Well, what do you know?!

My special lady had a girls trip w/ friends this past weekend so old Jaybird was prepared for a nice weekend of football, crappy movies, and possibly a beer or 2.  The weekend started off right w/ a team building hike up Stowe Pinnacle and then a goodbye to longtime Stowe staple The Shed which closes its doors after 50+ yrs in its current incarnation.  That place was one of the first I ever went to in Stowe and has been a steady go to after a day on the mountain ever since.  The food is decent pub fare and the beers for brewed in house are not too bad.  Anyway, after some wings and such I found myself asleep on the couch at midnight w/ mac and cheese on the coffee table, an opened but un-drunk beer, the TV blaring on some random channel like the Cartoon Network, and the cat out in the mudroom losing his shit.  Time for bed!  The next morning I awoke at a reasonable hour but w/ a bit of a hangover.  The home phone rang.  WTF?  The only people that call on the home phone are my wife and parents and both know not to call me before 10am.  An emergency?  Nope.  It was friends calling to see if I wanted to go to the Shelburne Museum.  I have lived in northern Vermont for about 10 years and in Charlotte for 6+ and even though it is less than 5 miles from my house and has an amazing collection of Americana... I had never been to the museum.  Why would I want to go w/ my friends and their small children while hungover you may ask?  A good question I asked myself.  But what the f***, I wasn't doing anything else.  It was a little rainy and cold which sucked but otherwise it was actually a quite pleasant experience.  They have a ton of cool shit there and we didn't even see everything.  I liked the circus room which had some cool old circus posters, the train was pretty cool, the old Dr office and the straight razor collection was intense.  Even the old toy shop was very neat.  Not sure it is politically correct to have a "darky" penny tossing bank anymore though?  The old toy train was cool.  We even went on the carousel which was really something.  Mid day we hit up the food service joint which was for mass catered food pretty solid.  I had a pulled pork sandwich and root beer.  It was pretty good, could have used a little more BBQ but was cooked well and the pork had decent flavor.  The funny thing about the whole museum was that it seemed like an excellent setting for a horror movie.  I mean, old scary dentist and doctor tools?  Straight razors?  A gun exhibit? Scary clowns?  The sketchy blacksmith?  Don't go alone!  Or w/ multiple teenage hot couples who just want to drink beer and have sex. 

One last thing... it was funny to watch the guy running the old printing press screw up and then explain why he screwed up and then watch all the knuckleheads nod and chirp as if they too knew why he had f*d up the red coloring on the apple tree.  That and the folks who cruised around the 1 acre property on the shuttle looking at stuff and never actually got off the shuttle... you know to see the shit in all of the buildings they paid to see!  "And here you have a building w/ cool stuff in it... and here is another one, and over there is the train but the shuttle does not drive that way...".   Pretty ok day, and thanks to the KB/DG faction for getting me out to check it out. 

After that I drank a Manhattan and watched Horrible Bosses which was only ok and a bit of a let down.  Indecent Proposal  on HBO 8 was much better.