My eyes are falling out of my head

We made it back from our Vegas trip safe and sound. No one was injured, no one got more sick than they already were, and no one got food poisoning. I think we can classify this trip as a success! Yay! Yay! Yay! The only real casualty was one of the "feet" on my large hideous hot pink suitcase was ripped off, so it tilts like the Leaning Tower of Pisa and is destined to a new home at the landfill.

Do you hear that? It's Joey, yelling Yay! Yay! Yay! to the demise of the suitcase. Nothing diminishes the power of your Man Card like carrying a hot pink suitcase.

In an attempt to cram even more crazy into our lives, we decided to take the red-eye back on Saturday night so we'd have all day Sunday to hang with the Monkey Man. In all honesty, I still can't decide if this was the smartest thing we've ever done, or the dumbest idea in history.

Our flight was scheduled to leave Vegas at 11:30 on Saturday night. My mind was racing with all of the delicious possibilities of all the things we could do with a whole day to ourselves (everyone else left on Friday or early Saturday). Sleep late? Enjoy a decadent day shopping at the Forum Shops? Gamble a little? Gamble a lot?

We ended up waking up ungodly early - 6:45 AM! Ate breakfast, packed our stuff to drop it off at the bell desk so they could hold it for us, and then gambled a bit. Joey won over $800, which is a good thing because it offset all the losses from the previous three days. Oops. We had lunch and then couldn't figure out what the heck to do. At one point we sat at a bar and couldn't even decide if we should drink alcohol or not because we didn't want to get sick on the plane. Pathetic. We were tired, our feet hurt, and we probably should've just headed for the airport to try and get home earlier.

But nooooo. Did I mention the part about wondering if this whole red-eye thing was stupid? We still stuck it out, and by the time we got on the plane I was cranky and at the point of exhaustion. Not to mention I looked like ass.

Jethro, the drunk redneck from the rural South, happened to sit behind me with his equally drunk redneck friend. Now, I love me some drunk rednecks, but not when I am sleep-deprived and they keep poking the touch-screen behind my headrest. I think I may have gotten a wee bit of sleep, but not nearly enough. We landed in Atlanta at 6:30 AM, ate a pathetic breakfast at TGIFriday's (how do you eff up pancakes?) and then sat at the gate in a stupor just waiting to get on board.

The flight between Atlanta and Richmond was possibly the most sound sleep I've had in my life. Amazing, fantastic, wonderfully blissful sleep. Too bad it only lasted about 40 minutes. I was ready to storm the cockpit and ask them to circle the RIC a few more times just to get some more shuteye.

We struggled through the rest of the day yesterday, slept fitfully last night, and today I was like the walking dead. What happened to the days when I could stay up for days on end?

Unfortunately, no sleep yet. I need to Swiffer up the mountains of dog hair, vacuum, straighten up, and throw in some more laundry. No rest for the wicked. I tried to train Rufus how to use the Swiffer himself, but he is protesting on the grounds that Swiffer descriminates against critters with no legs. And no opposable thumbs.