Friday, August 20, 2004

We depart New Britain, Connecticut, at 7am -- early enough, we hope, to beat
the relentless daytime traffic in Waterbury. Somehow we succeed, but we hit
enough smaller snags on the way, mostly due to construction and some due to
accidents, that our trip is long. Still, we managed to pull into the hotel
in York, Pennsylvania, around 4pm. We were thoroughly exhausted and altogether
too drained and haggard to face the challenge of being social, so we looked
forward to showers, food, and the lack of gasoline engine vibrations.

But as soon as we walked into the lobby, an unfamiliar voice said either,
"Hi Sam!" or "Are you Sam?" I remember the former, Leen remembers the latter,
and neither one of us remember the ensuing brief conversation, except that
it ended with something on the order of, "Hey, we're going to...go away." Ok,
it wasn't that blunt, but now TalkingDog holds the dubious honor of my most
mechanical and punctuated real-life introduction to a Rinkie. It wasn't
personal.

We got clean, and then we got outside some Friendly's, and upon our return,
Leen retreated to the restfulness of the room, our pillows, and the Olympics,
while I decided to amble down to the lobby and wait for familiar faces to show
up. ahmoacah was at Grishny's, last I knew -- she called me on the cell phone
to get TimTheEnchanter's last name so she could check into the room (long
story) -- and TalkingDog had vanished, and I couldn't think who else would be
showing up anytime soon. This year was easily the year we got the latest
start. famous, Issachar, Jaguar, and Christie were all driving out after work,
the Canadians got a late start on a long drive, and the torrential rain
wandering about the eastern half of the country was causing all manner of
unknown delays.

So after a while of no one showing up in the lobby, I went to the car to
fetch a book, and when I came back, ahmoacah and TalkingDog were chatting.
So I joined them, and by and by Issachar and his long, surfer dude hair
arrived. His drive from Raleigh turned out to be shorter than expected --
six hours instead of over seven -- so that was one good arrival story among
many bad ones. Leen came down from the room shortly afterward, and then we
were five.

The Canadians were supposed to be next: one of them had vaguely mentioned
an estimated arrival time of 9pm some weeks prior, so I was prepared to hold
them to that. It was not to be. Selah and her brothers, Gabe and Isaiah
(Zay), were next to arrive. Gabe and Isaiah were collectively known as "Bro"
thenceforward, a reference to my then out-of-date convention page, which
only listed "Selah & Bro" as expected attendees. Bro was as quiet as their
older sister but, also like her, are fascinating people once you get them
talking. Among the ensuing conversation were anecdotes about their mother's
attendance at last year's RinkUnion, and I mentioned that I brought with me
the autographed, inside-out styrofoam cup she had made then.

TimTheEnchanter and PrincessLeia were next. I nominate these with the oddest
RinkUnion attendance record to date, as they participated in the second and
fifth and no others. It was great to see them again, and I'm proud of myself
for recognizing Tim right away, despite a full beard and a bandanna around his
head. He walked into the lobby -- coincidentally at the same time as a group
of twenty or so -- and as I gazed idly into the crowd, one face turned to me
and raised his hand in greeting. My thought at that moment was,
"Obviously I'm supposed to know this p-Hey, Tim!"

After yet more conversation, I hit Selah with a sofa pillow (with her
permission), and then I started to wonder if we shouldn't have our cell phone
downstairs with us. The Canadians still hadn't shown, and famous was running
behind her estimated arrival time. Sure enough, when I returned to the room
to get the phone, there was an unanswered call from famous. I called her
back, and there was no answer, and a minute later she called me back and said
she was getting close. Just a couple more minutes, now.

A couple minutes later, she called to say she missed the turn into the hotel,
so it would be one minute more while she turned around and retraced the extra
block. I made fun of her.

And then she appeared and told the story of how she'd travelled in the rain
essentially all of the way. That got me to thinking about how the Canadians
were faring, as the three of them were also travelling in an easterly
direction. They didn't show up until much later, when I was starting to
worry about those still on the road, but arrive they did, and when I returned
from helping them carry luggage to the room, Jaguar and Christie were standing
in the lobby; he was standing in line to check in, and she was looking around
the now crowded lobby and perhaps wondering what kind of crazies she had
put in with.

