this weekend i am spending some much needed time in greensboro with one of my favorite couples mary and mike.  mary has known me all my life; we lived in the same neighborhood when i was born all those years ago in birmingham.  our mothers tori and kathleen were besties, as were our dads mark and milo.  they were friendships that were meant to be in that sweet neighborhood of broken bow south, but more importantly, they are friendships that continue to stand the test of time, as they have moved anywhere and everywhere over the past 20 or so years.  as young adults, all of us kids love each others’ company.  i consider them some of my closest friends, and to visit mary and mike at their humble abode in north carolina is a very special treat!

i rolled in late thursday night to a winter wonderland in their darling subdivision.  it’s so pretty!

the picture below is from us all at kyle and kari’s wedding back in october.  such a good looking bunch!  i’ll point everyone out, starting with kathleen on the far left and working clockwise.

kathleen, mark, clark, milo, kyle, mary, mike, gregory, me, kari, tori.

so, they both went into work that friday morning while i posted myself up at their kitchen table with my laptop, cranking out some sweet documentation for work.  before i hopped to it, though, i laced up my running shoes and braved the cold winter air for a quick jog.  when i say quick, i mean that the roads were still icy and i almost twisted my ankle and fell flat on my back, so i very quickly ran down to the edge of the cul de sac and right back into the garage.  oh well!

snow running: as unproductive as it sounds.

the afternooon came and went, and then the happy couple arrived home, ready to begin a weekend of fun and plenty of laughs.  we were going to keep things chill this friday night, so we started by cracking open some beers and bottles of wine.  it amazes me how quickly you can fall right back into conversation and comfort even when you haven’t seen someone in months.  in between handfuls of cheez-its and hummus we reminisced about our families and caught up on the latest and greatest in the neuwirth, guthrie, and andrich lives.

after appetizers we dug into our wedge salads, something remotely healthy, for the rest of the weekend we were quite bad with our diets.  okay, so maybe i’m not actually on a diet, but i needed something green with this meal, so iceberg lettuce and cucumbers sounded like a fair idea.  oh, yeah, but then we covered them in bacon bits and ranch dressing.  whoopsies!

mary whipped up some shake’n’bake chicken and nancy fuller potatoes for our dinner.  the chicken was delicious, but i will admit that the potatoes were somewhat average.  don’t get me wrong, i love carbohydrates and butter and cheese all in the same dish just as much as the next foodie, but i wasn’t dazzled.  regardless, we cleaned our plates and got to cleaning the kitchen and then…..oh……and then the garbage disposal broke down on us.  oh, the horror!

mike opened those cabinet doors to find water dripping from the disposal all over the place.  well, that’s an easy way to spice up an otherwise already lovely friday night, yes?  there wasn’t much we could do about it at the time, so mike quarantined off the kitchen sink so that the damage wouldn’t get worse.  excellent work, mike!  stay tuned for saturday’s greensboro post to find out what happens in the garbage disposal chronicles.  i promise it will be worth the read!

we topped off our glasses and snuggled onto the sofas to watch gone girl.  mary and i had read the book and were dying to see the movie.  mike didn’t have a clue about the film but was a trooper to watch with us anyway.  it’s more of a thriller than anything, so it was a good choice for the three of us.  two and a half hours later the credits rolled and although i liked getting to see the story on the silver screen, i concluded i liked the book much more.  i know that’s typical with most movie adaptations (just ask me my opinion on unbroken), but even knowing that, i’d say it was definitely worth the rental.  maybe not the eleven bucks it would have cost to have seen it in the theatre, but definitely the few redbox bucks we spent.

we turned off the gas logs, folded the blankets, and trudged upstairs to bed.  i ended the evening with an endearing conversation with phillip and then called it a night.  if you thought friday was entertaining, just you wait!