Last Hurrah

Just before my final days at work this past Monday and Tuesday (30 and 31 July), Chris and I headed out of town for a brief get-away. We had wanted to go to New York and see Fantasia Barrino play Miss Celie in the Broadway version of The Color Purple, but that trip fell apart as we studied our respective budgets. We scaled back our plans and decided on a couple of road trips instead of one big, fantastic voyage.

So, last Friday, Chris and I piled into the car and headed north to Lynchburg. Chris lived in Lynchburg for a few years and I had visited Lynchburg often over the previous several years, as it's the hometown of my ex, Jeff, and his family sstill lives there. Upon arrival in Lynchburg, I met Jeff's mom to exchange some of his and my possessions that had gotten shuffled in the moves. I brought her some of her favorite candy treats and Chris and I both enjoyed chatting with her. We then met a friend of Chris' for lunch at a Lynchburg-style Chinese buffet (complete with all of the normal, Americanized Chinese fare, plus french fries, pigs in blankets, pizza, cheese and seafood tartlets, and an array of dishes made by combining the same six ingredients in different proportions; kinda like Taco Bell, but "Chinese" instead of "Mexican"). As much as I deride it, I enjoy an occasional dose of Lynchburg-style Chinese food. After Lunch, I paid homage to tradition by hitting the J.Crew outlet (J.Crew is based in Lynchburg and this is a real outlet attached to the warehouse!) and the outlet of the Old Virginia Candle Factory, which is always a good place to find Christmas and birthday gifts.

I'd planned a surprise for Chris on Saturday, who organized and surprised me with several adventures when I visited him in the Philippines. (I'd have no idea where I was going and end up on a donkey headed up a volcano or on a plane to Fantasy Island.) We were planning to go to church at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh on Sunday and I wanted to find a hotel near Raleigh so that we wouldn't miss church like we did the last time that we tried to attend Pullen when we ended up too hungover to go! So, I was poking around on Google Earth to find a nice hotel with a spa and spotted the Carnivore Preservation Trust, an animal rescue facility near Pittsboro that has tigers, leopards, ocelots, servals, jaguars, and other carnivorous cats and keystone species. It sounded like fun, so I made a reservation and we ended up enjoying an educational, 90-minute tour of the facility and introduction to several of their eighty resident animals. We watched tigers feast on whole chickens, saw a male tiger spray (Think garden hose.), and enjoyed the antics of a deceptively comical kinkajou.

Leslie, my roommate, had gone to the Raleigh-Durham airport to pick up her nephew and her sister, so we met them and had dinner at Southpoint mall in Durham after screening Knocked Up on our own. After dinner, we headed to Raleigh. I gave up on finding a hotel with a spa in my price range, so I just got us a room at the Holiday Inn next to Pullen so that we'd have minimal excuses for missing church the next morning. We did roll out of bed and attend church, where we were treated to a Taizé-style worship service (the main feature of which are musical chants in-between the components of worship) that also incorporated vignettes of prayerful dance.

After church, we visited some of Chris' friends, Andy and Megan, who'd recently become parents. Another friend, Brooks, who knows all of us one way or another (I met him at Wake Forest Baptist Church.) and who happens to now be the youth minister at Pullen, also joined us and we spent a lovely afternoon catching up and taking turns holding the baby. Andy is a software developer, Brooks used to work as a Macintosh technician, and I was until just recently a database administrator, so it was predestined that the three of us would end up geeking out for a while. Sure enough, we headed up to the Andy's study to "ooh" and "ahh" over the Commodore 64 that he'd recently purchased on eBay to relive a bit of his youth. I mistakenly identified it as a Commodore 128 until he pointd out that it was a 64 in its second-generation case. He'd kitted it out with a monochrome monitor, two disk drives, and a HUGE mouse that plugged into the joystick port. He demonstrated the GEOS software that he'd installed that put a Macintosh-style GUI on the Commodore. I mentioned that I had a TI-99/4A and we went on for awhile about the TI's superior graphics and sound, the Commodore's greater popularity, and the deficiencies of the two (TI's curious implementation of BASIC and convoluted code interpretation, Commodore's crippled serial bus that made access to disk data slow). All we lacked was the tape on our glasses, the goose-honking laughter, and our tri-Lam sweatshirts! We visited for a long time and ended up going for dinner immediately after leaving Andy and Megan's house. I was able to talk Chris into going to one of my favorite restaurants, Sweet Tomatoes, whose nearest location is in Raleigh. Yum!

The weekend gave way to a short work-week, since Tuesday was my last day at work before beginning law school next week. I tied up some loose ends and snuck out, wanting to avoid any long goodbyes. My law school text books have begun arriving and information about orientation has been arriving steadily. I have recently learned that I must wear a suit for my first two days! I might as well get used to it, since gone are the days of wearing camp shirts, cargo shorts, and hiking sandals to work. Silk ties, starched shirts, and wool suits will soon replace them. I might just have to rebel a bit and wear seersucker or olive drab and, to be sure, my faithful bow-ties shall make frequent appearances! Feh. Trust me to rebel by being über-traditional! :J