father-daughter weekend recap

so! nearly back in the swing of things here... mostly caught up at work, just a wee 130 blog posts to catch up on in my reader still (!!!!) and i suppose it would be nice to write a post every once in a while, yeah? yeah.

my father-daughter weekend was actually my christmas present to my dad. i thought i would be clever and give it to him as a bunch of little pieces that made up the whole:

a) gas cards to pay for his transportation down here;
b) a movie gift card that had a note saying "FOR USE ONLY AT MOVIES WITH GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE" on it;
c) a print out of a hotel near my house in virginia; and then finally the piece de resistance,
d) a brochure to the secondary Air and Space Museum, the Udvar-Hazy center out by Dulles, where they store all the rest of the planes and crap that they can't fit into the regular Air and Space on the Mall.

all of those things (driving to VA, violent movies, air and space museum) are things my mom HATES. but all things my dad loves. plus! with me! extra love! i thought he'd be psyched. but instead he was sort of mostly-pleased, and then never really mentioned it the rest of the day. me: ...oh. huh. i thought it was a good idea.

then two days later when i'm back home in va, my parents call, because apparently my mom had commented that she expected my dad would have been more excited about my present. the convo went a bit like this, apparently:

dad: yeah, i guess, i just know you're not really going to want to spend much time doing the museums and stuff when we're down there.
mom: we? you mean you and alice?
dad: no, me and you. i know you don't like long drives. or looking at planes
mom: ...
mom: ...you realize that gift was for JUST YOU, right?
dad: ...
dad: OH! oh, no, ha, i didn't. oh! that's much neater! although it would be nice to have someone to go to all that stuff with.
mom: ...
mom: ...you mean aside from alice?
dad: OH! alice will, like, be around that weekend?

le sigh. he was much more excited about the present once he realized i wasn't relegating him to a weekend of misery. (me: what kind of a gift would that have been, dad?!? honestly!)

so! he drove down last friday after work, we went out to breakfast saturday, then headed to the udvar-hazy center. i can't believe the poor man hasn't been there until now. i've never seen anyone get so excited about planes before. he was all "OOH! look up there! see that one? that's a [some nickname for a WW2 plane]!!! aw man, that's so cool! we used that to catch the fast german planes, because up until then our jets weren't fast enough, but then we captured a japanese plane and see the swept wing design? that helps the maneuverability at high speeds......" etc etc etc. he, uh, knows a lot about aviation warfare, it seems.

they also have these flight simulator thingies at the museum, where 2 people get into a little moving box thingy that simulates an F4 fighter jet. one person is the pilot (my dad) and one person is the gunner (me). normally, you zoom around and there are other planes in the sky that you try to shoot down; we spent about 70% of the time hanging upside down from our shoulder harnesses while my dad tried in vain to figure out how to stop a) barrel rolling, and b) ending up stuck upside down mid-barrel roll. it was fairly hilarious.

unfortunately, there were no good traditional bad action movies out this weekend (we [my dad and i] got into a fight with karl about how YES-HUH, Live Free or Die Hard is TOO believable, YES IT IS, i mean WHAT, just because YOU haven't shot down a helicopter by using your car as a projectile means it's NOT POSSIBLE? WHATEVER DUDE) so we saw No Country For Old Men, which was very good - and very violent - although definitely fell on the side of "actual good movie" as opposed to "terrible but awesome action flick."

HOWEVER. any failing on the part of the movie was made up ONE HUNDRED BAJRILLION PERCENT when i spent 6.5 hours AT A BAR with my dad (!!!!) watching the two conference finals on sunday. when - you may or may not recall this point - the giants won.

photo courtesy of USAToday

father-daughter weekend: SUCCESS.