Catching Up With the Cast: TopGun and Cap'n Shack-Fu

Here's the first of several posts to get everyone get caught up on what's been going on in the many, many months since I went on "hiatus."  But first:  a recap!

When last we left off, Cap'n Shack-Fu had graduated from Quantico and been stationed in Tulsa;  I was renting a room in his house in Denton; and his pal TopGun moved to the area for work and became my new roommate, whereupon he and I bonded over our shared smartassery. And now, on with the post.

This past March TopGun informed me that he was going to start looking for his own place closer to his job, ostensibly because he was tired of the commute; within a couple of days he had found an apartment just a few miles from his office and made plans to move mid-May.  I was pretty bummed -- not only because he and I had become really good friends over the year we were rooming together, but also because the vacant room meant that I was going to have to start searching for a new roommate to help pay the rent -- a process I was not looking forward to.

Plus, he was taking his nifty SelectTech dumbbells with him, the jerk.

When moving day came, however, TopGun managed to distract me from pining for those wonderful click-weight dumbbells briefly with a bit of news:  a few weeks earlier he had bought an engagement ring, and was planning on popping the question to his long-distance girlfriend in Colorado when he went up to visit her over Memorial Day weekend.  The proposal was successful, and he cam back an engaged man. He also came back with a bad case of bronchitis which was severe enough for him to get some pretty hefty cough medicine with codeine -- a fact I mention solely because a few days later he asked me to be Best Man at his wedding and I'm still pretty sure the codeine played a big part in his decision making process.*

Of course, as honored as I was to be chosen as TopGun's Best Man, it still didn't change the fact that his move out was forcing me to search for a new roommate.  Although it turned out I needn't have worried about the tortures of interviewing potential roomies as I received not a single reply to any of my ads. By the time June rolled around and no potential roommates had surfaced, Cap'n Shack-Fu decided to put the house on the market and I started looking for a new place to live.  Due largely to a decision making process that can best be described as "Better the Devil You Know . . ." I decided to return to the apartment complex I had been living in back before I moved in with Biz-Z and Maverick. However this time I upgraded to a two-bedroom due to the amount of crap I've accumulated over the last several years.

When I moved Shack-Fu and his girlfriend came down from Tulsa to help out, as well as to grab some stuff of his that was still at the house.  They weren't able to fit everything into the truck they'd borrowed, so they knew they were going to have to make another trip when the house sold -- which wasn't looking promising for a while, as over the course of three months there had only been 3 or 4 people come by to look at the place.  But eventually a potential buyer was found, an offer was placed, and everything lined up for them to close on the house**.  Of course, this necessitated Shack-Fu making one last trip to retrieve the last of his stuff from the garage.  Unfortunately, when he went to rent a trailer to help haul his stuff, he discovered that none of the big name rental place would rent out a trailer to someone driving an Explorer.  After some frantic searching, he finally found a solution . . .

They called it Rusty

Yes, Shack-fu found a place that rented horse trailers, so he and his girlfriend made the trek down to Denton hauling a rickety trailer they dubbed Rusty. After I got done dying laughing at the sight of B.A.R.T. pulling Rusty down the street, I helped them empty out the last of his stuff, locked the place up, and bid goodbye to the house on Wicker Way. 

*I also accused him of picking me solely because he knew I would obsess over the Best Man speech for months and months, so the request was really a subtle form of mental torture.  He never really denied it . . .
**Today, as a matter of fact