I couldn't sleep Wednesday night. I was so excited about receiving our first guests to this year's Subrealicon that I only got about four hours of sleep. And work? Forget about it. I spent the whole day sort of dithering around, e-mailing Kielle constantly. Finally, when 5:00 rolled around, I jumped into my car and hurried down to Kielle's new place to wait with her for JB, Chandri, Lise and Falstaff.
See, Chandri and Lise are from Vancouver, Canada and Falstaff's from Oregon. They didn't have enough money for plane tickets, so they decided to Greyhound it from their respective locations, meeting in Oregon and bussing down together to L. A. Because most of the people with access to cars had to work, and their bus came in on Thursday, JB graciously offered to drive up from near San Diego way, get them in L. A. at 4:30 pm and drive them to Kielle's where they'd be spending the weekend. At least that was the plan.
Even with LA traffic at its worst, I kinda expected that by five thirty, JB would have gotten to the bus terminal and would have been on her way to Costa Mesa. Imagine my surprise (and consternation) when I got the following message at 6:08 on my pager:
We're still at the bus station. JB still hasn't showed. Long story short: HAAAALP!
'Staff, Lise, Chandri.
Needless to say, we got worried. I called JB's house and told her mom what was going on. In the meantime, we got online to give some last minute instructions to Ashlan (holder of the Disneyland tickets) and David (maintainer of OTL). This would come back to bite me in the butt, but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the while, we kept getting voicemail messages from them--WITHOUT A RETURN PHONE NUMBER. We were getting updates, but had no idea how to get a hold of them. The last message we got stated that they were going to try and get a cab to get them to Kielle's. Oh sure, you think this is good, but we still had no idea where JB was. I could just picture the headlines the next day: "Cute Girl Found Dead in LA; Parents Blame the Internet". Finally and luckily, JB arrived with the gang around 7:45 pm.
I was a little apprehensive about welcoming the Canadians (as Chandri and Lise would be respectively known as for the whole weekend) because I didn't know them, well, but things went along swimmingly. Chandri is very outgoing, while Lise is scared of cameras. Falstaff... well he's Falstaff. I shouldn't have to say more than that. I took a picture of them, one that unfortunately did not come out. Also, at this time, I'd like to take the opportunity to praise JB's mom, Marilyle, for sending along a case of Mountain Dew, Danishes and muffins with JB. Thank you! We love you!
However, since we knew we'd have to get more food, we decided to hightail it to the nearest grocery store (just a block away!) to get ingredients for the dinner I was going to cook on Friday night, plus other assorted necessities. With much difficulty, we pried ourselves away from the candy aisle (okay... we did get these really neat mint and orange sticks dipped in chocolate, but that's all, I swear) and bought a gigantic box of Froot Loops, two cans of orange juice, Jell-O, kiwi strawberry flavored wine (most of us were overage), paper plates, plastic utensils and cups, paper towels... I personally dished out $45 for my share of the groceries, and even then I wasn't sure if I'd bought enough. We went back to Kielle's, then I had to go home. As for the rest of the night's activities... you're going to have to bug one of them for that.
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