During lunch, I took Irene to Crabtree Valley Mall to meet her cousin. We were about 15-20 minutes late, which I thought might put her in a pickle, but it didn’t. However, here she is with one.
After work, I picked up Joe, and we went to Paneras in Cary, where we both had dinner, and hung out in Cyberspace.
Joe showed me some of his work stuff, and I showed him how to make the <s>strikethrough</s> function available on his tool bar in Excel.
I did a little bit of reading about MUDs and LambdaMOO, but not as much as I should have.
I briefly checked in with Robert on AIM.
At just after 8PM, I met some of the Tech Comm folks at Western Lanes for bowling.
We finally got to meet Courtney’s boyfriend from Boone, the infamous Wilkes, who turned out to be a great guy. And cute to boot.
On the left lane, we had Amy, Will, E-Ching, Wilkes, and Courtney.
On the right lane, we had LeeAnn, John, David, and Emily.
I bowled one of the worst games of my life (and that’s a long damn time) with a 102. My next game was either 135 or 136, and in the last game, I broke 150. Ridiculous. Generally, I have a 185 average.
Incredibly this place has no automatic scorers, which means we had to keep the score manually. Fortunately, having been on leagues for over 30 years, I knew how to keep the damn thing.
Of course this primer was created on a machine. Our actual sheet looked more like this.
I am not going to digress about the design error in the form itself. Let’s just say we worked around it.
With the exception of LeeAnn, who played two games and then left, we played three games and finished at about 10:30 or 11:00, I believe. From there, we walked over to Mitch’s Tavern.
In the 26 years, I’ve lived in Raleigh, I’ve never been to Mitch’s, a Raleigh landmark, and, as I found out last night, featured in the movie Bull Durham.
When I first arrived, I met a girl named Margaret at the bar who told me that there were three things she really wanted to do: Be at a Rod Stewart concert, eating blueberry pie, and having sex. We talked for about ten minutes, about a lot of things. She was a pretty interesting person.
Here, we proceeded to get totally shit-faced. Shot after shot, pitcher after pitcher, bourbon-and-diet after bourbon-and-diet. We got drunk the old-fashioned way — one drink at a time, one after the other, and the other, and the other.
The shots consisted of 
and 
.
It was all fun, games, and merriment until about 2AM, when everyone had left but me, Will, and Amy.
I left just before them, and when I got to the parking garage under Western Lanes, where both Will and I had parked, I found the gate closed, a padlock keeping it that way, and the lights out in the bowling alley. Closed.
I went back to Mitch’s to commiserate with my fellow prisoners.
I tried two cab companies provided by Mitch’s. For one, their phone just kept ringing and ringing. For the other, after two rings it went to voice mail.
When the bar back had handed me the cards, he’d said, “I’d call Cardinal, but we don’t have the number handy for them.”
On the one card, the one with the number on it that just kept ringing and ringing, there was a hand-written number added in. I called it for the hell of it, secretly hoping it might be the Cardinal Cab Company number.
Someone rather chirpy for two in the morning, but not with a business greeting, answered, and when I asked, “Is this a cab company?” she replied, “Definitely not.”
We tried to hail a cab out on the streets — to no avail.
I ended up calling my friend Joe, who was a dear to get out of bed and come to our rescue.
In retrospect, it was probably the best thing that could have happened — keeping us from driving, which we had no business doing.