Shaking Things Up
So it's been a busy latter half of August.
Whitewater Rafting
August 16th, I did a whitewater rafting trip with Eva, her new boy Brandon (who seems nice and also likes Marvel comics), Kathryn, Kathryn's new boy Raymond, and their mutual friend Oscar. If it weren't for Brandon, I'd have been the token "white" person, LOL :P
I actually took an extra day off prior to the trip (we spent the night there because we didn't want to drive 5 hours at butt-crack-of-dawn-o-clock to make it to the rafting place by 8am) for "packing" purposes, and of course, the day before my supposed day off my right tonsil gets a random stabbing pain in it (probably a tonsillolith bursting out of it, Alien-style, in retrospect) followed by a bit of blood oozing from it. Apparently this was either coincidental or related to a sudden throat cold that came over me, which I remained convinced was just my throat acting up in response to my irritated tonsil (which continued to hurt for another day every time I swallowed). Thus, we all head down to our hotel, where I have just recovered from this thing that robbed me of a proper day off, but it has moved its way down into my chest, and I am coughing up some rather colorful lung chunks as discreetly as possible. Sigh.
However, our hotel was right across the street from a theater, so I convinced Eva and Brandon to come with me to finally see Guardians of the Galaxy because I really wanted to see it (and the others already had), and we did! And it was marvelous! :D And I have never seen Footloose, but I suspect that maybe I should now... :P Had I the time, I might try to break away to a local comic shop and see if I could acquire some of the comics (cubemate!Robert tells me that Gamora is built much more realistically like a fighter-type female character in the comics, but concedes that he doesn't know of anyone of that build in Hollywood who can act as well as Zoe Saldana anyway; I rather like Nebula, too, in spite of the weirdness of it being Amelia Pond's face on a blue cyborg). Of course, that would also require me to find some time to actually also read said comics, but first step in comics seems to always be acquisition. Maybe there'll be a Groupon at some point, too. That's how I got the last batch of comics that I... haven't managed to read yet :/
Anyway, rafting was actually pretty fun, although it was technically the same stretch of river we'd done before and the crew of this rafting company wasn't as zany and silly as the previous company's--also there was no stopping to take flying leaps off of nearly two-story rocks into the rapids this time. Our guide, Jake, was seriously the most soft-spoken person I think I've met in a service industry. Folks had to keep relaying the "stop" messages to me (again at the front of the raft, because that's where it's at, people) to keep me from paddling forever. (Apparently I will do that, or at least until I'm tired out or think I'm going to hit a rock with the paddle.) He was a sweetheart, though, he just needed to have a little more assertiveness in his commands. We very nearly flipped going over the "troublemaker" or "gunsight" rapid (I keep hearing two names for it, not sure if they're two parts of the same section that the photographers camp out at), and definitely charged through a wall of water on the trip, so that was exciting. We also went down one rapid purposefully spinning as fast as we could like the stereotypical teacup ride, and that was also a lot of fun :)
On the way back, we got Rita's Italian Ices, from the one Rita's out here on the coast! (It's a big thing in the Philly area and the East Coast, apparently--Mike and Kerry were super excited to tell me and Eva about it, so of course we had to go and send them a picture of us having delicious Italian Ices after our trip.)
Ridiculous Obstacle Challenge
August 23rd, we did the Ridiculous Obstacle Challenge as Team Stark Industries. Kerry and Eva, having finally been cajoled (by me) into joining, wore red tops and yellow tutus (Kerry got one with a glow-in-the-dark arc reactor design), and foolish I wore this Iron Man dress costume, but with a zipper sewn into the back because no way were those dinky little two velcro dots going to cut it. Preemptively, yes, there are team pictures, and no, I'm probably not showing them to you. Cubemate!Robert ordered this full-bodied Iron Man costume, only to have it arrive the day before so ridiculously over-sized that he wasn't comfortable trying to run in it for fear of tripping over the damn thing. He's a slender six-ish foot tall guy, not some really diminutive person, so the mind boggles as to why it would be so ridiculously big on him if he ordered the medium, but we're convinced they actually sent him an XXL or something. So I was the only one in a full costume (the others had Iron Man shirts, so we still looked like a cohesive team), but I had my Iron Tutus to back me up.
