of the King again! Huzzah! This day just keeps getting better and better. 🙂 Happy Holidays everybody!