--Friday, August 20--

Having the entire day off from work, I'd stayed up rather late the previous night working on my give-away materials for the RU, so I slept in. My morning was spent washing dishes and tidying up the house. We ate lunch.

Just after lunch, we got a call from Harrisburg International Airport. It was ahmoacah, stranded there. She discovered that the hotel shuttle would not pick her up because she did not call 24 hours in advance and schedule a ride. (This turned out to be the first of many, many disappointments this weekend by Best Western. Rinkies should NEVER, EVER stay at a Best Western.) I hopped in the car with my four-year old son and headed for the airport to pick ahmoacah up.

Arriving at the airport, we found ahmo sitting in the baggage claim area, playing with some sort of knitting device. She gave us a brief demonstration of its use and showed off the tiny little knit tubes (finger warmers, maybe?) that she'd made with it. My son talked her ear off all the way back home.

At the Worst Western, ahmoacah discovered that she couldn't check into her room because the hotel did not put her name on the room as they were asked to do. Not knowing TimTheEnchanter's (who reserved the room) last name, there is nothing for her to do but come back to our house with us.

At the Grishnys', we looked up Sam's phone number, and ahmo called him. Sam provided us with TTE's last name, enabling ahmo to check into her room, so I drove her back to the hotel. While en route, TalkingDog phoned Grishny's house, and was informed that we were on our way, but somehow he missed us. ahmoacah checked into her hotel room and I returned home to finish putting my GGB's together before dinnertime.

ahmoacah did eventually meet up with TalkingDog and his uncle, who drove him to the RU. We met them for dinner at TGIFriday's, right next to the hotel. Mousie, I had a Southwest jalapeno burger with fries. My wife had fajitas. Unfortunately, I did not keep a meal log so I cannot report with any certainty what anybody else had.

After dinner, it was time for me to go back to HIA to pick up the Scotsman and his wife, whose flight was scheduled to arrive at 8:20. After letting ahmo and TD know that we'd probably be coming back over to the hotel to see them and any other Rinkies who arrived, I dropped my wife and kids off at the house and then left for Harrisburg.

Harrisburg is about a half-hour drive north on I-83 from York, and you hit the city on the west side. HIA is on the east side of the capital, right on the banks of the Susquehanna River and just a few miles north of Three Mile Island. You can hop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and buzz right over to the airport in about ten minutes, or you can stay on 83 right through Harrisburg and save 75 cents, taking an extra five minutes or so.

I hit some torrential rain just as I got to the turnpike exit. Opting to take 83 through town instead, I drove out of it, and when I neared the airport, the roads were dry. There seemed to be a force field around the airport, keeping the bad weather away. That didn't protect the planes in the air, though, and the Scotsman's flight was late. We didn't leave the airport until about 9:15.

The weather bubble gave out right after we left the immediate vicinity of HIA, and it started raining. The storm was moving south, so now we were driving with it. We caught up with the torrential downpour just south of Harrisburg, and it turned out nice half hour drive into an hours' ordeal. At one point I exited the highway accidentally because I couldn't see the lane markings due to the rain. I needed gas anyway, so I stopped and fueled up.

We finally drove through the rain just north of York, but it caught up with us again as we were waiting at traffic lights. We arrived at the Grishnys' home (where the Scotsman and his wife stayed during the RU) after 10, and decided that we didn't want to go out in the rain again to go back to the hotel.


--Saturday, August 21--

We had made arrangements for our older son to spend the day at a friends' house, so I was up at the crack of 7:15am to get him there by 8:00. After not quite making it and dropping him off at 8:30, I returned to the house to pick everyone up and go out for breakfast before heading to the RU. Called Leen around 9:00 and found out that everybody else was already up and in the conference room and waiting for us. It felt like RU2 all over again! Well, we had to eat, so we all piled in the car and stopped at McDonalds on the way. We made it to the RU by 9:30-ish, I think.

Being the last ones to arrive, we had our pick of the best seats in the back row (another RU2 flashback! Argh!) and had already missed Sam's handouts. But at least we avoided getting killed with all the microwaves. After a few minutes of opening by Sam, we were able to acquire our extraordinary official Rinkworks belt clip pencil sharpener / eraser / microwave death ray devices and highlighters, and Mrs. G and I distributed Grishny Goody Bags™ to everyone present.

