Waterfall

Just fin­ished read­ing Crypto­nom­i­con. I sup­pose I should throw up an update about yesterday.

Woke up at 5:15. Gave Peggy a wake-​up call. She wanted another fif­teen min­utes of sleep, so I took a shower and called her again. Got ready, had break­fast, watched the news for a lit­tle bit because I was ahead of sched­ule. Took off like a bolt when it was time, leav­ing my bot­tle of Gatorade on the kitchen counter.

Picked up Emily and Drew and headed to Old Sac. Will Oh and Peggy showed up basi­cally at the same time. Kris­ten gave me an overview of the plan and took Richard and me around to show us the dif­fer­ent places we’d be doing stuff. Back to the main loca­tion. We spent the major­ity of the morn­ing set­ting up tents; first our own, then help­ing ven­dors out. After that, it was time for the final push on duck sales. I dressed up in the duck cos­tume again.

Randy, Erin, and Alan showed up at 11. Randy took over the cos­tume for me, so that Richard, Alan, and I could go load up the trac­tors with the rub­ber duck­ies. Those things were mon­sters. We actu­ally fin­ished way before the sched­uled start of the race, so we went to the Sub­way around the cor­ner for lunch and to kill some time in AC.

The actual dump­ing was awe­some. The trac­tors went up on the bridge and we blocked traf­fic for days. Stu­pid peo­ple wouldn’t lis­ten to us about turn­ing around. A NEWS 10 cam­era crew was there, and they inter­viewed the dri­vers, but not us. Damn! I wanted to plug APhiO on TV. We were stand­ing right in front of the trac­tors when we finally got the sig­nal to start the race, so it was like a cur­tain of yel­low drop­ping before our eyes.

Then we had to high-​tail it over to the end loca­tion. Quote comes as we were going back to the truck to drive over.

I guess that made per­fect sense to him.

Oh, and there was this other guy that made me laugh. He was in some rebuilt Ford mus­cle car that I didn’t rec­og­nize towards the end of the line of cars wait­ing to cross the bridge. I guess he got impa­tient, so he revved up, laid down a solid patch of rub­ber, and ille­gally went over the dou­ble yel­low line and tried to get onto the bridge in the oppos­ing traffic’s lane. Except he didn’t count on two huge trac­tors to be com­ing down on that side, so he had to stop in a hurry and reverse all the way to the end of the line, see­ing as the cars behind him had moved for­ward after he left the line.

So the work at the end loca­tion was by far the most phys­i­cally demand­ing part of the project. After the ducks fin­ished the race, they had to be put back into the crates, and said crates had to humped up a long and wind­ing ramp from the river up to the truck.

Oh, to back-​pedal a lit­tle in the story… the ducks were sup­posed to take about ten to fif­teen min­utes to get to the fin­ish line. It took them maybe five. And they wouldn’t go to the side to be col­lected cor­rectly. And many of them crossed the fin­ish line and kept going, so every­one with a boat on the river chased after them with nets to get every last one of them all back.

Back to the main loca­tion and packed up the tents and stuff. That was noth­ing com­pared to the work we had just done. Then Spe­cial Olympics was really nice and treated us all to Joe’s Crab Shack. I didn’t want to accept, but it was impos­si­ble to say no. At that point, I wasn’t even hun­gry, though. I just downed cup after cup of lemon­ade. And then other peo­ple over-​ordered and shoved food onto me. I felt like I was eat­ing at home home again; always with the garbage dis­posal routine.

Any­ways, back to Davis after that. The swim­ming plans fell through, so I just show­ered and passed out.

Hmm… what to do now that I can’t dis­tract myself with that book?

Tags: Food, Peggy S, Will O, Work