apologies for the lateness of my account; i spent a week in stokes county, nc, with no access to reality.
Rum for Breakfast! (the story of a noder gathering gone weird)
Ok, let's start with the morning, as morning is an excellent place to begin this sort of thing. I woke up around 06:30 and made myself a bowl of grits, and started waiting for slide and ocelotbob to show up, and indeed an hour later they did show up at my door, sleep deprived and bearing alcohol. So, slide and I started our day with a good stiff drink, and we began talking about hardware and adventures in living, while poor ocelotbob made a shabby attempt at sleep on the livingroom floor. After he completely botched his sleep check, we three decided to have some breakfast at the 66 Diner, up the block from my apartment.
A brief digression into the nature of this diner: This place has been there as long as anywhere else on this strip of old Route 66, and great pains have been taken to stop time inside the restaurant and fix it somewhere around the mid-1950s. Turquoise and chrome fixtures abound, an old jukebox with neon trim sits in one corner, and all the waitresses are dressed in classic 50's soda shop waitress uniforms. All in all, a very strange place, but more authentic in its oddity than most things this town offers.
Return home, discuss physics and metaphysics, contemplate whether or not monitors will float in water...Starrynight calls to see if I need a ride to the meet, which I don't. We acquire a friend of slide's, and head out to the hoohah. Sadly, I arrive as Starrynight is trying to leave for his friend's wedding. (Congrats, Chris! You can't stand me, but congrats, just the same) We manage to bullshit for a few minutes before he runs off into the night, and he admits to having made some coffee ice cream.
I must again digress; Starrynight makes really badass ice cream. I mean, damn. Coffee flavoured with bits of chocolate, and really light and fluffy. This man knows his ass from his elbow, and it shows. A pity to lose him to Japan.
But back to the meet...MacArthurParker is fantastically funny. Engelbot entertains with insight into the local geek structure...well, local to Santa Fe and the labs, at least. At some point in the hilarities of the evening, we place a call to 7Ghent, who is at the above-mentioned wedding, and get the opportunity to further abuse (er, amuse...) Starrynight. I believe the final count on that call was eight minutes. Eight minutes of us laughing hysterically, admonishing them for not being at the party, and yelling about inflatable trauma pants. Straight up, hand in the air, this party was full of bees.
Special thanks to Mrs. haze for putting up with us rowdy louts when she's got two kids of her own. Extra special thanks to Mrs. haze for good cookies.
The rest of the evening proceeded much as slide describes above, except that he neglects to mention that we stopped at Lisa's place to pet the cat and listen to Shel Silverstien poems. He didn't behave nearly as badly as he thinks; conversely, perhaps he did, and it is merely my experience with trauma patients that leads me to believe he didn't. One can never be properly certain in these situations, involving, as they tend to, much alcohol and significant sleep deprivation.
There was significant hoohah on Sunday, as we four sleep deprived freaks cackled about Martha Stewart's inflatable trauma pants and whether or not they would be filled with bees. I managed to call my mother, and it went remarkably smoothly, considering that MacArthurParker was still yelling about things filled with bees, and I couldn't stop laughing. Next was the call from myrkabah (not yet a noder but soon to be!) verifying my flight number so he could pick me up at the airport when I got to North Carolina the next day. I made some crack about trauma pants, and handed the phone to slide so he could explain them to the poor confused kid on the other end.
I seem to recall having left slide passed out next to my rabbit, and ocelotbob and MacArthurParker watching Cecil B. Demented as I wandered off to lay claim to perhaps the most sleep I'd had in about five days. (I wasn't up for all five, I got four hours of sleep on the third night; but this was seven hours!) I'm sure at least slide came up to tell me they were off, but I sleep like the dead when I do go down.
You guys are full of bees. We should do this again!
Things that are full of bees:
Things that should be filled with bees:
- The White House
- George W. Bush
- MacArthurParker's mother
- Airport security