Round 11 Complete!

August 31, 2011

“Sweet days of summer, the jasmine’s in bloom. July is dressed up and playing her tune.” -Seals and Crofts, Summer Breeze

Now for the eleventh time and ten years exactly after the end of the first, here we are on this lovely…

DAY
100

The final day of this eleventh round of the 100 Days of Summer! A tradition dating back to 2001, finishing a round of each day occurring exactly ten years after the corresponding days of the original run. Began May 24 and ends today. Another summer has come by, and goodness, who’d have thought a round of the 100 Days of Summer that begins with me dancing on a giant piano could be so crazy?

Oh, yeah, I danced on a giant piano! Let’s get into the recap.

Day 1, horribly sleep deprived and feverish with an ill-timed late spring cold, I picked up Kathleen O’Neal in Georgetown and headed to Greenbelt, only to get pulled over by a DC cop for going the wrong way down a one-way street. Gah! Despite delay, got to Greenbelt and caught Bolt Bus and by noon we were in New York City! At long last, I got to Ferrara in Little Italy, where I’d wanted to go the last several times I went to the city but wasn’t able to. Then to a piercing place Kathleen wanted to see, then to the Met, then met Gella! Then to FAO Schwarz where I found the Big Piano and played Ode to Joy with my legs. Hehe. And by 7pm we just barely made the bus back to DC.

Day 2, still feverish. Sitting in a hot car fixes that right up!

Day 3, skipped work and went to NYRA office for annual meeting planning.

Day 5, laaaaate night of hanging out with Kathleen!

Day 6, still hanging out with Kathleen since previous day, saw 3am brawl in Adams Morgan, helped buy groceries at like 6am before finally getting home and sleeping! Also, poorly attended board meeting where some troublesome staffing changes were mentioned. And the summer NYRA drama begins!

Day 9, some reading at library and then some Thai food, where the restaurant’s hostess said to someone “we don’t have sushi here, this restaurant is Thai, not Chinese”. Sigh. *facepalm* And that night, by amazing coincidence, the new South Park episode involved people not being able to tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese people!

Day 12, to Baltimore for Orioles game with stupid family. Dad got mad at brother and wanted to cancel game, but brother and I walked toward stadium without parents regardless, forcing them to comply. Ha!

Day 13, gah! Fred Phelps wannabe trolls on NYRA! Banhammer! Oh and now they’re trolling me on Twitter. I can troll back!

Day 16, interesting new South Park… wait. What’s with that ending? Is the show over?!

Day 19, at library reading Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut, if you say “so it goes” one more goddamn time I’m going to find your grave, dig you up, and beat the shit out of your corpse! Also, bathroom electrical outlet seems to have stopped working for some reason.

Day 20, OMG WTF?! Four and a half hour long board meeting? Goddamn it, Hal, enough with the bylaw proposals. They all are terrible ideas anyway and I’m so writing these minutes in your BLOOD for this!

Day 22, think I’ll check my NYRA e-mail… what? Where’s all my messages? Were they lost in the server switch? Have I lost… all my NYRA correspondence since 2006?! 🙁

Day 23, oh, it’s okay! I managed to hack my way back into the inbox on the old server and forward everything over! I’m a genius!

Day 24, first of three runs of #16tovote on the 16th during the 100 Days of Summer! Decided to spend it skipping work and helping in NYRA office. Turned out to be lousy idea because I not only got there real late but had waaay too many things to do at once. NYRA overload!

Day 25, Thai food with Kathleen! After some road rage on Massachusetts Avenue. Oh, DC driving!

Day 27, finally a new watch strap! Having to carry about my watch since the old strap finally wasted away was annoying!

Day 31, hanging out with Kathleen again, this time at Popeye’s.

Day 34, rough morning! Then in afternoon, landlords came to fix electrical outlet though couldn’t find problem. Then found out housemates’ bathroom outlets weren’t working either, yet breaker was not tripped. Then landlord pushed a test-reset button on a garage outlet and that got it working again. Electricity is weird! And that night, saw Prop 8 documentary. With Kathleen.

Day 35, yay! We won the Brown v EMA video game Supreme Court case! Chat to celebrate!

Day 39, ah, more NYRA drama. A board candidate sent a nasty email to someone in a setting that has nothing to do with NYRA, nor was much worse than what other NYRA higher-ups have done. And this is our problem for some reason.

