The life and times of a city girl gone country: Recovery...

It has been a VERY long time since I have had as much fun as I had Memorial Day weekend. Mostly because I generally find that the kind of fun we had, is quite painful the next day. As an adult, I am generally able to weigh the consequences with the actions and make the better choice. Memorial Day weekend, we made an exception...

It all began Saturday around 7pm...a tan Jeep Wrangler rolls in to the neighborhood with a bunch of clowns blasting 'Buncha Girls' by Frankie Ballard (a new country music artist that we just happened to know and be friends with since high school). Not only are they blasting music, but they are screaming 'FRANKIE BALLARD!!!' and 'TAY-TAY' (as in Taylor Swift, who was headlining the show that Frankie was playing in the next day). SO embarrassing, but VERY funny!

('Sweet Jesus! You're embarrassing me' was all I could think, I do have to live in this neighborhood after all!). So they all roll out of the car, cocktails in hand-it only took them 5.5 hours to get here from Minneapolis with all their bathroom breaks. Sidenote: The poor driver was sober. That changed pretty quickly once said driver hit the door.

Anyway, I made a nice dinner of prime rib and horseradish sauce, homemade mashed taters and white chocolate mousse for dessert. In the middle of dinner, one of our guests decided he was going to go play 'sandlot' baseball with the neighbor kids next door and hurdles our porch, which drops off about 12 feet. Needless to say, he rolled out in to the grass-good thing he had a few drinks in him, a broken ankle would NOT have been the way to start the weekend. Subsequently, others joined them and they played until after dark.

After that it was cocktails and stories in the living room and even some of our brave neighbors ventured over to meet some of the Michigan/Minnesota gang. I believe they now have a better understanding of where exactly it is I come from.

We called it a night relatively early about 1230, knowing full well, the reason they were all here: Frankie Ballard was playing a concert at Wells Fargo Areana, and we had prime tickets (well, we didn't know we had such great seats at the time, but it didn't matter, we had a purpose)!

We also had a lot to do the next day to prepare. We went shopping for ingredients (and cuff-links for Mo-apparently this is common practice anytime Ash takes him on a getaway...Love you Mo!) to make Special K bars, Homemade Salsa, 'Crack Mix' (no illicit drugs involved thank you very much, we stick to the booze!) and a few other essentials, like a fifth of Vodka that was packaged in a fire extinguisher, because every road weary country singer needs one of those...

This is what it looked like...

We started cookin' and drinkin' about 2 o'clock. My mother-in-law offered to watch Guyface for the evening. She arrived @ 430pm. In the meantime, a tornado or wind scheers, etc, hit our hometown (don't worry, though there was damage, all of our families are OK). Everyone introduced themselves to my mother-in-law we were all, already, a little too close and a little too loud (this would get worse, much worse as the evening rolled on...) But they all introduced themselves and we packed up the goodies and headed to one of my favorite downtown restaurants: Centro.

As usual the food and the martinis did not disappoint! After a quick bite, we cruised to the concert, but not before Mo almost got in a fight with a groom who arrived on a caboose. We arrived early as Frankie was the first act.

We screamed our heads off-everyone around us was staring, it was hilarious! We were having a great time. Frankie did AWESOME, he's (and his guitar players are) very talented! Shortly after, he came out in to the crowd, and after he took pictures with a number of little girls (and big girls for that matter...) he invited us back to hang out. I think everyone was a little surprised when we showed up on the bus with 2 big coolers full of homemade goodies (and alcohol). I think the comment was 'usually people just come on here and drink all the booze!' Well, not good friends, we were trying to make him feel like home. Unfortunately, he had to catch a flight the next morning and wasn't able to enjoy all the goodies on the bus as it headed back to Nashville. But we're quite sure the boys on the bus partook and hopefully enjoyed. =)

We bar-hopped a little bit in downtown Des Moines, as much as one can on the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend anyway, there was a little 'Chunder' here and there and someone might have had to relieve themselves in an undisclosed location before we hopped in the car to make the 25 minutes drive home-good thing we had a driver! If we would have gotten pulled over with the mess of people we had in the truck, we ALL probably would have gone to jail, just for being idiots. =) It was more fun than I have had in a very long time.

All in all it was a wonderful time and a very fun weekend! Because I didn't have his e-mail when I started this post and I'm pretty sure he's not going to be home to get a hand written thank you note, I will publicly thank him here. Frankie, THANK YOU! We had a fantastic weekend, the highlight being getting to see you hit the 'big time'! Congratulations on your success, thanks for hanging out with us and please let us know if you're ever in town again...we promise we won't starting drinking until 5pm =)