Foudroyant?

At the club fair thing at the beginning of the semester, I manned a table for Icebox, the student journal I help edit. The lady who's in charge of Icebox is also in charge of the University Equestrian Network, the horse club on campus. Therefore, the tables for those two clubs were right beside each other. The guy who was manning the table for the UEN was a blond pony-tailed guy named Peter. Nice guy, very smiley, and fun to talk to. Of course, I told him about juggling club and showed him a few tricks. Then the club fair ended and I didn't see Peter again...

Until Friday, when he showed up to juggling club out of the blue. Seriously, I was talking to Abe, heard someone behind me, turned around, and there he was. I didn't even recognize him at first. I could tell his face was familiar, but couldn't for the life of me remember where I had seen him before. I taught him to juggle, and he picked it up pretty quickly. Time wore on, and people came and went, and I started to get thirsty, so I said, "Man, I would sell my soul for a strawberry milkshake right now."

"Ohhhh, that sounds really good! Let's go get one. Right after practice," he said. So at nine, after everyone else had left, Peter and I left to get strawberry milkshakes or ice cream or something. But we couldn't think of any place in Fairbanks that serves ice cream except Hot Licks, which is closed for the winter. So we just went to Fred Meyer's (or maybe it was Safeway) and got ice cream and root beer and went over to his place to make root beer floats.

We ended up staying up all night having root beer floats, watching videos on Youtube, talking about Dungeons and Dragons (he has the D&D 4.0 books!), dancing, and doing martial arts. It was pretty epic, actually--he's really big into both dancing and martial arts, so we would be sparring and he would have me in a headlock, and then suddenly he would twirl me around and start salsa dancing. Whaaat!

He finally drove me home in the late afternoon Saturday so I could get my history done. When I walked in, Amy looked seriously relieved to see me. I talk to my roommates rarely enough that I figured it doesn't make a difference whether I'm here or not, but apparently she and Amanda were a little worried when I didn't come home the night before. My cell phone number was on the fridge, and Amy said she was planning on calling at eight if I hadn't come home by then. She went on to tell me about Amanda's birthday dinner the night before. Amanda's birthday was actually Easter, but she was having birthday dinners with friends on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (I had been invited, but I don't really like the crowd Amanda hangs out with.) Amy said the dinner went terribly and Amanda cried her eyes out afterward. Out of the 26 people who went, only five of them gave her cards, two of them gave her gifts, and nobody paid for her dinner or got her a cake or sang to her or even proposed a toast. The boy she had a huge crush on hadn't even said hello to her, much less happy birthday. So Amy decided to bake her a cake using the recipe on the back of the Hershey's Cocoa box. I offered to help. Amanda drives me crazy, but she's a decent person, and I don't like her being sad.

So we made her a surprise birthday cake, and I holed myself up in my room to do my history. But I didn't get very far before Peter started calling to see if I was done so we could play some more. At almost the same time, Amy informed me that Amanda was going out again with her friends and she (Amy) was staying home to watch Hoodwinked and wanted to know if I'd watch it with her. So I asked if it was okay to invite Peter over too (to which she said "of course!"), and he came over just as Amanda was leaving with her friends. Before we put the movie in, we goofed off and dyed the Lint Monkey's hair blue while we watched some Jeff Dunham stuff on Youtube. (How can you not like Achmed? I can't believe Amy hadn't heard of him!)

The movie was great, but since we'd started it so late, Amy went to bed right after it ended. Peter and I stayed up to watch the extras and were dancing when Amanda came home. I wished her happy birthday (it actually was her birthday for real by that time) and asked how her party had been. She came in my room, sat down on the floor, and proceeded to cry her eyes out. She was a little vague about the details--she was crying too hard to be clear on anything but the fact that her friends treated her badly and she was hurt and her birthday dinner had been terrible and she wasn't talking to her friends ever again. We hugged her and talked to her and generally tried to make her feel better and ended up staying up with her until maybe five in the morning.

When I woke up, Amanda was already awake and sounded much better (sleeping off the alcohol may have helped). It was a gorgeous day today--fifty degrees outside! I was super excited to finally be able to go outside in a t-shirt, and a lot of other people seemed to be thinking along the same lines--stretched out on park benches (there's still a good amount of snow on the grass) in shorts and sleeveless shirts. I went to juggling practice, but counting myself, there was a whole one person there, so I only stuck around for 45 minutes before I went in to work. It was a pretty short workday too, actually, so I got to go home early.

I was looking forward to sleeping, but I still had to finish my history homework. So I got started on that, but then Peter called again and said he was bored. I told him he was welcome to come over, but I'd be doing homework and might be boring. He came over anyway. Interestingly enough, I've been unable to focus on this lesson and get it done for two weeks, but with Peter here, I got it done in an hour because he kept saying, "Stop talking! Hurry up and get your homework done so we can play!"

Amanda was off with friends again, but Amy said while I was at work, Amanda had cut into the cake, so we could have some. It was pretty much the best cake I've ever tasted. I don't know what we did right to it, but WOW it was amazing! (It was probably Amy's frosting, because it sure wasn't my doing!) Apparently Amanda was thrilled about it. Amy said she heard Amanda making phone calls and telling everyone all about how her roommates baked her a wonderful cake for her birthday. I was glad her birthday was salvageable.

I'm so jealous of Peter. I spent all day in my office in the Wood Center, and he got to spend the day outside training horses in the beautiful weather! That's not fair at all!

That said, I'm seriously sleep-deprived, and I have class in five hours, so I'm going to go zonk out.

This post has been brought to you by the word foudroyant.