That’s all I have left. I had 3 weeks in May too but they seemed so short. I’m heading to San Antonio and Austin later this week to hang out with the family and to a friend’s BBQ so should be nice and relaxing. Lots of Rock Band, eating, possibly movie watching going on. I may try to read all of Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood or watch it on youtube maybe. My remaining to do list is as follows:

• Upgrade computer
  • Add 300GB Velociraptor hard drive
  • Move to Windows 7 64 bit edition
• Beat Borderlands
• Beat Super Mario Galaxy 1
• Beat Dragon Quest 9
• Get all the Starcraft 2 single player achievements
• Catch up on various movies (Toy Story 3 perhaps)
• Clean apartment

The computer upgrading is going to be a huge pain as I’m moving from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Win7. This means a full format and reinstalling all my junk. My actual main concern is iTunes as my library is scattered across 2 drives so in order to be sneaky I have to preserve some of the file structure so when it opens the library file it’ll still see everything in the same spot. I also just downloaded and installed 30GB of Steam games so it will suck to re-download all of that. I’m hoping to cheat by just moving the Steam folder and seeing if I can still launch games.

My secondary concern is that I should probably be using the velociraptor as my primary drive but due to how the upgrade process will probably play out, I will probably be stuck using my current drive as the windows drive and I’ll install all my games onto the raptor.

It will be so confusing in the end. I’m currently setup on a 2 drive system. One 300GB internal with all programs installed, one 750GB external where data files are kept. The future plan is going to be a 3 drive system where the slow 300GB drive will house Windows/regular apps, the fast 300GB drive will house games, and the external will still just be the data/backup. I actually have another external I use to backup the external drive as well. It seems kind of crazy how much storage I have for practically nothing important.

Borderlands I’m somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 way through. It’s pretty fun and great so far but on PC it does feel like a port of the console version. The menus are a little clunky to work with the mouse. The game does this rollercoaster in difficulty at times where you’re breezing through because you have such awesome guns, then you hit a new area and it’s outrageous because now everyone has like 9x the health. I played a little single player and the difficulty is laughable at best. Coop is the way to go with this one.

Super Mario Galaxy I’m about 2/3 of the way through and I’m just not motivated to play the rest. It’s fun, but because I’m playing in very erratic spurts I’m not drawn to it. Lack of achievements also makes me want to get the minimum number of stars and call it a day. It’s strange, I want to play SMG2 so bad because of it’s incredible reviews, but SMG1 likewise had incredible reviews. So maybe I’m just building it all up too much.

Dragon Quest 9 I only just started. I’m determined to like it. Billions of people love this series and I don’t know why I can’t get into it. I always give these games 2-3 hours then stop playing. I really liked Dragon Quest 8, got stuck, then quit. Again I only gave it about 3 hours or so. I started 9 and it seems enjoyable but very classic turn based RPG. My recent experiences with Mass Effect have really shown me the differences in Eastern/Western RPG implementation. With ME2 being so cutting edge, it’s strange to feel like I’m sliding backwards when I play Dragon Quest 9. Again though, the game has exceptional reviews and I have to find out why.

I haven’t talked about it much but I do love Starcraft 2. It really is the game I’ve been waiting for for 12 years. You can check my profile here: Shockwave.759. I’m drawn to achievements for some reason. Maybe it’s that feeling that when I was finally able to kill Emerald and Ruby weapon in Final Fantasy 7 all I could do was talk about it. Who knows if people believe me. With achievements now you have this record of permanence. Some games do horrible things with achievements but I find that Starcraft 2 hits just the right note with them. I’ve finished over 75% of the single player campaign achievements and I’m determined to get all of them. I’m almost NEVER inclined to replay a game, especially if it lacks new game + features, but I’ll gladly replay SC2 to knock out some of the more elaborate achievements. My first run through I chose options/tech upgrades on my needs, but the next runs will be more achievement focused.

I have a backlog of movies I need to churn through in addition to TV shows and anime to watch. I lost my DVR due to my cable company moving to all digital broadcast which cut out my computer’s TV tuner, which really sucks because the tuner has a digital tuner but Windows Media Center doesn’t pick up the lineup. I’m hoping that the upgrade to Win7 will fix this but who knows. I would like to see Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me but I’m guessing I’ll only catch those when they hit DVD.

