Convention II
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Friday, July 20. Ellmyruh flew into Manchester, NH, around 10:30pm, at which point we gently informed her that the RinkUnion wasn't until the weekend after.
Thursday, July 27. Matthew and Ayako flew into Manchester in the afternoon. Matthew discovered just how little there is to do in a small airport when you have three or four hours to kill.
Friday, July 28. Cynthia flew into Manchester in the late morning. After lunch, Leen, Ellmyruh, and I started driving over to Manchester, which is just a bit over an hour away. We milled about the Comfort Inn for a bit, spied the conference room that we'd have the next day, and then decided to see what we could find at the Econo-Lodge. We scoured every hallway of the Econo-Lodge, searching for familiar faces and calling, "RinkWorks! RinkWorks!" as we went. We didn't have any luck, so we went back to the Comfort Inn and waited around. We gave up, decided to go across the street for ice cream and/or snacks, and bumped into Cynthia.
Mia and famous touched down in Manchester just before 5pm, and the four of us met them in the airport. All but Mia packed into our car to go back to the hotel; Mia stayed to meet Stephen, who would be flying in 40 minutes later. Meanwhile, Mousie had arrived in Boston and was cruising up to Manchester in a rental car. Grishny and Amy were on the road to New Hampshire but would not reach Manchester until the next day. Ditto Ticia and Don, who had started driving from Utah the Sunday before. Rivikah was on the road with her parents, had probably crossed the Canada/United States border by this time, and would arrive later that evening.
Leen, Ellmyruh, Cynthia, famous, and I went out to eat, some of us to Burger King (in homage to an absent Rinkie) and some of us to Subway. The Burger King folk brought their food over to Subway to eat it. When we got back to the Comfort Inn, I asked if there were any messages for me, because we were wondering where everybody was. Yes, the woman said, eight or nine people had asked for me, and several of them were across the street at Applebee's. So we went back and hunted around. No one was in Applebee's, but we found Mousie, Stephen, Mia, Issachar, and Jacqueline milling about, and the ten of us collided in the parking lot with only a few casualties. Mousie, Stephen, and Mia were going to head back to Boston to eat and pick up Dave, who wouldn't be landing at Logan Airport until 1am that night. Issachar and Jacqueline went off to eat, and those remaining went back to our room (Leen, Ellmyruh, famous, and I shared a room) to convene. Issachar and Jacqueline popped in after a while, and still later I got a phone call from Ayako, who wondered why the message she left for me at the desk didn't make it. I didn't know, but I told her my room number, and after a bit, she and Matthew came in and met everybody.
Later that night, Leen wondered if she could set up her model horses in the conference room then instead of waiting until the morning. We each took a model horse and paraded down to the lobby. On our way, we found Faux Pas and his wife waiting for the elevator. A gang of people carrying model horses? "Don't worry," Faux Pas assured his wife. "I think these are our friends."
It turned out the room wasn't set up yet, so we had to parade back to the room with all the horses. Faux Pas showed up at the room some time later, and we headed out to Subway again, since not everyone had eaten. The rest of us got ice cream from Store 24, a couple doors down, and brought it back to eat.
Saturday, July 28. Late in the night, the Boston crew returned. Mia stumbled into her room and greeted a mostly sleeping Rivikah. Dave and Stephen, in their room, spent most of the night talking and only managed an hour of sleep, from 6:30am to 7:30am. That's when I got up, too; Leen and I started setting up the room, and in the process we found Ticia and Don, who had gotten into Manchester around 4am. We brought Ticia back to our room to meet Ellmyruh.
The room wasn't completely set up by the time we were moving stuff into it. The guy in charge of set-up was very nice and very accommodating and efficiently fulfilled our every need. The display table was needed at the other end of the room, and we needed about five more tables with chairs in addition to the five already present. We were supplied with a podium (no, lectern), microphone that didn't work, a TV/VCR on a rolling stand, and an overhead projector and screen. The room itself was huge. It was a double size room. We rented one conference room, but no one had reserved the other for that day, so the divider was slid aside, and we got to use both. The extra space was welcome. We would have fit in a single room, but the extra room gave us space to maneuver comfortably.
