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In chronological order, then:
Friday
On Friday, Sath was meant to arrive at our school. Friday was also the day for the school computer system to be shut down because they're renovating it over half-term. All the computers in the library, the computer rooms and the tech rooms were shut down - the only ones remaining were the bastion of civilisation known as the Pod, containing lovely shiny new fast computers, hidden out of the way behind the Y9/10 lockers, and hence my preferred destination for in-school computering activities anyhow. Throughout the day, these stopped working one by one - crashing, then refusing to recognise anyone's username, even the 'ict' and other administrative accounts - until at lunchtime only one was left (on which was a Y9 by the name of Annabel, playing Neopets games, to the vast frustration of everyone else who wanted to do such trivial things as rescue coursework and print out homework).
By the end of school on Friday I was becoming a little worried, as standard operating procedure is for Sath to find me, and not being in the maths room this was likely to be a little difficult. I checked the places that reasonable people would hide - the locker area, the maths room, the common room - but no Sath. Wandering desolately down a corridor, watching workmen mess with network cable, I remembered The One Working Computer In The School. So I enter the Pod and yes, despite none of the other computers in the room being on and network cables being messed with, said computer does indeed still work! So Plan B can go ahead - logging onto SP and whining. This soon produced some response from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hatter, who is to be henceforth known as the Source Of All Mobile Numbers. (He first attempted to ring Sath, but as he's her pet stalker she ignored the call, so he had to dig out dreema's number instead.) This revealed that they were sitting around outside the school, similarly uncertain of where to meet up.
By the time I'd thanked people for their help (including a rather overenthusiasticmarnanel who thought that a Sath in my school would be hiding in a box ready to leap out and distribute huggles, and was quite excessively bouncy about the idea) and got out the door, both sath and dreema were at the gate to meet me, and the sath did indeed demonstrate the deadly run-and-hug technique. Apparently sath had been quite able to find Liz as many times as she wanted, but her homing instincts only worked for her, not for me. Anyway, after much complaining about sath's navigational skills and habit of calling the turning just after it had been passed, we made it to dreema's car, and hence back to my house with only one incidence of post-junction-calling on my part (which really *wasn't* on purpose!).
Saturday
dreema texted sath to say that he'd arrive about 11:15, then turned up at 11:00. Thankfully I hadn't done my normal trick of leaving everything until the last minute and had packed my bag before 10:30 (which was the earliest time he'd said he might get here). The journey to Horsham was thankfully fairly uneventful - no massive hold-ups on the M25 or anything. dreema has a pretty impressive stereo system :-). We got to Horsham Station to acquire a quoth_rachel on time almost to the second, and then hung around in the carpark choosing music. sath's phone went off, but when she got to it, it wasn't displaying 'missed call' or anything, so she strenuously denied that it was hers. We went back to sorting out music, and then sath's phone got a text message from quoth_rachel, which simply read 'Where are you?'. We decided that replying with 'Here. Where are you?' was not the most helpful of solutions, and hence headed off to the main station building to find her. This tactic worked, suprisingly, although quoth_rachel annoyed the ticket inspector by being more interested in hugging Sath than showing her ticket to him. (I'm not sure how quoth_rachel expected us to find her inside the bit of the station you needed tickets to get into, but anyway.)
marble finding">
Having acquired aquoth_rachel, we were now well on our way to doing a good bit of marblescaring. After only one wrong turning, leading to a significantly larger roundabout than expected, we managed to find the house of the marble, and duely invaded. After reassuring him that I'd forgotten my axe, we got drinks and settled down for a spot of quoth_rachelconfusing. I don't think we managed to convince her that she absolutely had to spod more, though. Eventually we decided to go to the park. On the way, it was established that I had also forgotten to bring any sharp sticks (apparently prodding with such is the only way to get marble to talk). This was shown not to be a problem due to the wide availability of fairly blunt sticks which appeared to do the job (or is that the jab?) adequately...
On arriving at the park, after avoiding the scary people on wheels, we went to torment the poor innocent dragon statue, in the middle of the woefully inadquate maze (it was a perfectly good *maze*, it was just that the wall-hedges were about 30cm high and hence could be stepped over with little difficulty). I tried following the right-hand walls, andsath and quoth_rachel tried following the left-hand walls, but we just went all around the outside of the maze to all of the exits rather than into the middle. We did find the right way in the end, but I got fed up and cheated eventually, so I could start taking photos (which if my ability in putting up the XF and DWCon photos is anything to go by, will languish on my hard drive forever). After posing with the dragon and some sticks (and chasing marble around with said sticks), we wandered over to the kiddie playground. I immediately spotted the merry-go-round, but waited until all the small children had cleared the immediate area before sath and I invaded. Despite the best efforts of us and marble, it was a very pathetic merry-go-round indeed, and hardly spun at all; sath wouldn't agree with this assessment though, as she got quite dizzy :-).