I actually did a lot better than I thought against most of the obstacles, because they weren't quite as difficult as imagined. Except the jump balls. Oh man, those were ridiculous. I don't think we saw anyone get across that without falling off, although some got kinda close. I surprised myself by being able to make it across the Gorilla Bars without dropping (I couldn't do monkey bars when I was a kid, I suspect rock climbing has helped). Thing is, I got mistaken for Wonder Woman twice. Twice. After a couple of actual Wonder Woman costumes have been through this race o_0 It was a little mind boggling. The first time was, incidentally, at the Gorilla Bars, where I looked at them and said aloud, "I don't think I can do those." The guy with the microphone (because there's at least one at every obstacle) came up behind me and said, "Yeah you can, you're Wonder Woman!" "No, I'm Iron Man." And of course, I went ahead and freaking did it anyway (possibly to spite that Wonder Woman comment). It took all the gold off my gloves, though, and it was actually really hard to not slip off with the half-gloves on o_0 The second time was at the wrecking ball, where you have to run across an inflatable tube (floating on a tank of water) and avoid being smacked by a pair of spinning inflatable wrecking balls. Somehow, I was the only person on my team to make it across without finding myself in the tank of water, and the guy announcing the thing (apparently now known as "Speedo Guy," because he kind of looked and sounded like Zack Galifianakis, but tattooed and in a speedo) announces that "Wonder Woman makes it across!" Cubemate!Robert apparently got a kick out of the fact that I turned around and gave the guy shit for not recognizing that I was dressed as Iron Man, but he made the point that we had to wear life vests for that particular obstacle (seriously... I don't even), which made it a lot harder, so I gave him that u_u Iron Man, guys. I am Iron Man.
My only complaint about the thing was probably that after the water obstacles started (which was way too late in the run for something in the dry heat we suffered that day), anything that wasn't a water obstacle became a muddy mess, and the water in all the water obstacles got really nasty :/ Other than that, it was kind of fun to dress in a ridiculous costume and run around with friends, even if said costume turns out to be a plasticized sauna suit in disguise. I may be on the lookout for more "fun run" things like this which actually have, you know, fun in it, as opposed to just being a run. (Which is not fun.) But maybe not quite as expensive events, although I did manage to con the registration packet pickup volunteer into believing that I'd gotten the same package as Eva and Kerry (I was picking their packets up for them with cubemate!Robert), thus getting myself a tech tee without having to pay the $20 they were trying to pull over me for it, so that was a plus. I paid the same price as they did, and there was no middle-man involved (theirs was a LivingSocial deal), so I figure they still made more off of me than they did off of them anyway.
Earthquake
There was an earthquake in Napa the Sunday of the following weekend, which actually woke me up. I remember thinking I must be dreaming because it feels like someone is shaking my bed and I know there's nobody in here with me, then realizing that the blinds are swaying and it's everything in the room being shaken a bit. Really, it was quite short, but I probably should have braced or done... something protective? I don't know. Shortly after realizing that it was an earthquake, my little race bib holder thing I made as a prototype of Mike & Kerry's Christmas presents last year (they actually do enough events to need something to hold their race bibs and medals, or at least Mike certainly does) fell off the wall again. I'd secured it there with 3M Command strips, but I think maybe it doesn't work so well on matte painted walls, because the strips pretty much don't have any sticky left to them right now. The wall's certainly undamaged, and thankfully my bike is okay (because it of course hangs over my bike, being that all my stuff is pretty much just Tour de Cure bike stuff), but I now need to find a better solution for hanging it :/ I was trying to avoid more nails, but that's probably what needs to happen.
Outside of that, nothing in my apartment appears to have moved noticeably from its place (I'm sure some stuff has fallen down cracks that I just don't remember and will discover next time I move said furniture pieces), so it was an okay earthquake for me. Napa's wineries weren't so lucky, from what I hear :/
Beta Babes
So Kerry and I went to a sort-of meet-up type thing for female climbers at our rock gym, Planet Granite, and it was mostly bouldering and chatting rather than the climbing technique feedback we were originally hoping for, but it was also kind of nice to meet some other folks. The twin sister of our teacher from the original beginner's climbing class was actually there, so we got to meet her, and then I won a shirt in the raffle.
I won a shirt in the raffle.
