Yeesh! I hate when I don't update for a long time, and then have about a billion things to write about. Too intimidating to try to tackle them all, because I know I won't do any of them justice. Oh well, here goes anyway!
I left on the 2nd for SimuCon, after picking Kiki up and stopping by my house so she could meet the cats. The drive up to St Louis wasn't bad at all, especially because mom called while I was driving to give me The Good News! (We'll get to that in a minute.) I nearly got pulled over by a cop just the other side of Springfield, but by some miracle, he pulled over the car in front of me instead. That would have been a horrible way to start vacation!
We stayed at the way too nice for the likes of us Sheraton Westport Chalet, same place as last year. As far as I know, we managed not to do any major structural damage this year, for a change.
Those balconies? Not as sturdy as they look.
So, I don't really remember what Kiki and I did when we first got to the hotel, so I'll just say we went to the bar, since that's probably right. The Modus crew was pretty small this year- only about 10 of us, but we were still the last ones standing on Weds night. Yay, us.
Unfortunatly, being the last ones awake sometimes makes things more interesting than you had planned. Another MO person and I, who had been sitting outside with the group, went back into the lobby to head to our rooms, when a lady from the reception desk called me aside and asked if we were with the convention group. Wondering what we could be in trouble for already, I told her we were, and she asked if we were on the fourth floor. I said I was, and she told me that there was a guy from the Con passed out up there, and they couldn't get him to wake up. So, we went up to the 4th floor and found him passed out by the soda machine with the security guy, and my friend did an awesome job of getting him to wake up and talk. Long story short, the guy didn't know his room number, nor the real name of his roommate, and finally while we were down at the check-in desk trying to figure out where he belonged, he mentioned that he was blind, and the security guy that had been helping us finally put two and two together, and said "OH! They've been looking for you all night!" and took him up to his room.
Humm, which other Con stories to tell? How about the one at dinner, while a beautiful flute solo was being played, and the room was silent, and a certain person at my table, who was listening to her iPod instead of the talent show looked up and noticed the cool fur thing on the flute player's costume, and said, loud enough for everyone in the otherwise silent room to hear, "I want to feel her pelt!"
Or the ever-important lesson, "If you can hump a monkey, you can play this game!'
How about the way-too-much-fun "grocery shopping" trip that Kiki and I took to Schnucks, and that I now deeply regret not getting any pictures of? That shopping cart full of liquor was a Kodac moment. Speaking of which, did you know that they now make both Pineapple and Mango Malibu? You do now!
Our pretty, pretty bar in our hotel room. Yes, we like girly drinks. Yes, the animal crackers are mine. You can't see it here, but Kiki's drink has a super-cool monkey on a palm tree swizzle stick in it.
We had an 80's party this year, for which Julie did my hair, and I applied way too much blue eyeshadow. There was also a 50's party, which we ended up skipping in favor of doing something I don't really remember now. There was the night that Con caught up with me, and I spent about four hours sitting in a chair in the lobby, without moving. There were the mundane things you see every day, like a giant pink bunny and a chicken having a sword fight in the bar.
There was Phelps, the monkey. While searching for some sort of cool tropical decoration to put on our hotel room door so that we could find it easier (we ended up with a giant pink cardboard flamingo.), I came across the holy grail of coolness- a six foot tall inflatable monkey. He was like Albert the Drunk Monkey of Simucon 2002's bigger cousin or something. I knew at once that Julie had to have him as her very own, and got him for her as a sort of thank you for scoring us a free room. He became our mascot for the weekend, and I hear that there were plans to kidnap him, but they never materialized.
What kind of loser kidnappers were you that couldn't steal a six foot monkey right off a balcony? Come on, people!
We also got to preview a new game that our company is working on, called Hero's Journey. It looks like it will be all kinds of fun, and the graphics are beautiful. I'm shamelessly stealing this one from the official Simucon memory site, because I wasn't smart enough to take any pictures of it myself.
