Sunday, June 27, 2010

Unnecessary Upgrades

There are few things in this life greater than an unexpected bonus. You know what I’m talking about.

Buy one get one FREE!

Now with 20% more!

Same great formula, new low price!

And so on and so forth. It is our natural instinct as human beings to seek out more for our money. Value is king, and we seek the throne.

But recently I have noticed some products and advertisements of, shall we say, questionable value. I refer to those brands that use cunning creativity and clever messaging to make us think we are getting more than we paid for.

Example A.

Due to the dental trauma I have had in my past, I have become a prolific flosser.

Thus I floss. I keep floss in my backpack, the pockets of my coats, at my desk at work, everywhere. I am paranoid. I even throw some in my pocket if I’m heading out to something like a Corn on the Cob party… if such a thing exists.

I use some brands that have a flavor, and some that don’t. But I’m not generally picky. Though it wasn’t until I visited my sister’s apartment on Easter that I really began to question floss.


The picture is blurry but trust me, you are reading it right.

High Tech Dental Floss.

High Tech? Really?

What makes this dental floss high tech? Was it made by NASA? Is this the preferred floss of astronauts in the Apollo program? Do they regularly get together for Tang cocktails at the end of the day and make fun of the proletariat who subject themselves to regular floss?

Neil: So Buzz I was using some floss the other day.
Buzz: Woah woah woah Neil, regular floss? Hey Other Astronaut that nobody remembers the name of, Neil was using REGULAR floss. What an amateur move! I can’t believe he didn’t crash our ship into The Sea of Tranquility.

High tech dental floss? Really? I turned the package over to see if I could scope out the deets of what made this dental floss so fantastically high tech but I found nothing. If only I had seen the packaging I could find out why it had been called high tech in the first place. Because I have to admit, to me it looks a lot like A PIECE OF WAXY STRING. And if it were “regular tech” or “low tech” dental floss it would just be A PIECE OF STRING.

Unless of course you are referring to the fact that it has a mint flavor that makes it high tech? In which case my toothpaste is high tech, so is my favorite ice cream, and those odiferous markers we were all so keen on huffing in elementary school, which is why I’ve got so much goddamn brain damage.

High tech, psha. Yea. Whatever.

Example B.

I was out in my neighborhood recently, walking to the store when I passed a food cart which is regularly parked, on the sidewalk on the corner of my block. It is Halal food. It is usually made by one guy in a big metal wagon that can hitch to the back of a truck and be pulled away. They prepare things like chicken and lamb shwarma. Shaved meats served in a pita with lettuce and tomatoes and one of either “white” sauce or “Spicy” sauce.

Side note: I have been to many of these vendors around the city and I have never heard these called anything except “white” sauce and “spicy” sauce. Which leads me to believe, nobody has a clue what the hell is in these sauces. But I digress.

So anyway I was walking past it recently when I noticed this sign.


Hrm. Interesting.

Now for those of you who have never eaten from a truck such as this let me give you a little knowledge. I have never ordered anything from these guys that has taken longer than 90 seconds to prepare.

Whose life is so busy that they can't afford the 90 seconds to eat some shwarma, or as it is otherwise known; Street Meat?

Listen, this isn’t The French Laundry, this is not El Bulli, this is chicken on a stick, scraped off with a glorified Mach 3 by a guy in a truck and thrown into a pita with some extremely ambiguous sauce. What kind of lifestyle are you leading that you can’t spare the 90-second wait for that indigestion you are most certainly going to get?

I have thought long and hard about it and the only person I could think of is somebody mid marathon who is jonesing for some lamb. And that is fine. But if you are running a marathon and think eating street meat in the middle is a good idea might I suggest you save yourself some time and just start throwing up now.

The other feature, “we deliver”, made me wonder how he would deliver. Would he just book it from his truck and hope nobody stole it while he was out? Or would he just push his whole “restaurant” to the person’s house? Just move his wagon to their front door.

Hey honey there is a Halal restaurant in our yard. Do you know anything about this?
Why yes I do sweetheart! It’s our lunch!

I figure this guy has either made 0 or 1 delivery in his lifetime. Maybe it was just put up to scare the competition, not that this guy has any competition in my neighborhood. Unless of course you consider restaurants without wheels to be competition. In which case, yes, there is plenty of competition.

Example C.

I mean, really I just have to show the picture.

