How I spent my weekend
Okay, some more detail about the weekend.
Saturday morning we overslept, but![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bk1e called and woke us up so we could go play DDR. He picked us up at Zach's (did I mention we stayed at zml's place?) and we went down to the UT area where there are two arcades with DDR. We started at Einstein's, which has a 7th mix with a broken 2P down arrow and all the stuff unlocked. When we got there, ubiquity and meeshdoublel were there already, and Pace was doing Oni Doubles (forget which course, think it was a Naoki something-or-other). He had like a 980 combo before getting to the hard songs. Anyway, we played a whole bunch of DDR. Brad and I played the first set and he picked Burning Heat as our fourth song. So of course I had to play it on Heavy. I got my normal 70% through it and just died. I made Eli play a round with Michelle, but he had never been on a MAX2 machine before and didn't understand how the song selection or levels or anything worked. After that, he mostly watched the rest of us. We played a whole variety of random stuff. I played Spin the Disc on Heavy for the first time ever and now I actually like it (even though I still would not listen to it given the choice). The funny thing is, so that and Make Your Move are both by "good-cool", and are both good songs to play, but dumb to listen to. Also practiced the fabulous fierce song, not that it helped at all.
Nick and Rehana and Adam all showed up around 12:30ish I think, and we decided to head down the street to Le Fun, which has a 7th mix and a 5th mix. However, the 7th mix pads were really awful. We tried Onis anyway. It was frustrating as hell to do the best I have ever done on Dynamite Rave Standard and have the MACHINE fail me out. I guess I'll have to try them at IZ again sometime. Also played a little 5th mix, but by this point my feet were REALLY beginning to kill me. So I went and took pictures of people. I was hanging out at the 7th mix with Pace and Michelle when I hear "DEANNA! CAMERA! QUICK!" and I run over to the 5th mix and Brad's like "I full-comboed a cata! My first time ever!" and sure enough, the score screen came up with an AAA for Dead End, so I took a picture. He and Rehana then played Matsuri Japan... and he full-comboed that too! But this time I was watching so I got the camera ready, focused, and told him to pose next to it so we'd get a picture of it AAAaron style. :)
Shortly after all the DDR it became obvious that not only were we all hungry, but our feet were dying, and Zach was about to get out of Kung Fu practice. So we went to Chuy's. Yay, I love Chuy's. We had tons and tons (read: 14) of people. Around the table was me, Eli, Elaine Ramundo, Elaine's roomate Kim,bk1e, tardis, zml, ajr, rehana, sheenaqotj, Sheena's friend Matt, ubiquity, meeshdoublel, and nickjong. It was fun trying to keep up with all the conversations, and fun eating a lot of nachos, and it was fun eating an enchilada after that, but it was not fun feeling really full and sick afterwards. Oh well. The amusing part of the lunch was when Sheena's friend Matt said, upon finding out my name, "Hey, I emailed you once. You had the big web page with the quotes and knew James Cheney, right?" and I was like "Yeah! You're the guy who was dropping out of Cornell grad school, right?" Small world. It amused everyone else at the table, of course. Anyway, jccw, if you notice this, Matt Fleming says hi.
After Chuy's, Zach drove me and Eli back to his house, where we showered/changed/etc and got ready to drive way out into the middle of nowhere for Julie and Jason's wedding. It was in Bastrop, which had been described as "40 minutes out of the city", as far as I remembered, but was really "40 minutes away from the hotel", near the airport, and the airport is 20-30 minutes from North Austin, and well... you get the idea.
So we showed up JUST AS THE WEDDING WAS STARTING, and ran out a side door and found seats in the back. The wedding ceremony was really nice and outdoors and pretty and stuff. They had various stuff from various ceremonies, including stepping on a glass cup to break it (a Jewish wedding thing. As my uncle said at my grandparents' 50th anniversary party - "The last time he got to put his foot down was on the glass at the wedding!"). It all came together very well and was beautiful and happy and lots of us smiled a lot and clapped and cheered and all. I didn't get many pictures, but I'm sure everyone else got plenty.
I got to see lots and lots and lots of people I haven't seen in ages. Many of them read LJ anyway, so they know who they are. My table was fun to sit at. It had three people I didn't know because they were PCOrder friends of Jason's, but the rest were gaming/aphio friends from CMU: Lawrence, Dan Tilkin, Todd Zimnoch, Mikey, and Gary Young. I had really wondered where the heck Todd had gotten to, since last I knew of him he lived in the Seattle area and worked for MS. Well, he's on the east coast now. :( :( So there was dinner, and then there was running around harrassing people, including harrassing Jason for stealing my seat, despite that obviously, as the groom, he had the right to steal anyone's seat. :P I got to talk to Christa and to Jamie K. Chang Esq. Trombone, and others at the head table, and my big brother Debbie, and then there was going downstairs for stuff.
The cake was really good, and Laurel and I sat around in the front taking pictures of people dancing and other cute-like things. Then I danced some (actually, specifically, I danced with both Jensens; first a swing with Barbara and then a swing with Mark. Heh). Then I made Eli slow dance with me. Then I wandered around taking pictures a little, and talked to Ben for a while. Most of the rest of the evening is actually a blur now that I try to piece together stuff. Eventually everyone started going home.
We went to Ben's apartment in the city. It's big and concrete and over-architected but really cool. A bunch of people showed up there eventually and we hung out talking and stuff. Ben has the recliner and comfy chair from his parents' house in Philly, so I sat on them for a long time. (It was funny, I could almost close my eyes and imagine being in Merion 10 years ago.) After a while I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, so Eli drove us back to Zach's house. We got there around 2:30am and he wasn't home yet, but we were too tired to dwell on it and just fell asleep.
Sunday we overslept again, but Adam called to get us to come over for some Iron Dragon. We got lunch at Chipotle's first, which was really good and really big, and we went back to A+R's place to play ID. We played with speed rules, that is, everyone can move double and build double on their turns... and I got three contracts that sort of sucked, but I could make them work by starting out at Eaglehawk. EXCEPT THAT BEFORE MY SECOND TURN OF THE GAME, someone got a whammy that basically made me lose a turn and a load. That basically put me two turns behind everyone at that critical beginning time when you need to get money and build places in order to get any prime building real estate. So I was just fucked from the getgo, and I swear to god that every single time a whammy made people lose turns, it got me. So I just sucked. It was really awful, and I can't help but think that there should be some sort of house rule that says "you can't get whammied until you have delivered your first contract" or something. I don't actually even remember who won - it was between Zach and Adam, and I think Adam won, but not by much. We also played to 150 instead of 250.
Oh well, it was still good to play and to not win and to know it wasn't my fault.
We said a lot of goodbyes and stuff, and I got to take pictures of Zach's motorcycle and Zach looking like a motorcycle robot. Then we drove to the airport. It was exciting. Returned the car, got some BBQ from the Salt Lick and some ice cream from Amy's, and got on the plane, where they showed the Ya-Ya movie thing. I bought a headset out of boredom and watched it - absentmindedly I ate a ham sandwich they gave us for "dinner snack" and then I felt really full and horrible and then it turned into full-fledged stomach hurting which lasted until 3:30am. I wasn't even really thinking about the sandwich, I just have this thing that food is comfort and airplanes make me unhappy and so food makes me happy... that was retarded. I'm never going to overeat on a plane again.
I guess that's the story of the weekend. I wonder if my LJ-cuts will work as I intend them to.
Saturday morning we overslept, but
bk1e called and woke us up so we could go play DDR. He picked us up at Zach's (did I mention we stayed at zml's place?) and we went down to the UT area where there are two arcades with DDR. We started at Einstein's, which has a 7th mix with a broken 2P down arrow and all the stuff unlocked. When we got there, ubiquity and meeshdoublel were there already, and Pace was doing Oni Doubles (forget which course, think it was a Naoki something-or-other). He had like a 980 combo before getting to the hard songs. Anyway, we played a whole bunch of DDR. Brad and I played the first set and he picked Burning Heat as our fourth song. So of course I had to play it on Heavy. I got my normal 70% through it and just died. I made Eli play a round with Michelle, but he had never been on a MAX2 machine before and didn't understand how the song selection or levels or anything worked. After that, he mostly watched the rest of us. We played a whole variety of random stuff. I played Spin the Disc on Heavy for the first time ever and now I actually like it (even though I still would not listen to it given the choice). The funny thing is, so that and Make Your Move are both by "good-cool", and are both good songs to play, but dumb to listen to. Also practiced the fabulous fierce song, not that it helped at all.Nick and Rehana and Adam all showed up around 12:30ish I think, and we decided to head down the street to Le Fun, which has a 7th mix and a 5th mix. However, the 7th mix pads were really awful. We tried Onis anyway. It was frustrating as hell to do the best I have ever done on Dynamite Rave Standard and have the MACHINE fail me out. I guess I'll have to try them at IZ again sometime. Also played a little 5th mix, but by this point my feet were REALLY beginning to kill me. So I went and took pictures of people. I was hanging out at the 7th mix with Pace and Michelle when I hear "DEANNA! CAMERA! QUICK!" and I run over to the 5th mix and Brad's like "I full-comboed a cata! My first time ever!" and sure enough, the score screen came up with an AAA for Dead End, so I took a picture. He and Rehana then played Matsuri Japan... and he full-comboed that too! But this time I was watching so I got the camera ready, focused, and told him to pose next to it so we'd get a picture of it AAAaron style. :)
Shortly after all the DDR it became obvious that not only were we all hungry, but our feet were dying, and Zach was about to get out of Kung Fu practice. So we went to Chuy's. Yay, I love Chuy's. We had tons and tons (read: 14) of people. Around the table was me, Eli, Elaine Ramundo, Elaine's roomate Kim,
bk1e, tardis, zml, ajr, rehana, sheenaqotj, Sheena's friend Matt, ubiquity, meeshdoublel, and nickjong. It was fun trying to keep up with all the conversations, and fun eating a lot of nachos, and it was fun eating an enchilada after that, but it was not fun feeling really full and sick afterwards. Oh well. The amusing part of the lunch was when Sheena's friend Matt said, upon finding out my name, "Hey, I emailed you once. You had the big web page with the quotes and knew James Cheney, right?" and I was like "Yeah! You're the guy who was dropping out of Cornell grad school, right?" Small world. It amused everyone else at the table, of course. Anyway, jccw, if you notice this, Matt Fleming says hi.After Chuy's, Zach drove me and Eli back to his house, where we showered/changed/etc and got ready to drive way out into the middle of nowhere for Julie and Jason's wedding. It was in Bastrop, which had been described as "40 minutes out of the city", as far as I remembered, but was really "40 minutes away from the hotel", near the airport, and the airport is 20-30 minutes from North Austin, and well... you get the idea.
