The Way it Goes

So I had planned a date for today in the morning, because that's when I don't have work and she was available then too, and it was going to be great! We were going to go eat and then go play at her favorite little park and have tons of fun with the partly cloudy, definitely sunny most of the time, weather. I planned on picking her up at 11am so I needed to head out early if I was going to have time to get flowers! I headed to the local grocery store and traced the familiar path back to the floral section to see what kinds of arrangements they had this time. This girl loves blue, so when, in the sea of reds and yellows and pinks, I saw bright blue petals I knew that was the bouquet I was getting.

As I approached the check out lines I looked at the express lane, the one that says 15 items or less, and made eye contact with the cashier, who was just finishing up helping a customer and was waiting for them to swipe their card. She hurriedly switched off the light on her lane indicator signifying that she was no longer available for customers to come through her lane. I thought some frustrated thoughts since the other two lines had people with significantly more than 15 items in their carts and I was under time constraints. My turn comes and I whiz through the process, head out to my car, ~* It is at this point that I would like to say how much I love my longboards. I LOVE them, they are so handy! You see they are in the back of my car and when I go to the store I park somewhere where there are no cars up at the top of the parking lot and cruise in on my board. I don't like wasting time looking for a spot up close that will save me walking distance/time because the time it takes to find one close cancels the other out. Then when I'm heading back out to my car I don't have to be all slow and walk there, I can hop on and push a couple times and ta-DA!! I'm there.*~ and drive out to her place. I pulled into the circle at 10:59 and walked up to the door and rang the bell at 11:00. Nice. By the way, still mostly sunny and partly cloudy.

Her grandmother answered the door and smiled at the flowers in my hand. My date was behind her and didn't see the flowers at first, until she opened the screen door to come out. She paused and the excited smile I really like spread over her face as I handed them to her. She turned to her grandma and asked if they had another vase since the one with the roses would be too small (a small question mark popped into my head at that) and the cute old lady bustled off to find one. I waited in the entry way while my date started preparing the flowers though soon she turned and looked at me as if to say, "what are you still doing over there?" She asked me if I was going to stand by the door all day, and I took that as an invitation to follow her into the kitchen.

~* Side note: you see, young men, it is not really appropriate to assume that you suddenly have free reign in someone else's home and should therefore wait to be invited in further. Not a lot of people know that, but I will say that it will earn you bonus points with anyone over 40 who was taught this as a child, and extra mucho bonus points with anyone from a generation who expected that sort of behavior from their children ;) End of side note*~

Her grandma came back with a vase that was just on the large side for the amount of flowers in the bouquet and excused herself from the room. My date went over to the vase with the roses in it and commented that even though the roses were in water they had managed to dry themselves out. I wondered again why she was telling me about these roses which were probably from some other guy or that were just there because her grandparents like roses, but I had to admit, it was pretty cool that they had dried standing up and still looked so nice. She got the fresh flowers arranged in the vase and put them on the sill and threw away the roses and washed out that vase. And then we were off!

We wanted waffles so we went to the Red Rooster, but they had closed... sad. So we went to IHOP, but they were undergoing renovations and gave us a five dollars off coupon. So we went to the IHOP down the way and had a yummy meal. All this time the clouds got thicker and there was less and less sun shining...not cool clouds, back off!

After lunch we went to her favorite park, which was close to where she used to live just a couple weeks ago before she moved to her grandparents' house. At some point while we were there at the park I realized why she had told me about those roses. All the pieces started falling into place now that we were back in the old stomping grounds you see. I had given them to her May 9th because she had had a super long weekend and I wanted to cheer her up. That was two full weeks ago and she hadn't moved yet! She moved and brought them with her! How cute is that?! Super, that's how. I parked and we made our way to this really cool play structure. I'm going to see if I can find a picture of it somewhere, because that would be awesome.

Well, I couldn't find any pictures of the place, but maybe I'll take some. Anyway, the structure was like a cube standing on one point and had a frame made out of smooth metal poles like on a swing set and the rest of the structure was a network of ropes linked together all over the place. It was really cool and really fun. We were on the smaller one and there was a bridge over to the bigger one where we spent a lot of time. We had a race to see who could get down from the top the fastest... my date won because she's smaller and fit through the tight spaces better. Then we raced to the top... I won because I'm taller and stronger. After sitting and talking for a bit, suspended 15 feet in the air, tangled in the network of ropes, we crossed the street and walked up the hill to a dome that resembled the cube structures and climbed on that a bit. The sun had decided that it didn't want to play so we dealt with the clouds and breeze. The dome was a little less amazing so we weren't on that for too long and instead went over to part of the park that has art sculptures that are designed to be skated on, a pretty good idea I thought. She went to the top of a little protruding mound and I found a little red hollow plastic ball which I tossed to her. I missed a couple times, though she didn't really move much to try to catch it. I started walking away, once she had the ball, to go check out something else and had only gone a few steps when I felt a soft stinging in the middle of my back. Spinning around I noticed the ball rolling around near my feet and a certain girl standing on a mound a few paces away with a mischievously coy grin on her face. I picked up the ball and walked to the top of the mound just inches away from her and placed the ball in a pocket in her hoodie.

We walked around the skate park art and back down to the dome where we each playfully bumped into each other a few times. The dome was on the top of a hill so we decided to roll down and get dizzy. The rest of the time we just sat and talked, and I stole her shoe a couple times, and we played with the little red ball, stuffing blades of grass into the tiny hole.

I took her back home and went to get ready for work. Hugs are pretty nice. As I went to the train station guess who showed up? The SUN! what the heck dude!? where were you all day!? The rest of the day the sun was shining and I just shook my head.

That's just the way it goes I guess.

Go to google maps and put in the following coordinates:


40.553959,-111.999369 the park we climbed around on
40.554078,-111.998755 the hill we rolled down