  
And really I don’t know what else to say here so let’s just go through the logic progression shall we? OK.

1.     I have some jewelry I no longer want and would like to sell. OK cool.
2.     I would like to find a place that will give me money for my gold and diamonds.
3.     Hey you know who might give me good money for my gold and diamonds? The guy who uses a scissor to cut my hair off for 10 dollars whose shop is in the entrance to the subway. Now THAT is a guy I want appraising my jewelry.

Oh and by the way. He also shines shoes and replaces watch batteries.

BONUS!

Can you imagine if there was a Halal truck that bought diamonds, cut hair, and sold high tech dental floss? Now that is a value add I can believe in!

Sunday, June 20, 2010

The Smell of Manhood



I am young. My toothbrush isn’t yet a full sized one, and my head is barely taller than the bathroom sink. I am standing next to my father as he gets ready. His face is covered in foam. He drags a yellow tipped Bic razor through it, pausing after every swipe to dip it into the plugged sink of water to clean it off.

He finishes shaving, rinses off his face, and opens the cabinet for a green bottle of Afta After Shave. He empties some into his hands and rubs them together before spreading the green stuff over his face and neck. It is the finishing touch on his newly smooth face. It is the last step in the first stage of my father’s day.

Now, over 20 years later, I keep a bottle of green Afta After shave in my medicine cabinet. I don’t smell it often, and my father hasn’t worn it in over a decade. But the scent of it is inextricably tied to manhood and masculinity, two things my father has always embodied. Two things that I have become obsessed with.

My father is tall. At his tallest he was a half inch taller than I will ever be, with big soft hands that are great for a head scratch or chasing an itch around your back. He has thin red hair, freckles, fair skin and has never weighed more than a shade over 200 pounds.

He is also a man of simple tastes. He wore a watch for years but stopped when he started carrying a cell phone. He used to wear his wedding ring but stopped after it got smashed onto his finger in an accident.

He has no wallet. He wraps his cash around his credit cards and slips it in his pocket. He has the minimum amount of keys necessary on his key ring.
The things that define him most are his love of golf, the side part in his hair which has existed, unchanged, since before my birth, and his face, which has been clean shaven nearly every single day of my life.

But for all these simplicities he has always been the most competent of men. He does everything like he has done it a million times before. There is never any trepidation, or worry. He contemplates, examines the pros and cons of a situation, and then acts.

Maybe this is strictly for the benefit of his family, as in taking on the mantle of strength for strength’s sake. But I am not as interested in the why. What amazed me, and continues to amaze me to this very day, was the way he always operated at the height of confidence.

When I think about the impression I want to give, the way I want others to see me, the kind of man I want to be, I think about the way I looked at my father when I was a child.

I am not so sure how manhood became the aspiration in my life that I have placed above all others. I have been thinking about it for a while now, 10 years at least. But I don’t know how this made it to the top of the list. I am not sure what happened that made being a man so fascinating to me.

I can’t be sure if this goal or my ruminations on my father would be as impressive to others. Maybe it has to do with my own insecurities from childhood, the ones that I shrink wrapped in a shiny plastic of loud extroversion for so many years. Those insecurities that resulted from those punks on the playground calling me stupid names that shouldn’t have mattered. Those kids who never gave a second thought to their own existence but somehow made me question every particle of mine.

Maybe it is those feelings, those half remembered emotions held up in comparison to my view of my father that make his masculinity even more impressive.

Maybe I am self aggrandizing my own supposed torment. Freud might find it to be fascinating while Dr. Phil might call it bullshit. At this point in time I am still not sure what is the actual seed of truth that grew into this tree of significance.

What I do know is that I have always placed too much value on the things other people say or do. And it seems despite my best efforts, part of me is still seeking vengeance for the person I once was afraid to be.

At this point in my life surely I have accomplished enough professionally, seen enough of the world, and functioned successfully on my own to affirm that yes, I am in fact, a man.

But somehow those things have not done for my masculinity what I thought they would. My father has never, ever, talked about a single woman except for my mother. He has never bragged about the money he makes, the car he drives, or the house that he owns.

I am starting to worry that I will never stop thinking about whether or not I have become a man.

Maybe for me it is really something else. Material things interest me yes, but even I know that those are fleeting. A nice house and car are great but I know if I wasn’t confident in myself when I had them, those things would feel fake to me, just another pseudo-man behind a different, newer curtain.

