So Jojo arrived late Friday night for the
weekend bearing gifts of homebrew beer and hard cider for my birthday - yeah! I'm told that the cider needs to sit for a couple more weeks to allow the yeast to create more carbonation - this will be tough 'cause I'm a *huge* fan of hard cider!
Didn't get up as early as we probably should have, then rode over to Midwest Mountaineering for their annual expo. I didn't realize this was going to turn into a shopping expedition, but with her Europe trip coming up in December, she was hell bent to find some travel pants upstairs at Thrifty Outfitters.
Had an interesting conversation there with a guy promoting sports involving a human being towed by a canine. Sports like skijoring, dog-scootering (if that's what you call it) and simply running with a dog tethered to your waist by a thick bungee leash. The common thread in all these sports is that the dog tows the human. Sweet. Made me wish I had a dog myself. This feeling was driven home even further when I saw a super cute dog that looked just like an ex-girlfriend's dog that I helped raise for over a year - a Chocolate Lab/Doberman mix.
Missed dodgeball (it was raining outside anyway) so we climbed around in the bouldering cave in the basement of Midwest for a while, since it was free during the expo. Jojo's hand was still bothering her from her cabbie incident. I attempted to climb around but quickly found it more difficult than it looked. Thankfully, I didn't injure my shoulder like I did the first (and last) time I tried rockclimbing - it took me the better part of three years to feel fully recovered from that.
Later that night a bunch of us met up on the Greenway and raced the thunderstorm into downtown, destination Psycho Suzies. Somewhere around Park and 5th we realized we had forgotten to wait for LadyVelo and her bf, earning Sascha the title of "Worst Friend Ever". Ok, LadyVelo didn't give her that title, I did. We missed the worst of the storm while waiting under shelter until LadyVelo could catch up, and Sascha bought the first round, so it all worked out fine.
Suzies was already over capacity and they couldn't let us in, but thankfully a big crowd left shortly thereafter so all was well. Beers, birthday cake snagged from a nearby group, and deep dish pizza (that took more than *forever* to arrive) were the order of the night.
On to Runyons downtown, where we hung out until bartime.
Checked the radar and captured this screenshot when I arrived home - we got pretty lucky with the weather on the ride home - the wicked weather parted right around us:
