Getting back to SUUSI updates: Day 4.
Aug. 2nd, 2008 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI know, I know, I only got to Tuesday in my recaps before they petered out... which is pathetic. In my defense: (a) the rest of SUUSI got really, really busy there, for a while; (b) the shooting at TVUUC has been dominating my thoughts this week and has taken me out of the shinyhappy headspace; and (c) let me just say that a head cold and the last vestiges of first-trimester symptoms combine very poorly.
But here I am. When we last saw SUUSI, I had fallen into bed achy and exhausted after a lousy hike on Tuesday afternoon, unsure about whether I'd be able to handle my Wednesday morning hike.
At 3am, Alex woke up crying. In our sleep-fogged state, it took Michael and I longer than it should've to realize that the reason she was crying and soaking wet was that she'd wet the bed. She hadn't done that in... actually, I'm not sure she had ever done that. Fortunately, she'd been half out of the top of her sleeping bag, and by turning it upside down and end-to-end we were able to find a dry spot big enough for her to sleep on. We changed her clothes and covered her with a beach towel, and I sang her to sleep. The alarm was supposed to go off in three hours for my hike.
When I woke, I seriously considered not going. I hurt. Then I decided that I owed it to myself to at least get out of bed, get some breakfast, and check a weather report before deciding. The sky was grey and heavy, and it was a good fifteen degrees cooler than it had been the day before. But weather.com gave only a 40% chance of morning rain, and the radar looked fairly clear. I dressed for hiking and headed over to the dining hall for a high-protein breakfast. I told myself that I still might not go, but I think at that point it was inevitable.
About ten of us assembled at the Nature Tent. Our leader was a quiet, assured, understated man in his late 50s, who said he'd been coming to SUUSI for 30 years. I felt myself to be in better hands than I'd been the day before, especially after he gave us a careful section-by-section description of the trail before we set off.
The trailhead was an hour's drive through beautiful hilly countryside. We chatted on the way, the usual SUUSI conversations about our SUUSI history, our churches, our hometowns, our jobs and families. We couldn't see much of the view because a thick fog continued to blanket the hills. On the last leg of the drive, we went straight up into the fog. That's where we spent the hike, too.
It meant no sweeping views, but it still turned out to be one of the most enjoyable days of hiking I can remember. The temperature was crisp and cool, in the low 60s. The trail was beautifully wooded and quite rocky, so the hike had an interesting part-scramble to it in places. The first ascent was quite steep, to a point called Bald Knob that's the highest in the area. Then we walked along a ridge, mostly level hiking with a bit of up-and-down for interest, to a second peak/lookout point called Bear Cliffs. Even at this early point in my pregnancy, my wind is already somewhat compromised - so I really appreciated the mostly-level component to this hike. The steep ascent was the only part I found seriously challenging - the rest was just an enjoyable hike/climb through beautiful, serene, peaceful woods.
This picture is not overexposed. It was this misty. This was the final ascent to the Bald Knob summit.
Our second destination was a place called Bear Cliffs. The landscape got progressively craggier as we neared the cliffs, and our guide drew us together for a "safety talk." "There are places here," he drawled, "where if you step foot off the trail, we'll be recovering your body later with ropes."
He was serious.
Giant crevasses appeared out of nowhere. Not just in front of us, where the actual cliffs were, but behind and alongside us as well. This was the hike I recommended that my blind father come along for. (Of course he did great. My Dad always does great.) It was a bit nervewracking at times, but so utterly worth it. It was beautiful.
Even though we couldn't see a single particle of the distant view. Looking over the edge of the cliffs was looking over into sheer nothingness. Just a white, featureless mist.
Another long, conversation-filled drive back to campus, a ravenous lunch, a check-in with Michael and Alex. We'd worried that her wetting the bed might might mean illness, but Michael said she'd been fine in the morning and fine at children's programming. We played for a bit. I dropped her off for afternoon programming and headed back to the dorm to do our pee-soaked laundry. (Michael had been occupied in the morning as well, with a geocaching trip around campus.)
Michael napped.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bosssio and I did laundry. I wrote up an LJ post. Just as I realized I only had a few minutes left to shower before picking up Alex, it started to rain. Hard. As in, the lights flickered and went out as I stepped into the shower. And it continued to rain. I timidly approached the door of the dorm and saw a wall of water bucketing down, sheets of water pouring across the walkways. bosssio reported that there'd been dime-sized hail. But the hail had stopped, and it was time to pick up our kids. We loaded up on umbrellas and went out to get soaked. The water in the quad, after perhaps half an hour of rain? Was ankle deep, in places. It was crazy.
Mercifully, the rain trailed off while we were in the children's building getting the kids signed out. I was afraid that Alex would be freaked out and want to be carried all the way back to our dorm, which I couldn't do. So I told her, with great excitement, that we were going to do something special: a puddle splash! Every time we saw a puddle, we'd splash in it.
She bought it. So, of course, did all the other kids. There was an enormous lake of water in a depression near the children's quad, knee-deep on some of the kids. About twenty of them ran and splashed for the next fifteen minutes. I couldn't believe that I was caught out without my camera! Alex tiptoed through the water holding a little pink umbrella over her head; later,bosssio's son Anthony pulled her through the puddles in his wagon. The bigger kids dove and slid and got utterly soaked. None of the parents had a camera - who takes their camera out in a rainstorm to pick up their kids?
Eventually we hauled them back, dried them off, changed their clothes, and shepherded them to dinner. Exhausted as I was, I was bound and determined that tonight we were going to go out. So after, with great difficulty, I got Alex to bed,bosssio, her aunt Rosemary, and I set out looking for adventure. We reached Cabaret, the short-form evening music program, just as Meg Barnhouse was in the middle of her first song. She sang "House of Love," and a beautiful, moving song she'd written for closeted gay Southerners on Coming Out Day, and then segued into "All Will Be Well." The theme song, I guess you'd say, for my miscarriage. I collapsed into an aching puddle of tears. bosssio held onto me hard, which helped. They weren't bad tears... it just felt cathartic.
That was it for her set, and we didn't feel like waiting around for ten minutes while they reconfigured the stage for the next act. So we went from there to the 24-hour coffeehouse, where we met up with our friends Lo and Peter and Molly. Molly and Peter turned out to be there with an agenda: they wanted to rope people in to play a card game called Werewolves of Miller's Hollow. We agreed, with some trepidation, and Werewolves quickly became an obsession that consumed the rest of our SUUSI nights.
If you want details of the gameplay, you can follow the link above. Essentially, it's a game for a large group of people (minimum = 8; we played with up to 14) in which some are werewolves and some are villagers. The werewolves' goal is to kill all the villagers, and the villagers' goal is to discover and destroy the warewolves. There are countless opportunities for suspicions, accusations, double dealing, provocation, guilt trips, outright lies, and debate. We kept getting loud enough to suck in horrified new players. It was awesome.
Very, very late in the evening, we stumbled home to bed. It had been an awesome day at SUUSI.
But here I am. When we last saw SUUSI, I had fallen into bed achy and exhausted after a lousy hike on Tuesday afternoon, unsure about whether I'd be able to handle my Wednesday morning hike.
At 3am, Alex woke up crying. In our sleep-fogged state, it took Michael and I longer than it should've to realize that the reason she was crying and soaking wet was that she'd wet the bed. She hadn't done that in... actually, I'm not sure she had ever done that. Fortunately, she'd been half out of the top of her sleeping bag, and by turning it upside down and end-to-end we were able to find a dry spot big enough for her to sleep on. We changed her clothes and covered her with a beach towel, and I sang her to sleep. The alarm was supposed to go off in three hours for my hike.
When I woke, I seriously considered not going. I hurt. Then I decided that I owed it to myself to at least get out of bed, get some breakfast, and check a weather report before deciding. The sky was grey and heavy, and it was a good fifteen degrees cooler than it had been the day before. But weather.com gave only a 40% chance of morning rain, and the radar looked fairly clear. I dressed for hiking and headed over to the dining hall for a high-protein breakfast. I told myself that I still might not go, but I think at that point it was inevitable.
About ten of us assembled at the Nature Tent. Our leader was a quiet, assured, understated man in his late 50s, who said he'd been coming to SUUSI for 30 years. I felt myself to be in better hands than I'd been the day before, especially after he gave us a careful section-by-section description of the trail before we set off.
The trailhead was an hour's drive through beautiful hilly countryside. We chatted on the way, the usual SUUSI conversations about our SUUSI history, our churches, our hometowns, our jobs and families. We couldn't see much of the view because a thick fog continued to blanket the hills. On the last leg of the drive, we went straight up into the fog. That's where we spent the hike, too.
It meant no sweeping views, but it still turned out to be one of the most enjoyable days of hiking I can remember. The temperature was crisp and cool, in the low 60s. The trail was beautifully wooded and quite rocky, so the hike had an interesting part-scramble to it in places. The first ascent was quite steep, to a point called Bald Knob that's the highest in the area. Then we walked along a ridge, mostly level hiking with a bit of up-and-down for interest, to a second peak/lookout point called Bear Cliffs. Even at this early point in my pregnancy, my wind is already somewhat compromised - so I really appreciated the mostly-level component to this hike. The steep ascent was the only part I found seriously challenging - the rest was just an enjoyable hike/climb through beautiful, serene, peaceful woods.
This picture is not overexposed. It was this misty. This was the final ascent to the Bald Knob summit.
Our second destination was a place called Bear Cliffs. The landscape got progressively craggier as we neared the cliffs, and our guide drew us together for a "safety talk." "There are places here," he drawled, "where if you step foot off the trail, we'll be recovering your body later with ropes."