Situations never changed my father. Possessions and promotions, none of it alters who he is at his core. The man who, even after our eyes met at the same level, always seemed to be just a little bit bigger than me.

Maybe it is the confidence I have in him that I so seek for myself. The confidence my father always seems to have. The confidence he had walking down the center aisle of church looking for a pew. The confidence he had while driving. Anywhere.
It is that confidence that I smell when I sniff Afta. It is competence.

It is that smell that trivializes all these things I fill my life with, all the trappings of supposed manhood: The Dangerous Book for Boys, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, a Viking Helmet.

And perhaps that is what worries me most. That my son, if the gods of family and reproductive fortitude see fit to bless me with one, will not have a similar scent that will remind him of my masculinity. That he won’t come across a sent that reminds him of me, but also that if such a sent does exist, it won’t call to mind the same things as when I smell Afta.

I have latched on so tightly with my heart to the idea of becoming a great man that I worry I will never feel like it is something I can accomplish. I worry that I will never look to anybody like my father looks to me.

I am terrified I will go through the rest of my life keeping my hair neatly groomed, my ties tightly tied, and my etiquette flawless, all without a single person taking notice, or a single person thinking, wow, now that is a man.

And that is why I keep that bottle, a bottle I had forgotten existed until my freshman year of college when I saw it in the grocery store, but have not been able to let go of since.

I am small again, waiting for my dad to come home, waiting for the sound of keys in the door. I hear it, and I run and jump into his arms, wrapping myself around him, burying my face in his neck, in the scent that will forever guide me toward the way I want to feel.



Sunday, June 13, 2010

A Good Reason to Go Crazy



Hey you! Yes I’m talking to you! The one sitting at your desk slumped over like the hunchback of Internet Explorer. I know exactly what you’re thinking!

You are thinking,

Man, I have way too much free time and money on my hands. I am looking for a way to be stressed and really alter my life. How can I do that?

Well lucky for you I have just the way! It’s new, it’s exciting, and it will also possibly help you lose all of your friends in the process!

HOLY CRAP THAT’S AMAZING!

Yes. Yes I know. So what is this amazing activity? What should you be doing? Or more specifically, what should you do now?

I’ll tell you, you should put on a play!

What? Rich Boehmcke that is ridiculous.

No, YOU are ridiculous.

No seriously, stop it. You should go back to doing what you do best, eating cereal and tripping over your own feet when you make eye contact with women.

Trust me. It’s so much fun. I’ve been doing it since I was 10 when we put on a dancing lip-synched version of Aladdin in my neighbors backyard.

Well, I mean if I’m being honest, that show never made it out of rehearsals. It was fatally flawed from the beginning.

Perhaps it was the fact that half of us had not hit puberty yet, and the other half had no theater training greater than the part of Protractor #3 in Mrs. Fink’s 5th grade production of The Case of the Missing Bookcase.

Or it could have been something more specific, like how none of us could figure out how to make a turban out of a bath towel and a safety pin. Or maybe it was the fact that none of the background dancers (Read: Neighbor kids) could say: He’s got the monkeys; let’s see the monkeys, without bursting into hysterics.

Now some might say I was a bit of a diva, starring of course, as Aladdin. But I only was seeking perfection for my cast. I mean we weren’t really organized. My sister was a good director and all, but a dozen kids acting like maniacs in the front yard of your house to the repetitive sound of Robin Williams' voice on a Disney CD isn’t exactly a well-oiled machine.

It wasn’t so much a musical as it was a summer mental asylum for ADD lunatics.

But I digress.

Three years later (tired with the musical theater industry… of my front yard) my friend John and I produced the first (and subsequently) last season of 2 very prominent television shows.

The shows I speak of are of course “The Rich Boehmcke Show” and the “Joe ‘The Hunk’ Shmo Show."

The shows basically consisted of John and myself taking turns hosting a talk show at my kitchen counter in front of the video camera. We used some cheesy wedding reception noise maker as applause, a ska CD as our intro music, and we dressed up in a variety of clothing from around my house to resemble different guests.

OK, basically it was really us putting on my mother’s old wigs, shoving pillows in our shirts, and pretending to be Pamela Anderson or Carmen Electra.

Again I know what you’re thinking.

RICH THESE SHOWS SOUND AMAZING! WHERE CAN I SEE THEM?