The Grishny Goody Bags each contained the following items: two .75-inch Grishny stickers, four .75-inch Grishny refrigerator magnets, one "I met Grishny at RU5" pin-on button, three Orc© Hobbitsfoot Patties (Chomp It With Fangs!™), and one Grishny's© Orc Chocolate bar.

The distribution of goodys being out of the way, Sam began by reading thousands of reader e-mails he'd received over the past year, ranging from silly to ridiculous to outright ludicrous. There were a couple really good ones repeated from RU4. ("Please help me to understand this more than I already don't.") Following the reading of the e-mails came selections from the Poetry Puddle, which began with a performance by Sam and his brother Jake of the new hit musical version of "Nothing Tastes as Good as Human Flesh!" Darien's brilliant masterpiece, "Teenager Talking About teh Death" brought the room to tears once again. (Forgive me, Darien, if I didn't get the title exactly right.)

Mousie, at this point, we broke for lunch. A group of us including ahmoacah, Issachar, The Scotsman & wife, and Mr. & Mrs. Grishny & TNM (The New Matthew) went to Friendly's. The remainder of the Rinkies walked over to TGIFriday's, and I can't tell you what they ate. But I can tell you that Mr. & Mrs. Scotsman shared a barbecued chicken lunch entree. And that I ate a chicken strips basket with fries and applesauce. ahmoacah got the same meal, but she went with the healthier selection of broccoli and mashed potatoes. I believe Iss partook of some sort of salad.

Back at the RU after lunch, it was time for Rinkie participation. I began by holding the first Grishny Trivia Contest, with handmade RinkChat smiley T-shirts as prizes for first, second, and third place. Although I tried to make the questions equally difficult for all, and enforced very strict standards about what answers would be given points, the Scotsman took first place. Very sportsmanlike, he recognized that he did have a unique advantage over the other contestants, and allowed the second and third place winners, Monkeyman and famous, to choose their shirts first. Monkeyman walked away with a defective SHOCKED shirt (I'd ironed on the word upside down), famous took home the non-defective SHOCKED shirt, and Scotsman received a DOG! tee. (TalkingDog, BTW, had already received a free DOG! tee for being my only new RinkMeeting at this RU, and graciously sat out of the trivia contest.)

Quite a few other Rinkies also got up and made presentations or performances for the group. Rebecca (the Enchanter's sister) told us amazing tales of her recent adventures in London and handed out tuppence to everyone. (She gave me a FAKE coin by mistake, but I noticed that it said "new pence" on it instead of "two pence" and she exchanged for a real coin.) Jake once again performed "Rock Island" from _The_Music_Man_ and also sang an (original?) song about potatoes. He also demonstrated some unique physical abilities, such as the ability to rotate his index fingers in the air in opposite directions at the same time, and the ability to walk on one foot while skipping on the other at the same time. Several Rinkies read poetry, including Issachar, Monkeyman (who read several selections from Howard's grandfather's book of poems), and famous, who, in my opinion, brought the house down with her original classic, "The Hair." Selah displayed some excellently hand-knitted Hogwart's house scarves, and Leen passed around her album of model horse tack, amazing as always. Henry set up his keyboard and performed a medley of music that he had composed for the Rinkworks musical that he's been working on, and then took some requests. (He didn't play the requests, he just took them.) While all of this was going on, Rivikah was steadily working on crafting the RU% RinkMobile, which she displayed upon its completion, and we all took pictures of it. I have no idea who it went home with.

Some other afternoon activities included the annual Moxie Taste-Test Challenge, the new (annual?) DIET Moxie Taste-Test Challenge, and a picture-guessing contest where Sam had us draw pictures of our fellow Rinkies, present or absent, and then passed them around the room for us to see and guess who they were. Tim the Enchanter won the prize (some extra Rinkworks tokens), not for doing the best drawing but for being the subject of the majority of the drawings!

