In which I’m stumped by a microwave boasting a function I’ve never seen on a microwave before.

Okay, sorry. I lied. None of the nuns I saw this weekend had guns. (That’s just the name of a song on an obscure album by SNL’s bandleader. Yeah. Nuns With Guns is the name of an obscure G.E. Smith song.

Oh, forget it. Never mind. Moving on.)

Tahmi picked me up Friday morning, we drove to Kansas, we went to evening praise, we ate nun food in the nun cafeteria, and that night we hung out in the basement of ‘our’ building and knitted stuff. The next morning I’d apparently decided to sleep in because I didn’t go to morning worship and stayed in bed ’til nine.

Saturday afternoon, we both got hour-long full body Swedish massages for $40 each. From a nun. How cool is that? She knew reflexology and everything. She also told me she could feel my aura, but I didn’t concern myself with it.

Saturday night we obtained a bottle of wine and again hung out in the basement with our knitting and we talked and talked and talked, as we are wont to do. It was way fun. You can’t imagine how much talking we can do.

It rained six inches Saturday night. BIG storm. Big, loud, thundering, cracking, hailing, power-outaging storm. I loved it.

All in all, a lovely retreat weekend at Mount Saint Scholastica. I enjoyed myself. I didn’t have any deeply profound spiritual experiences, but I know better than to think that they just show up because you’ve moved your body from one location to another. (I had a stunningly deep spiritual experience there once. Another time, I got drunk as hell on wine while smoking cigarettes on the lawn. The sublime, the ridiculous, it’s all part of the trip. I take whatever comes and try to be appropriately grateful when it doesn’t smell like dirty socks or sass me.)

We even ended up taking the gifts up to the priest during mass this morning, which amused me seeing as how I’m a poser heathen and all.

Oh, yeah: about the microwave. It took Tami and me – both college educated – nearly twenty minutes to figure out how to use the microwave in our building’s kitchen to make popcorn. (There was a “broil” button on the fucking microwave that had to be un-pushed. Who knew?!?)