Alas, like all great television shows, the originals have been lost. Rumor has it that they may be somewhere in a box in my parents house in South Carolina but only time will tell.

But again, I digress.

I took roughly a 13 year sabbatical from TV and musical production to focus on other more productive activities like getting an education and staring at girls I was too afraid to talk to.

But alas, last year after attempting many different pursuits I came upon the brilliant idea to write and direct 2 shows. And being the charming individual I am, I coerced  my friend Andrea into assisting me assuring her it wouldn’t ruin our friendship, even though I was almost positive it would.

The shows, which were written, rehearsed, and put on in less than 4 months were an excellent study in budgeting, sleep loss, and extreme stress.

Sounds amazing right?

Well it actually was. It was maybe the most fantastic experience of my life, including the crying. And then afterwards I went back to work, and life, and just being a normal Rich Boehmcke.

Things kind of rolled along as usual, took a dip south towards crappy for a while, but then the spring happened and things were going really well for me. I was happier than I had ever been. And I realized…

Something was missing.

I realized it was the sleep loss, the stress, the neuroses and all the panic attacks that come with putting on a self financed production based around your own writing.

So we decided to do it again!

Well not so much “we” as “me” and I kind of just told Andrea I wanted to do it again. And I think I did it while she was sleep deprived or not paying attention, thereby confusing her into saying yes.

So you too should join me in this endeavor. Keep your eye (or both eyes for that matter) on me in the next month as I get ready for our next show. As over the next 4 weeks I forget to eat dinner, wear one sock at a time, and walk around town with my fly open as I commit all available brain cells to our next play.

Wait, what’s that you say? What is the next play? What the hell is it all about? Where can I buy tickets? Is there a trailer?

First of all, stop asking so many questions. You are stressing me out.

Second of all, all your questions can be answered here…




Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Thrillist Miami - The End of... ME


So its not even noon in Miami and it is 100 degrees outside, and it is humid as a Turkish sweat lodge, which I’ve been in! The pool deck is massive with hundreds if not thousands of chairs, and cabanas and sexy sexy people in their sexy sexy swimsuits… and me.


The palest American ever.

(P.S. Thanks to Nick McGlynn for capturing for the world why I should never ever take my shirt off... ever)

So I got comfortable in the VIP section and started chatting up everybody. There was very loud dancey pop music playing putting people in a good mood so I just danced it up, but quickly realized I was going to burn to a crisp.

So I quickly put some sunblock on.

You put on sun block but you can’t stop sweating so you are just mixing sun block and sweat into a type of baste. So you baste yourself and realize you are so damn hot you have to get in the pool, which is super warm.

So it doesn’t really cool you off it just feels good. A sweaty, bastey, feel good soup of people.

So you are in the pool and you realize, you are thirsty, so you get out and you get a Corona. But as you drink your Corona you start sweating again, so you bring it into the pool. And so that’s how it went for the next 5 hours.

But being in the pool with a Corona is dangerous. I like a little limejuice in my Corona, not a little Chlorine. So I put my Corona in a water bottle.


Problem solved.

The people from Thrillist had brought a beach ball for every single person in the hotel, or at least it seemed as such. I decided to lend my powerful lung capacity to blow some up. After blowing up 1 I realize… I don’t have powerful lung capacity. So I quit that and went back to my Corona.

Something about pushing a beach ball up in the air is like Spanish fly for people looking for a good time. We had a dozen people tossing it up in the air and every 4th hit it would bounce off some strangers head, but we didn’t care. We had numbers! Somewhere between 200 and 300 people were poolside living it up like we had all just escaped from an island, an island of sobriety and no pools, and we were here to live!

Of course I lived a little too hard because I jumped up and tried to swat the beach ball and felt my shoulder pop (quickly) out of and back into its socket. I realized this was going to be painful, so I went and put more Corona in my water bottle.

I also ran out of sun block at some point and went to the hotel gift shop which only had SPF 15. The price? SIXTEEN DOLLARS! Outrageous! I mean shouldn’t there be some sort of “No more than a dollar per SPF” type of rule? But not wanting to burn, I bought it anyway.

Then my new British Vietnamese friend suggested we have a chicken fight against a 30 year old mother of 3 with a crazy slamming body.

I refused. Chicken fights, for those of you who don’t know, are when women decide it would be fun to wrestle each other while sitting on the shoulders of men who are trying not to drown.