Rex and Mattie will be 9 (I think?) on Saturday and I won’t even be here. Hopefully they don’t have a big party while I’m out. This is most assuredly the longest I’ve ever had cats. Mostly because as a kid we had indoor/outdoor cats and they would eventually end up roadkill somewhere along the line. I never let my cats out for fear of instant car death scenarios. However since I’m graduating soon and plan on moving I feel like my time with them is soon coming to an end. I’m pretty sure I’ll be giving them to my parents but I’m not really sure if that’s for the best. I feel like I should give them to someone locally but the likelihood that I’ll ever see them again drops off substantially. The situation I’m trying to avoid is having to have another roommate that will deal with my cats, but if I can live alone then I’ll probably keep them.

I actually have so many more things I’d like to do but I doubt I’ll even have the time to get to half of this list. My fall semester is loaded with more classes than I’ve ever taken and they all range from moderate to hard with maybe only 1 class of busy work. I am however looking forward to it for some reason. I think by the time May rolls around I’ll finally be able to put it all behind me and take my next steps feeling like a new person.

Intermittently I have problems with my cable connection. The last time I had a problem some guy came in, questioned why I had my setup the way it was setup then said something outside was broken and giving me poor signal quality. They replaced it and my net was working fine again.

This time I had a very super weird problem. My net connection to any single thing was always terrible (200Kb or so) but I could have tons of connections and it will max out my connection at around 4Mb. Meaning if I have 1 youtube video up, it sucks. I have to start it and hit pause and wait for it to download a bit. But if I had 10 youtube videos up they would all max out my connection up to about 4Mb but each be individually slow regardless of how much other stuff I was downloading. Things like Free Download Manager and bit torrent were still great and able to download things super fast.

So I finally have free time and call up the cable company and they came by yesterday. I explained that last time some weird thing outside had to be replaced. So he checked that thing and said he replaced all the connectors. But before that he also questioned my setup.

My apt has only one cable connection in the living room on the farthest wall. So what I do is I split it at that source 2 ways, one to the TV and one super long coax to the bedroom. In the bedroom I split it 3 ways, one to the modem and two to my TVs (one physical and one TV tuner on my computer). It’s a pretty nasty setup I imagine to have it split so many times.

Ok so he grills me about it and says that I should strongly consider moving my modem to the living room at the first split. The problem with this is that I have a super long ethernet cable back out to the living room supplying my Xbox with net. So I’d have to do some of crazy things to that working. Strangely on my 3 way splitter it turns out the modem was on the wrong prong and that matters as the splitter isn’t evenly balanced and one gets better signal than the others. This helped a little. In the end he left as he had done all he could and I was looking at 5Mb connection or so.

Thinking and knowing my setup was suboptimal I decided to go ahead and move the modem to the living room. It wasn’t a huge pain but I had to bring the router out there as well. This left me with the long ethernet cable I had been using for the Xbox now going into my PC but then the bedroom wouldn’t have any extra ethernet ports so I added a switch in there.

Ok once all this was done the modem was awesome. One speed test showed 11Mb which is 1Mb faster than I should get and what I would chalk up as a fluke, however most other tests showed I was at 10Mb which is what I should be getting. However now my bedroom TV reception sucked. I’m totally boggled but at the same time this is probably the same phenomenon that was making my modem suck in the bedroom.

So I look at the super long coax cable and I had forgotten it was like 50 feet too long. So I have this huge bundle of coax hiding in the bottom of the end table of my couch. Well I pick it up to see if maybe my cats had eaten it or something and it looked fine, then I put it back. Well after that the TV reception in the bedroom was flawless. I suspect there might have been some kind of kink in the cable or something and my messing with it unkinked it. The idea that all of this stemmed from that is kind of ridiculous but I wouldn’t put it past reality.

Interestingly I asked the guy before he left about these Motorola signal boosters I always see on sale and if they worked and he said they work great but the problem is you don’t want too strong a signal coming into the modem so there’s some weird caveat there that I don’t fully understand but it is interesting to know that those things work.

Anyway, the main lesson here is manage your cables well and make sure they’re in good condition. Also put your modem as close to a wall outlet and before as many splitters as you can.

As usual each May I trek down to San Antonio to celebrate the combined birthdays of my sister, brother and myself. I picked up Uncharted 2 for my brother and my sister requested Star Trek Season 2 on blu ray.

