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Anyway, Kara and Co.(including the queen and the girl) invaded the Thai hole, followed by the local vodka den. Fun. Much, much fun.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself.

My day started with my old pal Lisa. If you read the comments, you know her as PKB. In the olden days, before I spawned, Lisa and I would spend entire days digging through thrift stores. Oh, the junk we would buy! I bought enough mid-century artifacts to decorate my entire home. She bought enough kids clothes to ensure that her sons L. and B. would never have any public nudity incidents.

And accordians. Lord, how we managed to find so many accordians! They found us, really. It all started at an antique shop near Lisa's home just north of East Jesus, Illinois, and slightly south of Buttfuck Egypt.

Per our shopping method, I had gone one way, and Lisa the other, in the concrete-floor prefab building. While quietly minding my own business, digging through a pile of hand-embroidered tea towels I heard, "Hey Robin!" followed by a braying that made me wonder who, exactly, was trying to sell a diseased jackass in an Illinois antique mall, and why they were flogging the poor thing.

It wasn't a jackass; just Lisa, making an attempt at playing an antique accordian. I found a pair of antique majorette batons. Plans were made for parades. Officials were contacted.

Since then, damn near every antique mall and thrift store we've gone to together, we have found accordians. And they're always presented in the same manner: by Lisa screaming, "Hey Robin! BWRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" across the store.

So yesterday we went on an accordian hunt, but there were none to be found. Instead, I bought enough used baby clothes and baby books to keep my child clothed and reading until she's in kindergarten. But no accordians.

There were, however, incidents at Starbucks and the Purse Walmart.

As usual, I was demanding coffee. Trust me, if you're going on an accordian hunt with Lisa, you're going to need your energy. She whipped into the Starbucks drive-thru and I paused just long enough in whatever story I was rambling to say, "I want a Venti two-percent latte. So anyway, then the bitch had the audacity to sa..."

"What? Fendi? What the? Goddamn, I didn't understand a word of that!" (Keep in mind that Lisa's originally from the fine town of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, so all of this is said with that southern Missourah bootheel twang.)

"Oh, it's easy," I said. "Venti. That's the size. It's a large. Two percent. That's the milk. See? Right there under 'Milk Choices'? Latte. That's the drink."

"I don't see that on the menu!"

"It's right there! See? The size? Venti."

Lisa's in full squwaking and shrieking mode. "How the hell do you know this?"

"Don't you ever go to Starbucks? God! I'm not even ordering anything fancy!"

"Like hell!"

"Lisa, you know that they're probably listening to us through the mic," I said. "They're all in there, laaaaaaughing at you!"

"What, exactly are you ladies doing?" the voice boomed from the drive-thru speaker, on cue, trying to sound stern but obviously laughing just as hard as we were.

"Yeah, my friend here, she wants ... what the hell do you want?" Lisa asked.

"I want a Venti two-percent latte," I said. "With some Prozac crumbled on top."

"And I want a Ritalin smoothie," Lisa added.

"Would you like some vodka with that?" the barista asked.

"YES!"

Later that same day ...

My Starbucks-impaired friend and I were at the Purse Walmart. Not it's real name, of course. It's a large store that sells designer purse knock-offs. A few years ago, Lisa's youngest son, who was 3 or 4 at the time, dubbed the store the Purse Walmart. And we all know that a name like that never goes away.

So we were at the Purse Walmart, and had finished our shopping. Now, mind you, Lisa usually doesn't lock the doors on her vehicle, living way out on the outskirts of East Jesus, Illinois. But since we were in the crime-riddled urban blighted area of St. Louis better known as Chesterfield, she decided she'd better lock up.

When we came out of the Purse Walmart, I forgot about the locked doors and attempted to open the passenger side door, which set the car into full red alert - honking, shrieking, headlights flashing.

Let me just say that I will never, ever wish ill on someone with a blarring car alarm that goes on and on, for I, too, have been in that boat now. They don't do it out of malice. Oh no. They do it because they don't know how to turn off the fucking alarm!!!.

Lisa tried calling her husband. No answer. Then she tried calling her 15-year-old son. No answer. Then I think she tried calling her younger son, because if he's smart enough to come up with Purse Walmart, maybe he can make some helpful suggestions. I mean, anything's got to be more helpful than the woman who approached Lisa and said, "Honey, have you tried turning off the panic button on your keychain?" To which Lisa replied, "IT DOESN'T HAVE A MARTHA FOCKING PANIC BUTTON, AND DON'T YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE TRIED THAT ALREADY?!?!?!?!?!!!!"

Or the man who approached me and offered to disconnect the battery cables. "Dude," I said. "If you disconnect the battery cables, how the fuck am I supposed to steal this car?"

Not that we really said that. Those are the things we said later, once Lisa's husband was finally reached and the alarm was shut off, a good 15 minutes after it started blaring.

Now, having told you about the accordians, the Fendi latte and the car alarm at the Purse Walmart, I'm going to tell you a bit about my friend Stacey. Stacey has the best stories. Any get-together with Stacey involves tales of such hilarity that I always go home thinking, "Goddamn. My stories suck." Since I can't tell the stories nearly as well as Stacey, I'm going to give you a run-down of some of my favorite Stacey stories, many of which were told by Stacey at Kara's birthday shindig last night:

-When she had her wisdom teeth pulled, Stacey insisted on her husband being present to look after her in case something went wrong while she was under. "What do you expect to go wrong?" her doctor asked. "Anything! Fire, earthquake, alien invasion - anything can go wrong!".

-On the afternoon of their first date, Stacey called her now-husband and his brother to push her 1971 Plymouth Satellite out of the Mississippi River, since the reverse didn't work.

-When she was dating her husband, a pilot, he used to sneak the Satellite into the airport after-hours and fill up its gas tank with jet fuel, since she couldn't buy leaded gas for it, and didn't know you could put stuff in the tank to make unleaded gas acceptable. Many near-misses occured when the Satellite was running on jet fuel.

-Stacey once had 31 pet mice who became really fat and shiny from eatng the vegetable oil she used to grease their metal exercise wheels.

-Stacey occasionally pretends to be a blow-up doll, just to make her husband think that maybe he's crazy and isn't really married to a human being, but has created a vivid fantasy life with a sex toy. "You're not really a blow-up doll," he once told her. "Because if you're really a blow-up doll, how do you explain our daughter?" Easy: ventriloquist's dummy.

Don't you wish you had friends like mine?