Current location:	Golden City Brewery, Golden, CO
Current mood:	unburned
Current music:	Loch Lomond-Mulligan Stew-A Pint To Go

No flaming death for me, thank you.
Well, I managed not to burn down the brewery yesterday. The power cord to our big kegirator decided it had experienced enough of life, and partially combusted. When I arrived at work, I smelled burning dust and/or plastic, and found out that the heater was on in the building (and I turned it off). When the smell still lingered, I opened up the doors to let the place air out. Still, the smell lingered.

Ted, one of the brewers, started sniffing around like a bloodhound, and eventually found the culprit--the lowest plug on the power strip (which leads to the kegirator) was burned and/or melted onto the power strip. He turned it off as the other brewer, Jeff, came upon this scene.

Jeff looked at the cord, then looked at the cash register, which was no longer functioning (as we'd turned the entire power strip off, seeing as the lower part of it was a melted slag), and assumed the worst--that the REGISTER had just died. Because that would be hella annoying. So, he has me call poor Tamara back in to see what we could do about the situation. She walked up just as Ted and I discerned that the register was fine, and it was the kegirator that wasn't functioning (we'd pulled the bad cord out of its still-hot, blackened outlet on the power strip and turned the strip back on), wondering why we were all standing around an electrical outlet with the scent of burning plastic in the air and Jeff swearing up a storm, thinking that now, instead of manual bookkeeping, we had a non-working refrigeration unit.

In the end, though, Tamara watched the shop for a short time while I walked over to the hardware store and got a new power strip and a new plug end for the kegirator cord. Ted and I installed the new plug and I hooked it all back up again and it works fine now.

So that was MY amazing yesterday. Also, that's why I didn't have all the time I wanted to finish my parade story or really do anything other than stick a few random "define yourself" blurbs generated by one of those username script thingies in my last post. So, I guess that I'll have to finish the parade story.

The first part of this story can be found here.

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Once we finally started moving along with the assembled masses (including the jerk in front of us in his unassuming-looking PT Cruiser), we found that even once started, parades take a while to really get going. We stopped and started nine or twelve times on our way out of the parking lot, waiting for all the floats, groups, stupid-hat-wearing people, and PT Cruisers to get moving. On the way, we passed some big Budweiser promotional truck/float thing, complete with a DJ on top and bikini-clad women enjoying the noonday sun and beer that tastes like deer piss. And they had a pool, too, hooked up in some sort of trailerish method to the back of the giant beer truck party bus.

Once we finally managed to get out of the massing area and onto the road, we started up our music. We got some pretty good volume out of our sound system, and I'm pretty sure we overrode whatever easy listening smooth jazz llama dung muzak our "friend" in front of us was playing on his custom stereo. So he got to listen to us for the whole parade. And then some after, though I'm getting ahead of myself.

Things got interesting once we were in the parade, because we were running the entire thing off of a shuffled playlist comprised of our two CDs on my dad's iPod. We opted not to skip any songs, just because that would make our banner-clad PA-hooked-to-the-car-battery pickup "float" seem a little less professional. If that would even be possible, I suppose. So, we'd get a random song every couple of minutes, and it was almost always exactly the opposite of what we might've sung for a given audience as we passed them by--loud half-naked college students hanging out of windows and clambering onto roofs from their nearby apartment balconies often got "Danny Boy" or some other sad, slow song and the small children, whenever they were congregated, would usually get the blood-and-guts war songs or any song featuring the words "run like hell away" or "damn near drives me crazy," which got us some upset looks from a few parents. Just the luck of the draw, I suppose.

Speaking of the luck of the draw, one of our songs just happened to come up in my laptop playlist as I type this. Lurch's solo track off of our first album, actually. Back to the story.

At one point in the parade, Sherman flagged down a passerby that had a jug of whiskey and took a swig. We were kind of envious of him at that point, since all we had to drink was a jug of water that Greg happened to have in the back of his pickup truck. At a couple of slower points in the parade, I was sorely tempted to hop out of the truck and run to one of the roadside beer tents providing liquid refreshment to the parade-goers, but wasn't sure if I'd be breaking some manner of law (I probably would be, and the police, who were out in force, would be far less likely to let four big guys in kilts get away with it than they would the bikini-clad Budweiser beer bus babes).

Eventually, we got to the judging area (though we weren't really expecting to win any awards for the aforementioned four kilted guys in the back of a banner-clad pickup rednecked together with a PA to allow for the blaring of folk music to annoy the dick in front of us), which kinda came up on us unexpectedly. They'd said on the website that the judges would be on the end of the second leg of the parade (which basically made a large circuit relatively rectangular in shape), and we'd have a short time to present to them our float, which they would supposedly view from the front (though most floats are built to be viewed from the side, so we thought that odd). However, they ended up being three quarters of the way down the second leg of the parade, viewing the floats from the side. So we didn't expect them to be where they were and just kinda waved surprisedly as we passed (though what else we would've done, I don't know).

We didn't actually end up making it onto the TV coverage of the event; we went by the cameras during what was apparently a commercial break. The jeeps behind us (which I recognized on the parade footage because I remembered one of them had a Dukes of Hazzard horn and he beeped it as they passed the cameras) made it on, though. And the prick in front of us was also COMMERCIALED!! and thus didn't make it onto the TV either.

After that, the parade kinda wound down. Less people came to watch the parade on the other side of the judges' stand, and we eventually got back into the Coors Field parking lot complex/parade massing area (where we saw that floats were STILL queued up, waiting to get going). Lurch and I exited the truck as we passed the lot where he'd parked (so that he wouldn't have to walk the half mile all the way back to his car from the far end of the parking lot where the truck was headed to get my dad's car) and our adventure was complete. That is, it was complete once we managed to find Lurch's car, which took about five minutes of looking because he couldn't remember exactly where he'd parked it as he'd basically leapt from the car the second it was in a viable spot and high-tailed it down to where I met him back when the guy in the PT Cruiser insulted Greg's truck.

There we go, the story is finished and I can stop putting off finishing it.

Tried yesterday and today to post something for BOTP7/The Battle for NeoSeattle, but the forums over at Black-Blade.net (Outerverse's site) seem to be down. I posted my character profile, but then the boards ceased to function while I was reading the actual story posts. To find out what and/or who I want to post about, of course. I thought that this was odd, as the main part of BBN worked, but not the forum subdomain (even when I tried to connect from home later in the day yesterday). I wonder if Outey is mucking about with it or something. I did figure out, however, that I still have copies of a few of my posts from the first time we tried to do BOTP7, but the only complete ones feature at least one character that's NOT IN this incarnation, like Wolf vs. "Lord" Sullivan or Gwen dialoguing with Delta.

But amidst all of these now-useless text files, I did find that I still had my introduction-to-the-battle story where my character jumps out of a spaceship in the clouds mimicking Winnie the Pooh's "raincloud" disguise (though an eight-hundred-pound cyborg glides somewhat less gracefully than a stuffed animal when tied to a balloon and rolled around in a mud puddle). So as soon as everything is working again, I'll probably post at least that.

Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter