Yet Another Long-Winded Post from Deanna

Well, what have I learned from my LJ experience today? I've learned that I should just go on posting the way I do and not worry. It's just that there's this little "Deanna likes people and wants lots of friends" demon in my head telling me to try to entertain people so they will like me more. I've gone and punched that little demon in the nose. Or something.

At any rate, I guess I should talk more about people who want me to mention them more, specifically happysteve, blk, cellio, damion, jcreed, and teki. I like talking about cool people, so that's not hard. I guess the first step in this direction is that I'm chatting with Happy right now about the possibility of me coming out to Chicago sometime for the DDR tour of the area (they have 3rd K2 and MAX there! Whee!) and stuff. That would be awesome. Next step should be another driving lesson with Barbara sometime. I want you all to step back and realize how cool and courageous Barbara is for not only getting in a car with me driving and teaching me how to drive, but for letting me drive HER CAR. Next step... well, since I don't work with Monica anymore I only see her on Sundays, really, but maybe this weekend I will get to play music with her and then I'll have more to talk about. Or if I could ever make it to another On the Mark concert... hmm, now talking about Ed is sort of tough, because I only see him at KGB meetings. We should hopefully play Illuminati together again sometime though - if only he didn't always want to play during my D&D sessions. On a completely unrelated note, I saw a game called "Who Stole Ed's Pants?" or something to that effect in Games Unlimited this afternoon. I was going to get it for Ed Latimer, but it would make a good game for Ed Ryan too. Ok, anyway... hm, can I actually talk more about jcreed? I mention him a lot as is, because I see him a lot and am always happy to see him and he is so amazingly cool that it's hard not to talk about him. So, hmm. I guess I also would have to see Teki at more than just KGB meetings to say more about him. Although let me tell you something that is cool about Teki: I couldn't immediately think of anyone to compare him to. That's neat. I was going to say "Teki reminds me of ____ when I was a KGB officer," except there was nobody to fill in the blank. He is as charismatic as Tim Showalter, as nice as James Cheney, as booth-tastic as Bryan Nagy (also "demontechie" in his day), as goofy as Marc Gabriele, as Pravda-licious and submittable as Jason Grosman, as sweet as Kevin Cooney... you get the idea. (wow, over half of those people read LJ. Weird.) So there, I've talked more about you guys. I hope you feel better. :)

Ok, so now I will talk more about what I did today. LJ ate my last attempt at this so maybe it'll end up being shorter (but knowing me, I doubt it). I went to the lounge to meet up with dvarin around 3, except he was way late, which was good in retrospect because I got to chat with a whole lot of people. I also got to help Noble and rjmccall backseat-drive whitemage in playing Final Fantasy 6. That was sort of funny.

Carl and I attempted to go visit 高橋先生 (Takahashi-sensei), but she wasn't in her office. This was a shame, as I'd been even spending time in the lounge looking up appropriate Japanese words to use in conversation with her. Like 解雇, (kaiko), which means "to dismiss or lay off". I know words for "lose", but it would be more like "I had this job, and I accidentally left it somewhere" or "I had this job, but now I can't find it because it has run away from me and is hiding" and such. So now I can say "I was laid off" in Japanese. Woo.

So we departed to Squirrel Hill. We tried to go to Chaya, except we showed up at 4:30 and I was wrong, they open at 5, not 4 (I could have sworn their hours were 4-10, but oh well). So we went to Games Unlimited to waste half an hour. I got a copy of Lunar Lockout, this space-robots-puzzle game that combinator is doing his senior research thesis on - I think - hey Martin, you have to explain to me what it's about again, since I forgot, but now I have the game, and am so happy! I also got some dice. Yeah, I know I don't need any more dice. Plplpl. The coolest thing was that the GU guys had a nice wooden set of this game called Hneftafl, which I remember learning about in Governor's School because in 1998 one of the team projects was to implement it and AI for it on the Cray. That was really neat to see it for real.

Chaya dinner was good. We ran into Len Lanphar and Stacey Becker, who were sitting at the table next to ours. Also, we had fun listening to people talk in various languages. These two girls came in to apply for waitress part-time jobs, and we were listening to them talk in Japanese with one of the staff there, they were exchange students at CMU or something. We had a waitress who was Japanese (or at least spoke it fluently) and seemed to want to practice her English, as opposed to the other waitress, who is distinctly not Japanese (we're thinking Korean, we're not sure) but who also really needs to practice her English. Hm. I had sushi and tempura. Carl had tempura and soba. It was pretty good.

I was 50 minutes late for SFFS though - see we thought we'd get dinner at 4:30 and be back on campus at 6pm, but that didn't work out. We finished dinner around 6:15 or 6:20 and walked back. I ran into Jimmy and Barbara Klein outside Temple Sinai. They run a Tuesday night duplicate game there. Chatted for a bit. Jimmy said I should come back and play bridge, and spoke highly of Noble, Drew, Charlie, Jason, etc. I was like "But they're already all paired off... and I haven't played bridge with Mark in ages... he and his wife have been busy raising two kids and all..." Shrug. Well, it was still funny to see them. SFFS itself was sort of random and mostly empty anyway, so I didn't feel too bad about missing most of it.

I hosted IMSO tonight. Bayani was way early and brought over Guitar Freaks. I think his controllers suck. I mean, I've played it in the arcade before and was pretty good, but I really sucked playing on his controllers. Angel did pretty well, but the rest of us were just awful. Then we pretty much played DDR for the rest of the evening. We had Extra Mix on for most of the time. Rebecca and Angel were here, and Bayani, and me, and Becki, and Strasa, and some guy whose name I never caught, but who refused to play DDR anyway (shrug). I sight-read a whole lot of 7 and 8-foot songs. It was kind of cool. I'm almost done untangling all of the yarn in the stuff I'm using to knit socks for Eli now, whew. We played some DDR Oha Station, which was AWESOME - if it didn't have so few songs I'd go buy it, but... eh, I'll see if I can find a good price on Ebay or something. We also played Disney's Battle Mode for a while. Then everyone left. Oh, before we left I put on PPP just to play that one damned video for Bayani to go "you're on crack". It was pretty much decided that yeah, he's on crack. Oh, and Angel gave me a copy of Samba de Amigo ver. 2000 for the Dreamcast. It's way cool. I wish I played Samba more so I'd get more use out of it. But my arms get so tired...

Well, I lost this entry like twice already, so I'm just going to give up and go to sleep now. Bye.

My Wednesday so far

eub just let me drive him to Squirrel Hill and back. We went to Boston Market so I could grab lunch, then to the new spice shop a few doors down from there. They have a LOT of spices, and Eli really liked the place, but I was having a lot of trouble breathing in there. Then we went to Geagle, and picked up a bunch of stuff (the most important of which was bath soap, which we were totally out of). Then I drove us home! Whee! I even got out of the place Eli had parallel parked in before, and parked in the Geagle lot (I guess it was a good thing that Barbara spent so much time with me driving in the Morewood lot. BTW, I think maybe we could grab some milk crates from the back of the morewood lot and use them instead of cones, maybe?), and got out of the Geagle lot, and then parked on the street back home, too! Whee!

Of course, I was nervous the whole way there and back and so was Eli, but hey, I didn't hit anything, and learned something new: I need to stay closer to the center when I'm turning left so I can let people pass me. I got honked at over that.

Also, teki teki teki teki teki teki is cool. He makes me laugh.

Now I think I'll go to campus for a bit...