Breakfast Breakfast Breakfast Buzz Buzz Buzz

The hotel's continental breakfast was a diverse menu of baked delicacies such as powdered doughnuts, chocolate doughnuts, sugar frosted pastries, sugar frosted cinnamon buns, sugar frosted chocolate doughnut buns, powdered sugared frosted fruity pastry doughnuts, and chocolate frosted doughnut sugar bun pastries. Also, a tub of ice where there used to be orange juice. When I walked into the breakfast area, I collapsed in spasms and had to be taken to the hospital. En route, mosquitoes were lured through the air conditioning unit and flew down my nose to feed upon the sugar fumes that had coated my lungs in a thin, gritty paste. I was released from the hospital shortly thereafter, but not before I was diagnosed with a brand new strain of acute diabetes and have to take insulin shots every six and a half minutes. Later on in the day, against the advice of my doctor, I tried Canadian Mountain Dew. As luck would have it, I did not die, because, presumably due to its earlier proximity to the hotel's dining room, all the sugar had been sucked out of it and drawn into the great sugar vortex that was the continental breakfast.

How Our Morning Showers Were Effective For Almost One Hour

For the first time since the second time, Saturday's RinkUnion events began not at 8:39 but 10:00am. Or, at least, that was the theory. The conference center (in another first, the conference room was not located within the hotel) was only available from 10 in the morning, though we'd have it till midnight that night. My instructions were to meet the manager of the conference center at 9:30, and she'd give me a key and make sure everything was set up to my satisfaction, and everybody else could arrive around 10.

What really happened was I went over at 9:30 and discovered the place locked up. Minutes later, it was still locked up. Still more minutes later, it was still locked up. Finally, I got the cell phone and started calling the emergency numbers posted on the front of the door. The first one didn't connect. The second one didn't connect. Time is passing, and I'm starting to get concerned. But I somehow managed to connect to the right person (retrying the first number in the list, oddly enough), and the conversation went something like this:

"Hello?"
"Hi. This is Sam Stoddard. I have a conference room reserved for 10, but the doors are locked. Do you know anything about that?"
"...................... Uh. ....................."

I don't know how, but I heard her think the words, "Oh crap."

"...................... Yeah. ..................... Oh gosh. .................. Uh. ................... Oh. .................. Uh. ......................"

As the story unfolded between interjections such as "Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing," there was a major event the previous night that went late, and the maintenance guy for the place went completely AWOL, disappearing without notice, and somehow I got missed in the shuffle. The place wasn't clean. Was this a business meeting? No, I said, it was just a social gathering, so the place didn't have to be flawlessly professional. When would people be arriving? A few were arriving already, but the starting time wasn't supposed to be until 10.

Then, "Can you stall them?"

"Uh, for how long?"

"...... Maybe a half hour?"

I looked at my watch. It was 9:53. A half-hour seemed ok to me, under the circumstances. So she said she'd rush right over, and she apologized profusely, and said she'd try to make it right if we'd work with her, and we hung up. Shortly afterward, a black car blazed into the conference center's driveway, tore around the building, and was gone, just like that. We wondered who it might have been.

But the doors remained locked, and the lights remained off, and the conference rooms visible through the windows remained untouched. Later, I discovered this was because our room wasn't visible from the windows, but at the time I was growing increasingly concerned that the car that sped by wasn't the conference center manager after all.

By shortly after 10, we had all congregated, excepting Ticia and Don, in a corner of the empty parking lot of the conference center. At first, we were lining up our cars next to each other, blasting our ACs, and rolling down the windows so we could call across to each other. The joke was that this tunnel of front seat windows would be the conference room for the day, and we'd relay messages from one car to another. But when more people showed up, we braved the great outdoors and congregated in the parking lot, sitting on the curbs and so forth, as we waited.

My morning shower had already been rendered useless. I was sweating like a thing that sweats a lot, and the heat was sucking the vim, vigor, and verve of life out of me like something the heat sucks something out of. famous called Ticia and Don, and they were just crossing the bridge onto the island, so they'd be here very shortly. But we were still waiting for the conference room to be ready. While we were waiting, we joked about starting the festivities right then and there. For the first order of the day, someone suggested a seagull chasing contest. Monkeyman and wintermute, both wearing black like crazy people, chased the seagulls like crazy people. wintermute won, because he chased them for longer and further. I'm not sure winning this particular contest was preferable to losing.

