The best friends are the ones who will go through AA with you if needed

Thursday, I dragged the best friend up to Nashville for two days of fun. J, an old - ha! I called you old! - friend from the 7th grade just bought her first house. In our world, this not only mandates a party, it means that not to have one would mean punishment. So along with T&A (I'm going to call them that from now on. It makes them seem a little less dirty than they actually are), we planned a night. Luckily, we all know the entrance fee (some form of drinkable alcohol and an empty stomach) and the rules (remember something embarrassing about everyone, and liberally call each other names). As the BF and I headed north on Thursday afternoon, our latest alcohol inventory among the five of us was about 11 bottles of wine and one bottle of vodka. With a little rationing, we could make it through til the liquor stores opened on Friday morning. But even 5 hours of homemade pizza, wine, and laughing wasn't enough when - I think simultaneously - all five of us realized that in the next year we will all turn 30. More than one of us needed a drink refill. Some of us needed more than one. We all needed a subject change, so I think we moved on to discussing men at that point. That is so much more interesting - and much less painful to make fun of - than our age. Fortunately, I remembered that I had packed my camera. Unfortunately, I didn't remember until T&A had been gone for about 10 minutes. I thought about calling them back - but that would have wasted the energy I had saved up to finish the last bottle of open wine. I was still deciding on a plan of action when my head hit the pillow. Friday had far fewer hangovers than I anticipated. Not that any of us jumped out of bed ready to sing hymns of praise to the morning sun. But we don't ever want to do that anyway, so if one of the girls had acted in such a suspicious manner, I would have known they were hiding some good pills somewhere. We all made do with coffee, silence and some inspirational viewing of HGTV for a bit, then headed out to buy the plants and supplies we needed to do J's front lawn. Three hours, two Walmarts, one Home Depot and a liquor store later, we were back at J's house. First order of business: make the Pina Coladas. We took a vote after the first batch, and decided that all future ones shall be made with Mango flavored rum. After the second batch, we issued an edict, but I was pretty convinced that the Colada part of the equation could be left out, and I'd be happy with just the mango rum. Then it was time to get down to the nitty gritty. After which we rewarded ourselves with pasta and some more wine. So the girls and I had a chance to catch up. And - I have discovered - they all read my blog! Which is why I didn't pull out any of the embarrassing stories or pictures from our teenage years. We looked at all those pictures and we all admitted the bad hair mistakes we have made, bad hair mistakes that we all remember much more fondly than some of the bad man mistakes we've also made. I don't think it was verbalized, but I'm pretty sure more than one of us would rather live with the bad perm that interupted our lives than some of those men (I am, of course, excluding the Best Friend from this statement. I'm pretty sure she'd take a bad man over bad hair any day). We all agreed that good shoes trump just about everything else in life. Except good friends. And half price wine. J's New Flowers: And J's New Rose Bush: