Eating Bags of Hell

You can only tempt fate so long. If one has the audacity to set a gathering in Kentucky in August, one deserves to smolder in the scorching tongues of hellfire, like a burning red hot thing, simmering in the fiery inferno of Kentucky in August. But when this didn't happen at RU4, surely the consequences were merely postponed. Now we know how long they were postponed for.

RU6 shall go down in the record books as having the hottest, humidest weather of any -- and here I shall be careful not to tempt fate again -- of the first six RinkUnions. Not even RU4, the next hottest, can muster respectable competition. In the more general "worst weather" category, not even RU3's calamitously bad weather (75 and sunny but with upwards of two brief moments of mild mist called "rain" by San Diegans and "brief moments of mild mist" by anyone else) can compare to the fury of the heat wave that struck us at Chincoteague for the three days we were there.

It was so hot that neither Maryam nor Sara were cold.

Now, in fairness to the region, this heat and humidity was quite atypical. It was something that struck a huge portion of the eastern seaboard from Friday to Sunday all at once. Upon my return to work today (Tuesday), I learned from a co-worker that the previous weekend had the worst heat and humidity he remembers ever experiencing. It was not the worst heat and humidity Leen or I have ever experienced, but it was worse than anything I ever remember experiencing in New Hampshire or Virginia.

And yet, we not only survived, we survived in triumph. It is a testament to the rulingness of RinkUnions that the lethargy and irritability such weather normally inspires in me DID NOT PREVAIL!

The Trip

The trip down was long. It started Thursday night, when we drove the first three hours and spent the night with family. The next morning we hit the road all too early to dodge work traffic and made all too many pit stops due to poor advance planning. We bought too many Krispy Kreme doughnuts in Delaware, found five geocaches, missed two, and played Count-the-Franchises in Dover, Delaware, and Salisbury, Maryland, which goes through downtown districts with more restaurant franchises than you can shake a stick at, and believe you me, I can shake a stick at a lot of franchises. The fast food joint of choice in the area appears to be Hardee's (the East Coast version of Carl's, Jr.); at one point, we ran across five or so in a 20ish-mile stretch.

Poolside Chat

The evening was thick with a sense of deja vu. Those who attended RU5 seemed to arrive in the same order: first TalkingDog, then Leen and me, then ahmoacah, then Issachar. Selah and 1/2 Bro came along somewhere in the middle, and famous (and wintermute, naturally, but he wasn't at RU5) arrived next-to-last.

The evening was marked by an accumulation of Rinkies sitting in an ever-increasing collection of chairs by the hotel's outdoor pool out front. It was (comparatively) cool there, and we were far enough from places we had to be quiet around that we didn't have to be quiet.

Before the evening was over, everybody but Ticia and Don were there (they weren't landing in Norfolk, two hours away, until after midnight), including Maryam's brother Isaiah, who, had he not left to return home that very evening, would have had to be called Wayne the rest of the weekend so as not to be confused with Selah's brother Zay. It reminds me of the time I took a computer programming class in high school: the class had all of six people, one third of which were named Noah.

Both Isaiahs are just like their sisters, except for Isaiah.

When Isaiah left, he impressed us all by remembering absolutely everybody's names except for Isaiah's.

During the next few hours, certain key conversations took place. One, Monkeyman explained to us in agonizingly hilarious detail, how he missed the excessively well-marked exit for the Norfolk airport upwards of three times in a row and ran further afoul by the unwise assumption that East Coast roads are arranged in grid shapes.

Two, Leen coined what would become the RU6 tagline ("I've been buffered!") when, as chance would have it, the two seats on either side of her were vacated for different reasons. This led to a discussion of a /buffer command in RinkChat, largely driven by Monkeyman, about buffering users in the RinkChat user list with blank lines on either side.

Three, I got to hang out with gremlinn and relive, once again, the spectacle of eating at Buca di Beppo's with him and Mousie prior to RU3, because ahmoacah hadn't heard the story.

Four, I learned that Sara is from one of those small towns where everybody knows everybody. You know, one of those towns housing a mere THIRTY THOUSAND PEOPLE. New Hampshire has only four towns larger, and in my town of ten thousand, I know nobody, and nobody knows me. While the rest of us were trying to figure out how everybody knows you in a town of 30,000, Sara patiently explained that it's because of how spread out the town is that everybody knows everybody. I'm sure this makes sense somewhere other than in my head, which can only conceive of knowing 30,000 people at the same time if they all live in my driveway.

Five, Leen caught a frog and gave it to Issachar, whereupon it unexpectedly jumped into his eye. Ok, no it didn't, but it would have been a great story if it had.

When we noticed that the pool area officially closed at 10pm (roughly 12:15am) we adjourned to an outdoor pavilion, a wooden structure with a couple of picnic tables in it. We piled into it, took various seats, and discovered it was hotter in there than anywhere at night had a right to be. So we poured out of it and decided it was time for bed anyway.