After this we wandered into town in search of food (on the way finding larger and larger sticks to fence with, culminating in my finding of half a small branch, quite a sturdy staff of wood about 3cm in diameter, which beat everyone else's... with the bark removed it was also nice and smooth, although it did have a bit of nasty red fungus growing on it). We 'posted' the sticks in the green postbox (i.e. the bin - I wanted to post them in the real postbox but eventually decided that was too mean to the poor postpeople) before we went to feed, which I was slightly upset about because I did like the big strong stick I'd found, but I can understand why we might have been asked to leave fooding-places if we'd wandered in carrying sticks. We found several potential fooding-places, but most of them didn't have anywhere in particular to sit, or didn't sell anything we felt like eating; we annoyedmarble by claiming that we wanted 'food' and not being particularly specific about what type :-(. Eventually we ended up in Costa, because it was about 3pm and we wanted somewhere inside to sit. After quoth_rachel almost fainted at the prices and we offered to go elsewhere, marble insisted that it wasn't a problem because he was paying - I think he just wanted to get us sat down and eating somewhere! I do like Costa sandwichthings ('panini') a lot, though, so it was a good choice for me. Not only did I eat mine (turkey, bacon and cheese - mmmm!) I also ate half of quoth_rachel's. And I had a nice hot chocolate. (And sath dusted me with chocolate powder that had got onto her drink can, but that wasn't so nice.) It would have all been wonderful if it wasn't for the staff door that made a really loud bleeping noise every time someone opened it, which made marble jump.
On the way back tomarble's house, we stopped to watch the fountain. The fountain looks quite peaceful and sedate until once every eight minutes when lots of water suddenly swooshes down all at once. This made sath jump. Especially given that our intent was to throw her in. Later on we actually got her quite close to the little mini-fountains around the edge (we were spinning them the wrong way round), but still no-one threw her in the fountain. I guess we didn't want to have to find dry clothes for her. We also had a look at lots of DVDs that quoth_rachel Really Didn't Want To Buy, including the Tron DVD. On discovering that sath didn't even know what Tron was and quoth_rachel hadn't seen it, and sighting a video rental place on the way back, we had a look for Tron, but to no avail.
When we got back tomarble's, I spotted the dance-mat-controller-thingamy, and decided it would be a great idea to try and play a game it wasn't designed for with it. marble suggested Tekken as a game which didn't overuse the buttons that weren't on the dance mat, so we then proceeded to play a lot of very silly Tekken. Although dreema kept cheating (using the 'tag' button that wasn't on the mat when he had the controller, and sitting down to use the mat, which I couldn't do 'cos I couldn't hit the 'buttons' hard enough). I found out that the Tekken character called Michelle had a deadly low-kick that, used continually, beat up quite a lot of the other characters without really trying, but also made lots of really annoying 'hi-ya!' noises. And had zebra socks. I also discovered that the completely implausible one in an off-the-shoulders blue dress and high heels had a 'bitch-slap' combo move, which I was inordinately amused by. I actually seemed to do better using the dance mat than the controller, too. We almost got sath to join in but quoth_rachel said that she was forbidden to move, so neither of them played :-(.
After a while we got slightly worn out by dance-mat Tekken, and had a look at the other games. The first one I picked out was called Ico. We were all intreigued and slightly worried about a game with a 'hold hands' button. You were a weird Viking boy with a big length of wood. Wandering around hitting things with a massive stick is fun. A few rooms later you had to beat up these weird black cloud-things to stop them carrying off this pretty elf-girl in a cage. For some reason you didn't seem to be able to hit her with the stick, although you could herd her out of the cage with it. You had to hold her hand to lead her around. I kept losing her at the next lot of bad guys, though, so I got bored with that and picked out Baldur's Gate: Dark Allience to have a go at. Dwarf fighters with big battle-axes are fun.
Eventuallydreema started to get edgy, because he'd got to drive me home and then get himself and sath back up to Cambridge, and it was getting quite late. So we went upstairs to the computers with net-access to try and find quoth_rachel a train, but it transpired that she'd really, really wanted to get the train that'd left a few minutes ago, and the next one wasn't until 21:02 (it was 19:39). As no-one was particularly happy about her having to wait around that long, we found one that she could get from Redhill if she ran from train to train, and eventually concluded it'd be best all round if we drove her to Redhill to catch it, because it wasn't that far out of our way, and she didn't have a coat so she'd freeze if she missed it and had to sit and wait. So we got to introduce sath and quoth_rachel to the Big Stereo System (as they insisted on sitting together in the back of the car despite dreema's warning about what was prohibited on the seats of his car - not that they'd been anything other than suprisingly innocent the entire day, actually). And that was about it, really.
