Last night I got to bed a little after 1:30 in the morning, which is good for me, and then I woke up around six with bad acid reflux and some of the worst and painful muscle tightening I've ever had. It spread down from my neck across my whole right shoulder. I spent the morning in agony. At my parents' suggestion, I took a hot shower, and that helped for the time that I was in there. Before hand, however, I took a nice hot bath for about forty-five minutes and read a chapter in Myst: The Book of Atrus. I appreciate that story more every time I come back to it. They're well written works of fantasy period, the three books in that series - never mind that they're tie-in products. I absolutely love David Wingrove's style, even if most of the story backbone comes from the Millers.

Eventually we decided to do the Alpine Slides at Jiminy Peak, even though I was still hurting pretty good. It ended up being a nice time, even though we had a fight in the car about my driving to Six Flags New England on Thursday. My mother also tripped on a rock and skinned her hand and knees. I managed to get three good rides in, my father had two good ones and one sucky one, and my mom got one good one and one sucky one. She gave her third ride to Dad since she needed to get checked out at First Aid.

On the way home, we stopped at a local farm not far from the slopes and picked up three ears of corn. They had theirs with steak and I had mine with a tuna sandwich on a hard roll. It was a perfect meal. I surfed the web for a little while, and headed over to my friend Alex's around 6:30, so that I could look at his Old Forge pictures before we hit Darren's party. I use names for the first time merely because it's too hard to come up with ways of referring to a variety of people as "my friend" and still speak with some measure of clarity. I will never use more than first names unless I get the person's permission, however, and I may still drop back to "my friend" if the topic matter at hand would be too revealing with a first name attached.

Darren's parties are always good, and tonight was no exception. Early on it seemed like everyone was doing something but the actual interaction was minimal. Later on, however, especially with the karaoke, things got moving pretty good, and by the end of the night (about an hour-and-half later than it was supposed to have been) I think everyone had had a blast. With the karaoke and everything, however, Darren's family must have though we were insane. The expression on his sister's face when I went out to the dining room for carrots was priceless. I have very little in the way of vocal talent, but I make up for it by being louder and more obnoxious than anyone else. I did a duet of "Summer Nights" from Grease with Ryan, a pathetic take of BNL's "Alcohol" where I sputtered out after the first verse with Darren, and a better but not great duet with him on "Beer for my Horses" as well. I was Willy. My final song of the night was a solo effort on "Good Riddance" and while I wouldn't say it did the song justice, I at least knew all of the words. We did some "Who's Line..." style improv which was fun. I had the best hit-to-miss ratio of the group, although my attempts weren't close to always dead on. We hit the road with a song of Darren's that he recorded locally at professional studio. When we all hit the road, I realized that this may very well be the last time I see alot of these people. I think it says something about the place I am right now that I was able to accept this and move on without wallowing in some sort of pre-emptive nostalgia.