Food and Friends

It is a truth universally acknowledged that coming home for Spring Break will result in one gaining back all the weight that one has lost over the course of the past few months.

OK, I don't actually know if that is true...or if that is universally acknowledged.  All I know is that getting together with old friends seems to mean eating inordinate amounts of food while catching up on various details of our lives.

Case and point: I've been home for 5.5 days and have gone out for some sort of ice cream product 4 times.

I really don't need to say much more, do I?  Still, blogs are meant to be written upon, so I shall tell you of the various adventures of my day.

I started off the day eating lunch at California Pizza Kitchen with my friend Nick the Weatherman.  Nick belongs to the "Nick-and-Ashley" combination that together make up the surviving remnant of my middle school acquaintance.  I call him "Nick the Weatherman" because a weatherman is what he is aspiring to be, and he occasionally gives forecasts for Columbia, MO's NBC affiliate, and I have every confidence that he'll get a job as a meteorologist one day.  Nick has that way of pursuing his dreams in a practical and diligent fashion that makes dreams seem actually achievable.  He blogs about various weather events, and you can read about them here if you so desire.  

Anyway, I ate an ever-delicious Thai Crunch salad while brainstorming cities for Nick to send out resumes to in his continuing job hunt, and generally catching up on one another's lives.  And, because no Nick/Celia gathering is complete without ice cream, we followed our lunch with a trip to Oberweis Dairy (an ice cream place that also sells milk).  Naturally,  I chose the ever-healthy option of a chocolate-dipped waffle cone with chocolate and peanut-butter ice cream.  OK, not ever-healthy...but in my defense, it WAS the "small"...though, if what I ordered was the small, I never want to see the large.  Anyway, the draw of Oberwies is that they have chess boards on their tables, providing boundless entertainment for the chess non-officianados that Nick and I are.  I won, by a total fluke (although Nick and I are evenly matched, it's because both of us don't play with any sort of concrete strategy, so Nick still acquired most of my pieces in the meantime).  Things are even though, because Nick beat me at "flash chess", which was my newly invented game of chess where you take all the pawns off the board and just play with the interesting pieces.  It's like what happens to chess once the pawns have rebelled against the monarchy in revolution, and the monarchial bodies are left to fend for themselves without the help of their peasant army.  Anyway, Nick won that round.

So those were my early-afternoon food and social adventures.

Then I got my hair cut.  Less interesting than it sounds.

The evening consisted of a Chinese-food dinner with my best friend Jessica (General Tso's for me), which neither of us could finish in its entirety.  Still, that didn't stop us from bopping off to McDonalds for ice cream cones, which we ate at a nearby park, then wandered over to the adjacent elementary school playground where we sat on the swings and talked forever.  The sky seemed extra-huge tonight, making me feel extra small, and sitting there under the expanse of the dark blue sky on the swings of an elementary playground and talking to a friend that I've known since I was eleven years old, all the trouble and stress and worry of my life seemed less significant.  It's funny how sometimes feeling small can make you feel better.  And there's something to be said for sitting out in the open air in the place you grew up with a childhood friend.  Everything just seems better.

Last day at home tomorrow.