Usually on Saturday evenings, I settle down with the Spouse and relax. We never go out any more. With his ongoing painful legacy of the long-term illness that he suffered through for three years, he can’t manage going out and he does not have the energy for it.

Also, because I have never been a night-owl, relaxing at home and going to bed early is my preference as well. Except for last night. At the invitation of some friends (all LEOs) visiting from out of town, I joined them for …

…a pub crawl.

That is, they meet at one pub, have a few drinks, then go to another, and have a few more, and continue to another, and another… all night.

But I should put this in perspective. These guys are cops after all, and they’re not about to drink and then drive to another location. So they met in an area where they could walk from place-to-place.

At our mutual suggestion, they met in the downtown of my Maryland hometown for the first two venues.

Unfortunately, the downtown of my hometown has a dearth of establishments they wanted to “crawl” to, so they had planned to take the Metro from my hometown downtown to our county seat about 5 miles away to go to another establishment. They used Metro to get to my hometown downtown in the first place (and were an hour late because our Metro is so unreliable.)

However, since they’re not from around here, they did not realize that the only way to get to our county seat from the downtown of my hometown is to take a 45-minute ride on the Metro looping back through downtown DC. Rather than waste time riding the train all the way into and out of the city, and since I do not drink alcohol, I drove them to the next location as a “designated driver.” We did that… and got to the third place by 9:30pm.

But after a long day chasing LOLITS and executing the spouse’s non-ending “honey-do list,” I was growing very tired. I decided that one more ginger ale was enough, then I would call it a night.

Throughout the evening, we talked a lot about what appears to be a larger number of incidents of violence against law enforcement, including an unusually large number of officers who died in the line of duty last year. That’s what these guys are visiting DC for — it is National Police Week in Washington, DC.

We also discussed generally topics that guys chat about — sports, hobbies, politics, and so forth. Fortunately, the sports talk was minimal.

One of the guys asked me, “do you know anything about Dehner boots? I have a pair that I have had a problem with…” then he described his discomfort.

It was funny — when this guy asked, “do you know anything about Dehners…” two other guys in the group who know me better than this guy does laughed so hard they had beer foam flowing… (won’t describe further, but it was amusing if not disgusting to see.)

This guy’s question was common — his boots were rubbing his ankles. While he wasn’t wearing his boots this night (he was wearing sneakers like all others except me–I had on a pair of jeans and Chippewa harness boots), his description of his pain sounded very much like a bad ankle break (bend). I spoke with him a little bit and confirmed that he did what most other guys do with new boots — pulled them on right away and did not break the ankles manually as I recommend.

I gently explained that a bad ankle break in a new pair of Dehners cannot be fixed. My new friend said, “it’s not that bad — just annoying.” I described what to do when he gets his next pair of patrol boots. He said “thanks” and we moved on to other conversations.

Soon it was after 10pm and I was dead tired. My friends decided to move on to yet another venue for their pub crawl, but this time closer to the hotel where they were staying which is close to a Metro station. I dropped them at the Metro, wished them well, and drove home.

It was a rare but nice night “out with the boys.”

Life is short: be sociable, even when your spouse and biorhythms do not want to.