As I just wrote to Maria, Zomziepie is becoming a hotbed of activity. A hotbed!
Category: Roommates
This is the second Spring Break Follow-Up Post, and it’s mostly to say that Spring Break Was GREAT! I wasn’t as good about keeping a personal travelogue this time as I was when I went to California, but fortunately I have a roommate and trip companion with a photographic memory. I’ll try to finish that up and patch the holes today or tomorrow.
Notable events that are true:
- We did get caught in a blizzard, ditch the car, and walk five blocks with only a vague idea of where we were and an increasing chance of hypothermia. We lived, though. As did the car.
- We did have every intention of seeing Kid Koala and other assorted DJs at a Real Club in New York City.
- We did learn to appreciate the beauty of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
- We (this time including Bee and Graham, Maria’s college crew, who are awesome) did stay up until four in the morning for no apparent reason, eventually acting pretty drunk without actually being drunk. This is what grownups do for fun, kids.
- A cool thing about that night, though, was that Graham and I learned to communicate with gamma rays!
- We did share our floor of the Days Inn (in Bodily Region) with the entire high-school Asian population of Pennsylvania.
Notable events that are not true:
- I completely remembered to tell everyone at my job that I was leaving for a week on March 14th–long before, say, March 12th.
- We did way more in Providence than mostly hanging out on the third floor of the mall.
- I in no way embarrassed myself on the Dance Dance Revolution machine in the Brown Post Office. (You can take that as “I did play, but did look ridiculous,” or as “I did not play at all,” really. Your pick.)
- We did actually see Kid Koala, because the show was not sold out.
- We were extremely nice and careful with your car, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes, and certainly never killed its battery with a cell-phone charger and had to get a recharge from the hotel man. Thank you very kindly for its use. Look! Over there! Behind you! You’re not looking!
- I came home and, on our self-appointed Monday of Rest, did something more useful than get mad at Prince of Persia all day.
It was a great trip. I can’t say the past month and a half was the most traveling I’ve ever done, but man, it was a lot of traveling. Who knows, I might even grow a beard now!
In Providence. Maria is shocked at me for being unhip enough to mention that I don’t like the Strokes in a record store, but dang, man, they’re all 2002.
It was a long drive but not so long as California. I have now visited both ends of the country inside 30 days, so basically I’m the king and I get a special hat.
I’m sending a packet of misdirected mail to my mother, only I don’t have a postal scale nor any way of getting to one. I judged its weight (by holding it in one hand and two sticks of butter in the other, and asking Maria’s friend Jackie to do the same) to be about 9 ozzes, which apparently costs $2.21 and thus consumed my last six stamps (= $2.22). Innovation!
Really hoping that’s enough postage now.
Something pretty gross happened last night.
I semi-regularly make pitchers of Country Time lemonade, which only I drink but which I drink in great quantities. The pitcher is a hassle to wash, so usually I’ll let it get almost empty (at which point the mixture is too strong to drink) and then mix up a new batch in the same pitcher. Kind of like stone soup. I do empty it out and clean it every three batches or so, though.
Yesterday, trying to decide which leftovers to eat, I noticed that we’d almost run out of juice. I pulled the aforementioned pitcher out from the back of the fridge and set it on the counter in anticipation of making more lemonade for dinner. I knew it had been a while since my last batch, but hey, it was in the refrigerator. No worries.
A couple minutes later, Maria started wrinkling her nose up and wondering what smelled bad. I didn’t smell anything, and said as much, but suggested it might be the black bean hummus and pita leftovers we had out from the 3rd Avenue Café. Maria disagreed. Maybe it was the dishes, then? No, nothing we’d been eating would have that kind of sickly-sweet-sour odor.
In the process of emptying the dishwasher, I lifted up the lemonade pitcher and set it down somewhere else. Maria had to leave the kitchen from the smell. I finally took a closer look at the pitcher, which contained green liquid with black stuff floating in it.
I poured it out, followed by gallons of soapy water and a thick coat of baking soda, and Maria made me throw away the pitcher and everything the Undead Lemonade had touched. She wanted to burn them, actually, but we lacked the necessary tools.
If I ever want to kill somebody by burning their flesh off, though, at least now I know what to do.
Maria’s state map is… I don’t know, she has to be cheating. Apparently the absence of West Virginia is a subject of much debate in her family.
Post Road Trip Day Something
I cleaned a lot of plates in Berkeley, pumped a lot of pain in the EFF offices. But I never saw the good side of the city… until I played Illuminati with Leonard, Seth and Zack while Sumana danced to songs about shell accounts.
Actually I saw several very neat sides of the city, including BART (which beats the tar out of TARC, I’m afraid, leaving it with one measly C) and Salon Central. I missed out on the party at City Hall, but I sure heard a lot about it. The weather was gorgeous, and I made new friends (Jacob from Alaska is three, and he and I played hide-and-seek from O’Hare to Louisville).
Recent excursions into Powellian hyperbole notwithstanding, I had a freaking great time in California, thanks entirely to my kind and generous hosts. Even though I’ve been up for about 30 hours trying to grab the tail end of all the work I missed, I don’t regret a thing, and I can’t wait to go back. Maria and I spent a good chunk of yesterday (when I should have been, um, grabbing the aforementioned work-tail) making the first real arrangements for this summer’s Calicomicon journey. The Five Lords of the Texas Eagle will sow terror and reap, um, comic books!