The Patented Minnesota Ab Workout

This weekend, I went back to the frozen north to visit some of my best friends in the entire world! There's nothing quite like 4 years of shared academic torment to solidify enduring friendships.

After a shift in the ER on Thursday, I flew into Milwaukee and arrived at midnight. Matt picked me up at 1am after he finished his own ER shift. In the morning, we drove to Rochester to meet up with everyone else. We stopped off along the way at a psychadelic, animatronic, seizure-inducingly wickedawesome restaurant in Madison, WI, called Ella's Deli. It has its own carousel out front. Need I say more?

In Rochester, we all hung out, went to the rock climbing gym, had dinner, played games...

Katie, Justin, Di, Zac, Jorge, Val, Matt (Please note that even though it looks like Justin's head could fit about 7 of Zac's heads inside of it, this is due to the magic of panoramic photo distortion, not because Justin is a macrocephalic FLK.) * * *

And then on the last day, for random reasons that none of us fully understand, the visit took a strange tangent. Jorge's back was sore, so his fiancee Val was stretching it.

It turns out that Val is freakishly strong:

And that Jorge is freakishly fearless:

And then we discovered that Matt can make me fly:

And that I'm an epic failure at lifting anything:

Then Jorge wanted us all to try a 4-way push-up. Val was worried we'd accidentally kick a hole through the very nice flat screen TV, so we had to take our amateur enthusiasm outside. But her dog poops like a champion all over the back yard, so we ended up in the front yard.

Then Val found a website chock full of stupid human tricks for us to try. It had a bunch of pictures sort of like this, and we dedicated a good chunk of the morning to attempting them all. Many wipeouts ensued.

Translation: We spent a good chunk of the morning in the front yard convincing the neighbors that we're a bunch of nut jobs.

Justin and Katie recently got engaged. I think this should be their wedding announcement photo, don't you?

The three-person push-up stack wasn't so tough. We decided to try four, but I guess four is the magic threshold for structural collapse. You can see the trouble brewing here:

...wait for it....wait for it...

FAIL!

But with a surprising number of other moves:

SUCCESS!

This isn't an acro-yoga move. Sometimes the guys just like to hum the Superman theme song and make Justin fly around.

The morals to the story:

- Friends are amazing.

- Amateur acro-yoga causes extremely sore abs.

- Jorge's neighbors probably considered calling the cops.