The Daily Adventures of Mercat

EPIC DAY TODAY.

So everyone's sitting at home doing homework and stuff, waiting for chapter to roll around. The wind was ridiculous and definitely keeping us entertained. I had to go get the pool off the fence for Baujan Field, and Brittany noticed all our neighbors across the street pointing and realized we had siding coming off. From Adela's room you could see St. Joe's losing shingles off the roof. At one point the gusts were so strong I thought they were going to blow the window-mounted AC right into the house. D:

So security is coming around telling everyone to stay inside (of course EVERYONE across the street from us is outside on their porches for hours; wtf?!), and sending out warnings through the system (so the house got five calls, one for each of us) and chapter gets cancelled. So we all go back to watching TV and gettin' shit done, and of course we're all busy and sort of worried about our workload etc. etc. Well, then the internet goes down and everyone goes fuck, well, what am I supposed to do now? So we all kind of do chores until the internet comes back.

BUT, the power goes out across campus. For us it flicks back on in I'd say less than half a second, and we continue to do homework and stuff. Word slowly travels across the ghetto and the rest of campus that the north side of Stonemill (us) is the only part of the Ghetto (and actually the Dark Side, too, but I don't know about the houses by Frericks) with power. The dorms don't have power, and the upper floors (like five and above in Marycrest) don't have water, either, because of pressure.

Eventually a whole bunch of girls (some Phi Rho, some pledging, some just engineers) come over to take showers and do homework, and as it's nearing ten or so Brittany comes downstairs super-excited and puts a Britney Spears song on the CD player, puts the speaker up to the window and BLASTS it. She decided she was going to wreak revenge upon our neighbors across the street for all their Thursday/Friday/Saturday late-night music, and eventually we find some good music and I burn a mix CD and stuff.

So then Candice gets word that the PMA house (in the middle of the Ghetto, mind you, sans power) is having a greenlight. (They have an old stoplight upstairs; when it's green, it's party time.) So of course we have to go over there, and the guys are there , and as we leave our house we notice the UD Police pull up right behind us. Well, we get over to the PMA house and they're actually partying and drinking and stuff. There are a few glowbracelets and the greenlight is actually the team lights from a green-team Nerf gun, and they are powering their music off the battery for the pep band bass guitar. So of course it is awesome and at this point everyone is getting sort of slap-happy and more people are getting word and actually coming to the greenlight. Candice and I figure since we have homework and worry that Brittany might have freaked out from the police that we should go back to our house. (After all, we were having a party, too!)

So as we get back to Stonemill we can tell we're no longer blasting music, but the house down the street has Christmas lights up. One porch and one tree with colored lights, and then the tree also has a blinking giant white star. We realize Danny and Mike and some of the other guys from that house are the ones who put some of it up, so we go down there and talk to them for a bit and then steal some of their lights for our house. Well, we get back to our house and Brittany and Christine were already having thoughts of Christmas lights and pull out the house's lights. Which is an entire shopping bag full of stuff. So we put the music back on and shove an extension cord through the window AC's opening and proceed to spend the next hour or so hanging up lights, taking photos, waving to passing cars, and talking to people on the street. A few guys (5th year MBAs, don't know their names) from our side of Stonemill come down to see what's going on after we're taking out bizillionth photo with my tripod. They had heard that since we are on the grid with the campus, which is all on a generator (or, I'm guessing, several) that all these houses with the lights were trying to suck power to get classes cancelled. I can't speak for the other houses but we tell them that we're just trying to give the Ghetto some light and make people smile. And seriously, by this time, the lights are ridiculous. We have colored lights up one pole and around the top; white lights on the bushes in front; colored light tubes down the railing and around the front of the bushes; and pulsing white and blue icicles hanging from the other handrails. At this point we had a few people drive by and call us assholes :C I think because they were jealous we had power. But some people are staying the night (of course after we'd spent half a retaliation-induced-dance party and Christmas-lights time doing homework) sleeping on our couches and stuff, and some guys were supposed to come sleep over on the couches in the basement (they haven't showed up yet), but who knows. Tomorrow is another day, we'll see how that goes, too.

Oh, and the cops didn't even come up to the house and yell at us, Brittany turned the music down as soon as they pulled up apparently. =P

And after all the fun, I walk inside to see Brittany had taken a whiteboard marker and written on the wall tiles in the kitchen "Diane's Schedule" with a hole and arrows (because getting my schedule up is low on my priorities list right now) and I fix it to read "Diane's Schedule: Hopewalk and/or PoD" and Brittany and I decide (well, first of all, that we need to wash the tiles because when I got a wet paper towel to wipe away her schedule hole, there was a distinct white area and dirt line) that we are going to memorialize Phi Rho House Fun on the walls with the whiteboard markers. So she writes up "cops called" and "no power" and "christmas lights" with "9/14" on there and I add "AAHHH SPRINKLES" from Candice and this year is going to be awesome.




I'm kind of sad, though, the winds knocked over an old tree at home. =C It seems like all the older trees are having to go for one reason or another... Falling down, having to get cut down so they don't fall on the house, having to get cut down so they don't uproot the foundation, rotting, getting struck by lightning... =/ Or in this case blown WAAAAY over. It's just weird because when you come home after the old trees come down, it feels like there is a big hole in the sky. And of course, you can't just quickly grow a tree to fill it in... Yeah, this kind of thing breaks my heart, same kind of thing as having to move...