Next, I reminded Issachar of something he had planned, some months prior, to do at the RinkUnion. He had forgotten all about it, and I'm not sure he was happy to remember, because what he had planned to do was an interpretive dance portraying "suckage of laying Sam off from work." We had already needled Issachar about his RinkUnion memory the night before when we were sitting around the pool. He asked me my brother's wife's name when, in fact, he had essentially named her himself at RU5. ("Christie, 'ch' and then an 'ie' on the end," I had said, and Issachar mumbled to himself, "Chie?" Thus was her nickname born, and we sometimes refer to her as Chie to this day.)

Another vehicle pulled into the parking lot at full speed and blew by us in the manner of somebody trying hard not to make eye contact with a throng of people without a place to congregate except in the corner of a parking lot. It zipped around to the other side of the building just like the first vehicle did. I wandered over to the conference center again (this was a looooong walk with little shade) and this time the manager and another woman (I'm not sure what her position was) greeted me at the door, introducing themselves and apologizing incredibly profusely. "Our maintenance man went AWOL," they explained again, this time in more detail, and I think they were shocked that I wasn't yelling and swearing at them. Wasn't I just the nicest client they ever had, they said, a model client. Well, I didn't see any point in yelling at them when they were so obviously not only sorry but mortified that any of this had happened. And it didn't appear to be their fault anyway. And even had it been, it was just too hot to yell.

This was when I found out our conference room wasn't visible from the windows, because they led me into a room they had been furiously cleaning up for me. The mess of the big giant dividable room had been walled off with cubicle paneling. Given the speed constraints, everything had been done quite well. People started filing in, and we finished setting up the tables. She gave me the key to the building so I could lock it up when we left for meals. It was a relief to get into some air conditioning.


Introductions, Or, How I Owned Ticia

Finally, things could begin in earnest. I took my spot at the head of the room, threw up my hands, and said, triumphantly, "Welcome to Rin--aaugh."

Ticia had snuck up behind me and caught my sides in a tickle ambush. I turned around, somewhat startled. Then I pounce tickle tackled her so unimaginably bad, she cried out in agony, "Stop it, Sam! I give in! You are the best pouncer and tackler, and you have owned me so bad I cannot hope to recover the upper hand even if I spent the rest of my life trying! Don't I look so foolish, now that you've owned me more than anyone has ever owned anyone before!" While all this was going on, Don was videotaping the whole thing from the doorway, but I'm sure he'll doctor the footage up so it looks like I let Ticia win. I don't mind. I'm that much of a gentleman to permit it. If I weren't ok with it, I'd have owned Don and his little camera, too, but let it not be said that I am a vindictive person.

So after greetings were exchanged, I welcomed everybody to RU6 ("Are you up for RU^?") and introductions were made. Most people knew most people by that point, but it's an important formality anyhow. I took the opportunity to have wintermute say "aluminium" as Matthew did at RU2. We all pointed and laughed. Then came the exchange of doodads. famous and wintermute gave out wads of silly putty so that fidgety people would have something to fidget with (they did). Leen gave out bubble fluid and parachute guys in named bags (wintermute was visibly excited to have a parachute guy, and Monkeyman voluntarily traded with someone else to get a hot pink one). Gahalyn gave out pictures of herself with her guinea pig James. Selah gave out pictures from RU5. Sara gave out Mardi Gras beads. I gave out leftover highlighter markers from RU5 (Monkeyman picked hot pink) and NH toll tokens, which will not be sold after the end of this month, as the token system we have here is being replaced by the E-Z Pass. The tokens are bronze-colored quarter-sized coins with the image of the now-deceased Old Man of the Mountain on both sides. This is a poignant element of RinkUnion history, as it was a stop on the RU2 tour of the White Mountains. I've always been glad we had been able to do that before it was too late.