See that little fellow going up the stairs? He is what *makes* this game. He's going to put that crystal he's carrying into that little holder, and it will whirl up this impressive looking system to the top of the building, where it shoots out beams of light, which a big flying fish creature comes and... does... something.. to. Okay, so I may have missed some of the technical details there, but it was really freaking cool. I hear that later in the seminar, they made some of the little dudes dance together in the physics demo program, and I cry a little bit when I think about the fact that I missed that.
Kiki had to leave us on Friday for a reunion that never happened, (long story, ask her.) which made us all very sad. What's even sadder is that I think I've now told you most of the good Con stories from this year. Something was just off this year that made it seem not as much fun as years past. Still fun, just not to the same degree. I can't put my finger on what's missing, though. In fact, I opted to drive home on Sunday night instead of Monday morning, because once people started leaving, the magic spell that is Con was broken, and I just wanted to be back home with my kittens in my own bed. I only nearly fell asleep about eight billion times on the three and a half hour drive home, but I made it. Another Con survived.
HEY!, you may be saying. You mentioned that you got some good news on the drive up, didn't you? Well, while Kiki and I were driving along, minding our own business and trying not to get pulled over for speeding, my mom called. Guess what? says she. "What?" ask I. "We got the house!" Oh yes, my beloved wood-carpet house? That sneaky woman known as my mother went back and put another bid on it without telling me, and we ended up getting it. There was much, much rejoicing at this news. The day after I got back, known as "Monday" in many circles, and as "Oh, DAMN, what did I do all week?" to the SimuCon crowd, I got to spend four hours in the house while poor Mr Inspector looked it over. He found a leak in the dirt room next to my kitchen, which should be easy to repair, but which, over time, has pretty much eaten away at one of my kitchen walls, so that will have to be replaced. There's also a short in my kitchen ceiling light from some idiot trying to be an electrician, because when you turn my kitchen light out, the overhead light in the dirt room comes on. Brilliant, eeh? There weren't any other major issues of note, just little things to fix up here and there. The bank is supposed to close on the house on the twenty-somethingth, and then we can go in and make it all pretty, and then move in. Hooray! Being me, I took some more pictures while I was there, but I'll spare you and just show off my super-cool 70's light switch plate, included with the house!
I saved the depressing news for last. Right after I got home, we noticed that Pip was acting sick. Took him to the vet, and the vet decided that he probably has what Trinity has. We came to the decision that rather than making him sit in a cage at the vet's with an IV for his final days like Trin had to, we would bring him home. We were planning to keep him in the house so that we could keep an eye on him, but he started begging to be let out on Thursday, doing his thing where he tries to turn the doorknob, so we decided to just let him have his way. He disappeared for most of Friday, reappearing Friday night, and then we haven't seen him since. We're pretty sure that he went off to hide somewhere to die. I wish I could have been with him, or at least knew where he was so that we could bury him. Well, I guess that if I'm wishing, I wish that someone in the field of vet medicine would come up with some kind of treatment for this disease, because seeing cats perfectly healthy one day, and dead three days later is too devastating to keep dealing with. I'm going to miss my Pippin Kitten like crazy, but at least he's back with his brother now.
That's entirely too depressing a note to end this post on, even though that's where I planned to end, so I'll ramble on a bit more. We had our family reunion this weekend, so my 2nd oldest sister and her kids planned to camp out at our house, per usual, but something went screwy with our electricity, and now only about half of the things in the house work. Lucky us, with this being mid-June, the air conditioning is one of the things NOT working. So is the hot water heater, so I can't even take a shower to cool off unless I want to freeze to death. The landlord is supposed to be getting the electricity people here to fix things NOW, but he seems to be taking his own sweet time. I have, however, now added "Microwaving pizza in the living room" to my list of things done in my life, now, since the power outlets in the kitchen are not behaving. We had to plug the fridge into an extension cord to save the innocent hot pockets from an untimely demise.
Typing up journal entries while all sweaty is not fun, at all.
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