Our weekend visit to South Carolina began as an attempt by Jeff and myself to save money by cashing in some frequent flier miles on a February visit, in lieu of the planned Christmas visit. Katie was also unable to make it out for Christmas, so she hopped on the February bandwagon as well, and somehow convinced her poor, unsuspecting boyfriend Joel to come along and meet the insane family. Then, my half-brother-in-law Mark (my, that’s a mouthful) decided to stop by for a few days after doing some work up in DC. So, we wound up with quite a crowd!

Weeks before the actual trip, we started getting near-daily phone calls from Mom. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m not making fun of you – it was cute, really!) Some questions she had for us included:

• Would it be ok if she had us sleep in a room other than my childhood bedroom, should it prove absolutely necessary due to the number of guests and configurations of beds?
• Did we prefer flannel or cotton sheets?
• What foods do we want on hand? (She actually sent out a rather detailed questionaire with sections for each meal, plus snacks, and sample options)
• Were we absolutely positive we wanted to visit? It wasn’t too late to cancel if we had better things to do.
• Were we sure we didn’t want to stay in a hotel, where we could get away from everyone and Jeff could live cat-hair-free?
• Did Cookie and Barrie mind driving down to Columbia to visit? Mom was more than happy to drive us up there instead.
• Et cetera…

We arrived at my house late Friday night, after Mom picked us up at the Charlotte airport (slightly more than an hours drive away from Columbia). I immediately became completely wired, zipping around the house looking at all the things I hadn’t seen in two years, frantically pursuing the two still-alive cats. There was also TONS OF FOOD. Possibly literally. Sitting out in the dining room was a table full of snacks (muffins, brownies, cheese straws, grapes, ginger snaps, to name a few), and Mom instantly offered us some corn chowder and creme caramel.

Poor Jeff was completely exhausted from several consecutive days of travel and trade shows, so I finally took pity on him and we hit the sack.

Saturday, we crawled out of bed around noon (but were still up before everyone except Daddy and Mark). There was a perpetual pot of coffee going in the kitchen (Daddy-style – that is, stronger than almost ANYONE makes coffee, except for Jeff). I think I had more coffee this past weekend than in the entire month leading up to it.

Katie and Joel actually took a few hours in the afternoon to go out somewhere and do something, but Jeff and I contented ourselves sitting around doing NOTHING. (Well, not entirely nothing: I spent large chunks of the day battling some problems on Katie’s laptop, before finally concluding that the hard disk was totally hosed.) We ate, chatted with my parents and Mark, ate some more, puttered around with our laptops, enjoyed a visit from Mom’s friend Kay, ate some more – etc. Good day!

Saturday night, we all had dinner and cake to celebrate Daddy’s 79th birthday (actually on Sunday, but by then Mark would be gone). Afterwards, we played one of my sister’s favorite games: “Eat Poo, You Cat.” (I have no idea if that’s the real name.) Everyone sits in a circle with a piece of paper and a pencil. At the top of your piece of paper, you write a sentence (“The weasel danced to hunt the rabbit,” and “It is 10:20 at night” were both examples). You then pass your paper to the person next to you, who has to draw a representation of your sentence beneath it. Then the part of the paper with the original sentence on it is folded over out of sight, and the paper is passed to the next person, who writes down a sentence that describes the picture… and so on, all the way around the circle.

You’re especially screwed if you’re sitting next to my dad, who Jeff jokingly refered to as “Picasso,” more for his surrealistic tendencies than his artistic talent! For instance, Daddy took a picture of a cat being kicked through a doorway, and translated it as “Get out of here, and don’t come back,” which the next person found understandably difficult to draw. I’d have half a dozen other bizarre examples, if we hadn’t accidentally thrown away the sheets when we were done. :(

Daddy’s actual birthday was a bit more eventful. Mark was taking off late in the morning, so we spent 30 minutes or so taking pictures outside. Anyone reading this who has a family is probably familiar with how this went:

“Ok, now I want a picture with just the ‘kids’ – Mark, that means you, too! Now one with the men. Now one with the boyfriends/husbands. Ooh, we need a sister pic. Now all of us together! Shoot – did we get one with Joel?”

After PhotoPalooza, Cookie and Barrie drove down from Rock Hill to hang out for a while. We set off in search of Frank’s, a famous hold hot dog place in Five Points (Cookie and Barrie are trying to visit lots of famous old diners/hot dog stands, and this was the closest one on the list). After about 10 minutes spent cruising up and down Harden St, and with several fruitless calls home to talk to my dad (who claimed to have some vague idea of where Frank’s was located, but wasn’t really sure that’s what it was called), we finally gave up and had lunch at Yesterday’s instead.

