Long Weekend

Friday

Roche gives us a "Spring Fling" day every year, which is basically a Friday in March that we get time off. It didn't happen to be Marc's Friday off (he gets every other Friday off - I know, talk about a charmed existence), but he took the day off anyways. We decided to go to Half Moon Bay, since I've been wanting to take the dog to the beach for some time. I also thought it might be fun to bring a picnic lunch and eat on the beach.

So we picked up a picnic basket from Pier 1, and I made up a couple of rotisserie chickens, and we bought some potato and macaroni salad to go with it. I also cooked up a few polish dogs, just in case we didn't have enough food. Kenny and Leslie came along, since Kenny was still on spring break. The four of us drove up in the Rav4, with the dog sitting between my brothers in the back seat.

We stopped by this one beach first, where we had to pay a $4 entrance fee. Just as we were about to pull past the booth, Bandit gets up and pops his head up to the front by Marc. The lady was like, "Oh, dogs aren't allowed on the beach." Oops. So she pointed us to a different beach down the road where dogs and horses were permitted. Yeah, horses, which meant, of course, horse poop. We tried to pick a place as clear of poop as we could. Lunch was good, and it turned out we had more than enough food. I tied Bandit to a big rock while we ate, and he was surprisingly well-behaved.

Making the catch

After lunch, we let the dog loose and Marc threw a frisbee for him, while Kenny, Leslie and I went to relive our childhood (we used to camp at Half Moon Bay when we were kids) by building what we used to call, "Uncle Feathers." It's basically a big hole up near the tideline on the beach with a sand wall and a moat. The idea is to try to fortify it enough so that the water doesn't get over into the hole. Anyways, yeah, we're all in our 20's now, but what the heck, we did it anyways. Unfortunately, the water never came far up enough to even touch it. Sad!

Building Uncle Feathers

Bandit had a great time, with everyone just tossing the frisbee around for him to catch. I tried to get him into the water (which was freezing), but he wasn't too keen on the idea. He got his feet wet a few times, but it was mostly by accident. He did have fun trying to "bite" the foamy water coming up. By the time we got home, he was downright pooped.

The weather was perfect too. Awesome day at the beach!

Keeping an eye on the prize

After we got home and got cleaned up (I took a short nap too), we drove down to Union City to meet Cynthia, Vicki, Deepali, and Marian and her brother for a joint birthday dinner for me, Cynthia and Vicki at Texas Roadhouse. A few of us went over to Cynthia's house afterwards to watch a movie.

Saturday

Saturday morning Marc and I totally slept in. I woke up at like 7:30 am to let the dog out, then went back to bed. I think we ended up waking up at 12:30. Bandit must have been pretty tired too, because he didn't make a peep after going outside to pee that morning. We got ready, quickly grabbed some lunch, and then headed to Jan's for Bandit's herding lesson.

It was hot! Jan forgot that Bandit doesn't like the flag, so she brought it in with her his first go-round, and he spent most of the time worrying about the flag. The next couple times she left the flag out, and he did much better. He's really learning to go both ways now ("away to me" and "come bye"), and he's starting to learn to control his speeds. It still amazes me that he'll be in mid-"chase" and Jan will say "lie down" and he'll just stop and lie down. No video this week, unfortunately, because our camera ran out of batteries.

That night, Kenny and Leslie came over, and we rented Runaway Jury. Pretty decent movie, good for a rental. Blockbuster had a "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" deal for their pre-viewed DVD's, so I picked up Underworld and Dark Blue (both have Scott Speedman in them, yummy!), and Tomb Raider 2. It was a good chance to buy movies I'd never pay full price for. :)

Sunday

Sunday was a pretty low-key day, especially since Melanie (dog trainer) called to cancel class for the day because she was sick. So instead, Marc and I went shopping, to use some of the gift cards I'd gotten for my birthday. We went to Macy's, and I bought a couple of shirts, including a funny one that had a monkey on it with its fingers in its ears and the text, "Not Listening." Marc couldn't stop laughing about it. I ended up only finding two shirts, so I still have tons of gift-card shopping left to do.

Marc's brother, Steve, came up to meet us for dinner with his two kids, Jacob and Allison. We went to Amici's, where Jacob declared that he wanted a pepperoni pizza for dinner. When the pizza finally came, however, he asked his dad to take off the pepperonis. It was pretty cute.

We worked on the video we were doing for my uncle that night, which took forever to do. We had to do the whole thing over since the original tape we'd done got eaten up by the 8mm tape player. Finally, a little after midnight, we were done.

I was totally not ready for my weekend to be over! But alas, here I am at work, typing this up. And I just realized I left my lunch in the car. It definitely has to be Monday.