I should be try­ing to make up for sleep I missed last night, but I couldn’t resist jump­ing on the com­puter to check my e-​mail and a cou­ple of other things, so here I am now, writ­ing up another update.

Yes­ter­day… woke up at 9 again. Show­ered and stuff, but Drew and Peggy were still passed out, so I wrote a post. Drew got up and rushed his teeth and stuff and turned on the TV. We watched How To Boil Water on Food Net­work and mocked the “dumb” co-​host. Drew’s the­ory is that she actu­ally can cook, because she’s done sev­eral of these shows, but she just keeps act­ing like an idiot to make the “teacher” seem bet­ter in comparison.

Peggy woke up and we all had break­fast of bagels and fruit. Aaron L’s mom was super­vis­ing as Aaron L’s brother Michael and his girl­friend Katie were prep­ping some glass bot­tles for beer/​root beer fer­men­ta­tion. Katie told us a nice story about how glass bot­tles can explode vio­lently if they become over-​pressurized while fer­ment­ing. Appar­ently she tried long ago with her dad, and they had fif­teen or twenty bot­tles sit­ting in their base­ment. One day, they were just sit­ting around in the liv­ing room when they heard a “thunk,” and thought to them­selves, “Uh-​oh. That can’t be good.” Turns out they were right. Her dad went down to the base­ment to find glass shards embed­ded in the walls from the explo­sion. He put on his full gear (he was a fire mar­shal), and went about care­fully dis­arm­ing all the bottles.

Any­way, after break­fast, packed up and said our good-​byes before head­ing to down­town Santa Cruz. Win­dow shopped for a while. There was also an Antique Street Fair. No big pur­chases… just a cou­ple of gags and poten­tial LB gifts. We were sup­posed to meet up with Aaron L for lunch, but he had to stay late because his replace­ment at work never showed up at the end of his shift. By the time he got out, we had to leave to make it to Merced on time, so we did.

The drive was pretty dull. We got there just a lit­tle bit late. Only three UCM peo­ple showed up, though. I guess Ali­cia is now “Pres­i­dent,” Ali­son is “Fellowship/​Membership/​PR,” and Tina is “Ser­vice.” Oh, and I sup­pos­edly scared Tina when I said ser­vice was “tough.” Appar­ently, every­one else inter­preted that to mean, “Being Ser­vice makes Lovecraft’s Hell look like a tea party.” No, I actu­ally don’t see it being that bad as long as they have enough peo­ple to do stuff (a full car­load would be nice), because Bruce (The Librar­ian, and basi­cally God of UCM), is on their side and has con­tacts and con­nec­tions into every­thing in town.

After the meet­ing, we (the Iota Phi crew, because the UCM folks scat­ter to the winds after every meet­ing) rolled to a Thai restau­rant because Peggy wanted to have noo­dles. She really wanted udon, but Lo S didn’t know of any place that served that. So any­way, we played “Black Magic” while we waited for the food. Minh T, Peggy, Mo W, and Mommy Van don’t know the game. Then quote hap­pened as our food came out. Minh T and I were sit­ting next to each other; he had ordered pineap­ple fried rice, and I had got­ten the house spe­cial fried rice.

Good thing Minh T had just eaten Carl Jr.‘s and wasn’t really hun­gry, so he didn’t mind. In fact, he gave away more of “Dinh’s rice.”

After that, we rolled over to Oh Wow!, the Merced ver­sion of Nickel City, but Peggy wanted to go home, because she had chalk­ing and an early class in the morn­ing, so I took her, Drew, and Mo W back to Davis.

When we got home, worked on some more Ser­vice Fair stuff with Drew, talked with Will for a bit and did some ser­vice busi­ness, set up the new Merced mail­ing list, and then passed out.