Friday Five!

Hey friends! Life has been a little crazy here the last few months, and I have- once again- fallen off the blogging bandwagon. In an attempt to start the habit of blogging again, I am participating in something called "The Friday Five", in which five different bloggers tackle the same question or experience. We actually started this last week, but I couldn't get it to post. Maybe I'll try again in a bit...
*note: even though my answer this week is super-wordy, I am pretty sure mine was the shortest answer last week*
I hope you have fun with this and feel free to share your answer as a comment (or even in your own blog!) as well. =)

This week’s question:
When was the last time you stayed up all night or most of the night? How was school or work the next day? What’s your stay-coherent technique on days like that?

Lissie: the last time i stayed up all night, or practically all night, was two thursdays ago for my cousin’s bachelorette party. we got in and slept for about 3 hours before we were up and running for day-before-wedding festivities and prep.
the next day wasn’t awful like going in to teach kindergarteners has been after an all nighter. i had enough shots of espresso and family drama to get me through the day. it was saturday that i paid the price. word to the wise: don’t spend 8 hours walking around and dancing in 3 inch heels if you have to wear heels at all in the following week. your feet will hate you!

Kimi: The Last time I stayed up all night was last March. I had gone to see Dirty Dancing on stage in Chicago that day and then ended up talking in my friend’s (now boyfriend’s) apartment until about 6:30. This was a Saturday night. I do unfortunately work on Sunday mornings because I work at a church. So I drove straight from his apartment to my church which took about 1 hr due to the nasty road conditions. It was one of my busier days at work so I was running the entire time, but I remember very little of that day, except several kids telling me that I looked really really bad and asking me if I was sick. I got home from church around Noon and then slept until 5:00PM, when I headed out with him again to see another movie.

Rachel: I got 2.5 hours of sleep on Monday morning after getting home from Manhattan at 2 a.m. My pals and I went to see David Bazan at the Bowery Ballroom. He didn’t start until 11 p.m.! That’s late for us old people! The show was super awesome, and it was totally worth exhaustion throughout the next day. We drank coffee on the car ride home and so I didn’t get to sleep until 3:30. I was up by 6 to write more on my paper and to get to an 8:30 a.m. class. Woooo!
My stay-awake plan: drink lots of water, drink lots of green tea, don’t rely on coffee, eat very little sugar and eat light meals. Sugar makes me get really tired. Oh – stretch a lot, too.

Cory: well, as it happens, i stayed up most of the night last night. sadly, no Ladies/80s, but i helped a friend move some furniture and talked, then i went home stayed up watching movies on AMC with way too many commercial breaks. i just can’t not watch Stargate…
my coping techniques are going to be drinking lots of water, and since it’s friday, i might put some music on at work. i will probably hit the breakroom coffee machine a few times too.

Jen: I thought I was going to have to write about a few months ago when both of my kids alternately puked all night, but, alas, I remembered a more recent late-nighter that is much happier and less gross. =)
Our church has an annual girls retreat at Log Country Cove near Marble Falls. 20 or so log homes are rented for the weekend, and there are 10-18 women assigned to each one. There is a “hostess” (who makes contact with each of the women assigned to her cabin before the retreat and generally keeps the weekend moving along) and a “presenter” (who presents the actual teaching sessions planned for the weekend). I have served as a hostess for two years now, but this year held a bit of a surprise. =)
I got my list of ladies in my house a couple of weeks before the retreat, and there were only a couple on the list who I didn’t already know. One was “Mary Smith”, and her contact info was all the same as my presenter’s info. I thought that was a little weird, but my presenter told me she was a friend from out of town and that she would forward any correspondence from me to her.
Soooo, we all arrive at the retreat on a Friday (this was about 3 weeks ago), and a car full of girls pull up to our cabin, As I walk over to give them a hard time about taking so long to get there, etc, I notice that one of the girls in the car looks eerily like one of my best friends, Jenna Spears. But Jenna lives in Atlanta. As I got closer and realized it actually WAS Jenna, I laughed and cried and exclaimed “shut UP!!” all at the same time.
All that to say, that night was pretty much a school-girl slumber party. We stayed up till the wee hours of the morning chatting and laughing. And then my ridiculous body decided it should still wake up at 6:30am in the spirit of routine.
My coping mechanism the next day was pretty much to just keep the adrenaline going. I SOOOO could have used a nap, but instead rented a boat with a bunch of girls and went skiing for the first time ever. I even did a backflip off the boat (just to prove that I really AM still young and hip…. or something…).
There came a point that night when I hit the wall though. I pretty much knew that if I didn’t go to bed right then, I was either going to get really mean or be reduced to tears over nothingness. So, off to bed I went, followed by Jenna, where I feel asleep in the middle of a conversation. =)