Day 40, Ethiopian food with Kathleen and Patrick. Or, no, that’s Eritrean food. As the cab driver pointed out, they are different countries, “like Maryland and Virginia”.

Day 42, Independence Day and watching ‘splosions from nearby soccer field! And NYRA chat.

Day 49, think I’ll go to library after work, do some reading, come on back out… holy shit, dark clouds, severe thunderstorm coming!

Day 50, deep forum thoughts on Twitter, then purchased a Nook, then some pizza for the Fifty Fifty! Then Kathleen calls saying she wants to hang out. Then… learn Montgomery County, where I’ve lived my whole life, is proposing a fucking curfew! You’ve got to be shitting me!

Day 52, petitioning in Silver Spring with Alex and some anti-curfew group to stop this thing.

Day 54, the second of three #16tovote on the 16th runs in the 100 Days of Summer. And it’s being sort of hijacked. Bleh.

Day 55, board meeting! Samantha Godwin wants to change Resolution 00-L which specifies NYRA deals only with teens and twenty-somethings, that it shouldn’t specify an age group. Whole board agrees except for Alex. Fight ensues and Alex leaves meeting. Vote is delayed to give him chance to state case. Oh, dear!

Day 57, conference call board meeting to vote on 00-L. Alex did not show so changed resolution without him. Shame. Feel like he could have gone out of his long time on the board better than that!

Day 59, four years after first reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, went to see the movie of it in the theater! Pretty good! 🙂

Day 61, supposed to meet up with Kathleen but can’t get a hold of her! Oh, well, I’ll just get something to eat by myself in Bethesda.

Day 62, ah, she slept all day by mistake. So hanging out now. I get to her place at 6pm and she’s in candy cane pajamas and hugging a stuffed sheep named Truffles. Ha. Oh, and I was named Truffles’s “lady daddy”, a proposal I initially wondered was a really weird way of Kathleen coming on to me. LOL

Day 64, Montgomery County curfew hearing! Police chief defends curfew for hilariously fallacious reasons and gets owned by councilmembers who see right through it. Alex, Abigail, and Alan give great anti-curfew testimonies. Kathleen shows up late. She and I get food and hang out for a bit again!

Day 66, ordered some stuff at work that wasn’t totally needed yet, though would be soon, so I’d get the big boxes so I could smuggle food into the Annual Meeting!

Day 67, boxes arrived, left work early, grocery shopping, shower, stuck in traffic going to Silver Spring, have to dig up change because that metro’s parking lot has meters for some reason, get to NYRA office really late! Help assemble packets, argue a bit, then back to Silver Spring for curfew petitioning! And hanging out. And fighting with some pro-curfew woman who was all offended that we were campaigning against it. And lots of NYRA people around for Annual Meeting! 😀

Day 68, ANNUAL MEETING!!!! Had to pick up Kathleen and Neethi first, off to College Park, really late start, deciding which breakout sessions to see, Mary Beth Tinker speaking, talking social media over lunch, SSDP chapter stuff, NYRA victories, and off to bowling alley for annual report and laser pointer and election stuff and awards and, well, bowling! Then dropped Kathleen and Neethi back at her place. Then avoided that damn sobriety check point on the way home before getting gas and passing out in bed. Long day!

Day 69, ANNUAL MEETING!!!! Even later start for some reason. Picked up Kathleen and Neethi then off to College Park again. Election results! I’m in for my seventh term! Lost Jackie, though. 🙁 Then Hal’s presentation on, uh, Rebecca Black. Yeah. Then Alex and I hosted a youth rights theory discussion! My seventh annual meeting and I only now finally get to do something other than bring food! Yay! Then lunch in which some odd things happened, then UTEC’s presentation, and keynote speaker Robert Epstein himself! Who said a lot of things people took issue with and he and Usi got into this whole battle. I later found out it bothered some people but I thought it was awesome. And then it was all over! I invited some people for us to hang out that night, but plans sort of fell apart. Kathleen, Usi, and I went back to Georgetown before we were to meet Hal and Eric at a diner in Silver Spring. Then things got, um, interesting. We met up with Hal very late. Yeah, things got… interesting. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Day 74, wow! New volunteer in NYRA office is finishing off new website for us! Doing better job than the idiotic developers we’d paid a crapload of money for. Not too certain about this new forum though.

