pre-wedding festivities
Amy and I are doing the drive from Oakland to Los Angeles (Amy is driving); the sun is in our eyes, but it's a nice, comfortable drive; Amy says something that upsets me, about three quarters of the way there ((it's roughly a six hour drive)) We argue a short bit, resolve the argument, but remain somewhat irked for the rest of the drive.
We pull into our destination a short while after darkness descends. It's an oddly constructed place--as we first pull into the main driveway, we're slowed and asked to roll down our windows; we're then asked a number of questions by a security guard and allowed to move forward to the next station (around a slight bend).
While Amy's dealing with the second station I decide to get out and look around, stretch my legs, yadda. I walk around a bit, manage to get to the end of lot, look around, come back; Amy's already gone inside the building at this point, so I follow suit.
Brandon's inside showing Amy what he's been doing on his laptop: it's an unfamiliar OS to me, though it looks like he's playing with a blend of Mathematica and perl. We all talk a bit and then Amy and I head to bed.
I don't remember getting to bed or falling asleep (shows how tired I was, right? ;). But in the morning I come to in our actual bedroom, sun streaming through a window, dust motes floating lazily about. Amy's up before me and she's acting affectionate, focusing on me ((the cats are conspicuously absent, but I don't mind)). Then she gets up to go to the bathroom.
She's just gone for a second, but apparently people were milling about outside--or we're all waking up at the same time; some sort of synchronicity is going on. Sweetpea and Karan come in, sweetpea in a colorful sundress, karan somewhat nondescript, and we all exchange smiles give or take some hesitance. Then reddave and otherdave come in past them and try to find room in the bedroom--otherdave keeps asking me something that I don't understand, and blatantly has me confused with someone else. Spazmike can be seen just outside the doorway, and I'm feelinga a bit overwhelmed by people. Amy doesn't come back in, so I go outside--and indeed, she's still in the bathroom. The house melds back into the building we stayed at as I walk down the hallway and I go for a walk to help wakeup and gather my wits before facing everyone.
The road I'm on becomes a meadow and then a tree branch just as wide as the road had been, only more curved. The greens are the purest grass green, blues the clearest sky blue with varying values of darkness; the sun is bright but not unpleasant, adding a certain oomph of yellow into the pale white/mottled brown of the branch I'm standing on. I hear a waterfall in the far distance, can smell the dew.
I watch an enormous ((ten foot diameter, 25 foot length)) cylindrical weather-balloon thing ((made out of some extra-thick semi-glossy parachute-type-material moved around by two robotic propellor-rockets and there's a voiceover of someone saying how much control the two propellor-rockets have. The cylindrical weather-balloon is being moved through the space of a cylinder just larger than it formed by power lines and information cables. It bounces nerve-wrackingly against some of the thicker power lines under it, but seems to come to no harm, then veers off of this track into the wide expanse away from the tree.
I decide to explore, and wind up having traversed a lot of ground and wanting to head back; somehow I'm on a branch that Alllllllllllmost reaches the branch that I came from. My (mild? semi-rational?) fear of heights kicks in as I dangle off of some small outgrowths of the one branch and JUMP to the other; heart pounding, I clutch onto anything that will give me purchase. Now I'm up-close and personal with a network of branches roughly a foot in diameter; there are odd little loops and sworls and whatnot of the various branches making good grips, but it takes some thought to figure out how to get onto solid footing without having to crawl upside-down.
A piece of loose bark falls from under my hand and when I look down, the lunch I never had nearly follows it. My hands grip tighter and counter-productively begin to sweat, while my heart beats so loudly in my ears I can barely hear the forest. I don't want to die alone, like this--I want to get back to Amy. I calm down.
While I ponder there, I notice that there's life in the trees--under my fingers where the bark sloughed off there's a trail of SUPER-SMALL ants, still perfectly formed (roughly two-three times the size of a flea). I brush off some other debris to see where the ant trail goes, and it turns out that debris is really a triumvarate of amazingly iridescent leaf-hoppers, veinous-thin wings with the opacity and oily-colors of particularly spectacular beetle chitin.
My breath caught, I finagle my way back onto solid ground, finally, and start walking back to the party; I pass Quigza at a cafe on the laptop just past the meadow, and we exchange a few pleasantries, and I carry on--only nothing seems the same. The roads are all more center-of-city industrial...
I stop at a road where traffic flowing impedes pedestrian progress; there are no signs, though people are queuing up antsily. Some people try to dive through but jump back at the last moment. Past the road before us are raised walkways, chain-link on either side, going out further than I can see. To the left there seems like there might be an easier place to cross the street, so I walk down to that (it's a T intersection with the intersecting road going off in the same direction as the walkways). There're still no signs, but the traffic entering the roadway has things moving more slowly, and I manage to slip around traffic. The new road seems like endless cityness, walkways off and to the right, somehow not immediately reachable, and to the left are just building after building.