After several more hours of Doing Nothing (but now with Cookie and Barrie to entertain us), we packed some clothes and drove up to Rock Hill to stay with them overnight. First, we swung by Olive Garden for dinner. Jeff and I ordered glasses of wine, as we always do when eating Italian food. The waitress started to nod, and then looked surprised and told us “Oh no, I forgot, it’s Sunday.”

That’s right, folks: no alcohol is served on Sunday in South Carolina. (Well, not unless you shell out for a fairly expensive liquor license, which Olive Garden apparently opted to skip.) There’s something extremely surreal to me about eating Italian food, about being SURROUNDED by people eating Italian food, and not seeing a single glass of wine on any tables. Pasta and coke – not the same.

After swinging by Target (to pick up Miami Vice DVDs for Barrie and Jeff – I am SO being punished for subjecting him to Gilmore Girls) and Dunkin Donuts (for dessert), we headed to Casa Clark to see all the latest home improvements. Every time I visit, Barrie and Cookie have done something amazing to the place (granted, it’s usually years in between visits, so they have plenty of time to do stuff). This time, almost every room in the place had been repainted, and none of them were boring. Barrie had expanded on the wiring, so that you could bring up the video from a front-porch camera on the tv screen to see who’s ringing the doorbell. Jeff instantly started playing with the light dimmers and remote controls, as he always does, while Cookie and I zoned out in front of her fish tank and fish-watched for a bit.

The next morning, all of us geeks ganged up on Jeff and made him watch an episode of SeaQuest. (The one with the fish poo, if any of you were fans – and by the way, Barrie has one of the actual fish poo props in the Geek Room, and has fixed it so that it even lights up now!) Speaking of the Geek Room, we should have taken more pictures – but here’s one angle on it. You can see several framed SeaQuest uniforms (incidentally, Cookie and Barrie actually MET through an online SeaQuest role playing game), and one piece of the new built-in shelves that are home to all his unwrapped dolls. I’m sorry, “action figures.” :) There’s also a velociraptor claw on the table beneath the left-hand uniform, from Jurassic Park 2, I believe. I love the Geek Room!

Mom picked us up in the afternoon, and we headed home again to do more nothing. I made Mom watch Gilmore Girls while Jeff hid upstairs doing work.

In the evening, Daddy randomly got chatty. He’s quite a character; if you ask him outright to tell you about some part of his life (like, oh, say, WORLD WAR TWO, or living in Liberia, or starting to date his secretary – that would be Mom – while being married with five kids), he’ll wave you off and say he’s got nothing to tell. But if you wait long enough and don’t actually ASK, all sorts of stories can just start pouring out! For some reason, on this particular night, he was especially chatty about his, er, love life as a younger man. I love that my father is comfortable enough to tell me some of these things, but I think I may need to draw the line when he starts to get into details about my MOM….

I hope someone can convince him to write some of this stuff down one day (with some judicious editing, I hope). I always learn something new when he gets in a chatty mood. The G-rated parts of the stories concerning my parents are especially adorable. Daddy told me about how he started seeing Mom in a purely platonic way, shortly before a trip out of the country. She drove him to the airport, and apparently he couldn’t get her out of his mind on the whole trip. He claims to have even written poetry while on the flight! Mom and I gushed back and forth quite a bit about how lucky we’ve been to find a couple of terrific men. :)

I really enjoy visiting home – although it may well have something to do with the fact that I do it quite rarely! Mom is a blast to hang out with; just as goofy and gossipy as me. Daddy constantly cracks me up, and I love that Jeff has gotten comfortable enough around him (quite a feat, as you know if you’ve met my dad) to tease and joke with him. I actually get to see Katie every now and then out here in California, so I didn’t make as much of an effort to spend time with her as I probably could have on this trip. I was glad to have the chance to meet Joel again, though; he’s a little like Jeff in that he’s pretty shy and quiet when he first meets someone, so I haven’t really gotten to know him yet. And Cookie and Barrie – well, it’s one of the great injustices of the universe that the Clarks and the Laitys have wound up living 3000 miles apart! Cookie and I always fall right back in step with each other when we visit, as if it hasn’t been two years or more since we hung out; of all my high school friends, Cookie’s definitely the one I miss the most!