Rockin' New Year's Eve with LJ and the Funky Bunch

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (before my year-long laziness blog hiatus) I used to participate in Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop every now and again.

One of her prompts this week (or it may have been last week, I'm not sure...I'm confused) is: If the way you spent your New Year's Eve is any indication of how the rest of the year will go, how would you say your future is looking right about now?

Well, we live in one of the hottest New Year's Eve destinations in the world, so of course we partied, drank, and got rowdy on the Las Vegas strip.

And by partied I mean hung out with 4 dogs and 2 cats.

And by drank I mean I chugged a bottle of wine while Fred guzzled his usual milk.

And by got rowdy I mean we bickered over which movie to watch and argued about what Tom Hanks really meant when he said "Ken's working on it," in Apollo 13.

And by strip I mean our couch, then later the little strip of space in our bed that's left for me to lay in by the time all the pets climb into bed with us.

So yeah. Wild times going on up in here.

At 6:00 PM I was optimistic. "We're staying up till midnight!" I declared, gesticulating with my wine glass and sloshing wine everywhere.

"Right," said Fred. (And see what I did there?) "You better pace yourself with that wine then, party girl."

We planned on having a movie marathon but between Cable TV, HBO, Starz, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, couldn't find a damn thing on to watch. We ended up paying $5.99 for an On Demand movie that Fred got tired of after 30 minutes. So he watched war documentaries or The Big Bang Theory, or something, on the bedroom TV and I watched Sex and the City episodes on HBO in the living room.

We shouted back and forth to each other with suggestions of what we could watch together. That's the beauty of living in a small house. Conversing without even being in the same room - and not by texting. I'm beginning to love little houses.

Our favorite movie is Apollo 13. We quote lines from it to each other whenever appropriate, which surprisingly, is pretty often.

Source: avclub.com

Like when Bill Paxton says to Kevin Bacon, after Kevin stirs the oxygen tanks and the service module explodes, "I just asked you what the gauge was readin' and YOU DON'T KNOW!"

"I just asked you what the gas gauge was readin' and YOU DON'T KNOW!"
"I just asked you what the thermostat is set at and YOU DON'T KNOW!"
"I just asked you which dog peed on the floor and YOU DON'T KNOW!"

See what I mean? But I'm getting off track. And if you haven't seen the movie, you likely don't share our enthusiasm for it and have probably stopped reading at this point.

But anyway...Fred found the movie on Primetime for $2.99. But we had just spent $5.99 on a movie we didn't watch, so I didn't want to spend more money on another movie that was on TV all the time, but happened not to be on New Year's Eve. Because, cheap.

After another half hour of bickering over whether we should spend the $2.99, I gave in. I didn't want to spend the whole evening in separate rooms, after all. Bickering is so much easier when you're both in the same room.

By then it was about 9:00 and someone very nearby was setting off fireworks which made one of our dogs, Gracie Lou, beside herself with fear. So me and the doggies (or as Fred calls us, LJ and the funky bunch) piled in the bed with Fred and we watched Apollo 13. Gracie Lou buried under the covers as close to me as she could get without crawling inside me. And all was well.

The aforementioned Funky Bunch. Gracie Lou is on the bottom right, with her new Christmas toy.

Except for our ongoing dispute about whether Jim Lovell fully trusted Ken Mattingly to get the reentry plan up to them in time. The way Jim Lovell says, "Ken's working on it," always sounded to me like he had his doubts about 'ole Ken. Fred, of course, says no way.

We finally agreed the only way to know for sure is to ask Tom Hanks, if ever we have the opportunity. If he's smart, he'll file a restraining order about now.

Now it's going on 11 and because I was laying in bed already and was drunk had drunk a whole bottle of wine, I was pretty much done and fell asleep. Fred woke me up at 11:45 but Gracie Lou was still shaking and terrified and I didn't want to move her, so I fell back asleep stayed put.

And that was our New Year's Eve.

So what does this tell us about how 2016 will be?
1. We'll probably watch Apollo 13 455594 more times in 2016.
2. We'll probably quote from Apollo 13 593486739 more times in 2016.
3. We'll bicker and I'll give in to keep the peace.
4. Our movements and activities will be dictated by our pets.
5. I'll be drinking wine.
6. Fred will be a smart ass.
7. We'll spend a lot of time alone in our cozy little house. because no one else can stand us

But you know what? I'm okay with that. Our dogs think we're delightful.

Cheers,
LJ and the Funky Bunch

P.S. To Mama Kat: I went by the prompts that were in the email I got on Monday the 4th, but on your blog I see you have different prompts so I wasn't going to link this up because I naturally assumed I'd been away too long and was just massively confused. But then I saw others seemed to be confused too and were linking up posts for the prompts in the email so I went ahead and linked because everyone else was. And yes, if they jumped off a bridge, I would do that too.