Rambling Rhodes

Weekend Review This weekend can

Weekend Review

This weekend can be boiled down pretty much to a single term: Sleep. I got off work at 5 p.m. on Friday and drove to St. Paul to stay with the girl for the weekend. We were supposed to cook together.

Oh, for the record, two weekends ago, I introduced Mel to one of my favorite culinary discoveries from the the year I lived in Japan: Japanese Curry. This is isn't Indian curry, or the lame ass Jamaican curry, or the weak curry powders you find on American grocery shelves. No, this is Japanese curry, and I make it extra special because my parents, who live in Japan, are sure to bring back the main Japanese ingredients each year, thus satiating my occasional craving for the wonderful stuff.

I only share my Japanese curry cooking prowess with a few people, mainly because I like to hog it all for myself, but I thought Mel was ready to experience the wonder of Ryan's Japanese curry. The result? Yet another Japanese curry addict was born. She loved it so much, she wanted to cook it again when I got to St. Paul on Friday. She had even gone shopping to buy the other necessary curry components.

However, upon arriving in St. Paul, I realized my body wanted to be in a horizontal rather than a vertical position, so I plopped heavily into Mel's bed at about 7:15. Mel joined me without protest. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I saw the clock had warped ahead to 11:30. Oh. Great. That pretty much meant I would be up until 3 a.m. Mel woke up with the same thought. We kicked around a couple of ideas. We could cook curry. We could go to a bar and ingest just enough spirits to ensure slumber. We could eat cookie dough.

We opted to eat cookie dough, approximately two cookies of cookie dough each, to be precise, and for some strange reason, that did the trick. So, from 12:15 to 11:15, I continued my sleep marathon. Mel could only hack sleeping until 9:30, at which time she got up and started doing some sort of chores. Having no chores of my own to do, I opted to complete my 15 hour sleep cycle. Ah, bliss.

Not surprisingly, I awoke with a considerable horde of energy, what with my body having spent the last 15 hours with nothing better to do than burn fat into energy, but finding no use for energy, turning the energy back into fat, and then back into energy. I apparently woke up during the energy-creation peak of the cycle, so I decided to go for a run around nearby Como Lake. In my eager enthusiasm to get my feet a' runnin', I forgot to check the weather. Hell, it was sunny, so it had to be warm. Right? Wrong. It was cold. Not just any cold, but Minnesota cold. The kind of cold that makes icicles look like warm fluffy pillows. And it was windy. So, here it was cold and windy, and I was running around a lake, a watery expanse not known for its ability to halt blowing wind.

So, there I was, running headlong into a harsh, bitter, angry cold wind, with exposed face and ears, because my idea of head protection is a loose bandana tied in skull cap fashion. The biting cold brought tears to my eyes, which quickly froze. Yet I pushed on, primarily because I knew that, once I got halfway around the lake, I would be able to run with the wind rather than against it. Como Lake isn't very big, maybe a mile-and-a-half around, which should have been nothing for me, a veteran of five mile treks. Still, when I finally started running with the wind, I felt as though I had run 10 miles while pulling a tractor.

What better way to recover from hypothermia than by taking a nice hour long nap? Which is exactly what I did, much to Mel's total and complete amazement. When I awoke again, Mel convinced me that we should try to do something, anything, besides sleep. I reluctantly agreed, even though the bed sure was still warm and inviting, but oh well.

We browsed a few shops on Grand St., one of the nicer shopping stretches in St. Paul. Our initial stop was a relatively new Chinese furniture and knick-knack shop, but I can't remember the name. For blog purposes the shop will be referred to as the Chinese shop with neat but really expensive shit (CSWNBRES). We looked around for about half an hour, when I noticed a unique wine rack, which was really a television entertainment center with a wine rack shoved where the TV usually sits. All for the palty sum of $1,600. Mel loved it.

"Honey, we should buy this together!" she said.

*Reset Brain* *Give puzzled look* *Furrow brow* *Utter disbelieving HAH!*

What? Buy what? Together what? What? What? What?

Now, I love Melissa, and I love the time we spend together, and I like buying her flowers and taking her out to eat. But, suddenly, I got the feeling she's looking to advance things to another level, a level I'm nowhere even close to entertaining. She wants to have a toothbrush at my place? Great. She wants to have deodorant? Terrific. She wants to leave some body lotions? Super! She wants to go halves on a Chinese wine rack that costs $1,600? SCREEEEEEECH! Whoa, horsies! Whoa! Come on, horsies! Please whoa!

"Um, I don't need. . . we don't need. . .I don't think we, I, er. . . *adjust common sense meter* We're not going to start buying furniture, baby." I finally said, and it took so much effort, I kind of needed a nap.

"But this would look great next to the bookcase in my apartment," she said, apparently oblivious to my apprehension.

I opted to file away the conversation into the "consult later" area of my brain. Mel and I apparently need to talk about our relationship and set some common boundaries. Thankfully, we won't see each other all this week because she's starting school again. Maybe some time and perspective will do us both some good.

Sunday rolled around, but not until after I indulged in an additional 10 hours of sleep. Mel and I finally got around to cooking the Japanese curry together and, no surprise, it was a culinary masterpiece. Man, that shit is good! Mel had to work at 4 p.m., so we said our tongue wrestling good-byes and I started the drive back to Rochester. I always enjoy the drive back to Rochester because I don't feel rushed. There's no timetable that I have to meet. I can just watch the world roll by and think easy thoughts. Car time can be pleasant time if you don't think of it as a chore, especially when you're safely encapsulated from the harsh Minnesota cold outside.

Once back on the home front, I took a quick nap, played Alien vs. Predator 2 for a couple of hours, and then went to bed at 11 p.m.

You can never have too much sleep on a weekend.

Posted by Ryan at January 20, 2003 01:04 PM