Feeding Big Bertha...

Today's blog entry will be short, but it's important that I recount to you the final part of my holiday weekend because it includes one of the finest moments of my adult life.

Sunday, Anna and I departed from Maryland in the late morning. This put me at an 11 a.m. departure time from D.C., which I feared would result in endless amounts of traffic trapping me on U.S. 66 for hours.

Luckily, it did not! Traffic getting out of the city was slow, but not standstill - the worst part was trying to navigate my way through the city streets of Georgetown, but I made it out alive, somehow. After an interminable stop at the most crowded Sheetz in the history of the world, I was cruising down 29 again, back home safely by about 3 p.m.

So the adventure part of this adventure, really, came that evening. I headed to Smith Mountain Lake for dinner with Barrett, his parents and his godmother's gigantic family. Dinner was pleasant (om nom pizza), and we encountered some giant fish (seriously these fish were terrifyingly large) who had clearly been fed way too much by children.

After dinner, though, due to the large number of children in our party, we went to the arcade. And it was awesome.

At first, Barrett wanted to play some stupid shooting game, but it was occupied. So I suggested we kill time with the Big Bertha game, where you throw little plastic balls in this giant face thing to make this woman fat (it sounds very disturbing, actually, when described) and it was just as awesome as when I was a child and played it at Shakey's. I was also jazzed to get like 10 tickets out of it - at Blade N' Skate that would've earned me so many flavored Tootsie Rolls!!

Then we did go to play the stupid shooter game, and this is where either my greatest, or most embarrassing, depending on your definition, moment took place.

We played one round - I did poorly. I am not good at these games. As Barrett was preparing to start a second round, I looked longingly for the ticket dispenser. Why were there not tickets?

Because, apparently, these stupid shooter games don't dispense any tickets. WHAT THE F.

So then, luckily hidden by some other games but still in an arcade full of children and their patient parents, I half-yelled (as in, said in more than a normal speaking voice), "I only wanna play games with tickets!!!!"

Embarrassing as it was, my outburst worked, and we played ski ball and then bought some frogs and a bug with our tickets and it was awesome.

No flavored Tootsie Rolls though. Next time.