Downshifting and Hiding

This is one of those days where singleness is something to be desired. Today my parental units drove down from Lubbock to stay with me for the weekend. Being around my mother is always stressful, and I already saw her last week while I was up in Lubbock for the high school reunion. So my solution was to hide, at least for tonight.

There were just two little tricks to that: working second shift and going to one of my friend's Friday the 13th event. Working second shift turned out to not be a big deal due to the fact that 2nd shift starts after 12 noon, so working my hours around that was no big deal. (Finding the help I needed at work to get my tasks done, now that wasn't at all easy.) I worked until nearly 7pm, then I went to the Friday the 13th thing.

The Friday the 13th event is connected with another of my hobbies: geocaching. I have a long and sordid history with geocaching, and I quit actively caching months (if not years) ago, so I wasn't exactly looking forward to talking about caching for several hours tonight. But, seeing as how I was hiding, I decided to go and have as good a time as I could. That, and the event was organized by a single girl about my age, so not only could I hide, I also had a prospect!

I hid out at the event, well, dinner really, for a couple of hours. I saw a lot of friends from the geocaching community, and amazingly, we really didn't talk about caching all that much. There was a lot of talk about my weight loss and other personal things, which was exactly what I needed after a day of frustration and a weekend of stress. I talked at length with one lady who had had a bariatric surgery, and we compared notes. I saw one of my colleagues from work who had just gotten back tonight from a business trip. I talked with his wife for a little while to compare work notes. There were some door prizes, and even though I didn't win, it was nice just to be there in the atmosphere.

During the night, I talked with Monica, the single girl event organizer. I had met her before years ago at another geocaching event, and at the time she was engaged to a guy, so I really didn't get to know her that well. Now that she is a free agent again, I talked with her at length. It turns out we have a lot of the same interests, and we have a few divergent ones that could be fun to explore. She's 30, and I'm 31, so there is no problem with age differential. After dinner, when everybody else took off, we stayed and talked for another two and a half hours in the parking lot in front of the restaurant. It was a good, long conversation coving a lot of ground, and I think we might have connected somewhat. She likes Futurama, but hasn't seen any of the new episodes, so sometime this week I'll call her and invite her to see the new season that I have DVRed. This could be fun, folks! Stay tuned!