I showed up, the first non-employee or band member in the bar. The band had just settled into the stage. They stopped, shy of a note and looked up.

“Oh, ok, we can start now, our audience has arrived.”

Not that I go there a lot, or am strangely timed to generally be the first person in there. It’s actually kind of cool – for me not them I am sure – but most weeks I get a song or two that only I get to hear them play.

M was a bit spacey and her waitress was sick so things were fairly low-key. Fairly, that is, if you leave out the part that has M ranting and arm waving for a good thirty minutes about job and work stuff.

So we’ll leave that out and keep going.

S’anyway, moving right along. Hammerpants showed up eventually. There was hanging and much beer and laughter. Vin showed up, too, semi-unexpectedly. Always a treat. Even if he does have the loudest laugh this side of Black Bolt. True story.

M made some strange girly drink. It looked like strawberry milk. Now, that might have been helped by the fact it had half and half in it, but still. It had some rum and banana and strawberry crap in it and just looked … frankly … delicious. Hammerpants tried a bit and had to admit it was quite the tasty beverage. With my ulcer I couldn’t try it, but oh how I wanted to.

I do love a good girly drink. Who doesn’t?

See now, we didn’t go to the bar last week. I felt like crap, Hammerpants was overworked at work and things didn’t come together. M was telling me she kept people from sitting in our seats, but it was a busy night. So after a while there were folks standing around our seats glaring and she just kept waving them off, because she thought we were going to show. Around 8 she gave up on us. Do I have to start calling the bar if I’m not gonna show? I might. That’s… that says a lot. Some of it good.

At one point M got down the bobble head dolls from the shelf behind the bar. Mattingly and Einstein. Mattingly’s bat is broken and M was telling us her theory that he attacked Einstein but good old Ein. is so smart his skull is super thick, and thus the bat broke. It’s as good a theory as anything else.

Of course she also redid Einstein’s’ huge mass of hair into a top knot, so uhm. Yeah.

M also said something to Vin and grinned at him.

“You’re too much like him,” Vin said jerking a thumb at me.

“What do you mean?” M asked him, searching in her bag for the fifteenth time for the lotions she forgot.

“He just called you evil,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said and smiled.

You understand why I like my bartender. But yeah she forgot all of her lotions, left the bag at her mothers, and was a tea fiend. I swear at one point there were so many cups of tea in paper deli cups on the bar in a nice little row even she admitted it looked like she was running a deli on the side.

Anyway. Next week is St. Patrick’s on bar night. So that should be fun.