This is extraordinary because I come from a family that doesn't win anything in most cases. I've probably told the story of how my dad, for like three or five housing association meetings in a row, was the odd man out when they had enough prizes for everyone in the room except for one--to the point where people started offering him their prizes out of pity! We're not the winning kind. But I won a shirt o_0 I should probably have known that it meant that something was coming for me, but I picked out the one I liked, which turned out to be a tank top, and there you have it. A shirt from my rock gym, for free. It made my night!
Unfortunately, The Soup
I opted not to go in to work over the Labor Day weekend, because hey, nobody really wanted to, and it's a weekend with a holiday. Friday evening, naturally, I discover a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup lurking in the back of my cupboard, which used to be a favorite of mine, but I've kind of stopped eating a lot of canned soups and such lately. It was expired--really, really expired--but I've eaten expired goods before and always been fine, and I needed to eat something quick before it was time to head off to rock climbing with Kerry, Eva, and Brandon at the Belmont Planet Granite, which is the one near Eva. In short, I learned first hand why you shouldn't eat expired food, and that canned goods are probably not, in fact, non-perishable.
The can had no dents, no signs of strain, and it smelled fine. I think it was the reduced fat kind, which always tasted very slightly off to me, so I didn't suspect anything from the taste, either. It was eaten with some nice sourdough bread, and off I went with a belly full of (unfortunately apparently bad) soup.
After picking up Kerry, we drove up to Belmont to start climbing. By the time we're on the ropes, I'm a little woozy. Yeah, the soup might not have been a good idea, and I can kind of tell that by now. A climb or two in, and I am being described as looking "green around the gills." I make a crack about this being karma for having won that shirt earlier that week, and for wearing it that evening. Kerry laughs and agrees that maybe it's karma, since I'm "flaunting" it by wearing it immediately after winning. We try bouldering a bit, given the climbs are shorter, but there's also no rope and the way down is often via jumping, which wasn't really helping my stomach much. Another hour in, and I'm spending most of my time sitting, with a few bursts of climbing up a wall, carefully climbing back down, and then going back to sitting and looking miserable on some solid surface (ie not the bouldering pads) which won't move unexpectedly. By the time I'm dropping Kerry off, she's asking if I'm going to make it home alright, because I neither look nor sound particularly good, because I'm breathing kind of heavily in my attempt to keep from being revisited by the soup in the car. Obviously, I made it home okay anyway, but only after a short rest in her driveway to recuperate a bit.
Turns out I probably didn't have to worry so much about it coming out. Or maybe I did, and did too good of a job of holding down the fort. My stomach is odd in the way it refuses to give things up when I probably ought to just puke them up and get them out of my system. It took some trying (mostly of the willing myself and drinking a ton of extra water kind) to get the soup out of my stomach that evening, but then I spent the entirety of that night as well as almost the entirety of Saturday unable to sit up or walk around for more than a minute at a time without being overcome by nausea or dizziness. Couldn't even prop myself up to read a book or use a computer :( And shivering uncontrollably. Even with the sun shining, with me in a sweatshirt and a blanket, I was shaking and quaking on my couch, unable to hold down more than water until the evening, when I got brave enough to go for chocolate almond milk. But I did sleep, actually. I fell asleep off and on, between being woken up by chills, until at some point I woke up and was suddenly fine in terms of temperature, although sporting a big headache.
The sad part was, I was trying to organize a craft get-together (of the bead and wire jewelry variety) on Saturday. I'd tried, even in my nauseated state, to clean my apartment a bit that evening to prepare, but in the morning I was still not doing so well, so Emilie (who was probably the only really confirmed attendee since, like everything else that I plan, it was either at a bad time or was simply not interesting enough) suggested that I not push myself. It's good she did, because I probably would have collapsed if I'd tried to keep staying upright and sociable through all of that ;_; I'm still miffed that I lost pretty much all of my Saturday to this can of soup, and I've developed a new fear of things past their prime which I hadn't had before :( I'm about to become a wasteful American, sigh.
