The Lakehouse

We have regular accommodations at The Lake of The Ozarks through Ripcord.  Her parents own a house right on the lake.  They bought it back in the 1970's with another couple.  The various family members reserve the house for their selected weekends.  She opens the house to us drunks for an adult weekend right around my (and her) birthday.

The house is decorated from bits and pieces tossed out from homes redecorated thirty years ago.  There is a strong 1970's theme throughout.  Slowly it's progressing to the 1980's.  And yes, the upstairs is carpeted in orange shag.

The closets and dressers are filled with lost and forgotten clothing - perfect for Mix Master's rendition of Young Frankenstein one night.  Oh yes, the entertainment is non-stop.  Like most of our parties, the height of the night is the Solid Gold dance hour.  I'm sure the neighbors love when we pull into town with our 2am dance parties.

While we have endured a few rainy weekends, stranded watching Godfather marathons on a crappy TV, the focus for our adult weekends is DRINKING.  Full-on, no holds barred, no-one-needs-to-be-anywhere-the-next-morning, no designated drivers needed drinking.  You can already hear our livers screaming for mercy as we start to plan Adult Weekend 2010.

The goal is to putter the pontoon boat out to a small cove, drop anchor, and bob in the water sitting on our WetBuns sipping jungle juice.  "Jungle Juice" is an ever-changing concoction of fruit juice, clear liquor and sliced fruit.  Our earlier versions leaned more to the grape flavor, but more recently we've been using V8's fruit punch and rum.  It's mixed into a large insulated jug with a spigot that's kept on the boat and we load it into smaller (but still rather large) drinking jugs.

Jungle Juice jug on the left - drinking jug on the right

It's time to pull up the anchor, head back to the house and prepare dinner when we run out of jungle juice... duh!  And this is when the party kicks in - loud and silly.  This is when Mix Master K pulls out a velvet robe and declares it his smoking jacket as he starts to strut singing Puttin' on the Ritz.  The Husband finds our stories old and multi-times retold, but this is when we tell them yet again.  And we laugh over and over again.

The Nanny missed a step disembarking from the boat - WHEW, she was okay

For after-dinner drinks we've taken to making Dog Bowl.  The Nanny bought us an honest-to-God dog bowl (the largest she could possibly find) for us to make this delicacy - lemon-lime soda, vodka, ice, and sliced lemons and limes.  It is a group drink that you sip and pass to your neighbor.

At some point the party melts away as people make their way to bed (or the couch).  Early risers make breakfast and clean up the night before.

On Sunday (sometimes Monday) morning we clean up our mess, wash the linen, pack up and head home, sunburnt, hung-over, exhausted, and ready to do it all over again.

Sunday In My City - May 30, 2010

Sundays In My City is so much fun to participate in, capturing glimpses from all over the world.  Today I'm highlighting a Sunday from several years ago, in Florida.

On this trip I was using a friend's digital camera and caught a serious case of shutterbug.  I was very excited to see the results and haven't stopped taking pictures since.

This is by far my most favorite picture.  On my first day there I was paranoid about carrying the camera to the beach so I had it in a ziplock bag.  All of the shots had a hazy hue to them.

That's it for my Florida pictures!  Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did reliving it.  I have a few more trips I can highlight so come back and see what I come up with.

Friday Fragments - May 28, 2010

Taking a break from my posts this week highlighting a family vacation to Florida.  I have more vacation photos to post so come back next week.  Once I deplete those I wonder what's left to write about???  :) I'm sure I'll come up with something!

Friday Fragments is a great opportunity to review the bits and pieces of the week, to post little fragments that don't quite make a full post.  Click the button and follow the fun!

*Gearing up for Memorial Day, AKA Worship The Grill Weekend.  Yeah it might have something to do with celebrating our military and remembering the fallen, but for most Americans it's just a three day weekend marking the beginning of the summer season.  So let's all wave hi and say thanks to my brother sitting in the scorching heat of the Middle East while I figure out which BBQ invitations to accept.

*Don't you just love Garage Sales?  I especially love Estate Sales when I'm allowed to wander through the entire house pilfering through sale items.  OMG I just remembered my funniest Estate Sale story... Wait, I know I have to explain the difference because someone will ask.  A Garage or Yard sale is someone unloading their crap priced at super low prices and the shopper then haggles the price even lower (pisses me off to no end and I always swear to never hold another garage sale ever ever again... until the next time).  These are usually set up in one's garage or front yard, thus the name.  An Estate Sale is typically held after someone has died and their family has taken everything they want.  The stuff is priced similar to garage sales but it's displayed throughout the home.  There are professional companies that put on the sales, taking a percentage, but the best ones are hosted by the family.  I landed a killer collection (like ten shoe boxes) of recipe cards for the bang up price of ten dollars!!!  But that's not the best thing I ever found.  Nope.  I was going through little boxes of stuff on a shelf in the basement, set up next to Christmas ornaments.  You'll just die.  Clearly someone had not LOOKED in every box.  It was Grandma's DIAPHRAM!  No!  I did not buy it!  I boxed it back up and shoved it to the back of shelf.  YES!  HER DIAPHRAM!

*On my way to a luncheon last Saturday, I came to a schreeching halt in the middle of the street and sent my daughter to find out how much that cabinet cost.  THREE BUCKS!  Then we had to squish the damn thing into my backseat.  It was EXACTLY what I envisioned for the bathroom at the pizza kitchen.  The boys all looked at me cross eyed when I presented it.  Dude, you NEED a cabinet in a bathroom so you can store extra rolls of toilet paper, maybe some shit spray and if you hire women we would like a place to store certain supplies.  Shut up, it cost only three dollars.  It's going in the bathroom and it's perfect.  His mother approved so I didn't have to hear any more protests. 

