An update from home.

Yeah, I'm at home right now, despite it being 11:30 on a work day. I called in sick for the first part of the day. Well, that's not technically right... I called in and said "I feel like crap", which was true, since I didn't sleep hardly at all last night.

I wasn't home for very long last night before Mullens picked me up, and we were on our way to Mardi Gras. We had to make a few stops before we left Peoria, to pick up some beads and alcohol. The beads were remarkably hard to find, so we had to leave Peoria without them, figuring we'd get them in St. Louis.

After 2.5 hours of deep, bonding conversation, me and Mullens arrived in St. Louis. Parking was horrible, but we finally found a parking place a mere 200 miles from Mardi Gras.

Now here's the thing. In St. Louis yesterday it was 15 degrees and snowing. Hard. During the walk, we didn't hear any music and didn't see hardly any people. Me and Mullens wondered if they had called it off, or if no one was showing up on account of the weather.

We were half right. There was basically no one there. There was maybe 300 guys, and about 10 girls. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. The girls were flashing for beads of course, not that we could tell. There was always huge mobs of people around them, and occasionally they'd get on a guy's shoulders, but you still couldn't see anything. By some stroke of luck, me and Mullens found ourselves in a front row seat for one of these flashings. Guys were crowded all behind us, climbing on our shoulders and trying to push us out of the way. It was really obnoxious.

In the end, we stayed a little more than an hour and gave away about $2 worth of beads. We each bought $20 worth, so we have quite a few left over. I don't know what I'm going to do with them.

We got back to Peoria around 1:30. I had a hard time getting to sleep, and then I just kept waking up, over and over and over again. I hate nights like that.

Well, I'm off to grab a quick bit to eat, then heading off to work.