Laser Tag
On Labor Day, I participated in another outdoor laser tag game with Mike and Max--the last one was two or three years ago that I'd been to, so it was kind of nice to do it again, even if it was really hot out and the playing field was pretty seriously skewed in favor of one side (but we were all rotated through both sides and it was timed domination matches, so we were still able to be ranked). I guess the nice side-effect of being "one of the guys" is that even if Kerry is stuck at home watching Dylan and Becca is sight-seeing in Croatia, my guy friends are totally game to invite me along to such things :)
We didn't do all that well, but it was, at least in our case, mostly a PUG, although we got grouped with a guy that Mike and Max had been grouped with before at a previous related event, so he was more competent and experienced than I was. He had his wife along, and then we had a random high schooler, a random lady who appeared to be in her later 40s to me, and one of the staff members because one of the registered folks who'd been allocated to our team didn't show. I got tired fast in the heat, especially since I have no running stamina, but it would appear that I'm good at disappearing. I had one guy from another team come up to me and be like, "you totally lost me! I tried to follow you around a bush, and you were just gone!" That kind of made my day :) Also, I had a couple of instances of people coming and just sitting down a couple of feet away from me and not realize I was right there, so of course I shot them :P Two of them didn't realize I was there until I'd shot them dead, even. (We get 8 HP, so we can take 8 hits before we're "dead" and have to respawn.)
One thing that got us was the claim that anyone that showed up in camo wouldn't be allowed to play, based on (presumably) complaints the group had received at previous games about people in camo gear running around with fake guns, radios, and brightly colored headbands (team color designation). I had purchased a pair of digital camouflage pants specifically to match Mike and Max's digital camo outfits after that first game way back when, so I was pretty miffed I couldn't finally wear it, on top of it being a much more reliable fabric for running around and kneeling/lying in random bushes and such in the park this occurred in. Mike and Max, having bought full camo outfits, were also miffed they couldn't wear camo, yet Lo! There were people who showed up wearing camouflage pants and such, and they were not, in fact, booted from the game :( I think next time I'll just wear them and bring a change of pants in case they do decide to enforce this, because I'm suspecting they aren't actually planning to enforce it ever :/ I got myself a fabulous bruise on my wrist where I kept bonking a corner of my very boxy laser gun whenever I ran, but you don't worry about that kind of think when you play :) I wonder if doing more of this sort of thing wouldn't be something I'd enjoy, sometimes, in spite of my notable dislike of FPS games (which largely stems from my inability to translate where I want to go/look to controller movements etc., because my in-game mobility has always been crap).
So yes, there you have it. The exciting recent times of a very sleep-deprived, and somewhat actually plagued Xia.
Whitewater Rafting
August 16th, I did a whitewater rafting trip with Eva, her new boy Brandon (who seems nice and also likes Marvel comics), Kathryn, Kathryn's new boy Raymond, and their mutual friend Oscar. If it weren't for Brandon, I'd have been the token "white" person, LOL :P
I actually took an extra day off prior to the trip (we spent the night there because we didn't want to drive 5 hours at butt-crack-of-dawn-o-clock to make it to the rafting place by 8am) for "packing" purposes, and of course, the day before my supposed day off my right tonsil gets a random stabbing pain in it (probably a tonsillolith bursting out of it, Alien-style, in retrospect) followed by a bit of blood oozing from it. Apparently this was either coincidental or related to a sudden throat cold that came over me, which I remained convinced was just my throat acting up in response to my irritated tonsil (which continued to hurt for another day every time I swallowed). Thus, we all head down to our hotel, where I have just recovered from this thing that robbed me of a proper day off, but it has moved its way down into my chest, and I am coughing up some rather colorful lung chunks as discreetly as possible. Sigh.
However, our hotel was right across the street from a theater, so I convinced Eva and Brandon to come with me to finally see Guardians of the Galaxy because I really wanted to see it (and the others already had), and we did! And it was marvelous! :D And I have never seen Footloose, but I suspect that maybe I should now... :P Had I the time, I might try to break away to a local comic shop and see if I could acquire some of the comics (cubemate!Robert tells me that Gamora is built much more realistically like a fighter-type female character in the comics, but concedes that he doesn't know of anyone of that build in Hollywood who can act as well as Zoe Saldana anyway; I rather like Nebula, too, in spite of the weirdness of it being Amelia Pond's face on a blue cyborg). Of course, that would also require me to find some time to actually also read said comics, but first step in comics seems to always be acquisition. Maybe there'll be a Groupon at some point, too. That's how I got the last batch of comics that I... haven't managed to read yet :/
Anyway, rafting was actually pretty fun, although it was technically the same stretch of river we'd done before and the crew of this rafting company wasn't as zany and silly as the previous company's--also there was no stopping to take flying leaps off of nearly two-story rocks into the rapids this time. Our guide, Jake, was seriously the most soft-spoken person I think I've met in a service industry. Folks had to keep relaying the "stop" messages to me (again at the front of the raft, because that's where it's at, people) to keep me from paddling forever. (Apparently I will do that, or at least until I'm tired out or think I'm going to hit a rock with the paddle.) He was a sweetheart, though, he just needed to have a little more assertiveness in his commands. We very nearly flipped going over the "troublemaker" or "gunsight" rapid (I keep hearing two names for it, not sure if they're two parts of the same section that the photographers camp out at), and definitely charged through a wall of water on the trip, so that was exciting. We also went down one rapid purposefully spinning as fast as we could like the stereotypical teacup ride, and that was also a lot of fun :)
On the way back, we got Rita's Italian Ices, from the one Rita's out here on the coast! (It's a big thing in the Philly area and the East Coast, apparently--Mike and Kerry were super excited to tell me and Eva about it, so of course we had to go and send them a picture of us having delicious Italian Ices after our trip.)
