Given our normal weekend plans (stay home and watch DVDs, perhaps visit Bozeman, grocery shop), this weekend was jam-packed with activity. On Friday night we had dinner with Jen and Duncan and their two kids and thoroughly enjoyed watching the kids interact. Connery later told us that they had been in the tee-pee to "hide from the parentses." It's good to know that has started already.
On Saturday, Chip and I were trying a "spring cleaning fast," an idea borne from the concept that springtime is a perfect time to take a break from food and detox your body from the many pesticides, additives, and other all-around yuckiness that daily life provides. The plan was to do a modified juice fast for 36 hours starting Friday night in which we would consume numerous 8-ounce glasses of "master cleanser" made of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper and nothing else. Let me just say that as bad as that sounds, it tastes worse.
We managed to choke down two glasses before we headed to Belgrade to look at neighborhoods. If the lack of food and lingering taste of cayenne wasn't enough to make us depressed, Belgrade was. I've never seen so many connecting driveways and so few trees in my life. True, there was evidence of young families everywhere, and it seemed safe enough, but I don't think we left Prague to find ourselves cheek-to-jowl with every other young family in the Gallatin Valley. By the time we got home, we were hungry, dispirited, and suffering from caffeine headaches, but more fun awaited.
Part of the spring cleaning was to do a half hour in the sauna to encourage those toxins to flee. Chip went first, and he came back looking pretty good. I had fallen asleep while he was there--my body apparently unable to function without food--but I headed to the sauna anyway. When I first got in there, I was feeling pretty good. I mean, it was only 80 degrees! How bad could it be? Then I noticed it was 80 degrees CELSIUS, i.e. 160 degrees F. I managed to make it 22 of my scheduled 30 minutes and got out with the express intention of not fainting and possibly hurling.
By the time I drove home in my fog and stumbled into the house, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to make our 36-hour mark, especially as I contemplated drinking more of our master cleanser. It didn't take too much to convince Chip to throw it over, so we nibbled on some pita and hummus and started to feel immeasurably better. So much for detox...
On Sunday, we had planned to take Connery for a little swim, but we woke up to snow and so decided against it. That afternoon we dropped him off at Chad and Amy's to play with their two little boys while we went to see Fiddler on the Roof in Bozeman. It was nice to see live theater, and the production was really impressive, except for the performance in a certain key role. I don't want to turn this into a local review site so I won't say anything more, except to add that if I had been in the cast, I would have tried very hard to arrange an accident for that player before opening night--non-fatal and not serious of course, but big enough to prevent that person from taking the stage. Given the accomplishment of the rest of the production, it was a shame to have it sullied. Overall, though, it was still an enjoyable few hours, and it seemed to go by very quickly, except when that person was singing.
When we returned to Chad and Amy's to pick up Connery, he had decided he wanted to stay there and be adopted so that he could play there forever. He had a great time and was more or less ready to collapse from exhaustion the second we got home. Mission accomplished!