Dollar GUTS!

This past weekend Angelos had his yearly party for John Dyson's birthday. I was able to rearrange my plans to drive out there Friday instead of Saturday. This is one of those weekend-long parties that usually involves the equivalent of about 6-8 cases of beer, lots of pool, poker, darts and whatnot, and frequently snow to some degree. We had plenty of all of that this year, except the darts.

Friday night it was me, Dave, Angelos, John Dyson, Brian Rusch, and Tom Jurus. That night was mostly spent giving Angelos shit for not having chips, and playing poker while drinking lots of wine and beer. I don't typically play poker, but I decided to throw in $20 and play this time. I think I lost all of that money by the end of the first 30 minutes. Yeah, I'm that bad.

In the morning I went with Brian to secure bagels for breakfast. Everyone realized how much of a mistake it was that there hadn't been any real food the night before. It was a good thing that Dave and I got subs on the drive up.

Swilly and Ken Conner showed up Saturday with chips and more beer. That day was a lot of bullshitting, drinking heavily, poker, pool, music, Angelos yelling at Ken about politics, and breaking a DVD player for not playing a movie correctly. I also got a long, drunk talk by Brian about how awesome the Greatful Dead are.

It was a great weekend until the drive home. Given that it's early December in upstate NY, and that I was going to be driving across the Thruway to Rochester, I fully expected numerous bands of lake effect. That would have been nothing for me. As I hit Utica, I was started to see the snow falling. By the time I hit a couple exits past there I realized it was a full storm. Until I got about half an hour outside of Rochester there was minimal visibility, extreme wind, and the road had about two inches of fresh snow on it. The plows had quite the interesting time keeping up with all of it. At one point I almost wound up off the left side of the road because I didn't have any traction during a gradual left curve on the highway. Thankfully I got my traction back when I started crossing the rumble strip just before the road's shoulder. I was going to let myself go off the road straight instead of turning anymore than I was so I wouldn't start spinning, but fortunately that wasn't necessary. There were a couple times where I stopped at a service area and sat there for a bit with a cup of coffee or some warm food and tried waiting to see if it would pass. Both times I did this I only saw it getting worse. Ugh.

Obviously, I made it home safely, but damn. Still, I wouldn't trade winter weather for anything in the world.