I helped them bring the luggage up, and then Jaguar was going to come back down
with me to say hi to people, but he looked so agonized in his wakefulness
that I pointed out that they'd be there tomorrow, and so he sighed and sagged
on his feet to one side, and he directed his remaining vestiges of energy to
nodding the head that had lolled over onto one shoulder from its own weight.
So he went straight to sleep. He felt fine in the morning, but he almost
didn't even come, as he had come down with the flu just a day or two earlier.

It was after midnight by this point, the rest of us weren't up much longer
before we also called it a day. Morning would come fast, and Saturday's
activities would begin, as they have since the second RinkUnion, at 8:39am
on the nose.

Saturday, August 21, 2004

At 9:25am, I welcomed all but the Grishnies and Scotsmen to RU% and then
sought to stall for a while by passing out my annual giveaway oddities,
officialized in the grand RinkWorks tradition of permanent markers. This
year, I had two: a travel-sized highlighter (cute, because it's small) and
the deadly weapon of desk supplies, a combination eraser, pencil sharpener, and
switch-microwave (the microwave door snaps open when you pull down a tab
and emits deadly radioactivity at your enemies). Plus, it clips to your
belt buckle.

That's about all that the Grishnies and Scotsmen missed, for they entered
right when I was stuck for stalling material.

The conference room was odd. Rather than a room designed for conference
purposes at the outset, this seemed to be a regular room converted into a
conference room. It was wider than the regular rooms but had an adjoining
bathroom, closets with suitcase racks and the standard-issue chairs inside,
the standard-issue microwave and refrigerator (impressive, for a hotel of
Best Western calibre), and pull-down beds. The room was set up as multiple
rows of tables with a single aisle down the edge -- or, at least, it was
set up that way after I peeked at the room the previous night and reported to
the woman at the desk that it wasn't set up the way I had requested. It was
probably the most crowded we've ever been, although not all that much more so
than in San Diego, where we had a slightly larger room with slightly more
people. But it worked.

From front to back, we sat thusly:

Paul, TalkingDog, Monkeyman, famous, Leen
Henry, TimTheEnchanter, PrincessLeia, Selah
Rivikah, Gabe, Zay, Issachar, ahmoacah
TheScotsman, MrsScotsman, Christie, Jaguar, MrsGrishny, Grishny

All present, we began the proceedings in earnest. I pulled out my bag of
RinkWorks tokens, by fortunate accident a purpler shade from last year, and
started dispensing those. I think Monkeyman was the winner by the end of the
day, with 14, but we never took an official count before people and their
hard-won tokens had dispersed.

Then Grishny passed out a bag of goodies to everyone, which included all sorts
of Grishny memorabilia, including magnets, mints, chocolate bars, and stickers.
Verily, it was awesome.

Introductions were made: the group this year consisted of a large percentage
of RU4 attendees, with a few who were at RU2 but not RU4, so the RU4-only
folks got to meet some from way back. Jake introduced his fiancee, Christie,
and I clarified the spelling by saying, "C, H, and an I, E at the end."
Issachar feigned confusion and muttered, "Chie?" "Chie" came dangerously
close to a nickname as the weekend progressed.

Afterward came the reading of a new batch of stupid emails. I had a long
list this year, so I deferred the reading of some classic reruns until later
in the day, but I think that was a miscalculation: the new ones would have
been sufficient by themselves. After the stupid email reading came the first
break. During it, I asked for the second time (the first was the previous
evening) about the missing VCR, and the story was that the lady who would
be able to provide it would be in in the afternoon. Fair enough.

Upon returning from the break, Paul and TalkingDog had swapped places, which
unknowingly put TalkingDog in the place of honor for the memory game, as he
would be the first to provide the answers to the questions. Because of the
success of the categories used at the third RinkUnion, and the relative lack
of overlap between the two sets of attendees, we repeated those categories:
favorite word, favorite sound, and least favorite profession.

