Preemptive Aftermath?

Since I'm at work right now, and likely most of the festivities will be over by the time I get home, I figure I'll take a stab at this whole "aftermath" thingy.

now, on to the peeps who i met:
LitBolt= fucking awesome, but this guy does NOT GET DRUNK...its uncanny.(let me clarify...its not that he doesn't drink...it just doesn't affect him.
Martian_Bob = fucking awesome grill master, and a good friend of mine. He didn't stick around for the after-grill festivities, but thats excusable.
sublies = i really like the way this guy thinks...but i think that his milwaukee-style drink-fu is too hardcore for me.
BrooksMarlin = fucking awsome as well. he kept a log of good one-liners. expect a list of of them, completely out of context, to be posted here soon, i'd imagine.
enth = very very cool and knowledgeable, and a great sport. he even played a game of Magic with me. wonderful person to talk with about all things computers.
Girlface showed up late, but she was very cool, and tolerant of the rampant drunkeness and did her best to catch up ;p apparently a "local", but I hadn't met her before yesterday.
chancel a very sweet girl. She made mix cds for everyone. I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but it looks good. I'm envious of her garden...I can't manage to get basil to grow :(
jmc = English Major + Computer Geek...he knows way too much about Foucault, but thats not *really* a bad thing ;p
Sir.Cracked did indeed rock pretty hardcore. he's another local that i've never met.
Shoot! I almost forgot about Natch!. A great hostess, as always.

anyway. being that i spent friday evening/night at a friend's graduation party, i'll just write about saturday, for which i think i was there for all of.

sat morning...i wake up.
martian_bob is supposed to call me when he wants me to bring my cooler over, and i receive said call at approximately noon. so i head over there, we pack up all the meat and veggies and cheese and buns and orangutans and fruit bats and breakfast cereals, and then we are raring to head up to Beautiful, Pristine, Lake MacBride.
or so we thought.
due to no small fault of my own, mb and i ended up at Coralville Lake. in my own defense, i thought that there was only one lake/campground in the area. but that's ok, because none of the others had left Iowa City yet. so we tell them to get their collective asses in gear, we turn around, and we head to the real lake macbride.
but.
we take a wrong turn in the Metropolis of Solon, and end up in Mt. Vernon.
bad.
turn around, drive another hour, and finally get to lake macbride.
the others still haven't left yet :( regardless, we hang out and munch on some of the veggies that we had with us. finally we see a caravan of noder-looking people.
by this time, i realized that i wouldn't be making it to work today like i thought that i might (it was something like 2pm right now, with work staring at 3:30).
so i called in sick.
bad boy.
ah well.
so we find the campsites, unpack stuff, and then for some reason we decide to go back to natch's place. i don't get it, but whatever.
except.
on the way there everyone pulls over, which was disturbing. apparently someone thought of another place that we might like better.
guess where?
yup.
coralville lake.
wunderbar.
we were just there.
but.
the lead car managed to pass the camping area for cv lake, and we headed back to natch's anyway, where mb proceeded to break out his mad 14-inch grill and go to town.
we were grilling up a storm and i'm sure we pissed off more than a few neighbors. i know this because one of the others pointed out that an angry man kept looking out his window at us.
fearing police intervention, we packed most of the stuff up and brought it inside. mb finished the grilling, brought it up, hung out for a while, and then ditched us for his girl. thats ok though.
i don't really have any solid time-line for what the hell happened in there, but we had some fun. but please, please remember:
beer before liquor, never been sicker.
liquor before beer, all clear.

anyway.

so here is what i can remember that happened, in no particular order.

  • enth made a sort of weird vodka+cranberry juice+citron+sprite thing (this happened twice). tasted like ice tea, but much more alcoholic.
  • i peed. a lot.
  • jmc fell asleep
  • so did chancel
  • so did sublies
  • much water was drunk
  • much beer was drunk
  • much baily's was drunk
  • much other stuff was drunk
  • much cheetos were munched
  • much music was played
  • much flirting was done (mostly by natch ;p)
  • litbolt ran a game of sac 7a
  • i don't think anyone won it
  • i played a game of magic against enth. my mad counterburn deck barely took out his old-skool necro deck variant
  • i spent a lot of time just talking to people about stuff. this is bound to happen with so many people who love knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
  • dirty jenga was played. it really wasn't as dirty as i thought it would be. the wording on the blocks is pretty liberal. Brooks was the scapegoat, but he took it well
  • 5 am is when the party stopped. or at least that's when i stumbled back across the parking lot to my apartment and fell asleep
i woke up this morning with the worst hangover in my life. finally got out of the house at 2pm this afternoon to catch everyone else going out *for breakfast* lol. anyway, being that i had to be at work soon, and my inebriation from the night before put me in no condition to eat anything (or at least, not able to eat anything, and keep it down, but i won't ever mention that again), i made pleasantries, and walked to work. and then i wrote this node.

I don't really have any closing comments or anything, but I had a lot of fun yesterday, despite the bit of unorganization we had towards the beginning. You guys all r0XX0rs hardcore. Y'all come back now, y'hear?

Good lord. Ok, the aftermath node:

So jmc and I left scenic Ann Arbor at four on Friday, armed with tent and sleeping bags and mix cds and falafel and hummus sandwiches, and a paper grocery bag full of liquor, jam, and bears. We had previously both been at work all day. Yay work! But it called for fortification. There is certainly more falafel in my car now than there had been previously, let us just say.

There was then lots of driving. I-94 is a really ugly highway. All the trees are yellow and sick-looking. But we had to take it all the way through Gary, Indiana, home of similar ugliness, and into Illinois, where we turned out to have successfully avoided the worst of the Chicago traffic and proceeded to get on 80. I was blinded by the sunset, but otherwise it was a good drive. Illinois is all flat and farm-oriented, and the occasional trees were all just coming out to full flower. It was getting dark as we crossed the Mississippi. We listened to lots of Modest Mouse, being on the great plains and all. It was interesting; I hadn't ever driven farther west than Chicago without a large group of people of some type, and John had never been to Iowa before. It was nice to be going west in such a manner. I liked it.

We did realize partway through the drive that we had forgotten to take time zones into account, and that we would therefore be early, and people might not even be at the apartment. So we stopped for dinner at a little town which turned out to be the birthplace of Former President Ronald Reagan, and ate at a Wendy's on the Hiftoric Ronald Reagan Trail. Good god, what is wrong with these people?? Anyway, FOOD. I did not so much eat my sandwich as ruminate at it for a while, but that was ok. And so we got into town exactly at the specified time, which was 11:30.

We then met: Natch, in a lovely vinyl dress, LitBolt, BrooksMarlin, enth, who I recognized by the blue hair, Sir.Cracked, and sublies. erikbjo had apparently made an appearance earlier, then vanished. So.

I proceeded to forget everyone's names instantaneously, but that was also ok; there was so much forgetting of names over the weekend, whether said forgetting happened by virtue of alcohol or not. As it happened, there was no alcohol Friday night, so. There was, however, lots of eat poop you cat. I can't remember any specific sentences just now, but I am sure Natch will put them up. Anyway we all warmed up and were acquainted, and it was good. Everyone was extremely friendly and charming; I was all charmed.

Then we decided to take a trip to the graveyard up the street. It was fresh and nice out, and my feet got very wet very quickly. We cut through the graves in the close to pitch black, and I had one hell of a time not tripping over anything, especially going down the hill. In fact I did trip, but sustained no injury, so. We were looking at the statue of the black angel that we had come to see, when the streetlight above my head started to flicker and turned suddenly on, like a bug zapper, except with more spotlight qualities. Simultaneously, there were a number of bat-oriented noises from a little way away. I jumped a foot in the air and was like ok those are bats those are bats yet I am done with the graveyard. So I flipped out a little bit, and we went ahead back to the apartment. Everyone was extremely nice about it, which was good, because I felt stupid.

Bed ensued. Sir.Cracked left to go home, being local, then came back to retrieve his camera and inform us that he had caught some of his friends outside. Apparently they had followed us to the graveyard and tried to scare us, which worked well enough. So everyone was at least a little pissed about that; a later game of eat poop you cat revolved entirely around "Mike's stupid friends tried to scare us", for instance. But it was all good. I was actually a little relieved, since I could then legitimately be annoyed instead of creeped out.

In the morning I woke up with a huge sinus headache, and proceeded to be not all that much fun while everyone played heritage Atari games and breakfasted upon two different kinds of Cheetos. Had it until I had the presence of mind to have both some ibuprofen (didn't work) and a can of Dr. Pepper. Then it went away rather quickly. The moral of the story is: drink your caffeine.

I also got to take the first of many jaunts to the grocery store up the street. Iowa City is actually quite nice. Little houses and lots of plants in the front yards.

Eventually we all were organized, and left in caravan for Lake MacBride. Iowa continued to be very nice indeed. I like all the gently rolling business that the land does there, and the tufty scrub everywhere, not to mention actually green hills and fields. There was a hill of goldenrod at one point. We sang a lot of Elvis Costello in the car. It was gorgeous out and we got to the campground, where we met Martian_Bob, his girlfriend Molly, and FireBomb, without incident.

Then, however, there was incident. General dissatisfaction with the campsites caused us to turn back. We were just going to barbecue in the backyard of the apartments, but decided instead to run around trying to find some other place that people liked better. This worked about as well as you would think, and we ended up back at the apartments anyway, where we (being slightly collectively annoyed at this point) immediately broke out the grill and alcohol. A shot of Jack Daniels out of the bottle will cure all your ills! Anyway, the combination of beer and meat (or, you know, beer and Boca burgers and Hot Damn 100 and veggie kabobs and Absolut Citron) fixed things in short order. Everyone was in a good mood.

By this point the focus was largely on relaxing and socializing in a semi- to entirely drunken manner. That was fine by me. I was dubbed "hot" by several people. Ok then, that's a fine thing to be. I approve. Apparently several people approve. All right then!

Most people were instantaneously drunk. LitBolt, as mentioned, did not get drunk no matter how much he drank. This makes me wonder whether LitBolt + booze actually = disaster, as had been previously posited; he seems to me to be a fine upstanding young citizen. Natch spent a lot of time changing clothes, as predicted, and was extremely happy to see the bag of ice that jmc and I got (along with a basket of Sweet Williams, yay plants!) on another trip up to the store. jmc himself got immediately drunk enough to give his full lecture on Foucault ("...and Jeremiah Bentham, who--" "Jeremy Bentham!" ... ... ... "...and when Jeremiah Bentham proposed his--" "JEREMY BENTHAM!"), and someone commented "hey, the professor's drunk!" I made a bunch of Indian street corn, and talked to Martian_Bob about grad school. And I got to go into Sir.Cracked's car to get a cd. That was the smallest car in the world. He appears to be one of those people who look tall enough but drive like short people. And Girlface, the last of our great and valiant number, showed up and started to catch up on the drinking.

We all gradually moved back into the apartment. After this things got a little hazy, although I was actually maintaining a good degree of drunk in a sensible and steady manner. At some point I went to the store again, this time with LitBolt and sublies; we busted out all our quarters for a toy vending machine which advertised pooping animals. Clearly, we got no pooping animals out of the deal, just several temporary tattoos and non-Nickelodeon non-name brand Gak. But that was ok. Someone gave me a tattoo of Spongebob Squarepants and his starfish friend of whose name I am unaware. There was much music and loud conversation and enth's Citron/cranberry/lime punch, which turned out to be an outstanding beverage. I gave out mix cds; there are more available, if anyone wants one.

Somewhere around this time jmc went over the edge to "too drunk". We went back and forth and back and forth to sleep in the car/not sleep in the car/sleep in the hallway, while everyone else was having the battle of the mascots. He eventually passed out, and stayed in the same exact position for a good hour or two. I stayed up, such that the hallway was navigable for a while, and drank and talked and danced. Danced! Me, dancing! This has not happened at a legitimate social function in over two years. Y'all who witnessed such an event should feel special.

I seem to have gone downhill after that, and went to bed in the hall with jmc. So we effectively blocked the entire hallway, and got stepped on a lot. That was only to be expected, considering. We had a bunch of hazy sleep during the dirty Jenga, and that was fine as well. Eventually things wound down,and we moved out to the living room to sleep in a heap with everybody else. It was getting light out.

In the morning there was not all that much going on. John and I had to leave, so as to beat the time change, return the tent to Lansing, and get back to Ann Arbor with reasonable time to recover (i.e. sleep) before work in the morning. So we fuzzily collected ourselves and made our goodbyes at 12:30. I didn't get to make ratatouille as planned, and although I wrote down the recipe for Natch, I think it was kind of difficult to interpret. I shall have to fix this in the near future as well.

The drive back was uneventful, although jmc slept for a good half of it, which in turn made it difficult for me to stay awake. But I did and it was all good. In Lansing, ca. 8 pm, we dropped off the tent, talked to his parents, dragged ourselves away from the Last Episode Ever of the X-files, and ate burritos and peanut stirfry at Travelers Club. Then I let jmc drive the rest of the way home, and we sang The Wayward Bus/Distant Plastic Trees EPs with what was left of our alcohol-depleted voices. It was good. And so we got home around 11, cleaned bathrooms in a responsible we'll-be-fined-if-we-don't-do-our-chores sort of way, took showers, and collapsed into bed.

This morning I found a dixie cup shotglass in my coat pocket. AT WORK.

In conclusion. Noders are good. Alcohol is good. Sleep is good. MUCH GOODNESS ENSUED. (Look at all the value judgement!) It was a good weekend, although exhausting, and we shall come back and bother people at our discretion. Yay!

The end.

Well, I suppose it's time to throw my $.02 in, I'll try and fill in some blanks] and avoid bits that everyone has covered rather well... Mostly this will be my own observations], as the facts seem rather well established.

The meet had rather an awkward false start for me, as I arrived when Natch was absent, and met Natch's roommate, so, I killed an hour and came back, and THIS time I was both in the right spot and at the right time.

I was given everyone's name to forget (I am absolutely HORRID with names), and then, after a brief trip to North Liberty, We hit my house to snag a DVD player, and my parents were confronted with a nice cross section of E2 (I'm crashing with them while I move back from Chicago until I get taken to Texas). Somehow, I don't think they were prepared for it, or to have their DVD player walk out the door either, but that's what happened.

After a bit of Eat Poop You Cat, Two more people arrived who's names I got to forget (I think I'm catching on now, but it's a bit late now isn't it?). However, I was quite pleased that someone else with long hair showed up, as everyone to that point had extremely short, bald, or short and blue hair. Dunno why I noticed it, but it was pretty cool to have another pony tailed guy show.

After much drawing and such, a trip to the graveyard was decided upon. Now, don't ask me how, because I still don't know, but two people who apparently think my life isn't interesting enough decided to stick their brand of humor into this otherwise new experience weekend. I didn't know until we got back and I spotted one outside the building, and I have no doubt that I was MEANT to see them, because it's not enough that they annoy me, the need me to know that it was them so that when I get pissed later they can act dumb and deny everything. Don't ask, I don't understand either, All I can do is say I'm very, VERY sorry....

As coincidence would have it, everyone decided to crash at that point, and as I was leaving, I was able to catch the two morons leaving the lot. They were parked next to my car, so I assume they saw it. True to form, they denied everything, but snickered while doing so. I abandoned the questioning and decided to call it a night myself, but had to fetch my camera (which I had left) and fess up for my friends.

The next morning, I got up and took down the tent, which had been airing out for a couple of days, and packed it up along with the booze contribution I was to make. After trooping over to Natch's, and some general morning fun, We headed out to Macbride. Much confusion was had as to the crappieness of the campsites, to which I have to say, "this is Iowa, if you expect someone to do something right, you should really check out another state." On the way back, I remembered a place where there was indeed actual, secluded camp sites. I had gone there for a day camp thing years ago, and there was a trail that led from them to the dam separating Macbride and the Res.

Not knowing when to quit, I decided to try and inform a moving column of cars of this. This was my first strike of the day. Note to self: Know when to quit; Do so.

I then attempted to lead them to said campsite. This was my second strike of the day. Note to self: Just because you know the way to two places from Iowa City, does not mean you know the way to get from one of those places to the other. As punishment, I apparently missed out on a Natch flashing, DOH. Just a note, Natch, I would have honked, or at least shouted some words of encouragement.

Abandoning that plan after not terribly long, I simply went back to Natch's, via the most roundabout but on the most main streets as possible. I stand by this, as, 1)I didn't want to loose anyone and 2)you silly people made the mistake of following me, hahahah!

Drinking then ensued. I'm told there was grilling, but after my bone headedness, I was ready for lots of alcohol and no driving. I'd just like to say, that I normally don't get that drunk of that little. I was much helped on by the fact that I really hadn't had much in the way of food yet that day, and I was hanging with Natch. Being even slightly drunk with people who are willing to be silly and fun makes me feel all the more silly and fun drunk. This is a good thing(tm). I was also treated to a bit of Jack Daniels, which I had not yet tried. My whiskey experience to this point had been rather disappointing, but I was surprised by the goodness of the Jack. Defiantly something that is an acquired taste, but also something I think I could come to like. An extra special thanks goes to the people who listened to me while drunk, and especially Natch, who gives the most excellent backrubs as well as braiding my hair in such a way that I was referred to as "Highlander" multiple times over the course of the evening.

After retiring to the apartment and sobering up a bit, as well as loosing a couple of noders to fatigue, alcohol venting, and various commitments, Dirty Jenga was played. There was a bit of a disparity in men to women, and not much in the way of guys being interested in other guys, leading to some... creative reading of some of the blocks. I personally tried to stay as true to the blocks as possible, but there were a couple of challenges. I also think I had the dubious honor of having the first ass bared. Many were to follow.

At about 5 am, sleep was had, and after a very insufficient time, was done with. I find it a bit curious that no one seemed to have noticed me leaving (at least, no one mentions how I left in their wu's), but I busted out at around noonish, to get to Palisades park, where I had a suspicion, and was correct, a mere 10 minutes after I arrived Said moronic friends arrived for their weekend climb. Much chewing out was had, so much so that neither one was letting me run their belay. Weenies. I wouldn't have dropped them. Too far.

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