Friday
On Friday, Sath was meant to arrive at our school. Friday was also the day for the school computer system to be shut down because they're renovating it over half-term. All the computers in the library, the computer rooms and the tech rooms were shut down - the only ones remaining were the bastion of civilisation known as the Pod, containing lovely shiny new fast computers, hidden out of the way behind the Y9/10 lockers, and hence my preferred destination for in-school computering activities anyhow. Throughout the day, these stopped working one by one - crashing, then refusing to recognise anyone's username, even the 'ict' and other administrative accounts - until at lunchtime only one was left (on which was a Y9 by the name of Annabel, playing Neopets games, to the vast frustration of everyone else who wanted to do such trivial things as rescue coursework and print out homework).
By the end of school on Friday I was becoming a little worried, as standard operating procedure is for Sath to find me, and not being in the maths room this was likely to be a little difficult. I checked the places that reasonable people would hide - the locker area, the maths room, the common room - but no Sath. Wandering desolately down a corridor, watching workmen mess with network cable, I remembered The One Working Computer In The School. So I enter the Pod and yes, despite none of the other computers in the room being on and network cables being messed with, said computer does indeed still work! So Plan B can go ahead - logging onto SP and whining. This soon produced some response from
hatter, who is to be henceforth known as the Source Of All Mobile Numbers. (He first attempted to ring Sath, but as he's her pet stalker she ignored the call, so he had to dig out dreema's number instead.) This revealed that they were sitting around outside the school, similarly uncertain of where to meet up. By the time I'd thanked people for their help (including a rather overenthusiastic
marnanel who thought that a Sath in my school would be hiding in a box ready to leap out and distribute huggles, and was quite excessively bouncy about the idea) and got out the door, both sath and dreema were at the gate to meet me, and the sath did indeed demonstrate the deadly run-and-hug technique. Apparently sath had been quite able to find Liz as many times as she wanted, but her homing instincts only worked for her, not for me. Anyway, after much complaining about sath's navigational skills and habit of calling the turning just after it had been passed, we made it to dreema's car, and hence back to my house with only one incidence of post-junction-calling on my part (which really *wasn't* on purpose!). Saturday
dreema texted sath to say that he'd arrive about 11:15, then turned up at 11:00. Thankfully I hadn't done my normal trick of leaving everything until the last minute and had packed my bag before 10:30 (which was the earliest time he'd said he might get here). The journey to Horsham was thankfully fairly uneventful - no massive hold-ups on the M25 or anything. dreema has a pretty impressive stereo system :-). We got to Horsham Station to acquire a quoth_rachel on time almost to the second, and then hung around in the carpark choosing music. sath's phone went off, but when she got to it, it wasn't displaying 'missed call' or anything, so she strenuously denied that it was hers. We went back to sorting out music, and then sath's phone got a text message from quoth_rachel, which simply read 'Where are you?'. We decided that replying with 'Here. Where are you?' was not the most helpful of solutions, and hence headed off to the main station building to find her. This tactic worked, suprisingly, although quoth_rachel annoyed the ticket inspector by being more interested in hugging Sath than showing her ticket to him. (I'm not sure how quoth_rachel expected us to find her inside the bit of the station you needed tickets to get into, but anyway.) marble finding">Having acquired a
quoth_rachel, we were now well on our way to doing a good bit of marblescaring. After only one wrong turning, leading to a significantly larger roundabout than expected, we managed to find the house of the marble, and duely invaded. After reassuring him that I'd forgotten my axe, we got drinks and settled down for a spot of quoth_rachelconfusing. I don't think we managed to convince her that she absolutely had to spod more, though. Eventually we decided to go to the park. On the way, it was established that I had also forgotten to bring any sharp sticks (apparently prodding with such is the only way to get marble to talk). This was shown not to be a problem due to the wide availability of fairly blunt sticks which appeared to do the job (or is that the jab?) adequately... On arriving at the park, after avoiding the scary people on wheels, we went to torment the poor innocent dragon statue, in the middle of the woefully inadquate maze (it was a perfectly good *maze*, it was just that the wall-hedges were about 30cm high and hence could be stepped over with little difficulty). I tried following the right-hand walls, and