I watched my brother cruise through Uncharted 2 and it was totally awesome. I can see why people love that game so much. He blew through it in 2 days, both school nights, so the game is overall really short, however the experience is nearly unparalleled. I think the way they presented the game is phenomenal and extremely polished. If I had one gripe, and this is really silly, it is that they used depth of field blur heavily. It adds a sense of realism but not really. I mean when you look at an object in real life you don’t really notice everything else is out of focus. When you do that in a game it seems more like a technique to force the player to look at a specific thing. I had this problem with Avatar (the movie) as well. Let us look where we want please and our eyes will do the blurring for us. Other than that very minor problem the game was totally excellent.

I made my sister and brother watch Summer Wars. Summer Wars was made by the same people who made The Girl Who Leapt Through Time which I thought was excellent. Actually both are excellent. Anyway I let them watch GWLTT but it was out on DVD and they watched it in English (which the dubbing is really good actually) and they loved it. Summer Wars hasn’t had a DVD release to my knowledge so I made them watch it subtitled. I think that was too much for my brother plus I don’t think he was too invested in the story so he quit halfway through but my sister liked it. I guess 50/50 isn’t so bad.

My sister picked me up the second disc of Gurren Lagann so my collection is now complete. She also picked me up a Green Lantern shirt which I need to shrink down a little. Overall a nice haul since I don’t ask for things really anymore.

Coming home however was kind of a mess. Important facts before I continue:

• I left on the 16th and came home on the 20th.
• I just signed a new lease starting in May. Every time I sign a new lease they give me $50 off my first month on the new lease.
• I don’t usually read my utility bill I get in the mail. I wait for them to post a note on my door. This is due by the 18th
• They usually post said note on my door around the 10th-12th.

Ok so I get home and I see two notices on my door. One saying that I owe nearly $300 and the second one saying that after “multiple” times trying to collect from me, they’ll begin the eviction process at 10AM on the 20th if I don’t pay $180. I read these before I tried opening my door. As I put the key in I wondered if they changed my lock, but it slid right in and opened. As I opened the door I was wondering if they took all my stuff and if so if my cats were still somewhere. I opened the door and there were my cats sleeping on the couch watching TV (automatic timer to deter thieves and entertain my cats).

So an interesting side story is that the past few times I renewed my lease I always get a crazy overdue bill of like a million dollars because they forget that I had 50 dollar reduction for that month so they do like 50 dollars plus 10 dollars it’s late after the 4th so it balloons to some crazy amount. I go to the office and they go “Oh yeah! Forget about it.” then I go about my way.

Combine the above story with the fact that I actually hadn’t received my utility notice yet before I left I guess they added both the 50 I forgot plus utilities plus 10 dollars a day every day it was late and it was nearly 300 bucks. I went in the next day and they say “Oh weird. It shouldn’t be that much. You just owe 30 bucks for utilities.” So I paid and that was a huge sigh of relief. I usually get myself something cool for my birthday so if I had owed 300 bucks then I guess I would have bought myself rent.

So on the topic of getting myself something cool I’ve been needing a computer upgrade for a while. I feel like when I got this processor (Core 2 Duo E6600) I did a bad thing. I have a fairly cramped case and the area where my CPU goes is a total hotspot (800W power supply and a GeForce GTX 280 just below) with cables cluttering everything. I thought it might be great to try some mild overclocking since the motherboard has all these nice autotuning utilities built in for it. Well after a week or two the CPU goes up to like 75 degrees celsius. The rating for the E6600 is like 80 max and eventually it reaches it. I’m thinking that there’s no way this setup should be so hot. I open the case and the 3rd party heatsink had the fan fall off. So I was basically frying the hell out of it. I put it back on and go about my business then a few days later same thing. I open it up and it had falled off again! I’m sort of thinking the thing I bought was junk but I have an epiphany as I’m putting the side back on. The side of this case has this air intake duct that is made for stock coolers. It’s designed to help pull the heat off the CPU and direct it out the side. The problem was with the 3rd party one it was way too tall. So the air duct is like pushing against the apparatus and just knocking it off when I slide it on. Ever since then I feel like my computer has never really performed very well under full load. Clearly no scientific method applied here but in various situations where I feel like I should be getting killer frame rate in an app vs someone with a weaker system, I’m actually underperforming.