The seating order was as follows:

Back row: ahmoacah, gremlinn, Dan (TalkingDog's brother), TalkingDog
Middle row: Sara, Maryam, Gahalyn, Monkeyman, Zay, Selah
Front row: Don, Ticia, Issachar, wintermute, famous, Leen


The Morning Activities

For the third year in a row, I had bingo chips to throw at people for various reasons. I explained, to those who hadn't been to a RinkUnion since the third, that this was in retribution for making me pick up pennies at RU3, but it really wasn't. The bingo chips this year were blue (RU4 had red, and RU5 had purple). As before, I hand-wrote the Rinkworks "R" on the face of each one. Initially, I had a list of qualifications that would earn a token -- who came the furthest, who had the darkest eyes, who was the slowest driver, etc. Thereafter, as in other years, you could get tokens by making up a reason to be awarded one. Whoever had the most tokens at the end of the day would have...the most tokens at the end of the day. This year, though, I forgot to ask who had the most. It was probably Issachar, because he won seven at once for his interpretive dance, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I showed everybody a sheet of paper with a grid printed out onto it and asked if it looked familiar. Groans of pain rung out from all quarters. It turned out I had enough blank forms for the memory game from previous RinkUnions (some dating back as far as RU3) that I didn't need to print out any more this year. I passed them around and then made two challenges. One, draw a picture of another Rinkie on the back. Last year, several fine illustrations had been made; this year, there wasn't the same level of interest, but we did get an illustration of James (the guinea pig) from TalkingDog, an illustration of me in silly putty from Gahalyn, and wintermute drew this absolutely stunning drawing of Gahalyn and James (the guinea pig) that looked exactly like the picture of Gahalyn and James (the guinea pig) that she had given out earlier.

The second challenge was to write a haiku that describes yourself in some way. Later, I would collect these, read them out, and people would have to guess who wrote them. WhizKid submitted his own entry to this activity in advance by proxy through me. It was:

an outhouse itches
i want to borrow myself
you look like my spork

When it came time to guess whose was whose (later, in the afternoon), Leen proved an uncanny knack for guessing Issachar's by reading his facial expression (his "haiku face") when his were read. It was uncanny because he sat there stoically throughout the reading of ALL the haikus, so how Leen knew, I don't know, but for every one of Issachar's three haikus (and nobody knew he had written three), Leen looked over at Iss and cried out, "Issachar!" and was right every time.

The most emotionally wrenching of the haikus was Zay's, who wrote about how he sat in the middle row with but one token. He earned another for this literary equivalent of a lower lip stuck way out.

But back to the morning. I still had my main giveaway to dispense, which was a yellow smiley thing, a hockey-puck sized piece of plastic with liquid sealed inside it. ("It's one of those things where you put it in the freezer and it gets cold.") Five of them were larger than the others, so a contest was held to see who would get the five larger ones. The challenge? Write down as many Rinkies whose names start with a particular letter. Certain less obvious names were pre-selected to win a token for anyone who got them. I don't remember who got the five big smiley thingies (please reply if you know), but TalkingDog won the first one and scored high thereafter, too.

Then came the memory game. The categories were more interesting this time, because I actually thought about what to ask ahead of time. "Something you'd like to do before you die." (MM wanted to think of something he wants to do before he dies before he dies. gremlinn wanted to finish SOAT. Leen wanted to get a geocache in every state. Issachar wanted to go to the bathroom. WhizKid wanted to asphyxiate forty cabbages.) "A food that should be invented." (wintermute wanted Smore Steak. I wanted Jaffa Crumb Cakes. gremlinn wanted Chocolate Grapes, along the lines of Chocolate Oranges. Monkeyman wanted pizza whose taste lingers in the mouth for a week. WhizKid wanted barbecued uvulas.) "A historical figure you'd like to meet." (Gahalyn wanted to meet James Chadwick, a guy who got into the physics field by accident and wound up splitting the neutron. Sara wanted to meet Yoda, if fictional persons counted, Mary otherwise. WhizKid wanted to meet that ranting undertaker.) gremlinn won the game with 53 out of 54 correct answers. His prize was a pair of cheap sunglasses with "RinkWorks" and my initials on them, in the customary fashion, as well as a similarly signed map of New Hampshire. Maryam came in second place and also won a signed map of New Hampshire.