At this point, the time for the annual showing of Sinbad of the Seven Seas, the official Bad Bad Bad Bad Movie of Rinkworks was drawing nigh, but the Best Cistern hotel had screwed things up again, and we had no VCR! While Sam went in search of it, I, my wife, and Mrs. Scotsman left the building to go pick up my son from his friend's house. I dropped the three of them off at the Grishny House for naps and then returned to the hotel, expecting Sinbad to be well underway, but the VCR had only just been tracked down a few minutes before my arrival and it was only a few minutes into the movie.

HA! After braving the winds of utter destruction and the most powerful act of magical madness, we BUDGED from our seats and all headed for what seems to be quickly turning into an RU tradition... dinner at the Cracker Barrel. Rinkies loooove Cracker Barrel. They can seat large, large groups of people very quickly. They have food that everybody loves. And Issachar was even able to get his coveted Sweet Tea all the way in Pennsylvania! Mousie, we had to split into three different groups, so I can only give you some idea of what the people at my table had for dinner. We sat with Sam and Leen, TalkingDog and his uncle Paul, and Mr. & Mrs. Scotsman. I et me a vegetable plate with green beans, carrots, and hash brown casserole. I had a plate of cottage cheese on the side and of course, biscuits and corn bread. I think the Scotsman got a ham sandwich. My wife had chicken tenders, and my son had pancakes. Leen was eating what looked to be pork tenderloin, although I can't be certain. I can't remember what anybody else was having. Fill in the cracks, folks. I do remember Sam and Leen's large bottles of Stewart's orange creme soda.

Afterwards, a lot of peeps hung out on the Cracker Barrel's front porch in rockin' chairs for a while. I invited anybody who was interested to come back to the Grishny homestead for late night games, and ended up giving detailed directions to Monkeyman on his PDA. Some folks played giant checkers. Rebecca chased Li'l Grish around until he was dizzy.

After we got home, it looked like nobody was going to show up for games until sometime after eleven, a whole busload of Rinkies showed up on our front step. Issachar, Monkeyman, Henry, Tim The Enchanter, Rebecca, Selah and one of her Bros, The Scotsman, and my wife and I sat around for about half an hour trying to decide what game to play. Monkeyman described a card game that was new to some of us called "Up the River and Back Again," but we didn't play that. We considered Balderdash and MindTrap, but didn't play those either. We finally settled on a musical game called Encore. In Encore, there are two teams, and each turn they are given one word or category. The team whose turn it is has thirty seconds to come up with at least seven words of a song that contain the word they drew. If they succeed, the other team has thirty seconds to think of one, and play passes back and forth until one team fails, at which point the opposing team advances. At the end, the winning team must first win a normal round against their opponents, and then they have thirty seconds to think of songs for four more words and one category to win.

We finished playing this game at approximately 2:00 in the morning.


--Sunday, August 22--

Well, we got off to a late start Sunday. But, after finally getting all our stuff together, we made it out the door and headed for Rocky Ridge County Park in northeast York. Now, let me just say that Sma is doing a very nice job of developing a reputation for himself as a person with the ability to find obscure, out-of-the-way, hard-to-find places to have RU picnics. Last year at RU4, we drove around the city of Cincinnati for over half an hour trying to find the picnic location, and although we had very explicit directions from Sam himself this year, we still had a difficult time finding the park. The road that leads into the park is located just over the crest of a hill, across from a cemetary. But from the direction that everybody was coming, the road is hidden by an embankment, and one does not tend to see the cemetary until one is already barrelling past the road at 35 miles per hour. As we ourselves approached the turn, we spotted Issachar in a parking lot, turning around in an attempt to locate the road that he'd already probably missed twice. Once we'd turned around ourselves and headed back, we saw Iss passing us once more, heading out into the country away from us.

We did finally accomplish the feat of finding the park, and enjoyed a great afternoon and picnic lunch in the park, cooked up by Sam and famous. famous brought back the infamous bottle game from RU2, this time with plastic cups. Jake and Sam later invented a new sport, Picnic Table Tennis Ball Bowling, using the same cups. Issachar gave a demonstration of the Sinbad game that was conceived at RU4 and that he has been working on ever since. Several people played a long, long, long, long game of Phase 10, and later a game of Tikal (a game that Issachar brings to the RU every year but that seems to seldom get played).