So long story short, I’ve been eyeing the Q9400 for a while now. However my motherboard explicitly states I need a BIOS update. BIOS updates being possibly the most frightening thing you can do to a computer because if some weird thing interrupts the update you can basically brick your system. I’ve had a great streak of updating my own and never destroyed a system however the software for updating the BIOS didn’t want to take. So I found I could update the BIOS via floppy. The crazy thing is my floppy disks are freakishly old. I’m kind of risking a lot on a floppy that I have no idea if it’s in good condition or not. I throw caution to the wind and go ahead, right before work. I apply the update and the computer won’t restart. I sort of freak out. I didn’t have time to mess with it unfortunately and had to go to work.

In my spare time at work I looked at the worst case scenario of having to get a new CPU/Motherboard/RAM because why just replace the motherboard and not go for the whole thing if I was going to get a new CPU anyway. The total was like $450 for a cool i5-750 combo which is quite a bit more than the $189 for just the Q9400. I still had hope though for fixing the motherboard though it was very slim. My board comes with something called dual BIOS. Basically it has a backup of the original BIOS and in the event of a bad flash process it will kick in the original BIOS and take you back to square 1. So I broke out the manual and read up on restoring from dual BIOS. The thing says it should work automatically. So since it hadn’t I felt like I was screwed. On my laptop I do more research on the problem and someone said it could be a RAM thing. So my last light of hope was that maybe I had a bad RAM stick. I did some swapping around, which is the worst experience ever with my case/motherboard as I have to remove my video card every time to access the RAM. It worked, I took some sticks out and it reset to the original BIOS.

So did I want to try to get that BIOS update again and risk the headache of this whole thing all over again? Yes. However this time I discover I can put the update on a thumb drive. The update goes without a hitch so all my hopes for the i5 system are dashed. However in addition to getting a new CPU I feel like I need to get some replacement RAM sticks as well.

So my welcome home consisted of a near eviction and nearly destroying my computer. I did avoid both but I feel like this crazy trend of horrible news with near total saves is going to just keep up. I dunno if I can keep up with this rollercoaster!

In movies often the protagonist is setup in a slump and as the viewer you’re forced to sit and watch him come to his senses or make an “aha” moment. I hate that part in movies. I hate knowing that the main character has to drag himself out of his deepest darkest moment since I already know he probably will or the story would just be over.

Glover Wedding

Went to my buddy’s wedding this weekend and I did the worst scheduling for flying in and out. I was booking a flight on a site and the prices were a bit too high, well while I’m looking a super cheap flight popped up and so I took it. However it was booked for LAX and everything is closer to John Wayne in the south. So I had to rent a car which made the flight cost as much as the next highest booking price, so I saved no money.

Anyway, the wedding was at a beautiful winery in the middle of the mountains. I don’t have captions up yet but will get around to it. I’m beat from traveling at the moment. I unfortunately forgot to take a real camera, so the image quality is pretty low quality from my cell phone.

Well I traded up bedroom TVs.  I was using an old CRT 19″ Sony and moved up to this Toshiba 19″ HD.  I’ve discovered a very fascinating thing about it though. As you may or may not be aware we’ve made the switch to digital broadcasts which also allows for over the air HD broadcasts. Some stations were already broadcasting in HD before the switch but now all your local channels should definitely be.  Knowing this I thought to myself that it kind of sucks that I can have my cable plugged in and get all those channels but need to plug into an antenna for the over the air HD stuff.

Well this is actually false. When I setup the auto-tune it picked up on all the digital channels and local HD channels! This only makes sense of course due to the switch, but it’s a very pleasant surprise. I get all the regular channels plus, strangely, Animal Planet in HD. If only I could trade Animal Planet for Food Network!

So when I was at the parent’s house in SA I decided to retune their TV as well and there were the HD channels! Wimbledon in HD was pretty great I must say. Anyway, if you bought a new TV with an ATSC tuner you should retune and check out all your local digital/HD stuff.

I realized recently that the bulk of my wardrobe hasn’t really changed since my high schools days.  When I do get new clothes it’s always gifts from relatives so ultimately I’m at the mercy of what other people think looks good on me.  Thinking about this conundrum I realize that my entire closet is comprised basically of what everyone else’s appearance of me should look like.  It’s a strange revelation I think.

While I’m not one to go clothes shopping I suspect I should be doing it more frequently than I have been and I need to start phasing out fashion trends from the 90’s.  I dunno though, how often do/should people be doing such a thing?  Maybe it’s totally normal.

Ready set go!

