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At Trumpingtom park and ride, I specifically asked the bus driver 'does this bus stop in Emmanuel Road' and he said 'yes'. I spent the bus journey half-reading the bits of the Nitpicker's Guide I was goign to give bacck to Neil (along with a Starcraft Stratagy Guide and a PsiWin2 CD) that I liked best, while half keeping an eye out for the stops I recognised.. When we got to Emmanuel Road, did the bus stop? well, you tell me. I then spent a few minutes arguing with the bus driver while keeping one eye on the way we were going so I could get back (I spotted Neil waiting, and he saw me, and tried to run after the bus but busses are faster than people), and finally he let me out (after declaiming about how 'it is not possible' and acting like he didn't understand much English, which is fine in a bus driver until you want to explain something to them, like why they really must stop when they have been told they mustn't stop.
Anyway, I wasn't too far off when I argued him down, so I walked back really fast to let off some steam and was feeling slightly less vicious towards all bus drivers when I found Neil (who thankfully had just gone back to where I'd seen him so that I could find him). He showed me Emmanuel's Really Secure Side Door, which a keycard got broken in and the porters won't fix for some reason, and we went to eat coconut macaroons and talk about rolling 3-sided dice and proving that x^0=1. Sandy was meant to show up, but she didn't. We also worked out for the zillionth time that bcc32 is broken (it kept warning us that a function wasn't prototyped even though it was defined before the line it was complaining about, and even kept complaining when we prototyped it as well!). Oh, and we ate Supernoodles, due to being too lazy to go anywhere to eat.
We retrieved an email from Marn saying 'I wanna come to Poohsoc, but I've lost your email and forgotten where it is' when we went online to check with gcc on Pinkstuff that it was bcc32 being broken and not our program. (it was bcc32.) Through reading LJ and asking Chezzie on Snowplains, we worked out that Marn was prolly on his way to Neil's room, so we just waited for him. A very scary Marnanel eventually turned up, complete with a vague kind of 'I forgot to shave for a couple of months' beard, an orangeish waistcoat and toenails alternately painted bright green and bright orange. He then proceeded to talk about Firinel non-stop, blind us with this flourescant orange bible cover which was several sizes too big for his bible, and talk about Firinel some more. I finally managed to give him back that Romans notebook that he'd left at the LRC meet, rather a while ago.
Poohsoc was in an interstingly convoluted building, with another Really Secure Front Door and half a ton of small white internal staircases winding up and down all over the place. Everything looked new and white and shiny, including the room we ended up in. Someone had a bag full of Kinder Surprise eggs, which was the source of much amusement, especially when Neil announced he'd never had a Kinder Surprise egg before. There were a couple of plastic longboat-type-things (which we attempted to float in the sink-in-a-wardrobe; one floated upside-down and the other one floated on its side), a maggot with arms in a castle which Neil thought looked like a Portaloo, a dustbin-monster, and The Fish-Duck (a pelican and a little fish that fit inside it; experiments showed that the fish did indeed float just underwater).
There seemed to be a running joke involving censuring Neil for no good reason lots of times, which seemed a bit mean. I got to be the narrator for the main reading (in which Tigger comes to the Forest and has Breakfast), which was fun, and Marn proposed that we censure the typesetter for spelling Tigger 'Tiger' at one point, putting 'sand' instead of 'said' at another and missing out a full stop. Someone else proposed to censure Marn for criticising the 'testaments' (as the Pooh books are called at Poohsoc). Both votes were hung, so I decided 'for' for both :-). We then somehow got onto discussing how one of the stories contained a geometric progression, and hence ended up reading that one too (in which Rabbit has a Busy Day), and I got to be Rabbit, who I did in a very pompous kind of voice (although it went a bit squeaky in places). (The maths bit is where Eeyore is jumping up and down on his 3, no, 6, no, 12 sticks.)
I had to poke Neil and insist we leave at about 6pm 'cos the meeting was showing no signs of finishing. As we got close to the bus-stops I suddenly realised I'd left my fleece in Neil's room, so he ran back to get it while Marn and I tried to work out where my bus actually stopped. We discovered that it stopped where I thought it did, but only on the way *back* from the Grafton centre. (It said this on a little sign by the side of the road just as we'd decided to start looking for info, which Marn was quite impressed with, saying it was like some fairies had put it there.) The Park&Ride we went to was a new one, which was probably why it was complicated. We waited for at least 20mins while busses to the other four Park&Ride places went by, and I'd just got out my phone to apologise for being late (and had to chase my ticket down the road) when the right bus turned up. (We'd been talking to this guy who asked us if this was the right stop for the Park&Ride that I wanted too, and then turned out to be reading the book that Marn and Neil started discussing.)
It was only about 7:30pm when I got home, but for some reason I was shattered, so I just ate some tea and got some sleep.
