Best weekend evar

What a truly wonderful weekend.

Friday: We all started off doing *nothing*. The whole snow thing was pretty cool; see the post underneath this one.

Saturday: Valentine's Day! Or as many call it, Singles Awareness Day. Or as Soph called it, "I'm going to be emo for a week so bug off" Day. I actually got a present from someone who wasn't my mom, which made me freak the hell out because I didn't understand the concept of friendly presents. Hi, I'm an idiot. I wound up at a party at the House of Guys (defined: the house where a handful of Plan2 upperclassmen guys live, frequent parties there) and mellowed out. No, I mean, I really mellowed out. But I definitely slept like a baby that night...

Sunday: ...and forced myself out of bed at 11AM. At noon, I was in North Austin at the Texas Gaming Festival's last day. Everything I wanted to do there went off without a hitch. I saw some of the old-school gamers there getting their Halo on, I met with the head of the TGA and am working my way onto their staff, and I entered the Mario Kart tournament.

Things just went right for me at that tournament for the whole afternoon. Nobody scared me as I flew through the first two rounds finishing first place in two grand prix's. That put me in the top 8 of 16 original entrants. One more round and I'd be in the money. Star cup, no trouble, first and second place finishes in every race put me on top. So now I was in the money. At best, $250, at worst $50. I paid $10 to get in so I was damn happy about it deep down but I really was focused on pushing for as much money as I could get. The final was 4 players on Special Cup (BTW: the rules were VS on lan, so you get random characters and no CPUs). First two races were tight as could be. I lucked out and won both. Everyone was still even for the most part, but then on Bowser's Castle I took two spiny shells in front of the finish line and went from 1st to 4th in about 3 seconds. So now the scores were 8-8-5-3 with me being one of the 8's (custom scoring, 5-3-1-0 instead of the grand prix scoring).

Rainbow Road? Not even a problem. Second lap I just took the hell off and nobody bothered me again, and the tournament was mine.

So, yours truly came home with an astonishing $250 in money for one afternoon tournament. That's the most I've ever won in a day, and it's exciting as hell. I think MKDD just might be my new game.

Happy Monday, boys and girls.

Here comes the cold

Holy moly. It snowed. Finally, a true college event happened. It came completely out of the blue, there were lots of people having a great time, everyone was happy and festive, and people got messy and hurt in the process. That, boys and girls, is a true college event.

So Patrick came down and explained that snow was falling. I came outside to see that yes, snow was indeed falling, and it wasn't any petty snow either. It was snowing. Soon enough the whole quad had assembled out there like the Grinch had just stolen Christmas and we were the residents of Hooville, and I got to see lots of happy people and take pictures (which will go online as soon as I figure out my damned digicam drivers) and then 2 minutes had passed outside and I got hit in the eye with a snowball.

15 minutes later, I was back outside, running around and giving out more hugs.

The amazing thing was that this all happened at the stroke of midnight, 'officially' beginning Valentine's Day. I saw a few elated couples happily kissing in the winter wonderland that had come 7 weeks late. The song "St. Patrick's Day" played in my head over and over as my camera took as many party shots as my frozen fingers could handle, and that was my Valentine's experience. You don't need a significant other or even a simple cheap date to find it. You just have to have the kind of insane luck that we Texans had tonight to go outside and look up into the falling snowflakes and realize that you've found Love itself. Not the connection between two people blah blah blah Love, not even soul-mate Love. No, I'm talking about the greater, nirvana Love that you spend your whole life trying to find.

And then Patrick and I snuck up on the snowball snipers sitting on the balcony and got a few headshots. No matter how deep and philosophical your experiences here might be, there's no avoiding the fact that you're still in college.

So next time it snows on a lovely holiday like this one, go ahead and get lost between the song that rings in your head and your ideal, perfect love that transcends anyone of the opposite (or same) sex. Just make sure you don't leave yourself vulnerable to being pelted with snowballs.

Improvements

Things are slowly coming back together. My wrists are beginning to heal (but I need to lay low for another week or so) and I've found some new things to check out. Turns out I've somewhat got plans to visit Padre for a weekend over spring break (which will be awesome, enough said).

And Valentine's Day? Who needs it? Texas Gaming Festival all the way. Yeah, it's nerdy, and the ratio is about 100-1 on the romantic holiday, but screw it.

edit: Oh yeah, Padre, I've got the Gamecube n stuff.