no touch monkey (bwaaaaaaaaaaa!)

Check out the labels -- this may be the only time, other than my wedding, that these tags are used on the same post. After much anticipation, the first non-high-school friends to ever visit my hometown arrived this afternoon. Adit and Omar appeared to have a delightful time -- after driving through rain all last night in Nebraska and all this morning from Kearney to our house, they arrived here at 3pm, at which point we promptly started to feed them massive amounts of food. My parents made corn on the cob, potato salad, bean salad, and bratwurst, all of which (except, in my humble opinion, for the bean salad, but my mom, brother and Adit liked it) were delicious. Then, we left for town just in time to catch the Fourth of July parade, which lasted about two minutes, and was replete with a color guard (two old men carrying a couple of flags), two people with a dog, a girl on a pony, an ambulance, and a fire truck. We actually were able to see the parade a second time as we walked back across the square to the parked vehicle, so I suppose that was nice?

Michael was kind enough to drive us around and give us the grand tour, since his Suburban was much roomier than my old Pontiac Sunfire. We drove around town seeing the sights (mainly replicating the loop that my friends and I made around town endlessly on weekends during high school), stopped at the convenience store where I used to work to get gas for the car and a Red Bull for Adit, and stopped at the grocery store to get mushrooms and ice. We swung back past the house to drop off the ice, and convinced my mom to give us a tour of the round barn and its environs. The tour was lovely (although nothing was particularly new to me, but the buildings are cool), and Adit and Omar both bought round barn tshirts, which they proceeded to wear the rest of the evening. Then, Michael and I took them around the great town of Allerton, where they saw my brother's house, my parents' business, and a variety of other buildings and memories.

We came home and ate strawberry shortcake and started drinking, with the intention of going in to see fireworks, but it proceeded to rain 2.5" in the past six hours, so fireworks were cancelled. Instead, my dad made some delicious pizza (including the first and last vegetarian pizza that will ever be prepared in this house), and we ate pizza around the island in the kitchen while discussing small town life. Sometime after 10pm, Katie, Katie's husband James, and Katie's sister came over, and we all ended up hanging out in the kitchen until 2:30am. I hadn't seen Katie in ages, and it had been even longer since I had seen James, so it was good to catch up with them. The evening was highly entertaining, although it sort of degenerated as we switched from drinking beer (or in my case, Smirnoff Ice) to drinking either Bailey's or scotch on the rocks. Also, I think we fully explored the fun that can be had with this Android app that plays the opening scream from "CSI: Miami" on command -- basically, take any joke, ridiculous comment, or word of wisdom and play that scream right after it (which has to be timed pretty well to work), and the hilarity of the joke increases eightfold. Or, since I am prone to exaggerating, possibly twofold. Either way, it was vastly entertaining.

But now, it's three a.m., and as Adit and Omar are attempting to leave tomorrow morning around 11am, I need to get some sleep so that I can get up and see them off. Goodnight!