My Laborday weekend, Part I

It’s another one of those rare “long weekends” and here it is Monday and I’m not at work. How odd… I mean, I’m not really sure what to –do- with the down time. I got up at 7am as usual and went through my morning routine which gets me to about 8:30. I have an hour before I leave at 9:30-9:45 so I can be at the store and get it turned on, organized, and open by 10am.

So, from about 8:30 on today I’ve had this odd feeling that something is wrong…

I went down to Denver Friday evening to hang out with Aryntha and Rai for the weekend. The trip down was an adventure; I was one of about ten people going east while the rest of the world was going west. There was a line of RVs going up the mountain, in the slow lane, at about 10 MPH, all the way from the Eisenhower tunnel down to Georgetown. Seriously. The Arapahoe Basin, the area that comprises this area, was shrouded in a blue haze of pollution well past Georgetown on the downhill side.

They were probably all going “camping” with their color TVs, hot water heaters, and microwaves.

I got down to Aryntha and Rai’s place at about 9pm. Cracker, from the muck, was in town and stopped in to shack up for the night. So Arythna and I spent the evening in his room, fiddling with a 2kva pure sine UPS I managed to score a while back while Rai was at work.

Rai works at a coffee shop in southwest Denver and her hours are abysmal. During the weekends she usually works closing and doesn’t get out till midnight.

I’m not the vampire I used to be and Rai was exhausted so we called it a night and with Cracker on the couch I trundled off to get a room for the night…

Big mistake.

It’s a holiday and every hotel room in town it seemed was taken. I eventually found a room at a Quality Suites; which at $110 a night it was obvious why they had rooms.

Saturday, after dropping Rai off at work and sending Cracker off with Raven to the dump, Aryntha and I headed down town-ish to check out the ARC, Savers and VA second hand stores. It’s amazing what one can find, computer wise, at these places for cheap. We did find a 3com “near online” SCSI storage controller at the first place we went, but otherwise the stores looked like they’d already been hit by another group of geeks.

So, we went towards Golden to check out the microwave relay on the north table mesa there. We drove by my parent’s old house on East Avenue while we were there… The place is identical right down to the tower in the back yard and the POP Box that was put in for my BBS stuff when I was in High School.

We were about to head down highway 93 to scope out the autovon huts that litter the route due to Rocky Flats being out there when Otto called. So we headed down 93 with two purposes; to check out autovon and the GWEN system at Rocky Flats, and to get to Boulder to ‘hang’ with Otto at his apartment on the CU campus.

Got to his place at about 5pm and hung out while we waited for Korn to show up. Once everyone was there we sat around discussing human psychology and how it is affected by causality for a few hours before deciding to take a hike, as a group, down to the Pearl Street Mall.

So, with Otto and Bethany with their son Aldus in tow, Keyler, Korn, Aryntha, a fellow they knew but I just met, and I, we formed a “gang” and marched on Pearl Street. The whole way we were still on the causality kick and, even for a college town, we got odd stares. One of the highlights was when we, a group of folks in “nail bunny” or apple t-shirts, trenchcoats, and combat boots got approached by a fellow who wanted to show off his poetry-prowess… Talk about not choosing your audience…

He started off with “Name a poet, any poet” so Bethany did and, to his credit, he did know a few verses. Then Bethany rounded on him and, in good gothic form, quoted something *very* obscure from someone probably dead for a few hundred years, with perfect meter. So this fellow tried to up the ante and was smacked down by the new guy who did some Dr. Seuss in 180bpm with perfect enunciation and inflection the whole time… Poor guy; he had one talent and was victimized by us right there in front of god and everyone.

After that we decided to lay siege to a pizza place on the mall where Bethany got jalapeno juice in her eye. This resulted in the discussion of the perception of pain the whole way back to Otto’s place.

When we got back it was time for Aryntha and me to head back to Denver so he could pick up Rai from work. We did so then watched the Wall for a while before I decided to head back up the mountain for the night. I got home at 4am and spent Sunday doing laundry and cleaning up the house.

I’m getting ready to head back down the mountain here in a bit to spend the rest of the day with Aryntha and Rai. Who knows what we’ll do, but it’ll be an adventure… It always is.