Man, I could go for some Chinese food…

Took Friday off, so we could make fatass niece’s graduation party. As it turned out, we walked out of our house with our crap at 5:10pm Thursday and cruised right on out of Atlanta like I’ve NEVER experienced before. I was almost overcome at all the traffic flowing along… consistently… leaving town… at that hour. Next thing I knew we were at the South Carolina border and I was flipping out at our record time.

ANYWHO, our traffic karma wasn’t actually the cool part of the weekend. We got to town in time to go to a midnight movie with the niece and meet her new guy — but seeing The Strangers certainly wasn’t any kind of cool part of the weekend. Though, the group of apparently stoned guys over to our right who continued to feel the need to let the characters on the screen know when a bad guy was stalking them were kind of funny. JamesT, though, just remembers going deaf from niece’s screams as her bf enjoyed himself by grabbing her at every tense movie moment.

Now I have finally gotten to meet the bro’s new lady-love (man it was fun just to type “lady-love”) and I have to say I was let down. She was so busy with keeping things running at the pool party that I barely got to talk to her, and in that time she didn’t do anything outstandingly stupid or frustrating to me. We’d sort of been told it was a family cookout and pool party, though, so I was surprised to find so many of niece’s friends from school there — but, it was her party and it was certainly still fun watching them all goof around the pool.

I got to give away my 2nd graduation Swatch-watch gift, which I ordered and struggled not to just keep, and she seemed to enjoy it. Somehow I can’t get that Jeff Dunham bit out of my head now… Good thing those watches weren’t made in Croatia… What time is it? Oh, I don’t know.. let me check my Crotch.

Graduation itself was actually pretty cool. Small class, and niece was a valedictorian, so she got to give a speech. Thus, we had our little family drama of who was going to sit near my eXstranged brother in case his stalker wife showed up, and THEN when Niece did the bit in her speech about how thankful she was to have more family in her life now and thanked her Dad and godparents, then paused to look over at us all and smile, well, we were all ducking so the bullets would miss us from her wacko-mother. As it turned out, though, if psycho-mom was there, she didn’t make herself obvious to us, and there was no scene (man, I was hoping for a scene). Nor did she stalk us to Red Lobster, where niece works now, for our post-graduation lunch.

I think after all the stress and tension we were unconsciously building as we really expected something to come to a head with this graduation and psycho-mom, when the day went smoothly it left us all sort of punchy and drained. We spent the rest of the day, at least sis and I did, acting almost high. After the minimum of work helping mom with some household chores, we demanded ice-cream and packed everyone up to go directly to dessert. It had actually been several hours since lunch, and the guys were hungry, but we insisted that they eat dessert first — thus we enjoyed Sonic and then headed out in search of the Bristol Country Music Museum, of course.

All I knew from PennyCollector.com was that it was on the Virginia side, so after cruising around town a while, we ended up stopping to play the Virginia lotto. James brought me a $2 scratch card that looked like a giant crossword puzzle that took for freaking ever to figure out how to play, then another year to scratch off, and we were all getting crazy over the process. Somebody threatened to go buy me 10 more of them to do and the throwing of random objects in the car ala mock food-fight ensued. $2 poorer, we began to cruise some more but were lured in by a Krystal burger that we didn’t know existed in Bristol. A few burgers into our 5-way shared Steamer pack, we were clearly just eating them to gross mom out, since she couldn’t stop talking about how much ice cream we’d just had. I could see a TCBY across the road and suggested that we go there next. Somebody else mentioned that yogurt is a great way to start work up an appetite for Chinese food. And somebody else mentioned that the Chinese food ought to last us just long enough to make it back to the new Marble Slab Creamery on the other side of town. Mom was having a fit, and even after Krystal on the way home we continued to suggest stopping at every new little fast-food joint we spotted. That joke never got old.

Didn’t make it far, though, until we were rewarded with a little brown tourism sign directing us to the lower level of the mall to visit the Country Music Museum. Of course we all figured we were in luck, since there was a Great American Cookie Company in there, and mom was just too distgusted to get out of the car. So, we left her inside to explore the museum ourselves. Sis seemed as excited as me to be using the penny-squisher machine, and I got 3 to add to the collection. Pete and James browsed the shop and came up with a Conway Twitty hits cd, which we thought we actually knew most of the words to, so I snagged it as a present for mom. Back in the car, Conway (and Pete but NOT James) serenaded us all the way home. Joyce and I sang our “bomp bomp bahs” the only part of a song we really knew, which somehow seemed to fit into most of his songs, and we laughed and carried on like a bunch of drunks.

Niece and her guy met us at mom’s house near dark, in the hopes of some more hanging out and possible good conditions for setting off a couple of fireworks. It was too much effort to really explain to them our goofy afternoon, but they soon picked up the food joke and jumped right in suggesting a good sushi place. Mom is amazed that we’ve only been in Niece’s life for a year now, because we’re apparently all just alike.

Meh.. those are the highlights for sure, though we did make a stop in Greenville SC on the way home for some more family-hanging-out. It was amazing that nobody could tell James and I were jonesing to get home all weekend because we knew there was a copy of SingStar for the PS3 sitting on our porch. It’s been installed one night and we’ve already been nuts and doubled the songs via the store.

Okay… bedtime. So tired. Being a singing sensation can really wear you out.