Half of the display table was set up with Darleen's model horses and tack. The other half I filled with books that RinkWorks had been featured in, a book of Howard's grandfather's poetry (Mountain and Stream Songs of the Virginias), an assortment of the infamous chopsticks wrappers quoted in Things People Said, a letter from Stephen/Radebur, a postcard from Enigma, a Domain Name Day card from Faux Pas and many others who sent him note stickers to put on it, a donations envelope, a guestbook, Jaffas (a candy from New Zealand) that Brunnen-G had sent me for the occasion, and, later, Jaffa Cakes (a cookie from England) that Matthew had brought, and Puffcorn Delites, both butter and cheez flavors, which are oven baked snack things from Ohio that are similar to cheez doodles -- Grishny brought those as a result of a recent "cheez" thread on the message forum.
The other tables were long narrow things that were arranged in two columns of five tables each and had three chairs to each one. By the time everybody had come in, people were arranged thusly: Ayako and Matthew at the front left table (as facing the front); Jaguar, Ellmyruh, and famous at the table behind; Mina, Darien, Stephen, and Mia at the table behind that one; Cynthia, ahmoacah, and Rivikah at the table behind that one; and Grishny and Amy at the table behind that one. At the front right table was Leen, Ticia, and Don; Mousie and Dave were at the table behind; Tim and PrincessLeia were at the table behind that one; Jacqueline, Issachar, Tamara, and Faux Pas were at the table behind that one.
A starting time of 8:30am really meant 9am. People started wandering in until that time. Ellmyruh, famous, Ticia, Don, Dave, and Stephen were all there pretty early. Ayako, Matthew, Cynthia, Rivikah, PrincessLeia, and Tim all wandered in at some point before nine. When Rivikah came in, I didn't recognize her at first, which surprised me since of all those I hadn't met, she seemed to have the most consistently recognizable face (as opposed to Ticia, who looks different in every picture and like none of them in real life). Issachar and Jacqueline also entered before nine, and I rattled off the names of those present yet again, and by this time it was a daunting crowd. By this point some of us, including me, were amazed to see a pretty full looking room and then realize that seven more would be arriving a bit later. Faux Pas and Tamara arrived at nine on the nose, and the introductions happened yet another time.
I started at 9:10am and began the announcements -- such things as the contents of the display table and so forth. Following that was the dispensation of trinkets. I gave out strawberry hullers with, in the manner of other RinkWorks prizes, "RinkWorks" and my initials written on them with a black marker. Darleen gave out her EquiWorks business card -- edible color printing on slabs of white chocolate. Cynthia gave out cloth roses and, acting on behalf of teach, pins that said, "teach sent me a HUG! @ RinkUnion 2001." Ellmyruh gave out pens and Sewer Gator tattoos from the water treatment facility she used to do public relations work for. Mousie arrived at 9:25, just in time to give out rubber duckies (some with mouse ears -- Mousie Ducks, get it?) and brought a bag of Warner Brothers goodies such as key chains and Pez dispensers for people to dig into. During the dinner break, PrincessLeia and Tim went home and brought back goodies from their father's place of work, including paddle wheel timers, calculators, and flashlights. During the dispensation of trinkets, I gave everyone a little piece of note paper, which was not a free giveaway but for something we'd do later in the day. The pens Ellmyruh dispensed came in handy, because it meant everyone had something with which to write on them. The idea was, everybody had to write down something about themselves that few people knew. Later the papers would be collected, and I would read them and ask people to guess who it might be.
Throughout the whole of Saturday, Rivikah sat at her table working on a RinkWorks mobile, made up of small objects several Rinkies contributed which represented themselves in some way. I made an announcement about that and encouraged people to give her their trinkets or, if they didn't have anything, buy something during lunch. The first items were given to her, and more were given later in the day. I gave her a miniature deck of cards (I collect playing cards) which had "RinkWorks" and my initials written on them. It was convenient, because I had that deck of cards in my bag of miscellaneous RinkWorks prizes. Darleen gave her a small model horse. Ellmyruh gave her a pocket notebook, symbolic of her affinity of recording events on paper (later she recorded, in it, who contributed which items to the mobile). Jaguar gave three erasers, which were glued together. PrincessLeia gave her a small toy lightsaber and a Pikachu keychain. Tim gave her a calculator with a lego man and a toothpick-sword glued onto it. famous gave her a 3.5" floppy. Faux Pas gave her a bottle cap (recently he had posted in the Site Journal about bottle caps that say, "Sorry, please try again," on the inside of them). Mousie gave her a rubber duckie from the stash. Grishny gave her a keychain (he collects them). Ayako gave her a barrette. Matthew gave her an English 20p coin. Cynthia gave her a figurine of a penguin. Rivikah's own contribution was a miniature mobile. Rivikah worked diligently on the mobile all day, through the movie, and into the evening. She finished late evening and hung it in a corner of the room, where everybody oohed and ahhed at it and had her sit beneath it for pictures. The finished product was very cool -- the pictures don't do it justice -- and watching her work on it, twisting wire and testing weights, was fascinating.
