Manalive. So much to write about, and I have no idea where to begin. Oh, wait, I do.

I would title this entry “It’s all fun and games until Eric calls the frickin’ cops on you,” but that proved to be a bit unwieldy.

So Friday was Andy’s blowout Poker Bonanza day, where he estimated he’d have enough people to keep two tables going for most of the day. As I suck at poker, I elected to collect my chips the ol’ fashioned way (“I went to work”). Andy had informed me that he would have a keg at his place, and I’d have to stop by sometime that day to see it, if nothing else.

After taking care of some odds and ends that evening, I headed over to Andy’s place about nine. I expected it to be mostly poker and a small amount of chit-chat, so I didn’t bother calling Eric. When I arrived—contrary to my expectations—I found not only a poker game, but a posh social environment: Nick and Kevin had driven down from Lake Oswego, Joel and Tammy and others were over, and a subset of the group was about to watch Super Troopers. As I knew Nick and Eric are good friends, and I knew that Eric had expressed an interest in watching Super Troopers, I decided to give him a call. His line was busy, ostensibly because he was on the internet. I confess that I never really bothered to memorize his new email address, preferring instead to let Eudora do my heavy lifting, so emailing him from Andy’s (Andy doesn’t have Eric’s current email address (?)) became difficult. We (Nick, Nate, Neil, and myself) decided that a brief Road Trip was in order.

Now, you must understand something about Neil. He weilds the most ferocious door knock I’ve ever heard, and (appropriately) calls it the Cop Knock. When we arrived at Eric’s, the rest of us naturally stepped aside to let Neil work his magic.

He did.

From inside, a panicked Eric shouted out “who’s there!?!” Nate and I had pretty much stepped back to see what comedic magic the others could work—the setup was pretty damn perfect—unfortunately, Nick and Neil didn’t work much of anything. Hell, they didn’t even say anything. Neil knocked a few more times, and then Nick tried a “professional” knock. Inside we heard Eric talking, but couldn’t make anything out. After a decent chunk of time had passed, I (finally) came to my senses and realized that nobody else was doing anything either funny or useful (i.e. getting Eric to come watch the movie), and so identified myself through the door. Eric then opened up, and then cleared things up with the 911 operator he had called. (?!)

Eric then asked us which one of us had knocked. We pointed to Neil; Eric walked over to Neil and hit him a handful of times. We were then invited in, and took this picture of the prankster and the pranked. Apparently Eric’s porch light had temporarily died (it worked when he tried it later, but seemed to have difficulty starting up), so all he could see through his peephole was some shadowy figures. Also apparently, Eric was completely unaware of Neil’s specialty knock.

It was pretty damn funny, especially because we got to go back and tell the poker players (in grandiose style) how Eric called the cops on us. At the end of the day, though, I had mixed feelings about it. As I explained to Eric later that evening: I didn’t care that he had been scared, but did feel bad that we had wasted the 911 dispatcher’s (and ostensibly an officer’s) time. Nick commented that I would make a great politician with comments like that (saving resources, etc.). Was it overreaction on Eric’s part? I’m not sure.

The rest of the evening, in a nutshell: Super Troopers was a hilarious movie. Eric stole some of the ice from around the keg to use on his hand, which he had injured punching Neil. Later in the evening, as the group was sitting and chatting, Andy bursts in the front door (I hadn’t noticed that he was gone in the first place), excitedly explains something about giving girls a ride to Clod’s, and then leaves again. Andy and Rob return a bit later—Rob happy that some cute gal in a dress had sat on his lap for the ride over, Andy happy that gals had been in his car. Rob harbors hopes that these gals will come back to him, and leaves to pursue them; Andy recognizes that they’re gone and mopes on the couch. Rob later returns, dejected. Nick impresses some with a “find the selected card” magic trick, and then impresses again with a physical card trick: spread a deck of cards across the table, and then use one card to pry up an end and then support a “wave” in the cards that you can move back and forth at will (somewhat difficult to explain, but novel to all of us around the table). In general, though, it was just a big social hour—probably the last one like it we’ll ever have. I got home around 4:00 am, but it was easily worth it.

Today was much less eventful. My aunt has come down from Alaska to see my grandma. Today she (my aunt) needed to type something up in Word and fax it, so she came over and had the honor of using the old fax machine we bought from work to send a $5 fax. (As that’s the second fax we’ve sent using the machine, which we bought for $10, I figure it’s fair to amortize the fax machine’s cost over the two faxes.) Marin and I later wandered the countryside to find an elusive copy of X: [five] with (this time extra-) Limited Edition slipcover. Usually LE items aren’t that big of a deal, but in this case Marin has a box designed to hold the DVDs with slipcovers, and to miss one would not only look bad but also free the discs to knock around some in the box. We eventually succeeded, but not before my rear fell off from sitting too long in a car seat. This evening Andy and Nate came over, as they had cleaned their carpets and needed to pass some time while the carpets dried. We finished off the fifth episode of Rahxephon, which we greatly enjoyed despite (because of?) the numerous Evangelion references we saw, and then watched the first two episodes of FLCL. Andy took FLCL pretty well, I’d say.