'sista' night

Last Friday night I went out on the town with my three sisters, dubbed 'Sista Night' by my sister, McSniff. I have three sisters - two are older (Moo and McSniff, otherwise known as Pickles), and one is younger (Cootie). My family is big on nicknames. I can actually remember how Cootie and I came up with Moo and Pickles, but really, the end result is most important. We all live in St. Louis (well, McSniff in Wentzville, technically), which is really cool. Sistas are great.

The evening started off at the Macaroni Grill on Olive in Creve Coeur (hence Moo's comment 'You really need reservations at Macaroni Grill?'). Turns out you don't at 6:30. I usually eat later, so I really had no idea how things would be at that time. Oh well. Better safe than sorry. We filled our bellies with pasta and beer, then moved on to the Oberweis for ice cream. Yum. Chocolate milk from Oberweis is the bestest.

After this, we went to Olivette lanes for a good ol' fashioned game of bowling. I love to bowl, though I'm not that great at it. Cootie and I actually took lessons when we were younger. They were free at a new bowling alley by our house that had opened up. Anyway, drinks in hand, we made our way to the only open lane, thanks to some big Monsanto happy hour that was going on. We were stuck between three Monsanto guys (only one was even remotely cute) and a table full of hoosiers - one of the guys kept slapping one of the women on the ass. Not attractive at all. Two lanes away from us were two girls and two guys, I swear, high on crack. The girls wore their sunglasses to bowl, and literally lunged the ball from their chests. It was frightening. One of them caught Cootie looking in amazement and called her a bitch. Too funny. Cootie pulled off the win, but only by a few points.

After bowling, we retired to Moo's house for mimosas and Yahtzee. We are so the Golden Girls! We learned plenty of things about McSniff's sex life that could have remained unsaid, and had to use a calculator to add our points at Yahtzee. Geniuses, I tell ya. Hanging out with the girls is so much fun, though. And McSniff taught Moo and Cootie a new saying - 'Young, dumb, and full of cum'. How had they never heard that before? Leave it to McSniff, owner of such namecalling as Punjab, Mama Yenti, and other classics.

Thinking about those makes me think of the family trips we'd take every summer. My parents insisted on driving everywhere, which would have been fine in a van, but they had an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Dad drove, Mom sat shotgun, with three kids in the back and one in the middle up front. One trip I remember in particular was to New York and Canada (yes, from St. Louis). I was probably 9, Cootie 7, Moo 18, and McSniff 17. I preferred the front with Mom and Dad, attempting to miss out on the torture from the teenagers in the backseat. McSniff tore the head off of Cootie's Ken doll - a major catastrophe, since his head, once removed, did not go back on like the Barbie heads did. McSniff and Moo also managed to moon Cootie out the back window of the car, probably at a trucker. We saw Niagara falls, had our license plates stolen in Watertown, and I went on my first upside-down roller coaster in Quebec. Cootie earned the nickname 'Whistler's Mother' - the child would not quit whistling, even when we asked her to, nicely. It was a mild form of torture. I seriously don't know how Mom and Dad didn't kill us, but somehow, we survived. I'm so grateful I got to go on those trips. I have such great memories, and got to go to so many neat places.

As a side note, I've accepted my honorary Certificate of Business at the Sofa King Awesome School of Business. Please go here to read it, and celebrate the accomplishment my doctoral work in the field of Scratch Retention has earned.