In the two years since, famous decided she'd rather be the person with the
shovel behind the elephants in a parade than a software engineer after all.
Zay doesn't want to be a suicide bomber, Christie doesn't want to be a
dump manager (she'd rather be more of a hands-on worker, I guess), TalkingDog
would rather not be a poison tester, and TimTheEnchanter's answer to least
favorite profession was, simply, "all of them." MegaHal, who was present
courtesy of ahmoacah, would least like to be a maker of good cold packs.
There were lots of other good answers, but I don't remember them. Henry
does, perhaps; he achieved a perfect score after wrestling furiously with two
answers that eluded him until the last minute, and he was still able to
recite them all the next day. He and gremlinn need to come to the same
RinkUnion sometime, so they can square off against each other.
Second prize went to Issachar, and Jaguar took third.

Following the game, I did something new: I had everybody tear off a sliver
from the answer sheet and write three words on the back -- nouns, adjectives,
or whatever -- that best describe themselves, and then I read them off for
people to guess who they referred to. Henry used the three words "lazy,"
"lazy," and "lazy" to describe himself. MegaHal took a more diverse
approach with "peanut M&Ms," "dum," and...something else I don't remember.
Rivikah threw everybody for a loop by not submitting one, so people guessed
her on the last one instead of ahmoacah, who had probably been mentally
written off by people because she had confirmed the author of MegaHal's
three words earlier.

On the back of the remaining portion of the memory game sheet, I issued an
open invitation for people to draw a picture of a Rinkie, and later we could
guess who they were. This was an idea that came to me earlier that morning
and seemed like a pretty good idea. It turned out to be pretty fun. The
submissions ranged from Grishny's humorous stick-figure caricatures to
Issachar's impressively recognizable pencil sketches. Jake earned a RinkWorks
token for submitting Christie's back-of-the-room eye view pencil portraits
when she wasn't looking.

It wasn't until later in the day that the pictures were handed in, and I
went around the room with each so everyone could get a close look. Few were
difficult to guess, and TimTheEnchanter earned a token for being the most
frequent subject.

But rewinding again, after the drawing invitation was issued, I read the
stupid email reruns, to give people a chance to draw and to get us out of
the busy noon hour, when restaurants were likely to be to crammed. Issachar,
the Scotsmen, and the Grishnies went to Friendly's. famous, Jaguar, Christie,
Leen, and I went to T.G.I. Friday's. I think the rest went to a Chinese
buffet somewhere.

We returned at 2:30pm. Well, most of us did. I got back at 2:42pm and was
shocked that anyone else was there, let alone everyone else, because we went
to the closest restaurant, didn't really have service that was all that
slow, and yet we were pushing 2:30pm when we got back. Ah well.

For the last three years, everything but the Show and Tell stuff and the
movie was done by lunch, but we weren't even up to that point after a late
lunch, so I was starting to be a little concerned that we were going to run
too late in the evening. It turned out to be ok, because the late lunch
meant not having to race for dinner, but we still had a few things left to
get through.

Immediately after lunch was when we looked at the Rinkie sketches, and then
Grishny held a contest for RinkWorks-related T-shirts (which consisted of
questions about him and his involvement in RinkWorks; I am ashamed to report
that despite tying for third place and later tying for fourth place after
losing a multi-way tie-breaker, all the questions I got right were about
Grishny personally and none at all were correct answers to questions about
RinkWorks itself!).

After that, we moved the tables away, and then I remembered that we still had
Moxie to give out to the unsuspecting. Paul retreated to his room after
lunch, so he escaped, but TalkingDog and Bro were relatively unpained victims
of this particular initiation ritual. But then we upped the ante, and ahmoacah
pulled out the Diet Moxie she brought with her. I didn't make people try
that, but I offered a token to anyone who would. There were several takers
but not a majority. The consensus seemed to be that the initial taste of the
Diet Moxie wasn't as harsh as the regular Moxie, but the strong diety
aftertaste made it far worse; I'd rather have the regular stuff.

