roozden scoot 3: buffalo bill's revenge

They’ve just announced the rules of how this works, and I gotta say I’m not too thrilled.  All of us present at the announcement got a BBW branded paper tray like the ones they serve wings in, and tonight starting at 8 o’clock, they’ll be giving everyone who’s awake a sticker to put on the trays every hour.  At the end, whoever has the most stickers gets a prize until all 100 are gone.  In other words, your position in line means zilch, and it’s possible for someone to show up at 8 PM, stay the night and still have a shot.  That reeks to me of an underhanded way of them trying to get as many people as possible to stay in order to drum up business.  If they started turning people away once there were 100 people in line there would only be 100 people here, but they want everyone to stick around thinking they have a chance.  I don’t like it.  Of course, I realize that I’m not entitled to anything here, and they make the rules, but the sign and all the advertising says that the first 100 people get free wings, not the first to amass 14 stickers.  I’m just sayin’.

Now, for some real liveblogging, because this is the future.

Update: 8:00 PM - The fun has begun.  I spent the day playing cards and chatting with my new buddies Ryan, Ammon, Lindsay, and Kami.  My dad swung by earlier and brought me food (thanks Dad!) and came back a few minutes ago to take my brother Cameron's place, since he got a boat last night but can't stay tonight due to work in the morning.  Which brings us to now, and the first sticker of what I can tell is going to be a long, long, night.

Update: 9:45 PM - 2nd sticker!!  They've got the speakers blasting popular tunes and will keep it up all night.  Blazing challenges continue.  Meanwhile, I play my guitar and watch episodes of Community on my laptop.

Update:  12:00 AM - 5th sticker and going strong.  Computer is dying so no more Community.  I've been waking my dad up every hour for a sticker, and soon we'll start taking shifts getting each other up.

Update:  2:00 - AM Overheard while waiting in the sticker line for the upteenth time: "This is exactly like being in a concentration camp!" - Some ignorant caffeine-addled teen girl who clearly would know all about being in a concentration camp.

Update: 3:00 AM - Time is blurry.  All our jokes are funnier.  Kid next door has a rat tail that I thought about cutting off earlier.  The more I think about it the bettter the idea seems.

Update: 5:00 AM - Was there a time before stickers and cardboard wing boats?  I... I don't remember.  I just don't remember anything.

Update: 6:00 AM - We are the undead, and every hour we rise, bidden by our buffalo masters to shamble forth to the doors.  The only sound is the rasp of our feet - some clad in shoes, others barefoot - dragging over the rough pavement.  When we have recieved our sticker, we return to our shallow canvas graves accompanied by Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'.  There we lie dormant until the hiss of the loudspeaker summons us again to life.  Maybe next time they'll be playing Mambo Number 5. ... again.

Update:  8:30 AM - WE MADE IT!!  We're about to get our last sticker and then our victory will be assured.  The sweet taste of free wings is already in my mouth.  People are getting lined up for the last time and the mood is pretty jovial.  Last update folks.  After this we pack up the tents and then get into another line, this time to get into the restaurant.  In two hours I'll be stuffing my face with the best wings straight from the herd on Antelope Island*!

*Not actually from the buffalo on Antelope Island.

roozden scoot 2: stairway to buffalo wing heaven

Well, the rain has stopped.

Apparently it saw that my resolve was unshakable and gave up.  I had water in my tent however, and so I ran into the mall to grab napkins (camping in a parking lot does have some benefits).  There were no napkins in the bathrooms thanks to those tree-smooching jerks replacing them with air-powered hand driers (pro-tip:  do not attempt to remove and transport wall mounted hand-driers.  Not all mall cops are loveable oafs like Kevin James.), so I went to the food court and turned my gentlemanly charm on at the hot-dog-on-a-stick place.  Scored myself some napkins, but when I returned to my tent I found they weren’t enough.  So then I did something really stupid.

I stole a roll of paper towels.

I was on my way back to the food court to the same joint prepared to ask for more napkins, but as I approached, I saw the one girl who was working there walk into the back room.  And there, right on the countertop, was a brand new roll of paper towels, which I assume she was going to clean something with.  Now, I coulda and shoulda just waited for her to come back and asked her for some, but my brain panicked and was like, “STEAL THEM NOW DO IT!!”  and without any conscious thought I snatched the whole roll and ran.  There must have been a couple dozen witnesses, and I can only imagine what they must have been thinking.  Probably they were wondering why.  I wondered the same thing as I rode down the escalator clutching my pilfered towels to my chest. 

[Update: several hours later]

It’s late now and the music and the kids in the tent next door are too loud to sleep, so I’ll update this again. 

Watching how this line has grown has been like watching the development of a civilization.  When I arrived in what I’m now calling Buffaloville there were a few loosely grouped tents and camp chairs, and as the population grew, so did the level of organization.  The tents now form neat, ordered rows, and they’re no longer the basic shelters of yesterday.  Where a visitor walking the street of Buffaloville once would have seen a tranquil group of happy campers talking and playing cards on simple camp chairs, he is now greeted by elaborate and imposing fortlike canvas and blanket structures surrounding groups of teens, too young and recently arrived to remember to storm of 5:22 PM, who  cluster in front of TV’s playing Call of Duty while deep Hip Hop beats blast from the speakers set up around the perimeters.  Even the street itself has changed.   Crisscrossing snarls of extension cords line the way and lead up to where one of the new yuppies found an outlet on the side of the mall.  This place has changed, and you may call me old-fashioned, but I say it’s not for the better.

This guy's beard was black when he started the blazing challenge

Ha.  But seriously.  There’s a lot going on here.  They’ve been having blazing wing challenges and doing other fun stuff to keep the natives (us) from getting restless.  I didn’t do the blazing wing challenge even though I’m starving, because I don’t have any water for afterwards and it’s not something you go into unprepared.  The challenge consists of eating 12 blazing wings in 6 minutes.  In case you are uninitiated, blazing wings are ungodly.  They’re so hot that for every one you order, BWW donates 10 cents to your locale fire department, and heaven help you if you make the mistake of eating one and then scratching an itch or touching your face or going to the bathroom within 14 hours.  Going to sleep now.  Will update in the morning.

roozden scoot: the quest for free buffalo wings

I’m lying on a blue sleeping bag with my backpack propping my head up while the sides of my drab, olive-green pup tent are whipping back and forth in the howling wind, and water seeps into the corners, rudely ignoring my polite reminders that this tent is in fact waterproof and would you kindly respect that.  On either side of me are other people in other tents, and we’re all in the middle of the Layton Hills Mall parking lot. And we’re all here while our tents try to blow away with us inside because in two days, on Labor Day morning, the new Buffalo Wild Wings franchise in Layton opens for business, and the first one hundred people there get free wings for an entire year.  Let me repeat that for emphasis.  One hundred people will be eating the best wings ever to not actually be grown on buffalo totally FREE for an entire year.  We’re talking the Kobe beef of buffalo wings here; among the most incredible foodstuffs known to man.  Klondike bars are awesome, but if you asked me what I’d do for a Klondike bar, I’d tell you that I’d perhaps exchange one US dollar for it, and no more.  But for a year of BWW, I would give a sponge bath to a transient, I would spend a day with Justin Bieber, I would delouse Bigfoot and braid all his body hair (or, lacking a Bigfoot, I would provide the same service to Robin Williams.).  Because it’s just that good. 

And so here I am, number 40 in line, with about 40 hours to go before the gates of Shan Gra La are laid open before me and I enter the land of blazing sauce and honey-mustard.  And with all that time to kill, I thought I might as well document my experience on my blog. 

My original plan was to get here early tomorrow afternoon (Sunday), since I figured most people would plan on arriving sometime Sunday evening, but since I wanted to be sure, I passed by the BWW while doing some other shopping this morning and to my surprise there were already three tents set up in front of the restaurant.  That made me realize that I wasn’t the only one who appreciated the phenomenal powers of these wings, and I knew I couldn’t afford to wait until Sunday if I really wanted this.

So I went home and packed as quickly and lightly as I could, and I arrived here around 3 PM, equipped only with a tent, sleeping bag, pillow, guitar, laptop, scriptures, and my iron will.
 

In the few hours in between me checking and coming back, the line had grown to about 38 people, putting me right around number forty.  I took my place on the eastern corner of the building and went about setting up camp.  This proved to be harder than I’d envisioned.

In my haste to pack I’d done a pretty slapdash job, and I’d grabbed the first tent I saw, which happened to be a large 8 man deal and proved to be impossible to set up in a parking lot.  The tent was constructed unconventionally, and the only possible way for the tent to stay up was for it to be staked down.  Since I didn’t have any concrete nails with me and the mall cops probably wouldn’t be too keen on that anyway, I ended up with a 2D tent instead of the 3D tent I’d wanted.  So I sat in my chair and chatted with some of the other people there until my brother arrived and dropped off a pup tent.

He was just in time, it turned out, as not five minutes after I’d set up and moved my stuff inside, a huge storm broke.  And it rages on unchecked.  Rain is drilling the tent with the force of buckshot and the wind, jealous because it can’t even eat delicious buffalo wings, is doing its best to make sure the rain blows at an angle that propels it up and into the tent.  But no force of man or nature can deter me.  I am impervious to the fury of the storm.  I will have wings, I will have them of no cost, and I will have them for a year.

Updates to follow.

A whole mess o' pichurs and suchlike

Here be some pictures from Alaska.  Some of them have captions.  You can biggify them with a single click of the mouse.  You cannot smallify them. Please to enjoy!

Massive batch of pictures, part 2

More various Alaska pictures.

w-w-w-whales!!

Q: What do you do if you get stuck inside a whale?  

A: Run around and around until you get all pooped out! 

I know, my wit astounds me too.  Just watch the videos of the whales we saw bubble feeding right next to us while we fished.  By the way, did you know that the Wholphin is a rare hybrid animal produced when you mate a dolphin and a false killer whale?  I also believe that the first Narwhals were the product of whales and unicorns, and although science has yet to find substantial evidence in support of my theory, it's only a matter of time.

