Before the house lights go up

For weeks I've been wanting to take a weekend to slow down, camp my ass in one of our adirondack chairs and sip iced tea while knitting madly on socks or washcloths (washcloths if I feel guilty, socks if I feel self-indulgent). I got my chance for approximately two or three hours on Saturday before we were due at a neighbor's house for drinks.

Also, I was supposed to meet with a close college friend of mine, Jack, who was due in town sometime on Saturday.

So, I'm knitting and basking in the sun, big floppy beach hat on my head and cold drink to my side. It was a near picturesque day. We had somehow managed to get up that day at a reasonable hour (9 a.m.) and have breakfast and set out to the Dallas Farmers Market. It was an awesome diversion from my normal weekend of backbreaking manual labor (gardening and house cleaning). We picked up locally grown squash, tomatoes, tiny little new potatoes. Three huge heads of crispy green romaine for $2.50! Sweet little early season peaches from just a few miles away, blueberries from a nearby farm, onions from the Rio Grande Valley, limes from a grove close by! And my favorite: freshly shucked black eyed peas and multicolor sweetcorn!

Hornsby came with us, and he was such a good boy! When we take him out with us, people always remark on what a beautiful dog he is, and they ask us what breed he is (he's a Great Pyrenees mix), and they are shocked when we tell him he's a mutt. I guess he's just one well maintained mutt!

So, we stop and pick up some cheap red wine to make sangria, since we picked up some oranges, lemons and limes at the market. This sounded like a great idea at the time.

Flash back to the floppy hat and the adirondack chair, only I'm sipping on sangria after a lunch of lima bean and lentil curry with saffron rice and it's near 2 p.m. We're due at our neighbor's house at around 3 p.m. and still no word from Jack. At this point I'm beginning to get a little anxious on how this all will work out.

Dave took pity on humanity and decided to rinse the stink from his flesh before we went over to our neighbors house (We'll call them Art and Lauren). We met Art whil he was walking his dogs down our street and I was rehabbing an old side table. He's a pretty cool guy, and he works in remodeling. We're dead-set on having him do some work on the House of England.

So, we fix up more sangria and head over to Art and Lauren's. I leave the house sans cellphone because I sent a text to Jack earlier that I would meet him later. We get to their house and Art's very friendly pups take a shine to my skirt and decide to climb all over it and slobber, too. (I figure that's what the huge bruise on my leg is from -- one of the dogs trying to scale my skirt.) Art fires up the blender and all the sudden Dave and I have margaritas in our hands. We quickly dispatch those and are refilled. Repeat this process, oh, about six or eight times and you end up with a very sloppy drunk Miss Dallas.

Oh, how to deal with living down the street from someone now that you've imbibed in way too many? It's a Saturday evening, so I decided to use the good ol' work excuse (luckily I work in an industry where I can say "Gotta go! I'm on deadline!). I shuffled home very quickly and collapsed on my bed to be swallowed by the dangerous trifecta of tequila, sangria and a spinning room.

I checked my messages and lo and behold, Jack had to make a turnaround trip back home.

Sunday morning came, and it was me and a hangover on a desert island. I was beyond repair. Not even my trusty combo of three extra strength tylenols, cranberry juice and club soda could settle my stomach and dispatch the asshole using my brain to play the bongos. I spent the majority of the morning on the couch or over the toilet. What a waste!

I managed to salvage enough of my Sunday to bake muffins, a loaf of bread, a pot of turkey chili and a pitcher of kiwi-strawberry iced tea. I also learned my lesson: When drinking with neighbors, never overestimate your threshold. You will have to see those people again, and you don't want it to be awkward.