Several of my friends have four day weekends. I have to work tomorrow, but of course I have Tuesday off. I had nothing really planned this weekend, which was nice. I was able to just go with the flow and do whatever I felt like doing. I saw Charlotte a lot. We had dinner Friday night, and then had plans to go see The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift (again) and The Devil Wears Prada on Saturday. We invited Nicky and Dee, but it ended up being just the two of us. Dee joined us after the movies for a trip to Great America (an amusement park here) and her husband joined us at the park very shortly after we got there.
We stayed for a few hours, rode some rides- including the new Survivor ride which I totally don’t understand but is pretty fun anyway- and walked around a lot. Dee REALLY doesn’t like line-jumpers. We started getting hungry and there was a bit of a debate as to whether to eat in the park and stay til closing, or to leave the park, go to a restaurant across the street for dinner then go back to the park for the fireworks. I said that if we left the park there was no way we were getting back to the park before it closed, which proved to be right.
We left the park, and the road was all coned off in a really weird way. Firstly we could only make a right out of the park, and then had to go three blocks before we could make a u-turn. The right lane was closed at every corner, and there were police cars everywhere. I managed to make a right turn onto the street Bennigan’s was on, but Dee and Chad both got waved on by a cop and had to cross the freeway and make several more random u-turns before they could get to Bennigan’s. As we pulled into the parking lot we were asked if we were there to eat or to park for the fireworks. We said eating, and they charged us $5, saying that we’d get it back inside, they were doing it to keep people who wanted to watch fireworks from taking all the parking spaces and leaving none for the restaurant patrons. I was fine with that, paid the guy, got my little ticket to get my money back, and parked.
Dee and Chad pulled in shortly after, and after a few minutes we were seated. That was pretty much where things went downhill. Our server came and took our order, bringing drinks and appetizers in a fairly reasonable amount of time. My dinner salad came out at the same time as the entrees- something that I really hate but rarely complain about. But it turned out they brought me a bacon burger with a beef patty instead of the black bean burger I ordered, so I sent it back and had time to eat my salad while they fixed the error. Dee discovered her BBQ burger had no BBQ sauce on it, so she requested that and some mayo and some ranch after we managed to flag someone down.
We had asked the hostess to find our waiter, because he had all but disappeared. She didn’t get him for us, so we managed to ask another waiter for what we needed. Another burger came out of the kitchen for our table- a huge double decker affair with a knife stuck in it. So I again said no, I ordered a black bean burger. I think Dee requested BBQ, mayo and ranch again, but I don’t remember. We were all sort of annoyed at that point. Finally my black bean burger arrived, and while it was yummy, I felt bad for Dee, whose burger was now quite cold. We ended up talking to the manager and getting about half our dinner free- he took Dee’s burger off our tag, took half the price of mine off since they messed it up so many times, and bought everyone free desserts (everyone being my three friends- no dessert for me, though I did take a forkful of Dee’s chocolate lava cake and just smelled it a couple of times- I didn’t eat it). We left a pretty crappy tip too, which I felt guilty about even with how truly awful the service had been.
When I got home I realized my wallet was missing. I figured I must have left it on the table when I had gotten cash out to pay the bill. Charlotte had kept some stuff in my wallet while we were at the park and so when I took her back to her car she said she had to get her stuff out of it. I reminded her that I had given it back at the restaurant, and she checked all her pockets and discovered that yep, I had, so she didn’t say that my wallet was not in my purse because she didn’t look. I called the Bennigan’s, they said they didn’t have it, but to call back in the morning to see if it had turned up. At that point I completely lost it. I haven’t lost a wallet since I had my backpack stolen in college, and I was exhausted and overwhelmed and totally started crying on the phone with the manager of Bennigan’s. The same one who had had to deal with us while we were there. Then I called Dee, who said she’d tell Charlotte. I went upstairs and laid down on my bed, and called my friend Henry who got the ever so fun job of calming me down enough so that I fell asleep.
I refused to wake up this morning until I could call the restaurant. My cell rang at about 10, and it was Charlotte. She had gone out to the car this morning to run an errand and discovered my wallet on the passenger’s seat of her car. She must’ve not only taken it out of my purse last night, but had taken it with her when she got out of my car and into hers. She doesn’t remember doing it, I don’t remember her doing it, but the important thing is that it was found intact (there was quite a bit of cash in it- much more than I ever carry- and my brand new Great America season pass, which is not replaceable if lost or stolen). She said she’d bring it by in about an hour when she was done with her other errands, and I called Bennigan’s to say that it had been found and thanks for looking.
She got to my house and we decided to go get some breakfast and get our nails done, which was fun, and then I came home to do some cleaning and laundry. On my way home there were the cutest little girls who had set up a lemonade stand about a block from my house. I’m a sucker for kids with lemoande stands, because didn’t we all do that when we were little? So I always stop. Then I managed to get all my laundry sorted and my room is still sort of a mess but now the mess is piles of sorted laundry. I also got a few loads washed, and tust me on this one- never wash pillows in the washing machine. They massively overbalance and your spin cycle sounds like your washer is doing to explode. So I currenlty have a very wet pillow drip-drying in my shower, and two more that I managed to get most of the water out of got run through one dryer cycle but are still damp and are air drying on top of my laundry sorter. Now it is getting quite late and I’m waiting for one more load to dry so I can put the load of work clothes currently in the washer into the dryer and go to sleep.