Spending time at Larn's just feels like... going home.

We left work "early" (read: 5:30 PM) on Friday to head down to San Jose to visit Larn and Obi. The plan was to stay overnight at their place so that we'd be closer to the Peninsula in the morning. We had 6 apartment showings scheduled for Saturday.

As it turns out, we're very much improving on our ability to navigate California highways, as we only got lost once (as opposed to that unfortunate trip to Emeryville where we ended up going through the Caldecott four times, or that trip back from LA where we almost ended up in Sacramento.)

When we arrived at Larn and Obi's, the first matter of business was to clean out the car of anything resembling an object of value. In the past 6 months, Larn's car has been broken into twice, and what with the repeated moving Hunter and I are not really in the market for new car windows.

Dinner was at a local Italian restaurant - auspiciously NOT Bucca di Beppo, which has been out dinner of choice the last few times we were in San Jose. The place was in an absurdly old-looking shopping center, which is actually the only form of retail architecture in the South Bay. That's sort of one of the big reasons I don't like the San Jose residential areas - I grew up in the Land of the Strip Malls, and to go to an area that is just as sprawled but hasn't been updated since 1963 really doesn't seem like much of an improvement.

But the dinner itself was quite good. I may have mentioned it before, but California is in the middle of an extended Pizza Drought. The only kinds of pizza you can get are: 1) Round Table (crappy) and 2) Mediocre pizza at $25 a pie. It's so bad that *Pizza Hut* has started looking good to me, and I've always found Pizza Hut to be amazingly disgusting in the Excessive Fat and Oil category.

But this... this was a large pizza that fed a table of 4. Fresh ingredients. Just-right crust - soft and crispy. Lots of veggies. And only $20!! It has reawakened my faith in the pizza as a viable food source. Good stuff.

So after a few glasses of wine and a very good pizza, we adjourned to Larn and Obi's place, where they insisted on making us these lemon drinks that "we know you'll like." Obi spent the next 20 minutes squeezing the shit out of a bag of lemons. As it turned out, a pitcher ofthese Lemon Bombs consisted of: the juice of approximately 10 lemons, sugar, and a little over half a bottle of vodka. Serve on the rocks.

With the right proportions, it really is just lemonade. We finished off two pitchers, which meant that the four of us had consumed one and one third bottles of Skyy Vodka when all was said and done.

Larn and Obi showed us a photo album that they had put together to celebrate their 5th anniversary. I still remember the day that they met. We were freshmen hanging out at Sig Tau, and Larn was pretty well drunk. (I was sober because I didn't start drinking until April of that year.) We had made our way into the scholarship room - a safe haven from the other slobbering drunks. Larn picked up a Nerf gun and sat on the couch, only to lose her balance in such an incredible way that she tipped the whole couch over. At that moment, Obi popped his head into the room (he was the "Sober" guy for the night) to check on us. I smiled and told him we were fine, and he went away. At this point, Larn popped up like a waffle from a toaster. "Who was that?!" Even in her drunken haze, she was struck by something about Obi. She was suddenly obsessed and could not be dissuaded. She dragged herself to her feet and insisted on tracking him down before leaving.

And now they're getting married.

Everyone together now - awwwwww.

Drunk love at a fraternity knows no bounds.

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Inevitably, we came to the end of the first batch of lemon bombs, and we were informed that it was the girls' turn to make them - fair enough. We entered the kitchen and proceeded to slice lemons and pathetically squeeze them as much as our little hands would allow. We were much less efficient than Obi was. And we kept slipping and dropping the lemons in the juice. Anyhow, Larn and I were eventually relieved of our duty (but not until she had emptied half a bottle of Skyy in with the juice). We climbed up to the loft, where she spread out on the floor and cuddled the cats as we talked. Hunter came up to give us more Lemon Bomb, but I told him that Larn was in the easy-drunk penalty box for at least another 10 minutes.

At some point thereafter, the boys decided that they wanted to make cookies. From scratch. If there is any more telling sign of our 90's upbringing, it is that our boyfriends have drunken urges to make baked goods while we girls sit and talk about my $25 Skechers boots.

I got control of the mixer duties, and that was quite entertaining. The cookies themselves turned out pretty well - quite yummy, with giant ghiardelli dark chocolate chips.) From that point on things just generally disintegrated, and the evening ended on the couch, drinking more lemon bomb and watching Kissing Jessica Stein as Larn helpfully grabbed chunks off the top of an angel food cake and handed them to people at random.

That cake looked pretty silly the next morning.

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Apartment shopping sucked. No surprise, really. Menlo Park was depressing and the whole time we were there, it felt like I was driving through the streets of New Jersey. (As it turns out, there is in fact a Menlo Park, NJ which makes this all the more creepy.) It's down to 2 cities as far as we're concerned - one in the Stanford area and one that's really close to SFO. Now the trick is just finding an apartment.

The search was draining - at one point, we were sitting in the parking lot of a complex waiting for the realtor, and Hunter was so punchy that he took a jumbo red umbrella sleeve and held it up to his mouth, inflating it and deflating it over and over.

I'll let you form a mental picture of that for a second.

I wearily asked him to stop that lest the realtor think we were perverts and throw us off his property.

The most maddening part of the day was my cell phone. Since this week was "my turn" to set up the showings, my phone was ringing almost constantly starting at 10AM. People calling to confirm our showings and so forth. And then my mom called during breakfast. "We were just driving to see Doug's first play and we were wondering how the apartment search was going." Argh.

And then Vicki kept calling (my best friend from elementary school forward -- she still needs a Cast entry). The first time she called, the phone hung up after the first ring. So I figured it was a hip dial (look at my fancy terminology! I'm so l33t!), and I didn't feel too bad about ignoring the second call we got, when we were both in the middle of discussions with a landlord.

Well, shortly after the Umbrella Sleeve incident [remind me to remove that from the car before we really get in trouble] we were looking at an apartment when Vicki called for a third time. Now I started to get worried - was she in trouble? I picked up the phone even though we were in the middle of this stranger's apartment -

"Hi Vicki!"

"Hi!! Joe and I are getting married."

Well, that explains the whole calling-8-million-times thing, doesn't it? Joe is a great guy, and I am fabulously happy for them. I wish they lived closer to us (or we them) because they're just so much fun and we all get along so well �� Such is life. It was difficult hearing her entire proposal story while the realtor was giving me dirty looks -- it was all I could do not to whisper "You're lucky I didn't squeeee! loud enough to make the windows break, ya fucking bastard!" Anyway, I ended up calling her back that night and having her retell the whole story again just to make sure I didn't miss anything. She's so happy. ��

Joe even went down to our hometown and asked her parents for her hand in marriage. The funny thing was that this was on Tuesday night, and Vicki was practically ready to call the police -- she was terribly worried because he was running late and his cell phone was off. Awwwwww.

So it's a very awwwww weekend, aside from the terribly unromantic repeat of Apartment Extravaganza 2004. Weddings everywhere. And yes, Hunter and I aren't engaged. No, I don't know when or if we will be. What? Insecure? Me? No! Never!

Sigh.