At some point during the morning, I coaxed famous into demonstrating her talent of reciting the alphabet backwards (my mad persuasion skillz amounted to asking, "Could you recite the alphabet backwards?"), and then I tried to get TalkingDog to impersonate Goofy, which I had only recently learned he could do pretty well. He surprised me by reciting Darien's entire "talking about teh death" poem from memory in Goofy's voice. He had obviously planned it, and I hadn't even realized. It had the room in stitches.

Meanwhile, Issachar had been defusing awkward silences all morning, not that the silences were especially awkward, by reading an excerpt from "The Eye of Argon," considered the worst and most overwrought story ever written. It was a great idea and cracked everybody up whenever he burst out with a line from it.

At some point in the morning, Sara said something that freaked me out, because it seemed for a minute that *I* had said it. It was really weird.


Taking a Shower Inside My Shirt

We broke for lunch at that point and trooped into a place called Maria's, which has good pizza and bad air conditioning. We got a big long table in an otherwise empty section of the restaurant, and the food and service were pretty good, except that my pizza order got lost in the shuffle, and I made do by eating some of famous's and Gahalyn's, later replacing what I took with the pizza I was finally served when we were ready to leave. Like I say, it was good food, but 17 people do not get in and out of a restaurant quickly, and as I said, the air conditioning was poor. This was when I was hottest and least comfortable the whole weekend. It didn't help that I discovered too late that the Mardi Gras beads Sara gave out (Monkeyman said he'd wear his out in public if I did) somehow, inexplicably, possessed the heat retention powers of a wool scarf. After taking them off, I felt about 40 degrees cooler, which was still about 120 degrees too hot. Eventually I excused myself to step into the bathroom and splash water down my shirt and up my shirt. I left the bathroom actually drier than I went into it. Ticia said I didn't stink, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the entire stick of deodorant I had put on that morning had not been in vain.

But as I say, the food was good, and so was the conversation, which I scarcely remember in my heat-induced trance. I think some of it involved Don teaching me how air conditioners worked. The manager of Maria's might have benefitted from the same lesson.


The Afternoon Activities

Leen and I returned to the conference center by way of the hotel. We needed to put ice in the cooler so we'd have cold Moxie, etc, and I needed about five showers before I could continue the morning in any semblance of humanity. We did, but it cost us being around when people were playing with the parachute men and famous was exploding a can of Diet Moxie around the entire room.

After things settled down again, I read my latest list of stupid emails I've received from random people. Normally that's one of the first things I do on the Saturday of the RinkUnion, but it just worked out that it was the afternoon this time. Then came the requisite soda trials. I passed around Moxie to those who hadn't tried it and those who, against all odds, liked it. Sara was braced for the worst but liked it, quite a lot, and took more. Ten minutes later, the aftertaste finally kicked in, and suddenly she found it the most awful drink in the universe.
ahmoacah had brought some Diet Moxie with her (one can of which had already been inadvertently detonated), and so people got to try that, too. Sara was coaxed into it by Maryam but found it even worse than the original stuff. Gahalyn brought some kind of carbonated fruit juice (I forget the name of the brand), and we tried that. Finally, Monkeyman brought Canadian Mountain Dew, both the de-caffeinated regular kind and the medicinal kind with caffeine. (It is illegal in Canada to artificially add caffeine to food products, but Pepsico figured out how to get around this law for Mountain Dew by labelling it as a medicinal product, complete with medicinal directions and dosages printed on the can.)

After that, we rearranged the room to get the tables out of the way and set things up for the free-for-all performance part of the day. I kicked things off with impersonations of Cynthia, Darien, and TalkingDog, after which point I gratefully left the spotlight.

famous read a few of her poems, three older ones and one brand new one. I gave famous tokens for the poetry and wintermute one for enduring the last one. Don recited a funny verse about smelly smelt. famous coaxed wintermute, Ticia, and Maryam to join her in a recital of the theme song to Firefly. famous and I did our imitation of a desk toy. Monkeyman demonstrated his double-jointed elbows and malleable eyes. TalkingDog put his foot behind his head, Dan did a split suddenly and without warning (startling not a few), Maryam duplicated the goofy face in her yearbook photo, and Ticia walked around on her knees. Gahalyn read a poem from my book of poetry (appropriately about Virginia) from Howard's grandfather. If I forgot anyone, my apologies, and please let me know.

