Love and Longing

Man, yes­ter­day was such a long day, I’m still tired.

Woke up at 8 to get ready for “Wacky Water Day” at Fairy-​Tale Town. Nhi came over and we picked up Drew and headed off to Sac.

The project was really cool. Basi­cally the front half of the park was turned into a tiny water park. There was the cas­tle, where we ran around with squirt guns and some lucky peo­ple got to stand on top with a hose to get any kids that wan­der by. One side of the lazy river next to the pirate ship was des­ig­nated as the “raft­ing” area, where we had inflat­able inner tubes ready for kids that wanted to float around. On the oppo­site side was the deep­est part of the lazy river, and that was des­ig­nated the “swim­ming” area. And finally in the area behind Mary’s Lit­tle Lamb was “Kids’ Zone” for chil­dren five and under to play.

Offi­cially, I was on the Cas­tle Lawn crew, but at first I didn’t have a gun and so couldn’t do any­thing, really. Then one of the other Cas­tle Lawn peo­ple got fed up with their assigned weapon because it leaked more than it shot, and so handed it to me. I shot up all the kids by the cas­tle and got bored, so I went roam­ing and shot up kids (and other APhiO­ers) in all the areas.

Randy, Nhi, and Ngoc were look­ing VERY bored at Kid’s Zone, so I told them to go explor­ing like me, but their staff super­vi­sor was a bit anal, and demanded to have three vol­un­teers at all times, so I offered to switch with one of them, and Randy heartily agreed.

Stay­ing at Kids’ Zone wasn’t too bad. I think Nhi and Ngoc just weren’t as into it as I was. I actu­ally ran into the lazy river and splashed around and played with the kids, and they kinda just sat in the shade of the tree. Yeah, they were doing their job, which was basi­cally risk man­age­ment for Fairy-​Tale Town in the form of telling kids not to run (and trip and fall and sue), but they weren’t enjoy­ing it like I was.

The APhiO­ers came and went… there was a good amount of roam­ing. I hear almost every­one got a turn on top of the cas­tle, drench­ing every­one who passed under­neath. More peo­ple migrated to our area towards the end of the day, because Kids’ Zone was the clean­est area left; the other parts of the lazy river were affec­tion­ately called “Willy Wonka’s Choco­late River” because of all the mud and stuff that got into them.

So yeah, very fun project. And Fairy-​Tale Town takes very good care of us. Got plenty of free water and snacks. I was sad to see it come to an end. Well, maybe not entirely, because there were a cou­ple of brats who sup­planted the cute babies in the area. They broke both of the staff water guns I man­aged to get my hands on.

Any­way, ended a lit­tle bit early, so I hur­ried back to Davis, show­ered, picked up Tim H and Esther, and we headed off to San Mateo for Diana’s birth­day party. Left davis around 4:45 and didn’t get to the restau­rant until about 6:45, due to a cou­ple of spots of bad traf­fic. Includ­ing one really bad five-​car col­li­sion out­side of Fair­field. But it was cool, though; Tim H and Esther are very enter­tain­ing pas­sen­gers. In fact, they are quote!

(To set up this quote, Esther was sit­ting shot­gun, and Tim H was in the seat behind her. And they both had soda cans from her place.)

Yeah… they man­aged to kep me awake for the drive there and back just fine. :thumbs:

Oh, and on the way there, the din­ner loca­tion was changed from Mac­a­roni Grill to Red Robin. Good thing I had a San Mateo native in my car. We got there and parked exactly at the same time as Mommy Tang. Or so we thought. Waited for her out­side for a while, but decided it must have been some­one else with a car like hers, because we didn’t see any­one that looked any­thing like her walk­ing towards the entrance.

Went inside and found that every­one had ordered maybe two min­utes pre­vi­ously, so we got some menus and ordered our­selves. It was my first time to a Red Robin, and very hard for me to decide because I had to be veg­e­tar­ian, and there was basi­cally two things I could get off the whole menu. Either the Gar­den­burger or the salad. I went with the Gar­den­burger, because at least it had bot­tom­less steak fries to go with it, and I could load up on them. Also got the “Freck­led Lemon­ade,” which is their name for straw­berry lemon­ade with chunks of real straw­berry in it.

Din­ner was good, and I also got some onion rings off the com­mu­nal appe­tizer. Oh yeah, if you didn’t know, my ver­sion of “veg­e­tar­ian” is a lit­tle stricter than just “no meat.” Because it’s for my reli­gion, I’m also not sup­posed to have any gar­lic or onion, because they “make you hot inside.” (It’s a Yin-​Yang bal­ance thing.) But I ignored that rule, mostly because I didn’t know what the hell was in a Gar­den­burger any­way. Kinda feel bad, but at least I didn’t have meat.

Oh, remem­ber how I said we thought we saw Mommy Tang in the park­ing lot? It turns out it WAS her. She just sat in her car after­wards to write Diana’s card. Which appar­ently took like twenty min­utes. I sat next to Mike C for din­ner, and he’s still as funny as ever. I wish more of Toy class was still around. Where did all the great­ness go?

Speak­ing of Toy class great­ness, if I could have a… I dunno, video clip of the day, it would be when Esther gave her gift to Diana. She didn’t have the time to wrap it, so she tried to just hand it to Diana when they sat next to each other, but Diana closed her eyes and insisted it be wrapped. So Esther looks around and grabs a dis­play box on the table (it’s a paper­board cube with dif­fer­ent drinks/​desserts on every face), opens up the top, shoves her gift (a shirt) in, and hands it to Diana. Diana then pre­tends she doesn’t know what it is and goes through the whole shaking-the-box-to-guess-what’s-inside rou­tine. Mike C tells her not to do that, because the gift is a burger. Finally, Diana opens up the box and looks very sur­prised as she pulls the shirt out.

After din­ner, we went back to Diana’s place for what looked like a long night of drink­ing. But first, while Dick was out secur­ing the goods, all the guys sat around in the liv­ing room and Mike C read a girl mag­a­zine out loud. It was very edu­ca­tional. I wasn’t going to have any­thing, but then Bran­don busted out the absinthe that Dick had brought back from Europe, and I had to try some. We did a ghetto ver­sion of the Bohemian rit­ual, and drank the stuff straight up instead of mix­ing it into any fancy cocktails.

I have to say, the green fairy dis­ap­pointed me. Well, hon­estly, I didn’t see any­thing at all. I think we all needed more than our one or two shots’ worth. Or maybe we just have to do it the old school way, with rat poi­son and stuff to really kick it up to the next level. Oh yeah, and we were watch­ing Eurotrip at the same time, too. But we didn’t get to the club­bing scene by the time we were tak­ing it.

I got really tired after that, so Tim H, Esther, and I went home. I think Esther was scared I was going to start hal­lu­ci­nat­ing and run us off the road or some­thing, but that didn’t hap­pen. Not even close. I dropped them off at her place, safe and sound. Then I went back to my place for a bit. Peggy wanted to hang out, so I went to her place, and ended up crash­ing there.

Tags: Education, Ian R, Law, Ling K, Tim H