So we showed up JUST AS THE WEDDING WAS STARTING, and ran out a side door and found seats in the back. The wedding ceremony was really nice and outdoors and pretty and stuff. They had various stuff from various ceremonies, including stepping on a glass cup to break it (a Jewish wedding thing. As my uncle said at my grandparents' 50th anniversary party - "The last time he got to put his foot down was on the glass at the wedding!"). It all came together very well and was beautiful and happy and lots of us smiled a lot and clapped and cheered and all. I didn't get many pictures, but I'm sure everyone else got plenty.
I got to see lots and lots and lots of people I haven't seen in ages. Many of them read LJ anyway, so they know who they are. My table was fun to sit at. It had three people I didn't know because they were PCOrder friends of Jason's, but the rest were gaming/aphio friends from CMU: Lawrence, Dan Tilkin, Todd Zimnoch, Mikey, and Gary Young. I had really wondered where the heck Todd had gotten to, since last I knew of him he lived in the Seattle area and worked for MS. Well, he's on the east coast now. :( :( So there was dinner, and then there was running around harrassing people, including harrassing Jason for stealing my seat, despite that obviously, as the groom, he had the right to steal anyone's seat. :P I got to talk to Christa and to Jamie K. Chang Esq. Trombone, and others at the head table, and my big brother Debbie, and then there was going downstairs for stuff.
The cake was really good, and Laurel and I sat around in the front taking pictures of people dancing and other cute-like things. Then I danced some (actually, specifically, I danced with both Jensens; first a swing with Barbara and then a swing with Mark. Heh). Then I made Eli slow dance with me. Then I wandered around taking pictures a little, and talked to Ben for a while. Most of the rest of the evening is actually a blur now that I try to piece together stuff. Eventually everyone started going home.
We went to Ben's apartment in the city. It's big and concrete and over-architected but really cool. A bunch of people showed up there eventually and we hung out talking and stuff. Ben has the recliner and comfy chair from his parents' house in Philly, so I sat on them for a long time. (It was funny, I could almost close my eyes and imagine being in Merion 10 years ago.) After a while I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, so Eli drove us back to Zach's house. We got there around 2:30am and he wasn't home yet, but we were too tired to dwell on it and just fell asleep.
Sunday we overslept again, but Adam called to get us to come over for some Iron Dragon. We got lunch at Chipotle's first, which was really good and really big, and we went back to A+R's place to play ID. We played with speed rules, that is, everyone can move double and build double on their turns... and I got three contracts that sort of sucked, but I could make them work by starting out at Eaglehawk. EXCEPT THAT BEFORE MY SECOND TURN OF THE GAME, someone got a whammy that basically made me lose a turn and a load. That basically put me two turns behind everyone at that critical beginning time when you need to get money and build places in order to get any prime building real estate. So I was just fucked from the getgo, and I swear to god that every single time a whammy made people lose turns, it got me. So I just sucked. It was really awful, and I can't help but think that there should be some sort of house rule that says "you can't get whammied until you have delivered your first contract" or something. I don't actually even remember who won - it was between Zach and Adam, and I think Adam won, but not by much. We also played to 150 instead of 250.
Oh well, it was still good to play and to not win and to know it wasn't my fault.
We said a lot of goodbyes and stuff, and I got to take pictures of Zach's motorcycle and Zach looking like a motorcycle robot. Then we drove to the airport. It was exciting. Returned the car, got some BBQ from the Salt Lick and some ice cream from Amy's, and got on the plane, where they showed the Ya-Ya movie thing. I bought a headset out of boredom and watched it - absentmindedly I ate a ham sandwich they gave us for "dinner snack" and then I felt really full and horrible and then it turned into full-fledged stomach hurting which lasted until 3:30am. I wasn't even really thinking about the sandwich, I just have this thing that food is comfort and airplanes make me unhappy and so food makes me happy... that was retarded. I'm never going to overeat on a plane again.
I guess that's the story of the weekend. I wonder if my LJ-cuts will work as I intend them to.
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