Potato Salad

5 ½ pounds Idaho potatoes
¾ pound (about 2 medium) yellow onions, chopped
¾ pound (about 6 ribsstalks) celery, chopped
16 ounces Kraft Dill Pickle Relish
1 ½ pounds (24 ounces) sour cream
12 ounces Kraft Mayonnaise (see Note)
2 heaping tablespoons coarse black pepper
1 heaping teaspoon garlic salt
1 heaping teaspoon celery salt
1 tablespoon salt, or to taste

GARNISH:
Sprinkling of paprika
Sprig of parsley

Put unpeeled potatoes in a large pot of salted cold water; bring to a boil and cook until tender throughout, about 25 minutes. Test by inserting a knife into a potato. Refrigerate 30 minutes to allow potatoes to cool. Carefully peel potatoes and cut into 1-inch cubes; set aside.

In large mixing bowl, blend together onions, celery, relish, sour cream, mayonnaise, pepper, garlic salt, celery salt and salt. Add cubes of potato and mix gently.

Cover and place in refrigerator until ready to serve.

For Garnish: Dust with paprika and garnish with a sprig of parsley.

Note: County Line uses Kraft Extra Heavy Mayonnaise. The recipe was tested with Kraft Real Mayonnaise with excellent results.

Recipe can be halved, if desired.

In the past 7 days I’ve done tons of crazy things.  Well, they aren’t so crazy I guess, but here’s the rundown of what I’ve been up to.

Since around about the Fall of 2005 I’ve been the raid leader of a WoW guild which I occasionally talk about here and there.  In February of 2007 I became the guild master as well.  I decided last December that I needed a break and that I should focus on school for this Spring semester but that got bumped due to random politics at the time.  During the middle of the semester a new patch hit and I was again on the fence about stepping down.  Ultimately I pushed it off again.  Around 2 weeks ago I finally decided no matter what I’m going to have to step down from WoW and move on and last week I finally did.  It coincided with my annual birthday bash trip to San Antonio.

It’s a really hard thing to sort of let go of.  One, I’m a control freak so it’s tough to now think that it’s possible that if I’m in conflict with an issue, it might just stay that way.  It’s yet to happen and I doubt anything crazy will happen, but you never know!  This is going to sound really crazy but I knew the ins and outs of the guild and accessory items to the guild so well that I can’t yet comfortably take weeks off yet.  It’s still somewhat transitory.  There were mods we used in game custom built for us as well as very quirky systems we used for our web site that I feel like maybe only 2-3 people know how they fully work and interact with the guild.

This all sounds like I quit WoW though and really, I’m just taking a backseat to the next generation.  I’m still around but my login time will not consist of 80% dealing with other people and 20% doing random things for myself.  But it’s time for the guild to take the next step.  You can’t be the parent forever, so it’s time to see what the kids have learned and how they cope with things.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens after the summer when we have a new batch of recruits and maybe I’m just some mystery dude.

So May is birthday month, with me, my older younger sister, and my little brother all having birthdays within a timespan of about 13 days.  I originally planned to go 18th-22nd but work cropped up, which is the only busy time of year for me between sessions, and I had to push it off to 21st-26th.  Hammeron demanded I go to Whole Foods and I had pushed off seeing Star Trek to see it in IMAX.

So I get to San Antonio and my Mom usually makes a huge cake for us.  This time however, due to the request of her friends from work, she bought a cake from this cafe waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay downtown.  So job 1 for me was go fetch the cake.  My mom wanted to get a grand marnier cake but my sister went with the black forest chocolate cake instead.  There’s a picture of a slice on the sidebar on my flickr feed.  It was good.  Mom didn’t like it, she’s picky, but I suspect it’s because she wanted the grand marnier.  All of my sister’s friends liked it though so it’s no big deal.

If you’ve been following my twitter, I broke my Rock Band drum set foot pedal.  Despite owning the super great mega pedal, it broke where the mega pedal doesn’t connect, at the very base where it has a pin connected to pivot.  My initial plan was to super glue it back together.  I was stuffing my face with chicken while I let my sister do it.  So after letting it set overnight I started a song up and after about 3 notes it breaks again cleanly.  I said screw it, we’re going to Gamestop.  We head over and buy the replacement pedal with the double bass module.  I get home and plug in the new one and it’s great.  However, I have this new nagging annoyance that I have double bass and one broken pedal.  So I try the super glue again.  I went crazy with the stuff.  I let it set and sure enough, it has yet to break.  However I have been using the new pedal as the dominant pedal and the broken one as the secondary one.  Regardless, it has yet to break after a few songs.  As a sidenote, double bass is incredibly difficult to learn to use once you’ve gotten single bass working.

