A great, weird, and intense weekend.

Happy (belated) Halloween!

(Can anyone else believe that it's November?? Where has this year gone??)

So to say the least, I had an interesting weekend. Let's kick it off in reverse and start with:

INTENSE.

Friday morning, I woke up feeling fabulous. My best friend was coming into town that evening and a weekend of epic-fun was about to commence. I needed to get to work a little early, so I whipped up my customary morning smoothie and took it with me in the car. Around 10am, I started to feel some pain in my side. No big deal; unpleasant, but bearable.

But as time went on, it got worse.

And worse.

And worse.

By 12pm, I was pacing back and forth in my office, crying and gasping for air. Clearly, something was very, very wrong. I finally filled my co-workers in on what was going on, and we called our Nurse Manager to get her thoughts. Her advice: get to a hospital. NOW.

This is not what I wanted to hear. I hate hospitals, needles, and the bills they incur. The whole bit. I managed to drive home, sobbing the whole way, in part because of the horrible pain, and in part because of the horrible timing of all this craziness. My thoughts, silly as they were, went something like this, "Oh my gosh, my best friend is on her way here from Alabama right now. We have ballet tickets for tonight. We're throwing a costume party tomorrow. I just can't have emergency surgery today!" When I finally made it home, my husband and mother-in-law met me there. By the time I had changed out of my work clothes, I could barely move. Immediately and at everyone's insistence, to the ER we went. Praise the Lord, the wait was almost non-existent. I was quickly triage-d in, and 6 needle jabs (done by 3 different nurses, all equally astonished by my horribly difficult veins, the last of which stated "this is going to hurt like h-e-double hockey sticks" before draining me from my wrist), 1 ultrasound, 1 saline IV, 5 hours, and what seemed like a gallon of taken blood later, they figured there was something fishy going on with my gallbladder. No stones, (praise God), and no emergency surgery was needed, but there is definitely somethin' shady going on in there. Basically, they told me to keep a close eye on my symptoms, gave me pain meds , and eventually sent me on my way with the warning that I might be back. So no surgery this weekend, but we may need to get rid of the little sucker* sometime in the indeterminate future. I'm feeling much better now, but the pain is still floating around, and I look like a heroine addict after being attacked by all of those nurses.

(*I'm thinking I need to name the thing, (my gallbladder), any ideas?)

GREAT.

After a year and a half apart, me and my bestie were finally reunited! It was magic: endless cups of coffee, long strolls and longer chats in the crisp fall air, a trip to the ballet, costumed shenanigans, and late-night laughter that went on until tears rolled and abs ached. It wasBFF-BLISS. And it went by way too quickly.

WEIRD.

So it's an annual tradition for my hubby and I to throw a masquerade party around this time every Autumn; this year was no exception, and we had a fabulous time. It is also a local tradition for a friend of mine, (an exceedingly eccentric millionaire with a house that rivals any Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Really.) to throw his own epic Halloween bash. Of course, as neither Kristi nor Hannah had ever been to this fabled house before, we simply had to make an appearance. The boys, the preggers, and all those under 21 decided to skip out, so the mermaid, Tinkerbell, and the hippie sallied forth into the night.

(BTW, driving with a tail, not so easy.)

The party did not disappoint; there were easily 200 people filling the mansion, with characters ranging from Frida Kahlo to Waldo to a guy wearing a garbage bag and "Summer's Eve" wrappers (you figure it out.) I took the girls on a tour of the wild and wonderful house, and after we'd made a circuit, said hello to some folks, and ran into world-famous performer Lady Chablis, we ended up out on the front lawn chatting in the fresh air.


Shortly thereafter, we heard some screaming coming from inside the house. We couldn't figure out what was going on, until the bouncer shoved (with some effort) a screaming woman out the front door and onto the sidewalk.

A screaming woman in a chicken suit.

A huge, fluffy, school-mascot style chicken suit.

Her exceptionally loud ranting went on for a good 10 minutes, and it went something like this:

"That effing guy effing sucker punched me in the effing face! He's dead! You're going to find his body tomorrow and have to effing scrape him off the street! Watch the news in the morning! He's effing DEAD! I'm in an effing chicken suit and he sucker punched me in the effing face!"

And so on and so forth. I think you get the gist. Clearly, this chicken was more than a few sheets to the wind. Moments after she stepped outside, a guy dressed as a Constable, (complete with giant handlebar mustache and night stick), came out to guard the front door. And when the chicken still hadn't calmed down after several minutes, The Lady Chablis even stepped in to try and get things under control with her charm and cat-o-nine-tails. Seriously. In the midst of the ranting, the chicken shouted the alleged offender's name more than once, and much to our amusement, a guy standing near us in a nascar uniform looked up with complete dead-pan shock and said, "oh man, that's the guy I came with."

We almost peed in our pants we were laughing so hard.

Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up.

So with that, I leave you with some highlights of our great, weird, and intense weekend. Happy November!