He was serious.
Giant crevasses appeared out of nowhere. Not just in front of us, where the actual cliffs were, but behind and alongside us as well. This was the hike I recommended that my blind father come along for. (Of course he did great. My Dad always does great.) It was a bit nervewracking at times, but so utterly worth it. It was beautiful.
Even though we couldn't see a single particle of the distant view. Looking over the edge of the cliffs was looking over into sheer nothingness. Just a white, featureless mist.
Another long, conversation-filled drive back to campus, a ravenous lunch, a check-in with Michael and Alex. We'd worried that her wetting the bed might might mean illness, but Michael said she'd been fine in the morning and fine at children's programming. We played for a bit. I dropped her off for afternoon programming and headed back to the dorm to do our pee-soaked laundry. (Michael had been occupied in the morning as well, with a geocaching trip around campus.)
Michael napped.
bosssio and I did laundry. I wrote up an LJ post. Just as I realized I only had a few minutes left to shower before picking up Alex, it started to rain. Hard. As in, the lights flickered and went out as I stepped into the shower. And it continued to rain. I timidly approached the door of the dorm and saw a wall of water bucketing down, sheets of water pouring across the walkways. bosssio reported that there'd been dime-sized hail. But the hail had stopped, and it was time to pick up our kids. We loaded up on umbrellas and went out to get soaked. The water in the quad, after perhaps half an hour of rain? Was ankle deep, in places. It was crazy.Mercifully, the rain trailed off while we were in the children's building getting the kids signed out. I was afraid that Alex would be freaked out and want to be carried all the way back to our dorm, which I couldn't do. So I told her, with great excitement, that we were going to do something special: a puddle splash! Every time we saw a puddle, we'd splash in it.
She bought it. So, of course, did all the other kids. There was an enormous lake of water in a depression near the children's quad, knee-deep on some of the kids. About twenty of them ran and splashed for the next fifteen minutes. I couldn't believe that I was caught out without my camera! Alex tiptoed through the water holding a little pink umbrella over her head; later,
bosssio's son Anthony pulled her through the puddles in his wagon. The bigger kids dove and slid and got utterly soaked. None of the parents had a camera - who takes their camera out in a rainstorm to pick up their kids?Eventually we hauled them back, dried them off, changed their clothes, and shepherded them to dinner. Exhausted as I was, I was bound and determined that tonight we were going to go out. So after, with great difficulty, I got Alex to bed,
bosssio, her aunt Rosemary, and I set out looking for adventure. We reached Cabaret, the short-form evening music program, just as Meg Barnhouse was in the middle of her first song. She sang "House of Love," and a beautiful, moving song she'd written for closeted gay Southerners on Coming Out Day, and then segued into "All Will Be Well." The theme song, I guess you'd say, for my miscarriage. I collapsed into an aching puddle of tears. bosssio held onto me hard, which helped. They weren't bad tears... it just felt cathartic.That was it for her set, and we didn't feel like waiting around for ten minutes while they reconfigured the stage for the next act. So we went from there to the 24-hour coffeehouse, where we met up with our friends Lo and Peter and Molly. Molly and Peter turned out to be there with an agenda: they wanted to rope people in to play a card game called Werewolves of Miller's Hollow. We agreed, with some trepidation, and Werewolves quickly became an obsession that consumed the rest of our SUUSI nights.
If you want details of the gameplay, you can follow the link above. Essentially, it's a game for a large group of people (minimum = 8; we played with up to 14) in which some are werewolves and some are villagers. The werewolves' goal is to kill all the villagers, and the villagers' goal is to discover and destroy the warewolves. There are countless opportunities for suspicions, accusations, double dealing, provocation, guilt trips, outright lies, and debate. We kept getting loud enough to suck in horrified new players. It was awesome.
Very, very late in the evening, we stumbled home to bed. It had been an awesome day at SUUSI.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 05:49 am (UTC)(it's a great game.)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 06:46 pm (UTC)come to wiscon! we have cookies! and also usually a nightly mafia game!
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 03:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 02:28 pm (UTC)Fortune teller: Each night, before the warewolf rampage, the fortune teller gets to choose one person's card to look at.
Little girl: The little girl can peek when the warewolves are awake, but (a) gets slaughtered if she's caught, and (b) becomes an immediate target if she identifies herself.
Hunter: When the hunter dies (either by warewolf or by lynching), they can take one person out in retaliation.
Cupido: At the beginning of the game, secretly selects two people to be the Lovers. The Lovers then secretly have new victory conditions: they want to promote each others' survival, even if one is a warewolf and one is a villager. If one is killed, the other dies of grief.
Sheriff: This is an elected role. The first or second day, the villagers elect a sheriff to lead the lynch mob. The sheriff gets two votes when deciding who to lynch. If the sheriff is killed, they appoint another sheriff with their dying breath. A warewolf who manages to get elected sheriff can go far.