0830 - Leave for Grass Valley to see extended family.
1730 - Having had a couple of beers in quick succession, finish visiting family.
1800 - Walk into the Wall Street Cafe to get coffee and some food before driving. Smile at cute girl with two friends on the way in. Cute girl smiles back. Huh.
1810 - Suavely take small latte and egg salad sandwich to the empty chair by the fire next to cute girl and friends. Various eye contact around the table.
1812 - Get invited to play LifeStories. One of the women jokes about using this with her therapy clients. Nancy is a family therapist. Her friend Amy is a social worker visiting from Chicago. Their friend Terry is a freelance semi-employed musician/computer geek. I am my normal obnoxious charming self. This goes over well.
1956 - Hanging out with cool people is more fun than driving, so I give in and we all go to the Mexican restaurant.
2123 - Hey, let's go back to Nancy's place so Amy can shower, then maybe we'll come back and play pool or something.
2237 - After an interim beer, Terry motivates us for pool. He puts on a shoulder-length hot pink wig, purple leopard-spot glittery kitty ears. Amy puts on brown leopard-spot kitty ears, while I take the plain black. Nancy dons a straw cowboy hat, the sort of thing meant to mock cowboy hats. Thus dressed in raver accessories, we head out to the semi-rural dive bar to drink and shoot some pool.
2312 - I actually grew up with an old beat-up pay pool table in my basement (some arrangement with a local *cough* legitimate businessman in my father's hometown, as I remember it). I can usually hold my own, with the added bonus that otherwise competent players tend to make a lot of silly mistakes when playing me. Pool table etiquette requires that you put down the fee for a game as a challenge to whoever holds the table; after Nancy (a better player than me) fails to take the table, I get it for us by beating the guy who beat her. He is also much better than me. Go figure. I made some sweet shots, too.
2325 - People stop glowering at the freaks in kitty ears who walked into the bar and start loving us because we're fun.
0230 - back at the house, Amy's plane leaves at 0600, so she's going to sleep for 45 minutes and then leave. I doze for about twenty minutes, but am mostly awake.
0400 - get up and leave, not feeling particularly tired. I am wearing my emergency glasses, though, which are two prescriptions behind my contacts and, while fine for daylight driving, turn out to be really unpleasant for night driving. Especially in the fog coming in and out of the Sierra foothills. Whoops.
0745 - arrive home, delayed by a nap in a McDonald's parking lot. Notice my landlord's car in the driveway; knowing my housemate is gone, think "Boy, I'm going to be annoyed if he's staying in my housemate's room". Discover that to be the case, with a nice "Yeah, I'm staying here this week, hope that's okay, did anyone get a chance to tell you?". Commence rage.
1037 - after a couple of hours of dozing in front of the TV and working to settle myself down, I hit on the non-angry way to approach the whole thing: explain to him exactly how I feel about the whole getting-kicked-out thing, and how his being in the house produces a serious emotional problem for me. I'm nervous about it working, but it's the grown-up and aiki way to start resolving the situation: non-confrontational, but also very definite. And it goes well, we clear the air a bit, and he leaves immediately. (He'd also stuck around to see if there was anything he could do to help, which was genuinely nice of him, so I just left it that I'd ask if I needed anything.)
So starting a 3-hour drive at 4am after a night of partying isn't the smartest thing I've ever done...it's not the dumbest by a long shot, either (really, pick something). And I had a great time, which is the important thing.