For a while, Wal-Mart was selling yellow volley balls with the Wal-Mart smiley face on them. I bought one and called it an AIM smiley and brought it to the convention. I demonstrated how it could be turned to the side, as an ASCII smiley, and tossed it out into the crowd. Stephen caught it, and throughout the day it was tossed and kicked about. At one point it hit Rivikah's work, and everybody gasped and fretted except Rivikah. Her work was bumped a couple of different times under different circumstances, and it was the same story then, too, including once where I mismanaged the door when she was carrying a chunk of it by. Each time everybody winced, while she assured everybody it was fine. Funny thing about mobiles. You can apparently bash them around, separate pieces, and drop them on the ground without breaking them.
Five minutes before Mousie got in, Jaguar (my brother) came in and was introduced to absolutely everybody at once. At 10:15, Grishny and Amy entered, and names were repeated. (Their son Jonathan, the official RinkBaby, didn't appear on Saturday except briefly in the evening. Amy, confused as to how an infant had escaped her parents' notice long enough to hike over to Manchester, took him home that afternoon.)
I like to have several of the events at the RinkUnion be RinkWorks-related somehow. The dispensation of things concluded at 9:35, and the next item on the agenda was something related to Fun With Words, specifically the "Negatives Without Positives" section. I read a story published in the New Yorker, which contains a multitude of words such as "maculate" and "gruntled" and phrases such as "sung hero" and "that I could make heads and tails of." That went over pretty well, I thought.
Following that came Stupid Hand Tricks. Ellmyruh demonstrated her ability to do the Spock sign with both hands, then switch back and forth between that and the inverse Spock sign (space between the first and second fingers and between the third and fourth fingers, but none between the second and third fingers) rapidly. Then she had one hand doing it one way and the other hand doing it the other way and switched back and forth just as rapidly. That prompted Matthew to get up and demonstrate another hand thing, which involves moving the fingers of one hand back and forth through opened and closed spaces between the fingers in the other hand. Finally I demonstrated an improvement on the itsy-bitsy spider routine, which involves using all fingers, rather than just two.
And then came the memory game, which, with three times as many people, ended up being markedly different than it was the year before. The categories were favorite month of the year, favorite article of clothing, and favorite dessert. The procedure is, each person, in turn, names his or her favorite month of the year, and when everybody's done that, they name the favorite article of clothing, and when everybody's done that, they name the favorite dessert. We went through it twice, faster the second time, and then everybody has to write down what everybody else said on a chart. The one who remembers the most wins the game. There were 23 people present at the time (ahmoacah, Darien, and Mina had not yet arrived), so the maximum score was 69. PrincessLeia won the game with 51 correct answers; I believe 47 was the second highest score. At any rate, for winning the game, PrincessLeia won an official RinkWorks yo-yo, that is, a transparent orange yo-yo with "RinkWorks" and my initials written on it with a black marker. Just before the checking of answers began, ahmoacah popped in and was introduced to everyone.
After that came the taste-testing. Like last year, I brought Moxie, an old New England soda, and Issachar and Jacqueline brought Cheerwine, a soda they've only really seen available in the Carolinas. I went around the room with Dixie cups and dispensed some Cheerwine to everyone and left the other sodas in a bowl of ice at the back of the room. The Cheerwine was good. Then I went around pouring a little Moxie in everyone's cup, and I heard this mounting wave of sounds like "ewwwwwhhhh" mounting in my wake. Moxie is a macho thing. One drinks it to prove one is man enough to handle it. I put the extra Moxie cans in the back with the Cheerwine. After the convention was over, the Cheerwine was gone, but the Moxie, surprisingly enough, was not.
