MMMMOTOWN and Cows

Our busy weekend started on Thursday. We drove to the Trussville for a visitation of the father of one of our good friends who passed away Tuesday night. Afterwards, we met Teresa (my mother-in-law) at my parent’s house in Vestavia to pick up Ryan (my brother-in-law) and brought him back home with us. On Friday, Ryan and I took PB&J sandwiches to Brent at work and ate lunch with him. Friday night we went to downtown Huntsville to watch “Stand By Me” at Big Spring Park. I ran into a girl I used to teach with and we talked for a while about my job situation, or the lack thereof. Turns out she was meeting a friend of mine from high school that just moved to Huntsville. Random! I talked to her a few minutes then I went back to our spot on the grass to watch the movie. The movie was very anti-climatic with horrible language. It was about a group of boys that go on a search to find the body of their dead friend. I don’t recommend it. Especially to the younger audience because of the choice words. On Saturday, we went to Airshow 2008 at Huntsville International Airport. I have a fascination with planes and enjoyed every minute of it. My dad has a good friend that flies with Aeroshell, an acrobatic team, and my brother is good friends with his son. We coincidentally sat right behind his parked plane, No. 2. My parents and brother, showed up about 12:30, just in time to see the show and talk to Mark before his team did their performance. About 10 minutes after they got there, my mom wanted something to drink. My dad and mom left to get water and go to the restroom….about 45 minutes later, they showed back up. I just thought the line at the concession stand was long. Turns out, my mom got stuck in the porta potty and while she was in there she became very nauseous due to heat and lack of air flow (and probably that wonderful smell of a porta potty). She had to go to what she calls the “Fat Lady Tent,” otherwise known as the medical tent. Apparently she was the smallest one in there by approximately 150 pounds. My mom didn’t really cool off because these women were standing directly in front of all the fans, not sharing any of the cool air. There was a lady whose heart rate and blood pressure were sky high and they called an ambulance for her and she refused to go. Not good. Mom and dad finally made it back in time to see Aeroshell do their show, followed by the Blue Angels. At 4:30, after 7 hours of sitting in the burning rays of the sun, the show was over and we proceeded to walk the 1/2 mile back to our car. Little did we know that our sunburns and long walk back to the car were the least of our worries. It took us 2 hours to get out of the parking field. There was one entrance for what seemed like the entire city of Huntsville to leave the airport. No one knew what to do, where to go, and what line to get in. As my mom described it, we were like a bunch of cattle roaming in a field. There were lines forming everywhere, most of which did not actually lead to the exit. We ended up in 3 different lines. In the second line, we literally sat still for an hour. To make matters more annoying, the car was almost out of gas, so we sat in that line with the windows rolled down and car turned off. I had my legs hanging out the window and Ben, my brother, had his 18 feet legs stretched out through the middle of the car on the console. My mom was complaining about how dirty her feet were (as if no one else in the car had dirty feet) and kept screaming “MMMOtown” out the window because we were playing the location game and she remembered the first time she played and yelled “Motown” instead of “Detroit”, Ryan kept getting out of the car to see if anything had moved-trying to convince us to squeeze through the line and go through the ditch to get to another line, Ben and I were just causing trouble and taking a few pics along the way, and Brent was just laughing at the situation and begging Ben to move his stinky, Chaco-tanned feet. My dad was all by himself in the van and got out a lot sooner than we did…but had no where to go because he didn’t have a key to our house. We finally got out by taking a side road on the golf course. Apparantly the hairy dude hanging out the Bronco knew what he was talking about when he yelled out the sunroof, “Hey everybody, drive to the golf course.” We met my dad at Five Guys for dinner. It was the first meal Ben had since he drank chocolate milk for breakfast. All the while, mom still complaining about her dirty feet. She washed them at our house before they headed back to the Ham. Sunday was a little more relaxing…church, pot roast for lunch, nap, WALL-E at Monaco, cornhole, and ice cream for dinner. Teresa is coming tonight to pick up Ryan and things will get back to normal, maybe.