sath and quoth_rachel tried following the left-hand walls, but we just went all around the outside of the maze to all of the exits rather than into the middle. We did find the right way in the end, but I got fed up and cheated eventually, so I could start taking photos (which if my ability in putting up the XF and DWCon photos is anything to go by, will languish on my hard drive forever). After posing with the dragon and some sticks (and chasing marble around with said sticks), we wandered over to the kiddie playground. I immediately spotted the merry-go-round, but waited until all the small children had cleared the immediate area before sath and I invaded. Despite the best efforts of us and marble, it was a very pathetic merry-go-round indeed, and hardly spun at all; sath wouldn't agree with this assessment though, as she got quite dizzy :-). After this we wandered into town in search of food (on the way finding larger and larger sticks to fence with, culminating in my finding of half a small branch, quite a sturdy staff of wood about 3cm in diameter, which beat everyone else's... with the bark removed it was also nice and smooth, although it did have a bit of nasty red fungus growing on it). We 'posted' the sticks in the green postbox (i.e. the bin - I wanted to post them in the real postbox but eventually decided that was too mean to the poor postpeople) before we went to feed, which I was slightly upset about because I did like the big strong stick I'd found, but I can understand why we might have been asked to leave fooding-places if we'd wandered in carrying sticks. We found several potential fooding-places, but most of them didn't have anywhere in particular to sit, or didn't sell anything we felt like eating; we annoyed
marble by claiming that we wanted 'food' and not being particularly specific about what type :-(. Eventually we ended up in Costa, because it was about 3pm and we wanted somewhere inside to sit. After quoth_rachel almost fainted at the prices and we offered to go elsewhere, marble insisted that it wasn't a problem because he was paying - I think he just wanted to get us sat down and eating somewhere! I do like Costa sandwichthings ('panini') a lot, though, so it was a good choice for me. Not only did I eat mine (turkey, bacon and cheese - mmmm!) I also ate half of quoth_rachel's. And I had a nice hot chocolate. (And sath dusted me with chocolate powder that had got onto her drink can, but that wasn't so nice.) It would have all been wonderful if it wasn't for the staff door that made a really loud bleeping noise every time someone opened it, which made marble jump. On the way back to
marble's house, we stopped to watch the fountain. The fountain looks quite peaceful and sedate until once every eight minutes when lots of water suddenly swooshes down all at once. This made sath jump. Especially given that our intent was to throw her in. Later on we actually got her quite close to the little mini-fountains around the edge (we were spinning them the wrong way round), but still no-one threw her in the fountain. I guess we didn't want to have to find dry clothes for her. We also had a look at lots of DVDs that quoth_rachel Really Didn't Want To Buy, including the Tron DVD. On discovering that sath didn't even know what Tron was and quoth_rachel hadn't seen it, and sighting a video rental place on the way back, we had a look for Tron, but to no avail. When we got back to
marble's, I spotted the dance-mat-controller-thingamy, and decided it would be a great idea to try and play a game it wasn't designed for with it. marble suggested Tekken as a game which didn't overuse the buttons that weren't on the dance mat, so we then proceeded to play a lot of very silly Tekken. Although dreema kept cheating (using the 'tag' button that wasn't on the mat when he had the controller, and sitting down to use the mat, which I couldn't do 'cos I couldn't hit the 'buttons' hard enough). I found out that the Tekken character called Michelle had a deadly low-kick that, used continually, beat up quite a lot of the other characters without really trying, but also made lots of really annoying 'hi-ya!' noises. And had zebra socks. I also discovered that the completely implausible one in an off-the-shoulders blue dress and high heels had a 'bitch-slap' combo move, which I was inordinately amused by. I actually seemed to do better using the dance mat than the controller, too. We almost got sath to join in but quoth_rachel said that she was forbidden to move, so neither of them played :-(.After a while we got slightly worn out by dance-mat Tekken, and had a look at the other games. The first one I picked out was called Ico. We were all intreigued and slightly worried about a game with a 'hold hands' button. You were a weird Viking boy with a big length of wood. Wandering around hitting things with a massive stick is fun. A few rooms later you had to beat up these weird black cloud-things to stop them carrying off this pretty elf-girl in a cage. For some reason you didn't seem to be able to hit her with the stick, although you could herd her out of the cage with it. You had to hold her hand to lead her around. I kept losing her at the next lot of bad guys, though, so I got bored with that and picked out Baldur's Gate: Dark Allience to have a go at. Dwarf fighters with big battle-axes are fun.
Eventually
dreema started to get edgy, because he'd got to drive me home and then get himself and sath back up to Cambridge, and it was getting quite late. So we went upstairs to the computers with net-access to try and find quoth_rachel a train, but it transpired that she'd really, really wanted to get the train that'd left a few minutes ago, and the next one wasn't until 21:02 (it was 19:39). As no-one was particularly happy about her having to wait around that long, we found one that she could get from Redhill if she ran from train to train, and eventually concluded it'd be best all round if we drove her to Redhill to catch it, because it wasn't that far out of our way, and she didn't have a coat so she'd freeze if she missed it and had to sit and wait. So we got to introduce sath and quoth_rachel to the Big Stereo System (as they insisted on sitting together in the back of the car despite dreema's warning about what was prohibited on the seats of his car - not that they'd been anything other than suprisingly innocent the entire day, actually). And that was about it, really.
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Date: 2002-10-23 11:54 pm (UTC)From:I think
The edginess was more due to the fact we were spending a night at a