So this is what my apartment looks like

After a whirlwind tour of Kingston and then going to a lan party as soon as I got back, I've finally gotten a chance to not do anything. I think I'm getting sick too, but more on that later.

For nearly two full days all Kevin and I ate were hamburgers. Mostly fast food burgers, to be precise. Big Macs on the way to Kingston, McChickens that night, Harvey's Angus burger for breakfast, McDonald's double cheeseburgers later on, burgers at The Brass that night, Harvey's bacon cheeseburger for lunch the next day. I don't remember exactly when we ate each one, but it was far too frequent. Then, when I got back I decided to cook hamburgers, and that night at the lan we decided to walk to McDonald's where I got more double cheeseburgers.

I'm amazed I'm not dead.

I won't bother talking about the moving we did, mostly because there wasn't really a lot of stuff to move and the places were all half decent (one had a nasty staircase, but we got everything in with no difficulties). The worst thing to move in 3 different moves was a 250 pound dirty freezer, and even it didn't go too badly.

The first move featured the worst stench in the history of smells. There was an open garbage can at the side of the house, and apparently somebody had thrown some dog crap in there at one point in time, and then let the can sit for almost 2 years. Add rain and more garbage, allow for decomposition and what smelled like fermentation, then dump the water out of the can. Instant biohazard. None of us had any type of mask, and even then I don't think they would have helped. I don't think I've ever had a smell make me want to throw up before, but that one did. Luckily I didn't.

On to the real purpose of the trip: fun! The night we got there, we were going to maybe go for wings and just hang out, but that didn't pan out. We got into town pretty late and everywhere was packed. We found Greg and Jay and decided to try getting in somewhere. The wait was pretty bad, so we decided to play poker and drink 40s of Olde English. I'm no longer a stranger to malt liquor, and I'm glad I stayed away from it for so long. I have to admit that once it sears your taste buds off it's not so bad. I managed to get through that part by following my rule for consuming bad beer: Don't let yourself taste it.

Jay, Greg, and I played the first game, and Kevin came over for the second. Only Greg and I were drinking, and I managed to win the first game and lose the second. Greg finished second in the first game and won the second. Say what you want, but apparently OE makes you a better poker player.

On Wednesday we decided to drop into our old workplace to see where Twobelly was working. Kevin and I worked for Frost the Mover the past 2 summers, and last year we were almost always working with the same driver, who the full-time guys affectionatly nicknamed Twobelly on account of his size. Turned out he was out on Wolfe Island, so we decided to wait for him. That got boring, so we went looking for food and then did something else, and eventually he was back at the warehouse. General pestering ensued, zingers were lobbed back and forth, and we escaped before anybody realized that we were wearing our work shirts when we didn't actually work there.

Big changes there. Mark, the former dispatcher, is now doing sales, and Eddy, the old warehouseman, is now doing dispatch. As far as I know they don't have anybody working in the warehouse full time, so things might get messy down there. Everybody wanted me to go back to working there, but I think I've moved on. Besides, it doesn't make sense to move just for the summer.

It was good to see all the guys again, even if I did disappoint them by staying away.

Wednesday night after eating our Brass burgers, we introduced Greg to Robot Chicken. I highly recommend finding and downloading as many episodes of this as you possibly can. It's sick and twisted and utterly hilarious. Kevin and I wound up quoting it the entire weekend and probably scared a couple people. The sketch with Skeletor, Lex Luthor, Mumm-Ra, and Cobra Commander carpooling is probably my favourite from the entire series. It's done by Seth Green, so you know it's awesome.

Thursday was an exciting night. The day was sort of a wash, moving for people, moving for Kevin, going to Home Depot with Bjorn, woohoo. Thursday night was pretty awesome. One of the Bands' highland dancers was moving away or something (I missed the premise) so everybody was supposed to go to the Tir Nan Og for karaoke, but that didn't work out because everybody else in Kingston had the same idea. We moved it to the Merchant and had almost as good a time. It was good to be hanging out in a pub with a group of friends again. I didn't realize I missed it.

Afterwards, we decided to go play poker in the AMS boardroom. For the unfamiliar, the AMS is the student government at Queen's, and they have a nice boardroom. Giant table with a nice glossy surface, big comfortable chairs, and a perfect poker setup. We had 11 people playing, so the pot was significant enough to be worthwile winning. Winner got $40, second place got $10, third got their $5 buy-in back.

