Now that I feel alive again, I feel prepared to give a recap of my weekend…or at least what I remember of it when not about to fall asleep!
Friday night was uneventful, and Saturday morning was occupied by the 3+ mile run from hell (read back a couple entries for the full description of the torture of running in Houston in July). I ran a few errands Saturday afternoon, including finally buying a new camera bag because I have most definitely outgrown my old one. The new bag is not that great, but it was all I could find; Wolf Camera has crappy selection but they were the only store nearby that carried bags big enough for an SLR plus 4 lenses plus accessories. Best Buy, Fry’s, and Target only had small bags. I should have ordered something online, but online it’s harder to tell exactly how big the bag is and how your things will fit, not to mention that I needed the bag for Sunday.
Saturday evening was spent at Pooja’s bridal shower — dinner at Angelo’s followed by the coolest bridal shower I’ve ever been to! It was held at Bath Junkie, a store over near the mall that I’d seen but never entered. I’d assumed that it was just another Bath and Body Works type place, but it turned out to be much cooler! They have all sorts of products — lotions, bath salts, shower gels, shampoo, soap, etc — and you can select your scent (or combine different scents to make something even nicer), mix it up, and then select your color! So you could make lotion that smells like lavender, but is, say, bright green instead of light purple if you wanted to match a bright green bathroom or just wanted something crazy. (As a side note, the store also had hilarious rubber duckies in the form of celebrities and historical figures.)
As part of the shower, we each got to make our own bath salts and lotion. I chose a scent that was a blend of jeweled citrus, honeysuckle and rain (I am writing that down so that I remember if I want to have it made again), and made my bath salts bright blue and the lotion orange. Fun was had by all, even Becca who, despite professing to hate silly bridal shower games, secretly must enjoy them because she certainly plays them with vigor. I won the “Best TP Accessory” contest when I made Pooja a braided bracelet out of toilet paper. Woot!
From there, it was home to wait for Chris to arrive from Galveston to pick me up to head to Dallas. He’d originally hoped to get to me around 11:45; he actually arrived at almost 1:30. He’d been doing a wedding that turned chaotic, and then had to help a couple guys with a flat tire when he stopped for gas. So, at 1:30 a.m., we were on our way. I valiantly stayed awake until about 4:30, at which point my eyes started drooping and I just couldn’t keep myself from dozing. Chris, thankfully, was fine.
We arrived at the hotel at 5:30 a.m. and slept for exactly one hour, getting back up at 6:30 to drive the short distance to the triathlon, meet up with Karen and Sheila, and do the race. It was HOT and HUMID but still fun. The swimming shots turned out pretty bad because they were coming out of the water with the sun directly behind them (horribly backlit) but my biking and running shots came out well I thought. By 10:30 we were done and by 11:30 Chris and I were back on the road to Houston. We stopped for lunch at McDonald’s, but by 2:30 I was back to drooping eyes. Chris, miraculously, was wide awake. In the end, my slight worry about spending eight hours in a car with a guy I’d spent all of 15 minutes talking to previously (because I’m not a huge fan of making small talk with strangers) turned out to be needless. When I managed to stay awake, we chatted about photography, music, sports, life, and all sorts of stuff. Photography is his full-time business, and it’s always interesting to hear about what that entails, since doing it full-time is a pipe dream for me. Not ever going to happen, of course, but pipe dream…
I got home at 4:30, downloaded all my photos from the flash cards, organized them, and then started uploading to my server. I then had to go play a soccer game! I made it through the game and even played decently for someone who was exhausted and hadn’t played soccer in almost two months but we lost. We always lose. It’s depressing.