Day 77, off to Wolf Trap to see Berlin and (what’s left of) INXS. Good show! Glad I have my Nook now, which alleviates the common boredom between sets!

Day 78, forums are shut down for transfer to new one. I have a baaaad feeling about this…

Day 79, chapter chat, though Kathleen wanted to see me. Hmmm. So I left AIM open and in the chatroom while I went out. It worked! Got home to find I’d caught the whole chat and was early enough to still take part at the very end!

Day 81, almost time to launch the new site! I’m fighting with Alex over all the forum sacrifices we’ve made for the nice-but-not-vital forum-blog integration. He’s fighting with Usi over proper launch time. The NYRA drama this summer is endless! And far from over…

Day 82, and we’re launched at 8pm EDT! New NYRA website is live! Yay! Oh, and Kathleen needs to stay with me beginning of September and is informing me of this because of some housing issues. So must get the okay from housemates.

Day 83, yup, as predicted, everyone hates the new forum. Buggy and in general major step down from what we had before. WTF?

Day 85, the 100 Days of Summer’s third and last #16tovote on the 16th! Went really well, delving more into youth rights theory behind the desire for a lower voting age. Probably because of all the youth rights philosophy I’d been recently reading and discussing.

Day 86, youth rights theory is very important for NYRA. Can’t have victories without theory, and theory without victories is just, well, theoretical.

Day 87, after trolling Barnes and Noble’s Facebook with complaints for their question of “what’s the most obnoxious thing a teen has said to you?” question, went to DC for some event Dave Moss was holding. Foot behind head and singing “Swinging on a Star”! Hmm. Alex wasn’t there. He had been expected. What’s going on?

Day 90, hmm, can’t get to my site or email for some reason.

Day 91, Alex… is… leaving us…

Day 92, no, why?! He can’t! He just can’t!… Also, EARTHQUAKE!

Day 93, he is, he’s so tired from doing this for so long, NYRA is doing well enough he feels it’s time, and hopefully all the nasty infighting of late won’t ruin that.

Day 94, car maintenance. Oh, and Hurricane Irene is heading this way and looking to fuck shit up, just days after an uncharacteristic east coast earthquake!

Day 96, Hurricane Irene! Up early to feed parents’ cat and put backyard stuff inside because they didn’t bother to do so before they left. And back home to watch the storm! Lost power at 11pm. Ick. Probably another long outage!

Day 97, oh, wait, it’s back on at 2am, even while the wind is still going at full force outside! For Pepco, pretty good! Hehe, look at all the leaves and sticks everywhere outside!

Day 98, have to figure out hiring new NYRA ED. Who could possibly replace Alex?!

Day 99, catered food at work to scavenge after company board meeting. Mmmm!

And finally…

Day 100, pretty ordinary day at work, followed by a yummy sushi dinner. I go there now and then for their dollar sushi happy hour and always take a box home yet this time, while still letting me do it, seemed to not like it. Hmm. Now watching South Park!

As these 100 Days of Summer draw to a close, I notice things have in general picked up pace, especially with NYRA, but where it all is headed is unknown, not a trace of a clue. What will become of NYRA, with the board at each others’ throats, with the young man on whose shoulders the whole operation has rested at long last taking his leave from it? Will the whole thing fall apart? Or will it soar to heights never before imagined? Maybe something is to be learned by the recent earthquake and hurricane. We don’t get earthquakes here, and suddenly we get one, and it was of course unexpected, but really everything was fine. Then came the hurricane, for which we all prepared and braced ourselves, and she came raging through, and while many places did get destroyed and there were deaths, for others, it was a long lasting windy rainstorm with a not very terrible power outage, though that again varies by location and just plain luck. So maybe what seems greatly altering and inconveniencing and perhaps scary and damaging is really just a storm to weather, a ground shaking through which to keep your balance until it stops. And, as I’ve repeatedly come to realize throughout life, the main question you must answer, regardless of fear or heartache or disappointment, is… what do we do now?

So while pondering this, we say farewell to this eleventh round of the 100 Days of Summer! Until May 24, 2012, beginning of Round 12, in whatever shape the world will be in then!

This has been Day 100 of the 100 Days of Summer, Round 11.

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