The Show and Tell phase began, and Jaguar and I made our musical debut. I
had had an idea on the way down to York and had pulled my brother aside during
the first break of the morning to run it by him. Rather than reading the
Human Flesh poem, as it has been read every year except the last, I thought,
why not sing it? I developed a tune with an imitation Broadway flavor to it
that fit a surprising amount of the lyrics, which had obviously not been
written with rhythm in mind. Jake caught on to the tune fast and instinctively
figured out how to iron the rough spots into place.

But practicing in the hallway was something of a challenge. Even at low
volume, it was awkward to practice singing lyrics like, "Nothing tastes as
good as human flesh!" as the cleaning ladies were walking by. Finally we got
sick of lowering our voices as they got near, and we found a niche less
travelled.

When we performed it for everyone, it was the first real time we did it at
full volume with all the appropriate florishes. This was apparent on the
line, "Only human flesh satisfies!" where we had agreed to do some sweeping
theatrical gestures, because when I swung my arms to the side, I moved the
print-out of the poem out of Jaguar's view, and he stumbled a bit until I
moved the paper back, just in time for the triumphant final note. The
closing chorus included an invitation for everyone to sing along, from that
point onward, up through the middle of the following day, I had that stupid
song running through my head. The turning point was during the infamous cup
game, introduced to Rinkies at the second RinkUnion, when The Scotsman told
how he originally learned it at a Christian college, where it was played to
the tune of "King of Kings and Lord of Lords," and then I had THAT running
through my head. It later occurred to me that, hey, this was a small victory
over the enemy in my head.

Selah showed us her knitting projects, a hobby she learned and took up just
recently -- a Ravenclaw scarf and the beginnings of a Gryffindor scarf.

Henry, who brought his keyboard again, played a beautiful selection of his
own work, and then the mood turned lighter as he demonstrated how his keyboard
could pull off a trashy Eurobeat, led by a tuba. Someone asked him to play
"Flight of the Bumble Bee," and he met the challenge by playing "Flight of
the FAT Bumble Bee." The suggestion was an echo from earlier, when TalkingDog
earned a RinkWorks token by whistling "Flight of the Bumble Bee," and later did
not earn tokens by whistling all other existing music over the course of the
next two days.

famous read a brand new poem, whose refrain -- "the hair, the hair, is
everywhere" -- is all too true. Then she read some older poems, "Stephen,
Start Talking," and "I'm Hungry."

Jake sang the train song, from The Music Man, and later sang the humorously
celebratory song, "Potato," inspiring much amusement. He was joined by famous
for an obligatory chorus of "Black Socks." On a less musical note, he got
everyone trying to trace opposite circles with each index finger, and on his
way back to his seat (and after one false start), half-walked, half-skipped
back to his seat. These are the important kinds of things that occur at
RinkUnions.

Tim juggled chocolate for us. For future reference, juggling mint patties
works better than juggling Hershey kisses.

Issachar, who was embarrassed to receive a pack of print-outs of his Poetry
Pool work, was encouraged to read some of it, but he did so in his own way:
rather than reading "The sapphire-sprinkled lake of wine..." he offered a
self-effacing interpretation of it, which all boils down to "So there's this
girl...."

What happened at the second RinkUnion regarding a poem of PrincessLeia's
happened again: she didn't have it on-hand, but after we took a pre-movie
break, she came back with a copy of a poem she wrote and read it. It was just
as well, because the VCR still hadn't shown up, and we were officially on dead
time. It was after 5pm -- we finished the movie by then in previous years --
and so I went and bugged the front desk about it. The woman there was helpful,
but the people responsible for showing up with the VCR were not. Apparently
there were multiple breaks in the chain of communication, and as we would
discover with increasing certainty throughout the weekend, this place was
NOT efficiently or satisfactorily run. When someone at home brought the keys
in that the woman at the front desk needed, the VCR turned out not to be
where it was supposed to be, and she had to conduct a multi-floor search to
find the thing. But at last it turned up, and we hunkered down to watch
Sinbad of the Seven Seas, the Official RinkWorks Bad Movie, yet one more time.