[[Cats running in through the catdoor and then yowling at the cat outside wake me up; can you believe it took an HOUR to post this!? 5:59am - 7:01am]]
We pull into our destination a short while after darkness descends. It's an oddly constructed place--as we first pull into the main driveway, we're slowed and asked to roll down our windows; we're then asked a number of questions by a security guard and allowed to move forward to the next station (around a slight bend).
While Amy's dealing with the second station I decide to get out and look around, stretch my legs, yadda. I walk around a bit, manage to get to the end of lot, look around, come back; Amy's already gone inside the building at this point, so I follow suit.
Brandon's inside showing Amy what he's been doing on his laptop: it's an unfamiliar OS to me, though it looks like he's playing with a blend of Mathematica and perl. We all talk a bit and then Amy and I head to bed.
I don't remember getting to bed or falling asleep (shows how tired I was, right? ;). But in the morning I come to in our actual bedroom, sun streaming through a window, dust motes floating lazily about. Amy's up before me and she's acting affectionate, focusing on me ((the cats are conspicuously absent, but I don't mind)). Then she gets up to go to the bathroom.
She's just gone for a second, but apparently people were milling about outside--or we're all waking up at the same time; some sort of synchronicity is going on. Sweetpea and Karan come in, sweetpea in a colorful sundress, karan somewhat nondescript, and we all exchange smiles give or take some hesitance. Then reddave and otherdave come in past them and try to find room in the bedroom--otherdave keeps asking me something that I don't understand, and blatantly has me confused with someone else. Spazmike can be seen just outside the doorway, and I'm feelinga a bit overwhelmed by people. Amy doesn't come back in, so I go outside--and indeed, she's still in the bathroom. The house melds back into the building we stayed at as I walk down the hallway and I go for a walk to help wakeup and gather my wits before facing everyone.
The road I'm on becomes a meadow and then a tree branch just as wide as the road had been, only more curved. The greens are the purest grass green, blues the clearest sky blue with varying values of darkness; the sun is bright but not unpleasant, adding a certain oomph of yellow into the pale white/mottled brown of the branch I'm standing on. I hear a waterfall in the far distance, can smell the dew.
I watch an enormous ((ten foot diameter, 25 foot length)) cylindrical weather-balloon thing ((made out of some extra-thick semi-glossy parachute-type-material moved around by two robotic propellor-rockets and there's a voiceover of someone saying how much control the two propellor-rockets have. The cylindrical weather-balloon is being moved through the space of a cylinder just larger than it formed by power lines and information cables. It bounces nerve-wrackingly against some of the thicker power lines under it, but seems to come to no harm, then veers off of this track into the wide expanse away from the tree.
I decide to explore, and wind up having traversed a lot of ground and wanting to head back; somehow I'm on a branch that Alllllllllllmost reaches the branch that I came from. My (mild? semi-rational?) fear of heights kicks in as I dangle off of some small outgrowths of the one branch and JUMP to the other; heart pounding, I clutch onto anything that will give me purchase. Now I'm up-close and personal with a network of branches roughly a foot in diameter; there are odd little loops and sworls and whatnot of the various branches making good grips, but it takes some thought to figure out how to get onto solid footing without having to crawl upside-down.
A piece of loose bark falls from under my hand and when I look down, the lunch I never had nearly follows it. My hands grip tighter and counter-productively begin to sweat, while my heart beats so loudly in my ears I can barely hear the forest. I don't want to die alone, like this--I want to get back to Amy. I calm down.
While I ponder there, I notice that there's life in the trees--under my fingers where the bark sloughed off there's a trail of SUPER-SMALL ants, still perfectly formed (roughly two-three times the size of a flea). I brush off some other debris to see where the ant trail goes, and it turns out that debris is really a triumvarate of amazingly iridescent leaf-hoppers, veinous-thin wings with the opacity and oily-colors of particularly spectacular beetle chitin.
My breath caught, I finagle my way back onto solid ground, finally, and start walking back to the party; I pass Quigza at a cafe on the laptop just past the meadow, and we exchange a few pleasantries, and I carry on--only nothing seems the same. The roads are all more center-of-city industrial...
I stop at a road where traffic flowing impedes pedestrian progress; there are no signs, though people are queuing up antsily. Some people try to dive through but jump back at the last moment. Past the road before us are raised walkways, chain-link on either side, going out further than I can see. To the left there seems like there might be an easier place to cross the street, so I walk down to that (it's a T intersection with the intersecting road going off in the same direction as the walkways). There're still no signs, but the traffic entering the roadway has things moving more slowly, and I manage to slip around traffic. The new road seems like endless cityness, walkways off and to the right, somehow not immediately reachable, and to the left are just building after building.
[[Cats running in through the catdoor and then yowling at the cat outside wake me up; can you believe it took an HOUR to post this!? 5:59am - 7:01am]]