Barroom trivia

I just drove out to the insurance company of the lady who hit me for an assessment of the damages to my car. There's a decent sized dent where the driver's door and the front fender meet, making it tough to open the door. When I go over bumps, the tires rub against the dented part. Otherwise, though, it's not too bad. I suspect it will cost the insurance company a pretty penny to fix it though.

Unfortunately, the Mapqest Directions I printed out got me lost. I drove all around West Baltimore looking for Lord Baltimore Street, but did not find it. I didn't call because I thought I had left my cell phone at home; it was until I returned that I found it underneat my gym workout sweat towel on my front seat. The appointment was for 10:30 and I finally called them after returning home at 11:15. The guy on the phone was really nice, and we rescheduled for tomorrow at ten.

Hopefully I'm not out until 3am tomorrow night and tomorrow morning won't be as fuzzy as this one was.

My friend M. called yesterday at around six. I had just had my second workout of the day, and had bought a couple of bookshelves at Ikea to take home and build. I was beat, and almost didn't call her back. But her message said she wanted to get together Sunday night or Monday night, as she was leaving for the Cape on Tuesday.

M. was my first friend in Baltimore. On my old site, I called her "Boston Betty," because she comes from Boston and has a passing resemblance to Bette Midler. But now I'll go with her initial, because that's a pretty silly alias. In November of my first year here, after a couple months of not really having any friends, she took me on a tour of Baltimore and then out to dinner. I got lost all the time until then, never really getting the concept that Calvert and Charles were the two roads that headed north, and St. Paul headed South, and those were pretty much the three most important roads to know in Baltimore. Until then, my roommate and I had spent much of our time in White Marsh, because we knew how to get there and it was familiar, and that was the first time the city opened up to me. She's a woman who is old enough to be my mother, and is married to a great guy she met overseas, and I think we've formed a connection because she sees in me some of her when she was my age - namely, a sense of wanderlust and a love of teaching.

She became a great friend, but I don't see her that much any more; she switched schools and moved to the other side of 33rd. Last night, I was hesitant to go out because I was broke and tired, but decided to, and I had a great time. We spent hours just sitting there at Rocky Run, playing trivia and drinking beer. You may say Rocky Run is just like Friday's or Chili's or something, and it might be, but it's fairly cheap and the beer is extremely cold. I love throwing peanut shells on the ground, and it's never too smoky and rarely too crowded. I like it. And something about Rocky Run makes me get drunk quickly. Maybe it was because I hadn't eaten much. Or maybe it's the 32-oz beers. Whatever it was, I had to slow down and hold off until I drove the short distance home afterwards.

It was a great night, though, one of those that I'll look back at at the end of the summer and count as memorable - a total spur of the moment night of barroom trivia with my oldest friend in Baltimore.