Somehow with 11 people it went faster than our games in Ottawa do. It only took 4 hours to play the entire thing, and it came down to Jay and I. I was short stack, and lost it in my usual manner of going all in and losing to the hand just 1 step better than mine. I put up a bit of a fight, but I got outplayed in the end.

We finished around 5 in the morning, and by 5:30 we had returned the rental truck. I got to bed around 6 or so, and we had to be up by 9 to move another of Kevin's friends. He managed to set the alarm on his phone to vibrate, and we missed that deadline. We weren't too late, though, and we still managed to get almost everything of hers moved.

Kevin took off to give a campus tour, I got in touch with Aki and went for coffee, then caught the bus back to Ottawa.

On the way back, Mat called me and told me about a poker game to kick off the lan, and I naturally said I was in. I wasn't sure about the lan at first, and I didn't really decide until they were on their way to pick me up.

In what would become a recurring theme, I finished second in that game, eventually losing to Steve in my usual manner. Yes, he won and managed to avoid being out first, until I arbitrarily decided that he was out first. He picked up a nice pot, and I kept my buy-in, so it was all good. I managed to come back from the brink of disaster to make it into the heads up play, but then my cards decided to rebel against me. I don't think I got a single good hand the entire time. When you're short stack, that's a major problem.

Following that we played some Counter Strike. I play under the name "Scott sucks at CS", and it's fitting. Still, it's fun and everybody there had it installed. Sometime later we got a game of Tron up and running, which I'm pretty good at. We went in search of double cheeseburgers and tried to watch Kung Fu Hustle, but the subtitles weren't working, so we decided to just go to bed instead.

Next morning I got my copy of Guild Wars. My precious, my love. After playing off and on during the day (while other people were playing Swat4, which didn't interest me at all) I got my guy back up to level 7. Scott the Green lives again, but this time he's a Warrior/Monk who does a whole lotta smiting. Or he will once I get some smiting skills. He still plays air guitar on the field of battle though.

Derek and I did some questing while the other guys played Axis and Allies, and after we stopped around 2 or 3 in the morning, we watched the A&A game rage on for another 3 hours. I think we decided that Japan gave up its war effort in 1963, and Germany looked ready to fall until Japan gave it all it's money before surrendering. Russia had lost the war long before all of that, so they at least probably finished within the real scope of World War 2. I'll have to ask someone how long it really went, but I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the 80s or after.

We don't normally try to equate A&A games to real time scales, but this one was long enough to deserve it. It was 6 in the morning when Cid surrendered Japan so he could drive home, and they'd been going for 7 hours at that point.

Not long after that I got home and promptly collapsed.

I woke up with a nasty cough that hurts enough to leave me winded for a few seconds, and for some reason I can't stop burping. Both symptoms are really annoying, and the sore throat just makes it worse. I don't know if it's from 4 nights of sleeping on couches and bare mattresses with couch cushions or worse for pillows, but I'm sure they didn't help matters much.

While in Kingston I decided to get around to taking some pictures I'd had planned for a while, and now I have the start of a photo essay of Queen's campus at night. A bunch of the pictures came out blurry, but I think I can fix that when I shrink them, or do some stuff with Photoshop. The ones that turned out are pretty good, I think. I'll put some of them on the net later, maybe. I got one of the Biosciences Complex that looked absolutely awesome on the camera preview but turned out blurry, and that's the main one I want to save. It's an incredible picture.

Also on the highlight reel are a picture of a random sock on the ground and one of Wayne working Campus security. The night mode on the camera works pretty well, and it uses the ambient light to add a touch of colour to the pictures, so most of them turned out with a slightly reddish tint. I like the effect it gives, so I'm not going to try to correct it.

While Kevin was taking a nap on Thursday afternoon I went wandering and got another good photo idea: places that are designed to be busy, but are empty. I got the idea while looking at some empty tables in the JDUC (the main student centre on campus), but by the time I went back to Kev's place and got the camera they'd filled up. Undeterred, I went in search of others.

This type of project is probably best done when there aren't any students around and not during exams when people are either studying or blowing off steam, so I mostly got pictures of classrooms. I got a nice one of the BioSci atrium with nobody in it, so that's two good pictures that building has given me.

I don't know why, but I really like the visual effect of rows of empty chairs, especially when they're supposed to be filled. I'm sure I could pull some artsy-fartsy reasoning about the usage of space and negative relief or the role of man in the universe as expressed through the medium of architecture and interior design, but I won't. Sometimes it's better to like something for no reason.

I've been working on this entry for an hour and 20 minutes, and I think I've said everything that needed to be said. Good deal.