Then I did my world-famous impressions of Robert De Niro (in which I deadpan, "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?") and Jim Carrey (in which I deadpan, "Smoking."), and everybody was duly impressed.
Ticia shouted, "There's Darien!" and everybody looked to see. He was not there. Then we killed Ticia and buried her corpse in the lawn.
Then Stephen didn't do his overhead projector presentation. "Next time," he said, "remind me like a week before."
So then I read my collection of stupid emails that I have received over the past year. I also read some excerpts from some very very awful bad movie reader reviews. Then we broke for lunch, and just then Darien and Mina actually did show up. People scattered for lunch, but several of us went to the Applebee's across the street. An hour and a half later, we reconvened, and Dave took the podium in order to read a new review for It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie. He handed out business cards by flinging them out into the crowd and watching people scrounge about for them. Then he had a quick contest, the prize being a cube of note paper with his company's logo on it. The prize went to the first person who could guess when he wrote the movie review. famous won, correctly guessing that he wrote it on the plane ride over to Manchester the previous night. Then he read his review of Leprechaun In the Hood, which was not posted online until almost two weeks later, which garnered many laughs.
After that came the unveiling of the RinkWorks Convention II t-shirts, which has the It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie turkey holding up a sign with "RinkWorks Convention II" on it. The back has the RinkUnion tour schedule gag that I wanted to do with the shirts last year, except that we didn't have enough people to warrant the printing of a special RinkUnion shirt. The back has the heading "International Tour Schedule," and there is one stop on it for "Manchester, NH ...... July 28-29."
At last it was time to collect and read the note cards everybody had filled out with a little-known fact about themselves. As the last people were filling them out, I told the story of K to those who were not aware of it. (During the reading of terrible bad movie reader reviews, I read one from K, whose review read, in its entirety, "SAM IZ DA EVILL!") I shuffled the pile and read them out, each in turn, and people would try to guess who it went with. It became a running joke to guess "Dave" no matter what it said; for example, "At my high school graduation, I tripped--" "Dave!" The piece of paper that Dave actually did turn in said, "What is the meaning of life?" Well, I had asked him to write down something that nobody knows. (Answering that question with "Dave" is interesting.) I got through the stack of them and then realized I was missing one. Ayako's had fallen into the ice bucket I had the Moxie in (not the bowl of ice in the back of the room -- this was a DIFFERENT ice container) and was sopping wet.
After that we had a short break, which provided me time to sell t-shirts and set up the room for the poetry reading. The tables were moved to the side of the room, and I arranged the chairs in curved rows around the front, where a solitary chair could be used by the poetry readers. Don read a humorous poem while Mia was finding a lyrics sheet. Then she sang a song, accompanied by herself -- she recorded herself playing the piano and brought the tape with her. She has a fantastic voice.
Following that were poetry readings from Cynthia, famous, and me, and Layla read a poem from Mountain and Stream Songs of the Virginias about four leaf clovers. Then we broke out the comical poetry, including the pain poem and the cannibal poem (!), and Darien read his angst-ridden masterwork about death and buffets. Then Mina read a serious work of her own (the same one she read the year before). Then Darien, Stephen, and Dave got up to sing the Philosophers' Song, from Monty Python. ("Are we really going to do this?" Dave sighed as Stephen and Darien ushered him up front.) And finally Mina read a humorous poem about Dave that Darien wrote while everybody else was reading their poetry.
Another break followed, time enough for people to fetch blankets and pillows from their rooms if they so wished, and the lights dimmed for a screening of Sinbad of the Seven Seas, the official RinkWorks bad movie. But first, as should still be the custom with movies, short features were screened first. In 1997, I made two very short claymations, filmed by hitting the pause button on my camcorder twice really fast for each frame. I narrated these, as I did last year. Following that, I showed about ten minutes of camcorder footage from the first RinkUnion and embarrassed Dave and possibly others.
And then Sinbad of the Seven Seas began, and everybody applauded during the opening credits. This was the highlight of the convention for several. If you're only used to seeing conventional mainstream movies, it's not possible to imagine how entertainingly bad movies can get. Sinbad of the Seven Seas is a one of a kind and did not disappoint even those who came into it with heightened expectations. Of course, when watching bad movies, it makes a big difference who you watch them with. A crowd of 25 Rinkies makes a good audience.