I am a HUGE fan of not drowning. I mean I had thus far survived not getting a nosebleed in the pool and I just had a bad feeling that having 2 women fight… above me could end poorly.

So naturally I ended up in one. The BritNamese chick climbed on my shoulders and Mom of 3 climbed on another dude’s. I was almost positive we were done for. I remember thinking

Hmph, I never would have thought I would die in Miami.

I mean a mother of 3 who looked like she did Tae Bo in her sleep versus a tiny BritNamese girl with a very ladylike accent. I thought the fight would end in 2 seconds unless my girl bit the mom’s ear.

So it starts and it is crazy. I have no idea whats going on because I am just trying to keep my balance and the girl on my shoulders and I can’t look up cuz I need to keep track of how close to the water I am so I don’t drown… which I hate.

Thirty seconds later we finally went down and I came up thinking we had lost but it had been a valiant effort.

No. Not so much.

No, BritNamese was locked in battle with Mom of 3 until she took Mom of 3's head and palmed it into the water.

WE WERE CHAMPIONS!

So I celebrated with a Corona. Little did I know that this chicken fight would be the reason I wouldn’t be able to move my shoulders for 2 days. But I didn’t care. More dancing on the pool deck, more dancing in the pool. I was living it up. The crowd was amazing, and everybody was happy.

And that’s when the greatest moment of the weekend happened.

I was doing my nonsense thing in the pool when a girl I hadn’t talked to much came up to me and said;

Girl: Who ARE you?
Rich: Who are YOU?
Girl: Everybody here knows you as the guy who is always having fun.

I laughed, toasted her, and went to get more Corona.

Then the poolside concert happened and things REALLY got into gear. I can’t even really describe what it feels like to be dancing, in a pool, with a drink in your hand, surrounded by beautiful people, and knowing you haven’t spent a DIME to get any of it.



Oh yea did I mention there were Klondike bars? They came out of nowhere and rocked all of our worlds.

But we had to wrap it up and head to dinner.

And I went back to my room and noticed the beginning of the sunburn. But I couldn’t waste time I had to get to dinner on the roof of Red Steakhouse. And I know what you’re wondering.

Rich, this was your last night in Miami! You had only 1 more chance… did you…

You bite your tongue! How dare you question me? YOU of all people, how dare you? You want to know if I did? Of course I did.


I rocked the $#!% out of those white pants!

Boom!

We all were in our Miami best when we got to dinner where we were greeted by a violinist playing the classic hits. Including this piece of awesomeness.




I mean it really doesn’t get much better than that. We went up to dinner on the roof, and we had many drinks, and there was a ridiculous rainstorm which we thought would kill the fun.

And yes we ate, and danced, and drank the night away.  We all looked at each other knowing nothing ever would come close to Hotel Thrillist, the greatest weekend of (almost) all of our lives.


And it's funny, we all got these bracelets that got us in to all of the events. They say I "thrillist logo" Miami. And it's kind of ironic because a chunk of the "I" on mine is missing.



Which makes sense, because I definitely left a piece of myself down there.

The End.

P.S.
And yes, I did get burnt to a crisp anyway.

Damn it.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Thrillist Miami - The Beginning of the End


Today, right now, as I write this to you, I am in considerable pain.

And I know what you’re thinking. Rich went to Miami with Thrillist and drank too much and now he is hungover.

But honestly it wasn’t the booze that did it. Not that there was any shortage of booze!

I mean it was possibly the swag, the yoga, or the 100 degree sun, or the Nerf Football chucking, or the pool beachballing, or maybe it was the massage, or the dancing in the pool, or the dancing next to the pool, or the dancing at dinner, or maybe the dancing at Club LIV, but really… I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Friday morning I boarded a flight to Miami. I didn’t know anything except that when I landed I would be escorted to, what was promised to be, 36 hours of awesome.

I landed and immediately met a bunch of great people who were ready to get it popping. We get to the hotel and instantly the Thrillist special check-in had gift bags with so much swag that as it was handed to me I think I felt my bicep rip.

As I plowed through my swag and mugged it up for Nick McGlynn, the best damn photog in the business with my new homey Kim from Chicago, I realized the gift bag alone was worth the trip! But more details on that later on.

So then we said alright, cool we’re in Miami, let’s get our bathing suits on and go poolside! A quick room change and we got to the pool where I immediately grabbed an icy Corona and a fish sandwich.

