no more bourbon

This is fawn pea with a special report from bugheart HQ.

It's Sunday night and we are sipping Virginia wine and recovering from a little bit of a 3-day bender. As miss bugheart mentioned in her post yesterday, her elegant apartment is crowded with people and suitcases as the stars aligned just right (just wrong?) to bring both papa bugheart and me here to DC at precisely the same time. The bourbon has been a coping strategy.

What would you do if your friend and your father collided in your little apartment on the same weekend, vying for your undivided attention and pretending to listen to each other's exhortations on the virtues of organic food v. the virtues of quarks? If you're smart like bugheart, you would faithfully steer the conversation away from politics, get out the good bourbon, and pour some for everyone.

Actually, I have been sincerely enjoying papa bugheart's company. He is an exceedingly kind and gracious man, and just adores his youngest daughter. He's also been terribly generous to share her with me, especially since he only gets to see her a couple of times a year. But he drives her a little batty with his sometimes-repeated stories and arch-conservative politics, so we've been keeping lubricated and loopy much of the time. Tonight he is off at dinner with a colleague, and we are savoring a little quiet time.

It has been fascinating to meet the father of my dear friend for the first time.

Personally, I have been sharing my parents with my friends more lately since my parents live much closer now than they used to. It's always a little nerve-wracking to introduce them to someone for the first time. Sometimes they'll be on their best behavior and charm the heck of my friends. Other times, I want to put a bag over my head and claim to have been adopted. You just never know. We don't have all the nice liquor at my house that grub keeps here, so I have to find other ways to deal.

So it was a big deal I think for bugheart to have us both staying here at the same time, cluttering up her apartment with our stuff and interacting at all hours of the day - brave, for sure. We all get along quite well together, actually. Papa bugheart tells stories, and we all take shots of bourbon, and the stories get funnier and funnier.

Plus I get to see them together as father and daughter, which is a treat. Bugheart and I have been friends for about five years, and I've seen her in all kinds of states of being, but never this one precisely. I guess it's like when you're dating someone new and meeting their parents for the first time. They drag out the baby pictures and worse, the junior high pictures, and suddenly you see your squeeze in a whole new light. Any rate, my esteem for bugheart has only grown this weekend (even if it was through a drunken haze much of the time).

When I go home to North Carolina on the train tomorrow morning, I will be taking back about ten pounds of new acquisitions, mostly from bugheart's closet. We are lucky to be pretty much the same size in clothes, shoes, foundation undergarments, etc. You all are familiar with her magnanamous spirit via the Great Monday Give-Away, I'm sure. I had a few Monday items waiting here for me, as well as the items that kept appearing on top of my suitcase each time I came back into the room. She tried to give me two suits today, and that's when we discovered that my belly has pooched out some since reaching the ripe age of 30, and we are no longer exactly the same size. Sigh. Thankfully our relationship has grown past the marriage of fashion convenience it once was.

Thanks for the hospitatlity bugheart, and y'all reading, and thanks to grub for lending me the little lady and the west side of the bed this weekend (tee hee). Now it's off to finish some socks and drift off to sleep pretending tomorrow isn't really Monday.

P.S. If you missed getting your dose of bugheart today, head on over to my blog where she's providing a guest-post.