Shortly after lunch, a small group including myself, TNM, Mrs. Grishny, Rivikah, lockeai, and TalkingDog went for a quick walk in the woods. We found a Huge Rock for Sam to stand on, and a Huge Fallen Tree. I don't know if Sam went and stood on the rock or not, but I did snap a photo of him standing on a smaller rock in the playground after we returned from our short hike.

After we took the traditional RU group photo, it was time to take ahmoacah back to HIA for her flight home. (After giving the Worst Western MORE than 24 hours notice for transportation, ahmo was told that they do NOT give rides on Sundays and furthermore that she "had a bad attitude.") We enlisted TalkingDog and my son Jonathan to go with us, and headed north on 83 once more. Two missed turns later and one sincere apology later, I finally managed to drop off ahmoacah at the airport only half an hour before her flight! I hope she made it... I haven't heard yet. :o/

We arrived back at the park just in time for packing up. Many sad goodbyes were said as first Issachar and then Selah and Bros got in their cars to begin the drive home. The rest of the out-of-town Rinkies returned to the hotel while I and my crew went back to our house.

A little while later, Sam, Monkeyman, Rivikah, lockeai, TTE, Rebecca, Henry, and TalkingDog arrived at our house for a post-RU showing of _Wizards_of_the_Lost_Kingdom_II_. This is another Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie that some might say is even worse than Sinbad. Sam has brought it along with him to every RU so far, hoping that he'll have an opportunity to show it, but every year popular demand has insisted that Sinbad take precedence. I believe this was the first time it finally aired in the presence of a group of RU attendees. Well, it is WORTH watching. And let me tell you, now that I've finally seen it, I CARE about conquering evil.

But first, we had to get everybody quieted down, so I put on my video of RU4, and we watched that. At first, Sam was a little resistant to the idea, but soon he was laughing along with everybody else at last years' e-mail and poetry readings, as well as famous' and Iss' performance of the Official RU4 Song & Rap.

After WotLK2 was over and everybody recovered from busted guts and over-slapped knees, we watched an amazing video that TTE had brought called "Animusic." It contained seven electronic music compositions of different styles, all of which had been used to generate a computer-rendered animation of sleek-looking automated machine instrument thingies. Hard to describe, but really cool to watch.

Following that, I felt that it was time to embarrass myself and the Scotsman a bit, and pulled out an old video that he and I and our friends had filmed twelve years ago when we were all still in high school. In it, we parodied several film genres including horror, action-adventure, and even the variety/talk show. Although most of the group couldn't take it any more and left after the first of the four films on the video, Sam, Monkeyman, TTE & Rebecca valiantly stayed for all of it.

After that we were all videoed out, and Sam called it quits and said his goodbyes. Monkeyman, TTE and Rebecca all stayed, and along with myself and the Scotsman stayed up until 2am again, this time playing "Up the River and Back Again," the card game that Monkeyman had introduced us to the previous evening. I stunk at it, and Tim the Enchanter won. Although I can take credit for his win. I'll let Monkeyman explain how I did it, if he likes, since I'm still not entirely sure I understand the strategy involved.


--Monday, August 23--

This morning we got to say goodbye to Monkeyman again when he dropped by with Rivikah and the Canadian contingent to pick up Riv's sunglasses that she'd forgotten.

We took The Scotsman and his wife to Hershey today. Their flight left HIA around 6:50 this evening, so we drove to Hershey, which is only 15 minutes from the airport, and spent the afternoon touring Hershey's Chocolate World. The Scotsmans purchased a bajillion dollar's worth of chocolate while we were there, and also some Hershey's ICE CEAM.

Afterwards, we spent about an hour driving around the general vicinity of the airport trying to find someplace to purchase food that wasn't hamburgerish. We finally found a little independant pizzeria where they bought calzones or something. They didn't want to eat airport food. We finally got to the airport and said our goodbyes to the last of our visiting Rinkie friends shortly before five.

Then we got to drive home in 5:00 rush hour traffic. But it wasn't too bad. We took the turnpike.

Gri"many, many pictures will soon be posted"shny