eat, drink, and be merry

yesterday was the annual "rhumba on the lumber" 5k race and chili cookoff. being that i didn't have anything better to do with my saturday, and several of my new north carolina friends were thinking about running, i decided to sign up for the race. so yesterday morning i found myself in downton lumberton with a dietitian and a speech pathologist, surrounded by people and chili and getting ready to run a 5k.
the race went well enough - i finished in just about 30 minutes, which is not too bad considering i hadn't run outside in over a year. once the race was over, i then spent a very pleasant couple of hours sampling chili (most of which was not that great) and drinking beer (which was crappy bud light, but free so i can't really complain) with the two girls i had gone to the race with and my friend matt who showed up just for the chili and beer.
when we had eaten our fill, and consumed our 3 free beers, we went our separate ways, but only after i had agreed to meet up with matt later to play some beer pong and watch sci-fi movies. so after a quick, and very refreshing, shower, i hopped into my car and headed over to matt's.
at this point i should probably explain the background behind my friendship with matt. when i was working at the health department in robeson county, i got to be friends with mimi, who is the high-risk dietitian there. she's super nice, and we get along great - whenever it was slow at the health department, i would end up sitting in her office just talking (and there is a lot of down time at the health department, so we talked a lot). she even invited me to thanksgiving at her apartment, an offer that i readily accepted, since i was still fairly new in lumberton and didn't know very many people yet. it was at thanksgiving that i met mimi's boyfriend - matt. it turns out that i not only get along great with mimi, but i absolutely adore matt, and matt was just glad to find himself another drinking buddy who also happens to share a similar taste in movies. hence the afternoon of beer pong and sci-fi while mimi was at a wedding shower in raleigh.
back to yesterday: i lost the first game pretty miserably. i don't have much practice at beer pong, and it had been quite a while since i had last played, so i was not playing very well. by the second game, however, i had a couple of beers in me, and by some miracle that i don't quite understand, actually managed to win! this is terribly exciting to me - i have never even come close to winning, and usually can barely even hold my own when i play on a team, so you can just imagine how thrilled i was to actually beat someone.
the rest of the afternoon was spent basically just hanging around, eating pizza and watching "serenity" (a movie based on a television show that only lasted one season back in 2002. it's a space western, as in everyone talks like old-timey western cowboys and such, but they all fly around on spaceships and fight with laser guns. go figure.)
in short, yesterday was brilliant. it may be the best day i've had since moving to lumberton.
it's great to have some friends out here, but it also means that i'm going to have a new set of people to miss when i leave.