It's also that time of year

when I'm good for a I got drunk and fell down story.

Two Saturdays ago the Man and I went over to St. John for the day to meet up with some friends. We got on the ferry around 11am and all I had in my system, at that point, was coffee.

We found our friends getting ready to have lunch - we joined them and I ordered a beer and a cesar salad. I then ordered another beer...and realizing how good they were tasting I stopped ordering them individually and ordered a bucket of six (that came with a bag of chips).

Fast forward a few hours and I'm enjoying a hell of a buzz as a result of seven-ish beers, one half-eaten salad and a few handfuls of chips.

Fast forward again and we're back on St. Thomas, chowing down on some food and...yes...more beer. The buzz has now morphed into plain old drunk. It's late, dark and after leaving the restaurant we start walking to the parking lot to get the car. The Man is walking ahead of me and I'm stumbling along with my big beach bag on my shoulder, a beer bottle in one hand and take-out from the restaurant in my other, oblivious of the disaster that will soon occur.

As we walk through the open gates to the car lot the Man nimbly hops from one curb to another as he passes by the entrance. I, with my cargo securely in my hands, attempt to do the same and shockingly, given my beer intake for the day, do not make it. I stepped up on the first curb, hopped to the second but misjudged it, caught my foot on a tiny edge of it and proceeded to dive towards the pavement. Beer bottle, take-out, myself and a beach bag all hit the cement at the same time. The bottle smashes, the take-out styrofoam implodes and I suddenly find myself on the ground inches away from foaming beer and scattered popcorn shrimp (tossed in hot sauce...so good). The Man looks back at the sound of impact, I get up sans beer and food and we both scurry into the car and leave.

As we drove away I looked down at my stinging knee and silently cursed my non-agility. I pressed a towel to the bleeding, bandaged it up at home and in the time since have suffered ribbing from friends who remember my knee incident of two years ago. Quick recap: Christmas Eve 2006, we're at the beach, I get extremely drunk and fall out of the (parked) car onto steep grooved cement resulting in a credit-card sized wound on my kneecap that hurts anytime I stand, sit, walk, move. That scrape was MUCH worse and took a couple of months to fully heal - this one was minor and is just a nickel-sized scab at this point.

I have theorized that my beach bag played a role in this latest fall - I believe it fell forward as I did and my upper body somewhat landed on it which kept my face from landing in broken glass and appetizer shrimp.

Moral of the story? I think it's obvious, but clearly I didn't learn anything from 2006 so I don't expect I'll be absorbing anything from this latest incident...