Weekend roundup: Oklahoma excursion/Carling Cup final

An eventful weekend. Since I'm stalling for picking next week's songs, I'll summarize the goings on below the fold:

Amy and I made it Newark International in plenty of time Friday afternoon for our flight to Oklahoma City. Especially since it ended up being delayed for two hours. Fortunately I had a couple of Presidents' Club passes handy, so we got to snack on free beer and Fritos for awhile. We made it down to Oklahoma on an extremely tedious flight--no amount of dirty looks or turbulence could deter two strangers behind us (who had only met because they were both late getting on the plane in the first place!) from chatting inanely at full volume the duration of the flight.

Saturday morning Amy and I and Mom and Grandma went out to the Cowboy Hall Of Fame for a couple of hours, and then to the County Line for lunch. Then it was time for the main event, Katie and Chris's wedding shower.

Having never attended one of these things, I wasn't really sure what to do, but it was basically a nice little joint family reunion. We got encouraging feedback about our own wedding--that so many family members are even considering hauling themselves up to Maine is really gratifying! Fingers crossed it works out for them!

The night wrapped up with some American Idol Karaoke Revolution. I'm proud to report that I earned a double platinum record for Let's Stay Together (years of Al Green singalongs finally pay off!), and even better, on my next turn I became the only person booed off the stage all night for a truly shocking David Brent-style If You Don't Know Me By Now.

This morning was an early start straight to the airport. The flight home was quick, but I managed to finish up a couple of books (I was thinking that perhaps I would use this blog for book reports, but not today. For the record, I finished "When Affirmative Action Was White" and "Vietnam, Jews, and The Middle East: Unintended Consequences." The former explored the fact that all of our most progressive social programs (The G.I. Bill, social security, etc) were enacted when Jim Crow was in full effect, and how the postwar middle class was built, among other things, on the backs of Black America. The latter book is an account of the Middle East (particularly the events leading up to the Six Day War) viewed through the prism of LBJ's preoccupation with Vietnam. This one took awhile to gather momentum, but the last 40 pages were filled with interesting facts and observations that have a resonate (positively and negatively) today.)

Anyways, as I said, the flight landed 35 minutes early, early enough that I decided to check on the Carling Cup final, which was at halftime. Amy and I decided to try to make it to a bar to catch the end with Ned and Marcio. John Terry obliged by having his face nearly kicked off by Abou Diaby, so we got to see the last fifteen minutes of normal time and eleven-odd minutes of extra time. Unfortunately, and as could have been and in fact was predicted, we got there just in time to see Chelsea go in front. We never looked like equalizing, especially after a comedy brawl that had Toure and Adebayor sent off (with Eboue sure to follow). But fair enough, we played really well the first half, and it's clear to everyone we're going to have a ridiculously good team in a year or two.

So then it was off to pick up Martin, nap, and then wonder if either this rapidly approaching cold or already-arrived snowstorm will be enough to keep me at home tomorrow!