Nick’s New Year’s party was quite enjoyable, and wound up being well-attended. Some highlights, in incoherent sentence-paragraph form:

Nick asked me about how I had such dedication to school while at OSU. My flippant response: “years of practice.” My actual response: “put school before all else.” (It works, but it sorta cramps your social life.)

Andy and Myles conspired to steal a pot from Nick’s living room to hold a tree Andy had received for Christmas. I was later greatly amused to look down later that evening to find that the pot was gone; I have no idea how they pulled that off. (I mean, I waved to them as they left!) They returned the pot the next day, and Andy’s girlfriend commented that they shouldn’t have stolen something so obviously belonging to Nick’s fiancee.

A drunk girl on the lawn below Nick’s patio (he lives on the third floor of his complex) gave us her interpretive dance of being a firework (namely: jumping into a curled position, and then “exploding” before falling to the ground).

Only one guy puked, and in the process somehow instantaneously teleported from an uncomfortable sleeping position on the couch to Nick’s patio. There he discovered that another guy was sleeping outside, and (furthermore) that he was on the third floor—and so he instantaneously jumped to the bathroom. The speed with which he moved was downright astounding.

Dick Clark’s Rocking New Year’s 2005 was in fact titled that way, despite the fact that Dick Clark was still recovering from a stroke and Regis was actually hosting the show. Before we turned on the TV for the New Year’s countdown, people were almost to the point of placing bets on whether it would be “DC’s RNY2005 hosted by Regis Philbin,” or simply “Regis Philbin’s RNY2005.”

After most people had left, those who remained watched a DVD of the best of SNL featuring Christopher Walken. His “The Continental” skits were either hilarious or just painful; it took many people a good bit of time to figure out the double-entendre of his Colonel Angus skit. Ugh—don’t ask me to explain, please.

On New Year’s Day proper, Eric, Brian and I first bought doughnuts at Krispy Kreme. We then proceeded to wander around a mostly-dead garden of roses, the local Vietnam War memorial (what a way to make one somber), and then rode the Max—Portland’s mass-transit system. We got suckered in by the chance to ride an elevator deep into the earth and then hop on a subway; the elevator surprised us by being a damn fast elevator, and the subway (which soon after would permanently emerge from its underground route) was vaguely reminiscent of the metro in London. I had acid flashbacks, at least. (The biggest problem with Max is that it doesn’t cover all of Portland, and so fails to be a complete mass-transit solution.) Still we rode all the way out to the airport—because we could—before turning around and heading home.