That brings me to Issachar's interpretive dance, which I shall try to describe and fail. It was, as a reminder, an interpretive dance about the suckage of laying off me from work. It was a dance in two acts. Act one. He stands, eyes downcast. His lower lip protrudes in a fierce pout. Pause. STOMP! on the ground goes the right foot. Pause. STOMP STOMP! on the ground goes the right foot. Pause. STOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMP go both feet. Pause. Lie down on the ground and kick and flail with all four limbs! Pause. Kneel. Act two. Rise on tippytoes. Spin in a pirouette. Spin and traipse across in the floor in a furious spin cycle! Leap! Spin! Leap! Spin! CRASH INTO THE WALL AND FALL DOWN. Fade out. End credits.


Theatrical Viewing

At RU5, Sunday night, a few of us went over to Grishny's house, including The Scotsmans, Monkeyman, Henry, Rivikah, TimTheEnchanter, and TalkingDog. We watched "Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II," which was a big hit there, as well as some movies Grishny and The Scotsman made with a friend of theirs in high school. These were short movies made without retakes and set mostly inside their own homes. They had us in tears, and I wanted to play the best one, a spoof of Indiana Jones, at the next RU. Grishny was gracious enough to make a copy for me, and so I played it for everybody. It was a huge hit with everybody, who found it interesting to see Grishny and The Scotsman as high schoolers and hilarious to see the great special effects, the highlight being a masterfully edited freefall off the edge of the Earth.

Then I put on "Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II," which was also received well, though, it seemed to me, a lot less successfully than it had the previous year. Still, there were some great lines oft repeated thereafter, most notably, "Hand it over, or I'll skewer you like you've never been skewered before!" Other gems include, "Or are you too good to be evil?", "He's serious about fighting evil," "See ya next quest," and an inexplicable exchange about who the French are in the closing moments.


The Night Activities

After that, we adjourned for dinner. After such a big lunch (and all the time and fuss of a sit-down restaurant), most of us were in the mood for something easy and fast. Some went to McDonald's. I was part of a small crew that went to Subway. I didn't feel all that hungry, but I tore into a toasted chicken breast sub on Italian with cheese, lettuce, and mayonnaise like I hadn't eaten all day.

Refreshed but still exhausted, we returned to the conference center, trickling in a group at a time. Issachar invited a small group of the first people to return to play one of the board games he had brought, and while that was going on, Maryam was trying out one of TalkingDog's Gameboy games, and Selah was knitting a pursy thingie. I lay down on a row of chairs for a while, pretty exhausted, but eventually slipped over to where Selah was and got THE INSIDE SCOOP.

Eventually, more people arrived, and a game of Apples To Apples (much like MatchBot, but with special decks of cards -- the game was introduced to Rinkies by ahmoacah (as a direct consequence, the game is currently a big hit with both my family and Leen's). We played a game with Gahalyn's set. I was watching at first but wound up simulating WhizKid by submitting the top card of the deck each round. WhizKid usually lost ("I would have won if I had put something better.") but won one ("I OWN you people!") when wintermute picked "Sharks" out of a highly competitive collection of matches for "Wild," which was an appropriate adjective for WhizKid to win. The best WhizKid match, however, was when he submitted "The JFK Assassination" for "Patriotic."

Following the Apples To Apples game, Issachar headed a competitive reading of "The Eye of Argon." The game, which is played at sci-fi conventions and so forth, has players attempting to read as much of the story as they can without breaking out into laughter. gremlinn, Issachar, and Monkeyman were all pretty good at keeping straight faces (even while putting comic inflections on the dialogue) but no one was invincible. Sara and wintermute only averaged one sentence before cracking up at first but improved considerably over time. Maryam seemed to average somewhere in the middle. Gahalyn was classic Gahalyn by cracking up before even starting to read, then eventually successfully tackling some rough passages. It is just stunning to me how overwrought this story is. wintermute and I were talking about it later -- it's like the author abided by all kinds of good advice, such as showing and not telling, and using descriptive alternatives to commonplace words, and following it to absurd extremes.

Midnight came and went before the competitive reading was over, so we interrupted it to clean up and clear out. Bedtime was soon to follow, and it didn't take me long to fall asleep.