Another pretty good day. I think I'm actually getting used to staying in my dorm room, as I haven't been having as much trouble getting to sleep as I did on the first day and it seems more like "the place I stay when not doing stuff" now than it did when I first got here... though it may need some cleaning pretty soon (maybe I should've brought a mop/broom and stuff like that along with me...)
Had to get up pretty early (well... 8 am, so about as early as I had been getting up) to go to the big "pledge to not break the honor code" thing, pretty much immediately after breakfast (Cap'n Crunch this time... and yeah, I'm pretty much always going to mention food. I think I'll add a "food" tag to these posts to go along with that.) Basically promising not to get drunk, do drugs, dress sluttily, cheat on tests, and so on. Lots of hymns and praying involved but nothing in the code was really explicitly religious, or at least not the kind of thing I'll have any trouble with (I don't drink coffee or have tattoos or piercings anyway, so not breaking those parts is no problem, heh.)
After that they gave out these little whistle keychain things, which light up when you push a button in addition to... well, being whistles. About 10 seconds after they started giving them out, people starting blowing them for no good reason; normally this would annoy me, but I think it helped me wake up this time, so the guys blowing their whistles all over the place got a free pass this time. Not long after that, everyone started calling them "rape whistles" (to... make a lot of noise in case you get raped, I guess? maybe it'd be loud enough to stun the guy or scare him off if you got him right in the ear, though I think it's probably intended to alert other people around you instead.) Apparently the nearby city has something like 30 sex offenders, so those might come in handy.
After that we had a service project. I was in Boy Scouts, so I had a lot of practice doing this--we basically just went to a particular road and picked up the trash off of it. I ended up climbing around on the rocks in the creek and up on a little hill to get stuff, rather than just walking along the road. I think I got the most trash, or at least the heaviest trash, since I had a big chunk of broken pipe and a split-open lid to someone's trash can along with the typical cans, bottles, and bags. No condoms, though. Of course, the road was right next to a church...
We were going to play kickball with this green bouncy-ball we found during our trash pick-up, but it was raining and everyone was hungry, so we (aka "everyone but me, who said nothing") decided against it.
After that, the van came and picked us up and dropped some of the girls off at their dorms to get some stuff. They got back and we went driving down into Buena Vista for the "Progressive Lunch." I'm... really not sure what that is, but in plain English it apparently means "go walking around and get free/discounted food from local restaurants." Someone was giving out popcorn (everyone in my group--me and three girls, after the rest of the group wandered off in another direction--got a bag), some other place was having a jump-rope contest (two of the girls entered; one got a shirt and the other got a pen), and after about 5 more minutes of walking around we all decided we were pretty hungry and should head toward the Italian restaurant.
Food was really, really good--they had a special where we could order an extra-large pizza for somewhere in the range of $10, with one topping on it (or one topping for each half, which is what we got--pepperoni on one end, black olives on the other!) I'll still miss going to Victor's back home, but finding more good Italian restaurants around is always good. Once we finished eating (and talking... lots of talking) we split the bill four ways, which meant I only had to pay $4.15. I ended up paying $4.33 instead, since one of the girls had no change with her and I figured I'd use some of those random quarters and dimes sitting in my wallet and taking up space (plus I have a ton of extra spending money, so I don't really have a problem with helping people out if they're short on it occasionally. Doesn't mean I'll let people completely mooch off of me, but I'll be glad to give away a few cents or a buck here and there.)
At some point the Olive Garden came up, and I mentioned that I'd never actually eaten at one. One of the girls actually said I should come with them when they have her birthday party there sometime in the next month or so, which freaked me out a little--back in high school (and, with a couple of exceptions, even in Dabney!) nobody ever asked me to come to stuff like parties and such, or even made me aware that they were happening. It seems kind of odd that after only knowing someone for a day or two they'd already "pre-invite" me to their birthday party, but hey, it's definitely big improvement from what I'm used to. I'd much rather make friends and get to know people fast than not at all, despite my perpetual fear of rushing into stuff.
After that, we stood around at the Battle of the Bands thing outside of a hotdog place for a few minutes talking (and, in the case of two of the girls, buying makeup from some odd little outdoor makeup vendor under a tarp) and bumping into the missing other half of our group. The other half wandered off once again, this time taking one of our group people with them, so it was just me and the two girls who bought some makeup from the outdoor makeup stand for a while until we got back to campus (after maybe an hour of walking around just looking at stuff in Buena Vista.) We saw a random pointy-tipped piece of wood lying next to a telephone pole, which one of the girls said looked like a stake (as in the "shanking vampires" kind.) Other odd sights included an old lawnmower (with blades still inside...) hanging from a pole ten feet in the air, and another lawnmower with a "For Sale" sign... which had already vanished by the time we came back by that area 20 minutes or so later.
One of the girls who left earlier wanted some cotton candy but never got a chance to go by the place giving it out, so we decided to bring some back for her. That... didn't work very well. It dissolved into thin air before we even got to the hill leading back to school! I had no idea cotton candy could even do that, but I pretty much got a chance to watch it happen right in front of my eyes--first it was a big chunk, then it was about half that size, then smaller, then just melted blue goop with one little lump of cotton candy on the side, and finally not much more than a residue of blue sugary stuff along the outside of the cone it came on. Pictures of the cotton candy dissolving away were taken every minute or so on the way back, to show just how quick it could happen (and no bite marks, so nobody can say that we were just eating it, heh.)
And of course, there was the football game. I didn't go to it (it's still going right now if I remember right), of course, so that's all I have to say about that. Not a sports (or huge-screaming-crowds) person at all, so eh. Don't want a repeat of yesterday's pep rally...
Last of all... pancakes. Yeah, after the football game was over our dorm leader people (...I can't remember the actual term...) cooked pancakes and people could come into the lobby and eat pretty much as many as they wanted. I ended up eating five. Don't think I'll need any M&M's or Pop-Tarts or anything for snack tonight, heh...
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