I keep saying that I'm going to stop showing it, but every year it seems
called for. This year there were fewer than ever that hadn't seen it, though,
so perhaps sometime soon we'll be able to shift to a rotating selection.
But the arrangement was to head over to Grishny's house Sunday night and watch
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II. Not everyone that wanted to could stay that
long, but Sunday night's viewing, with about a dozen people, was a successful
one, so I'm sure it'll show up at a RinkUnion down the road.

After the movie, we descended upon the Cracker Barrel en masse, where we were
informed that the 23 of us would have to wait 2-3 minutes to be seated. Leen
had roast beef with mashed potatoes and macaroni, and I had macaroni and
fried apples (wasn't that hungry), and we both had Stewart's orange cream
soda, a favorite of ours we can only find at Cracker Barrels -- themselves
few and far between -- in our area.

We (famous, Leen, and I) left the Cracker Barrel before most did, stopping at
the Giant supermarket (Giant is the name, not the size) on the way to pick up
the burgers for the next day. famous picked up some blue plastic cups for the
cup game. We already had the rest of Sunday's cook-out materials.

By the time we got back to the hotel, I was thoroughly drained. RinkUnions
exhaust me more than just about anything, especially Saturday. Part of it is
that I tend not to sleep well the previous night, but I think most of it is
just how subtly exhausting all the arranging and conducting and coordinating
is. It's a lot of fun, but by Saturday night I'm dead, so I wasn't up for
going over to Grishny's, as most did, to play games and hang out. Leen and I
crashed in our rooms. famous scouted around to see who else might be staying
(had everyone gone to Grishny's she'd have, too), and it turned out that
Jaguar, Christie, Rivikah, ahmoacah, and a Bro (Gabe) also stayed. So we all
hung out in our room and talked. It was good time: sometimes the number of
people make it difficult to have prolonged time with anybody, but this was one
of a couple different exceptions.

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Bedtime was declared around 1:30am, and I fell asleep right away, only to
awake too early the next day, sick as a dog. Part of it was that the
atmospheric conditions of the room were basically impossible to control
properly. You couldn't open the window at all, so fresh air was an
impossibility. Putting the fan on would keep the air from getting way stale
by keeping it only mildly stale. Putting the air conditioner on meant guessing
where to position the temperature dial, which, despite appearing to be a
sliding scale between hot and cold, was actually a binary switch between
stuffy and freezing, and the line between the two kept shifting based on the
time of day. Going outside was half of what made me feel better, and I was
fine in a couple hours.

For Sunday, we congregated at the Chipmunk pavilion at Rocky Ridge County Park,
some five or ten minutes down the road. Some of these pavilions get reserved
up to a year in advance; we were lucky that there were two new ones that
hadn't yet been advertised online. The pavilion could have accommodated a
hundred people, easy, so we had plenty of table space to spare. Leen was
first, and famous and I were close behind (I rode with her to help her
navigate). TalkingDog and Paul were close behind, but the others didn't
make it until nearly 11. When people did finally arrive, we started bouncing
around my :smile: tennis ball from last year. And shortly afterward, the cup
game began, followed closely by cup bowling (with the tennis ball). Grishny
took Jonathan into the adjacent playground. A small group played Phase 10,
and shortly afterward Issachar moderated a trial playtest of his Sinbad of
the Seven Seas card game, a cooperative game in which players must team up
(each playing a character from the movie) to keep Jaffar from WINNING and
the little girl from falling asleep. Among the gameplay balance corrections
inspired by the playtesting was Soukra, who makes the game more difficult
for whoever is winning with her incessant nagging.

Still later, Issachar played a game of Tikal with Jake and Christie.

Several people went for walks along the park's trails. I was initially
concerned about the lack of grassy areas to lounge about on, but that
proved not to be a problem at all.

We learned from our mistakes last year and this year came fully prepared for
lunch, including aluminum foil and disposable mesh cooking racks that Leen
found. The burgers and hot dogs cooked beautifully on it, and we had all
kinds of chips and leftover Hershey Kisses from yesterday, plus a cooler full
of sodas of varying sorts. Due to a mental lapse of some kind, I only had one
12-pack of Mountain Dew, but everything else -- Pepsi, Sprite, Sprite Berry
Remix, Sierra Mist, and even the Code Red, just barely -- held out.

