Houghton, Day Two: The Temple of Doom

Okay, okay, okay. You've begged and begged, and finally I'm going to relent. I'll get on with it and post what happened the second day of my trip to the U.P., before it fades into a blur and I can't remember what really happened and what I dreamed happened.

I meant to post this little ditty on Sunday, since I posted my Friday article on Saturday, but as you may have guessed from my clever foreshadowing from the last post, I woke up on Saturday SICK. I don't mean like a little sniffle or anything, I mean full-on SICK. I'm dead tired, I can barely breathe, and I have a cough that sounds like a foghorn. Woo freaking hoo.

But, I figured, I'm here for the weekend, there's a big party tonight, and I can choose to be lame or I can just grit my teeth and pretend I'm not sick. Well, I did sort of a combination of the two. MEg, the VP and I went to breakfast at Suomi, which means Finland for those of you who are braindead hicks. It is a very tasty diner with superb breakfast food. I ate a lot: a giant pancake (mostly without syrup, which blew MEg's mind), two eggs, some toast, and bacon. Glorious, glorious bacon. MEg had a giant pancake with molto syrup and more glorious, glorious bacon. The VP ate, like, two biscuits with gravy. He was finished eating before I had even finished buttering my pancake, which was seriously the size of a small country. Maybe Liechtenstein. I suppose this is why he is a string bean and I am not.

I got to go to the John MacInnes Student Ice Arena (JMSIA) and got the grand tour. When I say grand tour, I mean we just walked in. There were some Boy Scouts there doing something, too. There wasn't any ice on the rink because they were setting up for graduation, so it wasn't quite the same, but it was still cool to see it in person. We went down to tour the facilities: I got to see the coaches' offices (no JR... SO depressing! Didn't he get the memo?), the weight room (okay, we peeked down the hall at it, as there were people in there), and the den of iniquity skating treadmill. That thing is... interesting. Lots of harnesses and such. Rrar. I bought a MTU Hockey sweatshirt. It was the only freaking small sweatshirt in the whole place. I don't know why they think only XXXXL people like hockey. S people are people, too!

After that, we had to run party errands. Or alleged party errands, like buying lightbulbs for people under the guise of needing them for the laser light show. We went to weird stores, like "Shopko" and "Econofoods." I wonder if they have a "Pamida" up there, too. They had one of those in Cloquet. Well, for all I know, they could still have one. I bought some medication and we picked up some soda and ice. I got excited at my very first player sighting. Silly me, little did I know... The VP had the brilliant idea to just chuck the soda in the back of MEg's car. That ended badly. MEg and I got sprayed with Coke.

The party officially started at 6, but we were ready long before that. Covert Brian had set up a great sound and light show, setting up the lights so they changed with the rhythm of the music. The Bruins-Canadiens game was on, and then... well, things started to deteriorate fast. And by deteriorate, I mean become very fun and crazy. Angela screamed at the top of her lungs that the Wild were a bunch of... something I won't type here. But it was so funny MEg fell onto the floor laughing. Obviously, I don't want to hear that about my Wild, but I smiled a little from my lofty perch on the upper deck couch. Then people started playing a card game that had one rule: the person who draws the highest card gets hit by everyone else. If MEg ever asks you to play cards, Just Say No.

I was pretty much down for the count at this point, which is really sad because all I was doing was sitting there drinking Mountain Dew, which shows just how desperate I was to stay awake and alert for this party. I hadn't even had any booze at all, which is a tragedy. I did have a few test sips of the rum punch, which we deemed extremely dangerous, as it 1. had tons of booze in it 2. said booze was cheap, plastic bottle booze and 3. did not taste like it had any booze in it. Unsafe at any speed. I ended up lying down upstairs, but I didn't mind because plenty of people came to keep me company. Some people I didn't even know came upstairs to chat with me, watch TV, or climb into bed and snuggle. I went back downstairs for a little bit to watch some of the (horrific) Wild game and sing along to Don't Stop Believin', but then I ended up right back upstairs, until...

Steve comes flying into the room and shouts that the hockey team just pulled up in a bus. An actual bus. I came about halfway down the staircase and there were people just pouring in the door. It wasn't the whole team, but it was about 2/3 of them, plus girlfriends/friends. They were all dressed very strangely, although many of them were Canadian, so perhaps people just wear Spandex pants, nipple-baring tank tops, and cropped Michigan State jerseys in Canada every day. It is strange up there. I guess all the guys hate tUMD, too. I know this because I asked, and they all said they hated Duluth, except for one person who is friends with Grawler and demonstrated this by whipping out his cell phone and showing me he was programmed in there (no, I wasn't psycho enough to write it down! I didn't even see anything except the area code), and one person who said "What's UMD?" I also learned that they don't like the skating treadmill, that they think MTU and UAA have the worst facilities in the league (Hear that? We don't need a new DECC after all), and that some of the guys are very good at dancing... with each other. I chatted with quite a few of them, which is totally opposite of my normal m.o., DUCK AND COVER, but then MEg made me her personal photographer and I had to take photos of her with various guys. If I were to make my All-Hottie Team over again, there'd be a lot more Techies on there. Rrar.

It was a really bad day for the state of Wisconsin. During the punching card game, the one guy from Wisconsin received several severe beatings and many disparaging remarks about the state. During our photo-ops with some of the players, they yelled "F Duluth! And WISCONSIN!" I can only get behind 50% of that sentiment. Additionally, after I went upstairs to lay down again for awhile, I heard a very loud, very long "remix" of Jesus Hates Wisconsin, which involved the lyrics "Futher muckers." It was recorded for posterity and will likely be the next YouTube sensation. I suggested we caption it and have one of those bouncing balls so people can sing along at home. It will unite the country. Except Wisconsin.

Hilarity. Utter hilarity. Even though I was sick, I didn't regret the trip. I'm not posting any photos because I need to protect the guilty. There were no innocents.