Afterwards we headed out to see Star Trek.  I really wanted to see it in IMAX but apparently the theater only shows the newest releases of the week or something crazy in IMAX so I had to see it regular style.  Overall it was cool.  I won’t spoil it but my brother/sister got an earful when it was done.  There are things I didn’t like but the good things outweigh that stuff so overall I enjoyed it.

Sunday felt like a lost day to me.  I borrowed Crisis Core from Ashley before I left so I wouldn’t die of boredom and I put about 5 hours into it overall.  It’s pretty neat but really easy at the same time.  Though I can’t really tell if games are easier because I’m older and wiser or if they are in fact, just easy in general now.  There’s some random hard stuff in there and I actually really hate how the level up system works, but the main story of the game hasn’t caused any problems yet.  The battle system is entertaining enough. I need to finish it soon.

Monday we went out to Whole Foods which was a really crazy store.  95% of it is organic and everything smelled so fresh.  It was pretty great.  I got a Mix1 for me and my brother and he got a Dagobah chocolate bar just for novelty sake.  Though it was a pretty good chunk of chocolate anyway.  They had Brain Toniq there as well and I tried a sample.  I would say in the general category of energy drinks, it was better than most and it wasn’t carbonated which is a plus for me, but the taste wasn’t there for me.  The only problem with Whole Foods is that it’s so far away, it would be impossible to buy anything that needs refrigeration since the trip back home is so far and it was around 100 degrees in the car.  After that we shipped out to the mall for some new threads and hit up all the stores at La Cantera.

As usual when I visit I like to go out to eat with my brother and sisters somewhere that I don’t have in Lubbock.  However it being Memorial Day I wanted to head to the County Line for some killer BBQ.  I think my new favorite there is the pork ribs.  They’re so great fallin off the bone style and succulent.  The potato salad is king as usual and we had ordered 2 loaves of bread to take home.

My Mom also went on a spree of buying suits for me recently, none of which fit.  However she has a friend that is a tailor, which is a crazy profession for some reason to me, but I forgot I went there on Sunday to get 2 of these suits fitted.  I picked them up on Monday and man they look great.  This year is like a marathon of weddings so now I should look pretty dapper.

Ok lastly, while I don’t actually ask for much on my birthday, I walked home with the new fitted suits, a crazy hand blender with chopper, Gurren Lagann disc 1, and I got myself the second season of Shin Chan.

Now that Summer is upon me and lots of freed up time due to lack of WoW, I’m gonna start plowing through these mountains of games/movies/anime that I’ve neglected all these years.  It’s certain I won’t be finished by the end of the Summer, but hopefully I make a dent.

A friend’s birthday recently elapsed and since it was midweek I thought nothing of it.  However festivities ensued the weekend after (this past weekend) to which I was part of at the last minute.  The plan was a scavenger hunt for her presents all around town with me and another friend planting gifts just ahead of her path to ensure proper delivery.  The gift locations were meaningful to the gift giver and giftee.

Location 1: Gas station
We had very specific instructions with this one to place it on pump 3.  We drove around what seemed to be pumps with no numbers which made it somewhat tricky, but we finally discovered the numbering scheme and found that someone was actually pumping at pump 3.  So we sat behind them waiting, which had to be akward for this person since we never got out and when he was done we moved up immediately.  We waited patiently while munching on some kind of cheetos which weren’t what I asked for but tasty nevertheless for a text message stating the gift searcher’s location relative to us.  We left the gift, a book, above the pump and hoped that no one would pull up to pump 3 after we left and headed out.

Location 2:  House
We went to a house that we previously lived in and on the way I was thinking about how very horrifying it would be to see if the people living there would notice us planting an object somewhere around the place.  Fortunately for us, the house was for rent and no one lived there currently.  So we popped this present into the mailbox.  Unfortunately for us, this location was literally 3 minutes from the previous location.  So as we were driving to the next spot, the searching party drove directly beside us at the intersection.  I yelled at my cohort to duck and I threw down my sun visor to obstruct the view of my face, but didn’t switch sides as their vehicle drove directly beside us.  We get a text message saying that our giftee was in fact dumb, and didn’t notice us.  We die laughing to the next spot.