A Word from the editor

It is the taste of shame, hot and metallic, that fills my mouth as I type this.  In the corner of the screen, the words “last updated 6/5/12” glower accusingly at me.  Has it really been that long since I’ve posted something here?  Now that I think about it that seems very possible.  My excuses shuffle reluctantly forward like the attornies of a death row inmate who’s guilty as Cain and bound to ride the lightning, ashamedly filing half-hearted appeals they know will be denied with snorts of incredulous contempt.  I have no excuses; I just haven’t made the time to write. 

No, that’s not totally true.  Several times I’ve had a good idea for a post and started to write it down, getting maybe halfway through before I run out of time and save it to my bloated drafts folder, where it sits in an elephant graveyard of other half-finished stories, each as useful as the dusty, half-assembled lawnmower that has sat in the shed since 1992, and about as likely to ever be completed.

Even this post, which is intended to be a summation of some of the shenanigins and goings-on that I should have been writing about but haven’t, has only a slight chance of being added to the glut of traffic on the information superhighway.  I’m writing it in the break room at work, having arrived earlier than my scheduled time, and I’m just about out of time.  Naturally, I intend most earnestly to finish it when I get off work today, and fully expect that I will do so.  Just as sincerely as I intended to finish every one of my other aborted posts that, now obsolete, crowd into my thoughts, morosely wagging their ghostly heads at me, chains a’clanking like the myriad ghosts of Christmas could-have-been. 

I’m now sitting in my bus in between runs.  I’ve got an hour before my next duty and if I can finish this I’ll post it when I get home and that’ll be an accomplishment.

So here’s a rundown of the things I’ve been doing lately:

1)      BURFDAE TIEM!!  June 11^th, 2012 was a big day for double digits.  It was the day I turned twenty-two. It was also my third consecutive birthday away from my family and friends.  Even though I’ve passed the point where birthdays aren’t a huge deal to me anymore, it was still a melancholy thought that it’d been so long since I was with my family for the anniversary of my birth.  Nonetheless, my birthday was awesome.  Nay, it was double awesome, surpassing tubular and approaching the level of radness known as da bomb dot com.  I had expected it to pass as did the birthdays on my mission:  like a fart in the breeze.  Instead, I had one of the most memorable birthdays ever.  I had to work, but that was a good thing since I had a tour and could make a big deal of telling my guests it was my birthday (and thus boosting my tip revenue).  After work, some friends had reserved tables at a restaurant I’d wanted to eat at for a long time and they’d decorated it all with streamers and balloons and junk.  During the meal, which 18 of my good friends attended, gifts and cards were given, gyros were eaten, and all in attendance reported joviality in abundance.  After the succulent supper was had, the birthday train trundled back to the driver house to watch my favorite most hated movie, Troll 2.  Yes, people love me enough to subject themselves willingly to Troll 2 (If you haven’t seen it, speak with me posthaste.  I will make the necessary arrangements).  There was also the spice cake that my friend Olivia baked me, the Spongebob piñata provided by the same, and lots of calls and texts from friends and family back home.  It was a supremely satisfying birthday.

2)      I’M ON A BOAT When I grow up I want to be, one of the harvesters of the sea, and when my days are done, I want to be, A FISHERMAN! –Primus.

One dewy morning in Alaska, there were no cruise ships in town!  Which meant that we got the day off.  So myself, Bob, Alex, Don and Olivia rented a skiff and went fishing in the ocean!!  It was just gobs of fun.  Double handfuls of fun.  Highlights included me catching a halibut (in addition to some rockfish and the largest frond of bull kelp in this neck of the galaxy) and seeing AN ENTIRE SMEGGING POD OF WHALES BUBBLE FEEDING NOT 15 FEET FROM OUR SKIFF OH MY GOSH IT WAS AMAZING LIKE ONCE IN A LIFETIME EXPERIENCE  AMAZING!!!  We got pictures and even a video, which will all be put up soon in it’s own post (don’t laugh!  I really am going to do it!) 

Um, yeah there was tons more stuff but I kinda don't have time and so it'll hafta wait until a later date, when I'm in a state where I'm feeling great, not so much on my plate, which I'll appreciate, like William Butler Yeats, born 1868, before the roller skate, in Ireland not Kuwait, but let us not debate, neither shall we berate, lest we become irate, and without thought misstate, with words we can't negate, this prose waxes ornate, like Nephi's golden plate, which Joseph did translate, and to his wife dictate, in New York (yes, upstate), at a fantastic rate, no time to recreate, he picked a running mate, and ran for head of state, of foes he had a spate, mobbers lying in wait, suffered a martyr's fate, now guards the pearly gates, and worlds he will create, in his final estate, with Emma his soul mate (maybe), and now at any rate, it's kinda getting late, my words must now abate, my twitching hands sedate, (with which I will equate), my swollen brain deflate, my lust for rhyming sate, because I've reached home plate, which doth my soul elate.  Peace.