I know what you’re thinking, Rich, a Fish Sandwich to start the weekend? Did you learn NOTHING in Istanbul? I know, I know. But it was worth it.

And that’s when the wind picked up like CRAZY and it started to rain. For an idea of how bad the rain got, take a look at my special (and slightly dark) report with Number 1 stunner himself, Todd the Weather Stunner!




In fact that chief weather expert eventually lost it and went for a swim should have pretty much clued me in that this was going to be my buddy for the weekend.

So we went back to our rooms again and showered and got ready for dinner and drinks and looking our best.

Here’s what I learned about a 495 dollar a night room with a beachfront view in a 1.3 Billion dollar hotel: It is hard to leave. I mean the TV in the bathroom was enough to gather my love. But the phone next to the toilet I mean, I wanted to make a long distance phone call while sitting on the bowl just so I could tell the person on the other end of the phone:

Hold on I’m watching the game.

But I eventually got my life together because after all, there were 200 strangers I needed to meet for free drinks.

The great thing about meeting 200 people for free drinks is nobody really knows each other. So you can do one of 2 things. You can sit on the side and only talk to the people you know, or you can walk around and try to toast every person with a drink.

Guess which method I use?

So we had some Coronas, some vodka shots with warm pineapple (incredible) and the drink of the weekend which was Bacardi Torched Cherry. And if you haven’t tried this beverage let me tell you, it will get your engine started.

We had dinner and it was incredible. One of the best meals I ever had. All the hotel restaurants contributed just phenomenal things. Truffled this, braised that, I mean it was unbelievable, but the highlight, was far and away, the corn.



I wanted to tip the guy who served me that corn it was so good.

Mind you the whole time we are eating, there is a band playing with a guy playing the conch, and not just one conch… TWO CONCHS!




I mean if that guy doesn’t have groupies there is something wrong with the universe.

From there we went to Club LIV. We all got VIP wrist bands, but by the time I got to the actual entrance, there were already 200 people in an unruly crowd around the 5 very large bouncers guarding the velvet (possibly felt, I couldn’t tell) rope. So with no better ideas, I just put my wrist in the air like I was Wonder Woman trying to stop a very poorly aimed bullet.

And ya know what? It worked. I pushed my way to the front of the those saps and got into the club where there was much drinking, much dancing, and very low lighting so I wasn’t entirely sure who I was talking to or what was going on for most of the evening.

We danced until the wee hours of the morning and I got back to my room in need of some water and that’s when I figured out what 495 dollars (or in my case, 0 dollars) a night DOESN’T buy you… glasses.

There were no glasses to drink out of, and the hotel water was like, I think 482 dollars, so being the inventive invention genius I am, I filled up the ice bucket and drank out of it like I was some kind of peasant.

I woke up the next morning feeling slightly injured, and reached for my water bucket, and as I got to the bottom of it I saw my reflection and it was not good. I looked like Frida Kahlo after a slap fight.

But that couldn’t stop me. I hopped in my awesome shower, used my awesome hotel soap, popped some Advil, and made my way to buffet breakfast outside where it was already in the high 80s. And there I feasted on fruit, donuts, and truffled eggs.

What? Yes. I said truffled eggs. They were so good it made me angry. But I didn’t have time to be angry; I had to get to beachfront yoga.

There are few things that are more awesome than doing yoga on the beach. It was my first time doing yoga. I realized I am not good at yoga. For an hour we breathed, stretched, and contorted ourselves into poses like Sun Warrior and Wild Thing which really could have just been called “Wedgie” and “Bigger Wedgie.”

This is were I probably started trying too hard because I stretched parts of me that I have never used, including trying to get myself into “Pigeon Pose” which I have chosen to rename “I don’t want to have kids pose.” Awesome.

But it was still an awesome workout and then I jumped into the ocean to refresh. And it felt amazing but it was the warmest water I’d ever been in. I could have stayed in it all day, but there was a pool party to go to.

Poolside I met the awesome ladies of Nerf who supplied me with footballs which I then tried to throw 50 yards. I was nearly successful. I then thought the only thing better would be to punt one, and that is when I hit some woman in the back of the head. That is when I decided I was probably less dangerous in the pool.

And that is when things got RI-DIC-U-LOUS!

To Be Continued…