Ridiculous Obstacle Challenge
August 23rd, we did the Ridiculous Obstacle Challenge as Team Stark Industries. Kerry and Eva, having finally been cajoled (by me) into joining, wore red tops and yellow tutus (Kerry got one with a glow-in-the-dark arc reactor design), and foolish I wore this Iron Man dress costume, but with a zipper sewn into the back because no way were those dinky little two velcro dots going to cut it. Preemptively, yes, there are team pictures, and no, I'm probably not showing them to you. Cubemate!Robert ordered this full-bodied Iron Man costume, only to have it arrive the day before so ridiculously over-sized that he wasn't comfortable trying to run in it for fear of tripping over the damn thing. He's a slender six-ish foot tall guy, not some really diminutive person, so the mind boggles as to why it would be so ridiculously big on him if he ordered the medium, but we're convinced they actually sent him an XXL or something. So I was the only one in a full costume (the others had Iron Man shirts, so we still looked like a cohesive team), but I had my Iron Tutus to back me up.
I actually did a lot better than I thought against most of the obstacles, because they weren't quite as difficult as imagined. Except the jump balls. Oh man, those were ridiculous. I don't think we saw anyone get across that without falling off, although some got kinda close. I surprised myself by being able to make it across the Gorilla Bars without dropping (I couldn't do monkey bars when I was a kid, I suspect rock climbing has helped). Thing is, I got mistaken for Wonder Woman twice. Twice. After a couple of actual Wonder Woman costumes have been through this race o_0 It was a little mind boggling. The first time was, incidentally, at the Gorilla Bars, where I looked at them and said aloud, "I don't think I can do those." The guy with the microphone (because there's at least one at every obstacle) came up behind me and said, "Yeah you can, you're Wonder Woman!" "No, I'm Iron Man." And of course, I went ahead and freaking did it anyway (possibly to spite that Wonder Woman comment). It took all the gold off my gloves, though, and it was actually really hard to not slip off with the half-gloves on o_0 The second time was at the wrecking ball, where you have to run across an inflatable tube (floating on a tank of water) and avoid being smacked by a pair of spinning inflatable wrecking balls. Somehow, I was the only person on my team to make it across without finding myself in the tank of water, and the guy announcing the thing (apparently now known as "Speedo Guy," because he kind of looked and sounded like Zack Galifianakis, but tattooed and in a speedo) announces that "Wonder Woman makes it across!" Cubemate!Robert apparently got a kick out of the fact that I turned around and gave the guy shit for not recognizing that I was dressed as Iron Man, but he made the point that we had to wear life vests for that particular obstacle (seriously... I don't even), which made it a lot harder, so I gave him that u_u Iron Man, guys. I am Iron Man.
My only complaint about the thing was probably that after the water obstacles started (which was way too late in the run for something in the dry heat we suffered that day), anything that wasn't a water obstacle became a muddy mess, and the water in all the water obstacles got really nasty :/ Other than that, it was kind of fun to dress in a ridiculous costume and run around with friends, even if said costume turns out to be a plasticized sauna suit in disguise. I may be on the lookout for more "fun run" things like this which actually have, you know, fun in it, as opposed to just being a run. (Which is not fun.) But maybe not quite as expensive events, although I did manage to con the registration packet pickup volunteer into believing that I'd gotten the same package as Eva and Kerry (I was picking their packets up for them with cubemate!Robert), thus getting myself a tech tee without having to pay the $20 they were trying to pull over me for it, so that was a plus. I paid the same price as they did, and there was no middle-man involved (theirs was a LivingSocial deal), so I figure they still made more off of me than they did off of them anyway.
