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| A heavenly pina colada! |
We here camping for the week, had no worries about driving, were at a safe campground, life was good. The only bad thing was hubby was stuck working for Uncle Sam that weekend, so he wasn't able to attend the event.
Anyway, I'd just finished working during a very warm afternoon on a field, passing out water to folks and doing first aid. I trudged back to my campsite, hot and tired. I was heading to my tent to get a Diet Pepsi (Elixir of the Goddesses) when my campmate Sherry called me over. "Jae, I have some pina colada here!" I debated, since I hadn't eaten yet, but then she said the magic words: "It's cold!"
She had me at 'cold'. I grabbed my beer-stein sized mug, which she filled to the very top with TGIF Pina colada straight from the bottle. It was ice-cold and fabulous, and rather thick for a drink, but I was too tired to pay attention to that little detail.
About 1/8th of the way thru, the buzz started. I said "Wow, this is really strong."
She looked at the instructions of the bottle for a moment and replied, "Oh, we're supposed to be mixing this with ice."
We laughed and continued drinking it without the ice. Of course, this should have been my first clue that maybe we should have gotten some ice, but I didn't care at that point. The pina colada mix was ice cold, my tired feet were propped up, and I was feeling a little too mellow to even consider extricating myself from that camp chair.
We started telling jokes. They started out semi-clean. After all, she was a 'Southern Belle' type, and I'm Christian. We both try to behave. Unless we're soused.We can get a bit off-color at those times.
Shortly thereafter, another friend, Jeff, came over, saw we were drinking and laughing hysterically, and went to get his 151 proof rum out of his tent. I promptly added the rum to the over-strong pina colada mix, because apparently 80 proof wasn't good enough. It did have the benefit of making the pina colada a little less thick, however, and that was beneficial. We started talking and degenerated to dirty jokes. And by 'dirty jokes', I mean 'the kind that will make even an ER nurse blush'. The conversation theme for the evening developed into "f---ing like bunnies", because yes, I do let loose the f-bomb every now and then. Every time one of us said it we all laughed loudly, clicked mugs together, and took another drink. We finished off the bottle of TGIF pina colada and switched to Rum-and-Diet Pepsi, since that's lower calorie, of course. We apparently were still sober enough to be concerned about calories.
It's natural to get the munchies when drinking. We pulled out tortilla chips, Doritoes, and Oreos--always an excellent combo with Pina coladas and Rum-and-cokes.
Sometime while we were eating, a bit of tortilla chip broke off of the chip I happened to be eating and fell smack-dab on the middle of my chest. It looked quite silly there, so I picked it up and popped it in my mouth.
Sherry exclaimed, "Jae!! You just ate a bug!!"
"I did not. It was a broken tortilla chip that fell on my shirt!"
"It was a bug. We saw it," added Jeff.
"I swear, it was a tortilla chip. Besides, it was crunchy."
"So are bugs!" said Jeff.
"Yeah, but it was salty, too!"
Jeff insisted, "And so are bugs!"
The one brain cell I had left functioning fired. I asked, "Jeff, how do you know bugs are salty?"
He didn't have a good answer for that. To this day, I maintain it was a broken tortilla chip. To this day, they still claim it was a bug.
After that, the three of us decided to do a walk about camp. In the dark. We quickly discovered that the gravel road that was flat earlier that day actually had developed an incline while we were drinking, and we found ourselves holding each other up and trying not to fall down the hill. I grabbed Jeff's belt when he started to veer down the side of the road so that he wouldn't fall over. Fortunately I was in the middle of our stumbling threesome, so I did not experience the problem of kissing the gravel road.
After walking around the camp saluting our friends and gleefully sharing the "f-bombing like bunnies!" theme with everyone, nature called. We decided to make our way to the nearby portajohns. After we helped Jeff into one of them with the admonition "Don't pee on the seat!!", we ladies did our business and found our way back out safely.
The bad thing about portajohns is that they have no lights in them. It is remarkably dark in a portajohn at night, and when you're inebriated, the laws of physics are altered such that it's even darker. All three of us thought to bring our refilled mugs of rum with us on the walk (stagger) through camp, because we did have our priorities, you know. However, not one of us thought to bring a flashlight.
After some unspecified amount of time, undoubtedly too long for us even if it had been only 2.8 seconds, we gals decided Jeff had been in the john just a little too long. After banging on the walls and scaring the snot (among other things) out of him, we asked loudly, at some unknown decibel, but likely approaching eardrum-damaging loud, if the Tidy Bowl Man had come for him. Jeff informed us that we could go do something with ourselves that is anatomically impossible for females to accomplish. This made us howl even louder and bang on the portajohn a little more. We warned him not to let the Tidy Bowl Man grab anything and asked if there were any, you guessed it, copulating bunnies located inside. This elicited a couple more colorful expletives which had us ladies virtually rolling on the ground laughing. In fact, we were laughing so hard that it took us several moments to realize that Jeff was experiencing some distress. When we realized that he was not yelling because he was laughing but was yelling for help, we experienced some level of sobriety. Not much, given our condition, but every little bit helps.
"Help!" called Jeff.
"What's wrong?" I asked. Being the medical type, I had a number of scenarios passing before my eyes, including having things stuck where they shouldn't be stuck in portajohns, and who I was going to get to help, because I obviously was way too impaired to do anything more useful at that point than to encourage him that only a few hundred people would see him in a compromised state should we have to call 911.
He replied, "I can't find the door!"
Sherry and I decided to put our banging on the walls to good use and informed him that the door was the side we were banging on, and explained how to lift the handle to open the door. After a few tries, he was finally successful and expressed his great relief that he wasn't going to have to sleep on hard wet plastic that night.
At some point during our trek through camp, it occurred to us that it was getting rather late (the fact that we overheard a lot of snoring and other noises coming from tents being our clue), and that even humping bunnies need to rest sometime. We decided we'd escort Jeff to his tent, since we girls were camping next to each other and could hold each other up on the trip back, whereas Jeff was by himself and had no one to keep him from falling down the flat street-turned-steep-hill.
We approached his tent, only to find ourselves in front of one of the event officers. We girls curtsied. Jeff fell flat on his face at her feet. We girls expressed our concern by helping him back up, but only after we laughed.
The event officer commented to Jeff that she thought it was a good idea if he headed to bed since he could hardly walk.
Jeff responded, "I didn't fall! I was prostrating myself at your feet!"
We girls thought that this logic indicated that perhaps he might be sobering up and offered him a drink from our mugs, though somehow we managed enough discretion to not bring up bunnies doing the wild thing to the event officer. I didn't want the bunnies to miss out on anything.
Sherry and I got Jeff to his tent and then headed back to our tents, holding each other up, because the flat road had gotten even steeper. Happily, I remembered to drink a big glass of water and take tylenol and an antacid before bed.
In the morning when Sherry's junior-high school aged son smirked and asked me how I was feeling, I just took another bite of my cherry Pop-tart and a sip of my Diet Pepsi (and managed to keep them down without looking green), smiled sweetly, and said "I'm just fine. Why do you ask?"
Image source: casiansblog.blogspot.com