We broke for dinner. Some went for Chinese, others (Leen, famous, Ellmyruh, Cynthia, Rivikah, and I) brought Papa John's pizza back to the room (that way I could keep it unlocked and attended), and others went elsewhere. Rather than screen Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II, which I was going to do in the evening, we got distracted with a bottle game famous got people to play, which involves clapping, maneuvering soda bottles, and passing them around in coordinated rhythmic movements. As people wandered back in and became interested, more joined the fray.
Sunday, July 29. Dave, Mousie, Leen, and I left the hotel at 7:30am to pick up the vans we reserved to take everybody up into the White Mountains. We arrived bright and early and discovered that since the reservation had allegedly not been confirmed with a credit card number, the reservation had been cancelled. I was worried and angry all at once. I had made the reservation a month and a half prior, understood that it was all set, and no one from the rental place had tried to call and get confirmation information from me until the day before -- July 28th, when we were at the hotel. So the vans we had reserved had been rented out from under us. Fortunately we were able to make due. The original reservation was for two 12-seater vans, but they had a 15-seater and a 7-seater that would just barely work. We had exactly 22 people, so that worked out perfectly.
We arrived back at the hotel right on time, at 8:30am, and saw everyone gathered on the steps of the hotel's conference center entrance. We loaded up and headed north into Franconia Notch. The northernmost stop was first -- the Old Man of the Mountain. It was a quick stop, because there isn't much to do there other than see it and snap pictures. We hit restrooms next, took a group picture or two, then headed for Loon Mountain. I got a group rate for the gondola to the top ($8 instead of $9.50), and we all went up, arriving just before noon. We listened to the Mountain Man for a bit. The Mountain Man is a guy that lives up on the mountain during the summer and in his own cabin in the woods "over the ridge" the rest of the year. He lives without electricity, hunts and grows his own food, and trades gathered crystals for what he can't get himself.
We all listened to him for a little while, and after that we scattered into smaller groups. We had lunch at the snack bar at the top, and most of us did the caves at some point. The caves weren't so much actual caves as boulders piled up around each other, but they were fun to navigate and climb around on. By 2pm, we were at the bottom again and ready to move on.
The final stop was at the Flume, a natural gorge, 70-90 feet high and 12-20 feet wide, through which a river flows. A wooden walkway is built against the side of the gorge and just above the river. The area surrounding the Flume has more trails with other sights: glacial boulders, New England-style covered bridges, and so forth. A bus allows walkers to skip some of the uphill part. Some of us took the bus and got to hear some information about the place from the bus driver; the others walked and actually got to the drop-off point first. The bus driver stopped in the middle of one of the covered bridges, because he spied the other half of the RinkWorks crew scrambling around on the boulders on the banks of the Pemigewasset River. He radioed back to base and asked if he should root out the wayward walkers. Meanwhile, those of us on the bus were covering our RinkUnion II shirts and pretending we did not know them.
Some of us took short trails; some of us took long trails. We all ended up back at the bottom shortly after 4pm and headed back for Manchester. Once there, some left, and the rest piled into cars and the 15-seater to head for Newick's, a seafood restaurant in Dover (near Portsmouth) that Mousie really wanted to eat at during her stay in New Hampshire. I'm glad she got to. Newick's is a fascinating restaurant. The restaurant sits on the ocean; two walls have continuous windows along them that overlook the ocean. The humongous parking lot was packed, but the restaurant itself was not. There are a couple of gynasiums' worth of seating area in there, and they weren't even using it all. We had 19 people with us and showed up unannounced; they didn't have any problem seating us.
After a hearty meal, which included shooting straw wrappers at each other and snapping lots of pictures, we congregated in the Newick's parking lot, which, by that time, was almost abandoned. It had become dark by then. We screamed and hugged and beat each other up. Somehow we ended up doing a Ring-Around-The-Darien, which involved everybody holding hands and sashaying one way, while Darien and Mina held hands and spun around in the other. Darien also got to practice the /huge command he's been wanting in RinkChat for eons. "HUGE!" he cries, and everybody squats on the ground, while Darien revels in his newfound size. Mia didn't duck, but the illusion still worked.
And, I'll have you all know, I did manage to fend off the repelling forces of like magnetism. I managed to get Dave, Darien, Stephen, and me into a group hug. If anyone has pictures, guard them carefully, because there are many who would see them burned.