Earthquake
There was an earthquake in Napa the Sunday of the following weekend, which actually woke me up. I remember thinking I must be dreaming because it feels like someone is shaking my bed and I know there's nobody in here with me, then realizing that the blinds are swaying and it's everything in the room being shaken a bit. Really, it was quite short, but I probably should have braced or done... something protective? I don't know. Shortly after realizing that it was an earthquake, my little race bib holder thing I made as a prototype of Mike & Kerry's Christmas presents last year (they actually do enough events to need something to hold their race bibs and medals, or at least Mike certainly does) fell off the wall again. I'd secured it there with 3M Command strips, but I think maybe it doesn't work so well on matte painted walls, because the strips pretty much don't have any sticky left to them right now. The wall's certainly undamaged, and thankfully my bike is okay (because it of course hangs over my bike, being that all my stuff is pretty much just Tour de Cure bike stuff), but I now need to find a better solution for hanging it :/ I was trying to avoid more nails, but that's probably what needs to happen.
Outside of that, nothing in my apartment appears to have moved noticeably from its place (I'm sure some stuff has fallen down cracks that I just don't remember and will discover next time I move said furniture pieces), so it was an okay earthquake for me. Napa's wineries weren't so lucky, from what I hear :/
Beta Babes
So Kerry and I went to a sort-of meet-up type thing for female climbers at our rock gym, Planet Granite, and it was mostly bouldering and chatting rather than the climbing technique feedback we were originally hoping for, but it was also kind of nice to meet some other folks. The twin sister of our teacher from the original beginner's climbing class was actually there, so we got to meet her, and then I won a shirt in the raffle.
I won a shirt in the raffle.
This is extraordinary because I come from a family that doesn't win anything in most cases. I've probably told the story of how my dad, for like three or five housing association meetings in a row, was the odd man out when they had enough prizes for everyone in the room except for one--to the point where people started offering him their prizes out of pity! We're not the winning kind. But I won a shirt o_0 I should probably have known that it meant that something was coming for me, but I picked out the one I liked, which turned out to be a tank top, and there you have it. A shirt from my rock gym, for free. It made my night!
Unfortunately, The Soup
I opted not to go in to work over the Labor Day weekend, because hey, nobody really wanted to, and it's a weekend with a holiday. Friday evening, naturally, I discover a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup lurking in the back of my cupboard, which used to be a favorite of mine, but I've kind of stopped eating a lot of canned soups and such lately. It was expired--really, really expired--but I've eaten expired goods before and always been fine, and I needed to eat something quick before it was time to head off to rock climbing with Kerry, Eva, and Brandon at the Belmont Planet Granite, which is the one near Eva. In short, I learned first hand why you shouldn't eat expired food, and that canned goods are probably not, in fact, non-perishable.
The can had no dents, no signs of strain, and it smelled fine. I think it was the reduced fat kind, which always tasted very slightly off to me, so I didn't suspect anything from the taste, either. It was eaten with some nice sourdough bread, and off I went with a belly full of (unfortunately apparently bad) soup.
After picking up Kerry, we drove up to Belmont to start climbing. By the time we're on the ropes, I'm a little woozy. Yeah, the soup might not have been a good idea, and I can kind of tell that by now. A climb or two in, and I am being described as looking "green around the gills." I make a crack about this being karma for having won that shirt earlier that week, and for wearing it that evening. Kerry laughs and agrees that maybe it's karma, since I'm "flaunting" it by wearing it immediately after winning. We try bouldering a bit, given the climbs are shorter, but there's also no rope and the way down is often via jumping, which wasn't really helping my stomach much. Another hour in, and I'm spending most of my time sitting, with a few bursts of climbing up a wall, carefully climbing back down, and then going back to sitting and looking miserable on some solid surface (ie not the bouldering pads) which won't move unexpectedly. By the time I'm dropping Kerry off, she's asking if I'm going to make it home alright, because I neither look nor sound particularly good, because I'm breathing kind of heavily in my attempt to keep from being revisited by the soup in the car. Obviously, I made it home okay anyway, but only after a short rest in her driveway to recuperate a bit.
Turns out I probably didn't have to worry so much about it coming out. Or maybe I did, and did too good of a job of holding down the fort. My stomach is odd in the way it refuses to give things up when I probably ought to just puke them up and get them out of my system. It took some trying (mostly of the willing myself and drinking a ton of extra water kind) to get the soup out of my stomach that evening, but then I spent the entirety of that night as well as almost the entirety of Saturday unable to sit up or walk around for more than a minute at a time without being overcome by nausea or dizziness. Couldn't even prop myself up to read a book or use a computer :( And shivering uncontrollably. Even with the sun shining, with me in a sweatshirt and a blanket, I was shaking and quaking on my couch, unable to hold down more than water until the evening, when I got brave enough to go for chocolate almond milk. But I did sleep, actually. I fell asleep off and on, between being woken up by chills, until at some point I woke up and was suddenly fine in terms of temperature, although sporting a big headache.
The sad part was, I was trying to organize a craft get-together (of the bead and wire jewelry variety) on Saturday. I'd tried, even in my nauseated state, to clean my apartment a bit that evening to prepare, but in the morning I was still not doing so well, so Emilie (who was probably the only really confirmed attendee since, like everything else that I plan, it was either at a bad time or was simply not interesting enough) suggested that I not push myself. It's good she did, because I probably would have collapsed if I'd tried to keep staying upright and sociable through all of that ;_; I'm still miffed that I lost pretty much all of my Saturday to this can of soup, and I've developed a new fear of things past their prime which I hadn't had before :( I'm about to become a wasteful American, sigh.
Laser Tag
On Labor Day, I participated in another outdoor laser tag game with Mike and Max--the last one was two or three years ago that I'd been to, so it was kind of nice to do it again, even if it was really hot out and the playing field was pretty seriously skewed in favor of one side (but we were all rotated through both sides and it was timed domination matches, so we were still able to be ranked). I guess the nice side-effect of being "one of the guys" is that even if Kerry is stuck at home watching Dylan and Becca is sight-seeing in Croatia, my guy friends are totally game to invite me along to such things :)
We didn't do all that well, but it was, at least in our case, mostly a PUG, although we got grouped with a guy that Mike and Max had been grouped with before at a previous related event, so he was more competent and experienced than I was. He had his wife along, and then we had a random high schooler, a random lady who appeared to be in her later 40s to me, and one of the staff members because one of the registered folks who'd been allocated to our team didn't show. I got tired fast in the heat, especially since I have no running stamina, but it would appear that I'm good at disappearing. I had one guy from another team come up to me and be like, "you totally lost me! I tried to follow you around a bush, and you were just gone!" That kind of made my day :) Also, I had a couple of instances of people coming and just sitting down a couple of feet away from me and not realize I was right there, so of course I shot them :P Two of them didn't realize I was there until I'd shot them dead, even. (We get 8 HP, so we can take 8 hits before we're "dead" and have to respawn.)
One thing that got us was the claim that anyone that showed up in camo wouldn't be allowed to play, based on (presumably) complaints the group had received at previous games about people in camo gear running around with fake guns, radios, and brightly colored headbands (team color designation). I had purchased a pair of digital camouflage pants specifically to match Mike and Max's digital camo outfits after that first game way back when, so I was pretty miffed I couldn't finally wear it, on top of it being a much more reliable fabric for running around and kneeling/lying in random bushes and such in the park this occurred in. Mike and Max, having bought full camo outfits, were also miffed they couldn't wear camo, yet Lo! There were people who showed up wearing camouflage pants and such, and they were not, in fact, booted from the game :( I think next time I'll just wear them and bring a change of pants in case they do decide to enforce this, because I'm suspecting they aren't actually planning to enforce it ever :/ I got myself a fabulous bruise on my wrist where I kept bonking a corner of my very boxy laser gun whenever I ran, but you don't worry about that kind of think when you play :) I wonder if doing more of this sort of thing wouldn't be something I'd enjoy, sometimes, in spite of my notable dislike of FPS games (which largely stems from my inability to translate where I want to go/look to controller movements etc., because my in-game mobility has always been crap).
So yes, there you have it. The exciting recent times of a very sleep-deprived, and somewhat actually plagued Xia.