{"id":3950,"date":"2010-07-09T09:17:20","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T15:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=3950"},"modified":"2010-07-09T10:01:12","modified_gmt":"2010-07-09T16:01:12","slug":"july-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/the-family\/july-4\/","title":{"rendered":"July 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0455\"<\/a>   \"IMG_0453\"<\/a>   \"IMG_0445\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For once I actually had July 4 off work. That only happens every few years, so I decided to make the most of it and head to Saltillo to take part in the annual grilled-meat-and-pyrotechnics-a-thon. A fun twist this year is that I somehow convinced the manfriend that he should get in on that shit and come with me. So we took off as early as we could coax ourselves to Sunday (think 2 p.m.), armed with a bag of margarita fixins and a big bowl of chicken salad I had made. <\/p>\n

I haven’t taken a boy home to meet the family in … a long time. So naturally everyone acted like the zoo was getting a new animal and everyone<\/i> wanted a chance to come gawk at it. Within seconds of arriving, we had a margarita in our hands and moonshine had been shoved in our faces. My dad had teased me mercilessly<\/a> leading up to Sunday, seeing as the manfriend is from Jersey and has been dubbed a full-on Yankee. But everyone was on their best behavior (read: they were goofy as ever) and I was so unbelievably relieved and happy to just sort of watch as everyone got along really well. Even \u2014 especially! \u2014 through gun show-and-tell time<\/a>! <\/p>\n

Maybe I also felt a little happy because as soon as we got to the house, I started pawing through the medicine cabinet for some Tylenol to knock out my lingering headache (**coughhangovercough**), and since it was kind of hectic and everyone was talking at and around me and I was checking back to make sure the manfriend wasn’t being ambushed and it was just chaos, I accidentally popped THREE TYLENOL PMS instead of actual regular don’t-fall-asleep-instantly Tylenol. My nervous brain did not even register why the pills I was putting into my mouth were blue. As soon as I realized my mistake \u2014 made on an empty stomach, no less \u2014 I began thinking I should make myself puke, but my sister seemed to think I’d probably already absorbed the medicine. And she was right. Shit got real trippy then, and I set about occupying myself the rest of the evening so that I wouldn’t fall asleep. This involved a LOT of coffee and M&Ms. And a lot of sympathetic looks from the manfriend, who was probably worried that I would fall asleep and leave him to the wolves. It was not unlike being in a Nightmare on Elm Street<\/i> movie. Whatever you do, do not close your eyes.<\/p>\n

But I mostly kept it together. Well, I stayed awake. I was pretty unable to comprehend complex sentences (people would talk to me and it just seemed soooo faaast<\/i>) but my emotions felt super squishy and nice. The fireworks were pretty awesome, especially this one set called Chicken on a Chain. Yes, I don’t know what the hell that means and even when I was on sleepy drugs, it didn’t make any damn sense. But they sure were pretty.<\/p>\n

Monday I got up early thanks to phone calls from the manfriend, who was stationed downstairs to sleep while I was upstairs (my parents are at least consistent in their old fashionedness). He wanted a tour of Saltillo, which I gave him in all of ten minutes. Then we headed out to Savannah to go to Walmart. I told him all the ridiculous hometown stories I could muster. Yes, including the one about the local decapitation lore<\/a>. I am a fucking charmer. We ate delicious and greasy ground beef-based meals at the Worley Bird Caf\u00e9 (named for Savannah’s current most famous export<\/a>) and came back to Saltillo for more time with the family. The manfriend is such an unbelievably good sport, even when he was informed that because I have referred to him as “manfriend,” everyone else has started calling him “Manfred.” <\/p>\n

He’s a catch, I tell you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    For once I actually had July 4 off work. That only happens every few years, so I decided to make the most of it and head to Saltillo to take part in the annual grilled-meat-and-pyrotechnics-a-thon. A fun twist this year is that I somehow convinced the manfriend that he should get in on that shit and come with me. So we took off as early as we could coax ourselves to Sunday (think… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[479,85,1477],"tags":[500,649,1478,1468],"class_list":["post-3950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holidays","category-the-family","category-the-manfriend","tag-family","tag-holiday","tag-july-4","tag-manfriend"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-11I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3950"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3957,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3950\/revisions\/3957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}