Eventually, sadly, some people had to start heading home, but we remembered
to snag a group picture just in time. The sun was in our eyes, so it was a
choice between squinting and shadow. We had lockeai take the pictures, before
anybody realized that he was actually a Rinkie (albeit one from four years
ago) and not a random friend of Rivikah's; he really should have been in the
picture.

Grishny drove ahmoacah to the airport around 3pm and took TalkingDog with
him for company on the way back. Jake and Christie hit the road within the
hour, as did famous. Around quarter after five, Grishny returned just in time
for us to pack up and evacuate. Issachar headed out around then, and so did
Selah and Bro.

We reconvened at Grishny's by way of the hotel. Leen was thoroughly
exhausted, so stayed behind to rest. We got the grand tour of his house,
including his legendarily "juicy" yard. Taking up a good third of the yard
is the weirdest shaped bush ever -- some short, wide lump of a green thing
that looks like it was just plopped there, not something attached to the
ground.

And then there's the incredibly thin walkway -- too small for an open
umbrella, Grishny regretfully mentioned -- between the garage and that of
the next door neighbor -- thin enough that, if you want down it to the gate
at the end, and turn around to go back but find Monkeyman standing there,
you can't move.

So after filing in, we naturally tried to scale our way up to the garage
roof, but the problem was that it if your back was to one wall, it was too
difficult to pull the pressure off enough to slide up. I suggested that it
might work better with a skateboard taped to one's back, and then I disclaimed
responsibility if an accident resulted from my comments.

After returning to the living room, Grishny put on a video of RinkUnion IV,
much of which was taken up by the reading of the Stupid Emails, thereby making
RinkUnion V the definitive showcase of those. Unfortunately, the tape did
not contain Henry's musical performance, but it did contain the RU4 theme
song, complete with Issachar's intervening rap.

Following the RU4 tape, Papa John's pizza was ordered, and as it was devoured,
I fired up Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II -- while not quite the Official
RinkWorks Bad Movie, it does have a RinkWorks connection, as it is the
movie discussed in a Site Journal entry, written by a friend of Ticia's, about
his experiences on the set as an extra.

I hadn't seen the movie for a few years, and only the once, so I was, if not
greatly concerned, mildly concerned about how well it would play. But it was
perfect: lots of bad acting, awful lines ("I'll skewer you as you've never
been skewered before!"), and nonsensical plot developments.

Following the movie, we put on Animusic, a half hour video that TimTheEnchanter
brought. The basic idea is that creatively impractical orchestras are rendered
in 3D and programmed to accept musical input -- given music as input, the
instruments move appropriately. The whole thing is rendered beautifully.

Next and last was a series of homemade movies made by Grishny, TheScotsman,
and their high school cronies from years ago. Rivikah, lockeai, Henry, and
TalkingDog left after the first one, so that left TimTheEnchanter, PrincessLeia,
Monkeyman, and me -- along with Grishny and TheScotsman (the Mrses had retired
for the night) -- as the last remaining hold-outs.

The second short film, a parody of Indiana Jones, was the stand-out of the
four, and I hope to air it at a future RinkUnion. I left after the last one,
and that left five to squeeze out a couple of games before bedtime.

In the morning, Leen and I ambled down to breakfast, said our goodbyes to
Monkeyman, Rivikah, and TalkingDog (the rest were still sleeping), and hit
the road.

And then, I am sorry to say, I became this year's victim of the RinkUnion
driving curse, that is, on the way back from a RinkUnion, someone must have
some kind of annoying problem on the road. It was thankfully not as severe
as last year, which featured an ornery vehicle of Rivikah's that refused to
start in the heat. Rather, it was a speeding ticket, incurred in some podunk
town in New York. The one and only one moment of the whole trip where I lost
track of the speedometer, and that's when the cop was sitting on the side of
the road. Blast.

Next year, I'm flying, and everybody else should, too.