Location 3: Scary Restaurant
In what can only be described as the worst part of town, we made headway to this remote restaurant that was apparently shut down.  This is what I coined the warehouse district of the city but there were a couple of seedy looking houses overlooking us.  We actually had no idea if this was the right spot or not, which is kind of frustrating as the driver.  We decided this had to be it, there were no other restaurants around, and then hopped out of the car to find a suitable location for this gift.  As we’re scouring around, we look to our right and notice someone staring us down from their screen door.  Very uncomfortably we find a place to pop this present and hope that our buddy finds this thing.

Location 4: Disc Golf Park
So we’re comfortably ahead of our search party as we attach this gift to the bottom of a bench near tee #2.  We’re sitting here waiting when all of a sudden we spot the search party’s vehicle turning into the park.  My mind reels at the possibility of it not actually being them considering we didn’t get the warning text message, but I decide in the worst case scenario, we have to go.  This is truly a hilarious setup since no other cars are in the vicinity and they parked exactly where we were not but 1 minute ago.  Our clueless friend again, somehow, didn’t notice.  As we’re making our getaway we get a text “HIDE!!!!”  Clearly, some amount of delay occurred there.  We laughed until we stopped.

Location 5: Old job
So we go to this old place of employment that my friends worked at.  We stroll on in and there’s 2 girls on the phone.  With a very very puzzled look on their faces, we explain our situation that we’re placing a gift here for a friend.  One girl asks “Uhhh, is she coming to get this today?”  We said yes and then they just sort of took the gift.  This was an odd moment indeed as my friend breezed her way right to them all the way in the back of this office with no hesitation.  She explained that if they got up it would screw up their actual job so she had to walk back there.  It was gutsy and I thought she was going to punch them.  Ok I didn’t think that, but it was funny because I was going to explain it all from the doorway in a non-menacing way but she just bullied her way to the back and gave them the run down.

Location 6: The bar
We hang out at this place every few weeks.  It’s a nice place and our plan on the way there was to hand the gift off to the hostess.  However since it’s early Sunday, there’s no hostess.  So we waltz up to the bar and explain the situation to the bartender.  He says no problem any place we want to hide it specifically?  Does she have a favorite beer?  I have no clue, but my friend knowing our friend better than me says “Yeah Guinness.”  So he puts it behind the Guinness tap.  When our friend finally arrives at the bar, she snoops around the foyer, the bar, and is completely stumped.  The bartender asks her “Can I help you?”  She says, “Yeah did anyone come by and leave anything?”  He says “No, not that I know of.  But can I get you a drink?” She says “No…” He follows up with a “Well how about a Guinness?”  To which her quick reply is “Ok sure!”  At this point the friend who was traveling with her says “WHAT!?  We don’t have time to sit and drink a beer!”  This friend looks at the bartender with a crazy look and the bartender gives her the nah-it’s-ok-this-is-supposed-to-happen look/hand gesture.  He then hands her the beer and the gift very coolly and doesn’t even charge her for the Guinness!  We as the gift placers were not amused by this beer break!  It is however totally funny in retrospect.  Even without the beer, her next clue took her forever to decipher.

Location 7: Coffee Shop
The problem with this spot is that the coffee shop is closed and secondly in the middle of a shopping center.  So there’s really no great place to hide anything.  Did I mention it was a breezy day?  This gift was a pillow, fairly light.  So our conundrum was placing it in the wind, attaching it to the abandoned store, or doing something else.  We looked over and saw a stack of newspapers which we could use to weigh down the present if placed in a bag.  However as I approached this stack, I noticed a pair of old man glasses on top.  I backed away like I discovered someone had peed on the object and the stank of this form of personal identification had slapped me in the face.  Why? I don’t know, but it was an oddity.  Anyway, we ended up putting it in a paper shopping bag and weighing it down with a water bottle.  We also ended up sitting there for what had to be like 45 minutes.

Location 8: Back to the starting point
The final location was simple enough, it was go back home!  Strangely, it took a while for our scavenging friend.  Overall I think it took over 2.5 hours total.  It was pretty great though, except for the more difficult clues to the next locations.  Mostly that was just boredom on our end, but I’m certain it was probably more exciting for the seeker.  Did I mention a dog was so scared to have me hold it, it pooped all over me?  Yes this was in the beginning of the story and actually created a nice diversion to account for me and my teammate not being around when the birthday girl arrived.  It was pretty funny, even to me, the poopee.  The pizza and birthday pie made up for it.  Plus I’m pretty used to animals doing crazy things, mostly throwing up, but even so, pretty tolerant of such things so it was no big deal.