*At work someone brought in a bag filled with radishes!  We have some seriously weird shit come into our kitchen.  So I spent a little time scrubbing the dirt off them and plopping them in a bowl of water.  Evidently I'm the only person in the entire office that actually eats radishes.  It's going to take me some time to polish them off.  Does anyone have a decent radish recipe?   Maybe radish cake?

Still reeling over that diaphram, aren't you?  Yeah, me too.  And I almost TOUCHED IT!

Florida - The Kids

The awesome thing about hanging out with my friends is that all of our kids get along.  Really well.  And while the adults turn most every gathering into a drinking event, this outing was a family vacation.  Honestly, it was all about the kids.

This picture is posted specifically for Kelly who commented yesterday.  It was from the first Florida trip on the way home.  The group of kids may get along well, but the siblings sometimes have issues.  There is some wisdom in traveling with the kids separately.  I was on the verge of smacking a couple of pissy boys upside the head with their bitching and bellyaching but then I turned around and saw their sourpuss faces and just had to take a picture.

We just didn't have big blow ups between the kids on either trip and I think a lot of that had to do with having plenty of space to spread out.  They also broke up into different groupings at various times.  Sometimes it was the girls one direction and the boys another.  Other times it was the big kids escaping the little kids.  The parents took turns escorting kids to the pool or to the beach - again in different groupings depending on the day, time or mood.

The boys bonded... frequently.  There were several wrestling matches.

The siblings had a few go arounds.  Amanda and Keith were smacking the shit out of each other in the pool

But like I said, overall they all got along very well

Florida - Playing In The Sand

First, I may have the name of the town wrong.  I hate how I screw up names.  I thought it was Sea Grove, but when I look at the map we might actually have been in Seaside.  Whatever.  It's Florida.  On the beach.  That's all that matters. 

When pilfering through my vacation pictures one very common theme on this trip was playing in the sand.  What I don't have a picture of is the sand creation I did one night after a few dozen cocktails.  It was quite obscene and remnants were still visible (if you squinted) the next morning.  I'm sure the daytime visitors were shaking their heads in disgust at the stupidity of unruly teenagers left roaming the beaches at night.  So I acted all offended too.  Damn drunken teenagers.

Nighttime walks along the beach were mandatory.  Piranha, Booty and I fell in love with the ocean at night on our Cancun trip so we flock to the beach after sunset every chance we get.  One night after the kids were down for the night (we have old teenagers supervising the scene so pipe down) the girls went out into the water.  The guys stood on shore holding cameras and all non-water friendly items (and somehow losing Piranha's camera).  They kept joking about us being shark bait and then Ripcord announced  that she might be even more baitlike as she started that morning.  I swear we ran out of that water cartoon style!

The kids were taken with all of the crabs that came crawling out of the water at night. 

Our little bucket was filled with crabs.  When we decided there was nothing to DO with a bucket full of crabs we released them and they all scampered back to the ocean.

There was the obligatory sand castle

But then they got creative with what my daughter called an ALMAGATOR

And then there was a sand turtle

I was surprised to see my son, Keith, sit still as the girls heaped sand on top of him and give him pointy mermaid boobies

Sea Grove, Florida - At The House

Yesterday I posted our first trip to Florida.  Two years later we repeated the trip, but we couldn't secure the same house which we absolutely loved.  We ended up in neighboring Sea Grove with some mixed reviews.  Overall we still preferred the first house in Destin, not as though our time in Sea Grove was miserable or anything.

On this trip I borrowed a friend's digital camera that I was able to download at the end of each day, hooking me on the new fangled technology.  Her camera was absolutely wonderful and I ended up with some really fantastic shots, so much so that I had a really hard time narrowing down which pictures to use for today's posting and will have to drag this out a couple of days.

I took several shots of the house, just because it amused me so much.  My housemates weren't quite so taken and were more, "the 80's called and they want their couch back."  Whatever assholes.  It was filled with FLAMINGOS!  And I LOVE flamingos!

Like the first house this accommodated our families very well.  It had plenty of spaces for us to gather or hide away.  It was also well stocked with movies, boardgames, and cards. 

There were two porches.  The one upstairs was left unused, but little Alex was hellbent on escaping out there.

The main porch was taken over by the adults every night once we tucked the kids into bed. 

One of the perks of this house was the private pool in the backyard.  Because the ocean was kinda icky on this trip we spent a lot of time in the pool.

Ultimately, no matter how icky the water, our goal was to hang out at the beach.  A short walk down the street brought us to the wooden path and stairs down to the sand and waves...

Destin Florida

The friends, me, Booty, Piranha and Ripcord, took all of our kids, nine total, and two spouses to Florida.  We rented a house that could accommodate fifteen people.

I took my crappy soon-to-die camera.  It meant very few pictures, but I also landed some unique"texture" in the resulting shots.

If we thought three of us going to Cancun could test our friendship, combining four families for a week in the same house could have been all-out war.  Not only did we survive, we rocked.  The big kids looked out for the little kids and the adults had plenty of time to sit back and relax. 

Of course, this was my first time for taking my kids on any vacation and I have issues with water.  So I over-bundled little three year old Ian with a lifevest and spf 9000 and a hat.

Somehow, despite my frantic over-mothering, my kids managed to have fun.

The house was large enough that everyone could gather and play together or take off and have a little alone time.  Now to sound like a total MOM, one of my favorite things about renting a house was having a washer and dryer at our disposal day and night.  It meant fresh towels every day and if Koolaid spills down someone's shirt we don't have to wait until getting home before it can be worn again.

Not only did we go to the beach a million times a day, we had a pool at our disposal right across the street.

This was such a fabulous vacation that we did it again two years later.  I'm still scrolling through the gillion pictures to figure out how many days of posting that will involve.  Come back tomorrow and let's see how it turns out!