Last Post (IN AMERICA)

+1 for Bandit Keith reference? I leave tomorrow for South Korea, so I'll try to keep this post short because I haven't started packing yet (I actually leave in about 15 hours). The remainder of my summer has been quite enjoyable, providing me with good times and some decent stories for you. A quick note first though, I will probably not get to post from Korea until sometime at the end of August. From that point, I'll try to hold myself to weekly/bi-weekly posts because I'm sure the posts from Korea will contain more interesting things (or at least new things).

I went to the beach one weekend with Grandpa and my aunt. I promised I would go with Grandpa during the summer and this was me finally coming through on that. He got to do the go-karts at ocean shores, which he really wanted to do. After returning from that, I continued just studying Korean and doing my usual activities around here.

D&D:
I attended my first session since May a couple weeks ago and the session ended well considering I will not be back for at least four months. I became the first player in our current party to die. I had low health in the fight, but I was trying to make sure we just got through the fight and I was taking calculated risks. The ogres we were fighting had been hitting me for about 10-12 damage or less the whole time and I kept getting good heals from our healstick. So at one point, I got hit down to -5 health, but I healed up to 5. The ogle supposedly was near death, so I figured landing one good hit would kill it. I hit it, but it did not die, so I was kind of hoping Steven would get it on his next turn and I would endure the one hit it would lay on me in the meantime. Out of nowhere, the ogre did 15 damage to me. That was exactly enough to make me die. If it had done one less damage, I would not have died. Anyway, it works out because now they don't have to come up with a reason for my character being unmanned for the next four months. I also feel like this death was a little more legitimate than my last ones.

Keir Here:
Keir came out to Washington because his sister is going to school up here and he was coming up to visit with people/accompany her to the orientation. He managed to get enough time to stay the night over here at my house one night. We had pretty good times playing Starcraft. Keir had not yet experienced Starcraft 2 on ultra graphics, so I had him use my PC while I used my laptop to once again stress test it before Korea. The whole time we played, I kept hearing him being amazed at how smooth everything was. We would be in the middle of a game when suddenly I would hear "OH MY GOD, THE CREEP JIGGLES" or "THE PROBES GLIDE!" The following morning, we played through some Battlefront and did pretty well before getting to a difficult level at which point he had to get going to go see Robin.

That day, since Keir was gone, I went to the rescheduled game night (which was just Steven, Chris, Eric, and I) which we had rescheduled to Friday so that we could have a bigger game night/bbq party with a bunch of people on Saturday. It was quite a standard game night, playing some badminton, then moving on to other games. This time, Chris and I stayed the night because it was meant for this to be just a huge party weekend for the four of us. Eric had to go, but he came back at about 1pm the next day, which was cool. After Eric left, the three of us watched Pulp Fiction (the first time for Steven and I (I really liked it)), then we tried to watch Wild Wild West (which we had all seen), but I fell asleep sometime during the movie and I guess the other two passed out sometime after me because when I woke up, I saw the menu screen for Netflix with Wild Wild West on it. A couple hours after we got up, Eric came back and we went out in the (surprisingly bright) sun to go play badminton while waiting for others to show up.

Eventually, Peter came by. Eric decided that he was going to pretend to be Ting, a foreign exchange student we hang out with. Peter correctly identified Eric, but Eric has such a good FOB impression, he convinced Peter that Peter had incorrectly identified Eric. As Eric went back on the court, Peter sat down with Chris and I and said "Man does he not look exactly like Eric?" It was pretty funny and we let Peter in on the joke shortly after that. A bit later, I went to go get Keir and to buy some beer for the bbq. When we got back, Ting struck again, introducing himself to Keir. Since Keir had never met Eric, the Ting thing was much more believable to him. Throughout the day, hilarity ensued from that. When they were playing badminton together, Keir spoke slower to Eric. Poor Keir was trying to be so nice to him. I was making fun of Ting's accent just to be a dick to see if Keir would say anything and I guess Keir did actually notice. While we were eating, Eric pointed to his beer bottle and asked Keir what the word "Refresh" meant (said with perfect terrible pronunciation) and Keir went on to define it. After about 3 hours of this having gone on, Keir was let in on the joke. His finding out was pretty funny as well, Eric really had him going. After it got dark, we had a ping pong tournament which mostly consisted of showmatches between Keir and Steven. Keir is actually really good at ping pong and managed to beat Steven (I know, impossible!).

People started to trickle out until about midnight when it was down to just Keir, Steven, and I. I was kind of tired from getting 4 hours of sleep and not having eaten all day until we got to dinner. I wound up falling asleep during a brawl match, so Keir and Steven decided to play some ping pong so I could sleep on the couch while they were playing. After that, we played a game of Risk in which I might have been able to win, but I was too timid and Steven took the win on his next turn.

The remainder of my time since then has been spent just playing Starcraft, studying, and packing. I also spent a lot of time visiting people and being visited (because I'm leaving for four months and people seem to think I'll never see them again). I think I'm ready to leave now though, this is going to be a fun semester.

I had to register for classes earlier in the week. That was kind of stressful because they have all 25,000 students enrolled in the university enrolling at the same time. I'm going to need to do some work during the add/drop period, but I think things will work out. Even if I were to get into no classes I need for my major, I only have 6 classes left to take, so I will be able to graduate on time (provided I can get into those classes back at SU).

Last night was more or less my last night since I leave early morning tomorrow. I spent some of it with the guys for game night, then I had to head downtown to hang out with my friend from school. I promised her I would see her during the summer and we hadn't really gotten in touch until late in the summer (more or less my fault there). Anyway, I felt bad and she said that this was the best night for her, so I went to go hang out with her. She was out with some friends, but they were pretty cool and I got along with them anyway. Her and one of the guys were pretty drunk and the designated driver (I assume) was also there. As soon as I got there, she  handed me a PBR (oh God, I've become a hipster T____T) and told me to drink it, so I obliged of course. She then told me it was spiked. I didn't ever find out with what, but I didn't taste any hard alcohol in it, so whatever was in there, there was not a lot of it and it couldn't have been strong enough to matter anyway. The four of us walked around the capitol hill area for a bit before it was determined that she needed to get back to her house to sleep off the drunk, so we parted ways. I'll have to hang out with her when I get back because I kinda felt bad about not contacting her sooner than the end of July. After I got back, I hung out with the guys a bit more before we all parted ways for the night.

Today, I'm spending the day packing and desperately hoping I didn't forget anything. I've never been big on first drafts or stuff like that, so if I don't remember to pack something, I'm probably not going to catch it until it comes up that I need it. That's about all I have to say before I head off tomorrow. I'll try to be in touch with you all in Korea. An easy way to figure out the time in Korea is take Pacific time, add 12 hours, then add 4 more. That's how I usually add it. Good times to talk to me will probably be late afternoon/night here when it's morning/early afternoon for me.

Oh, and before I go, visit this site and recommend it to people you know that are into the Starcraft scene and like to follow it (I'm probably pandering to the wrong crowd here, but oh well).http://starcraftcrew.tumblr.com/

It's a blog that Peter, Keir, and I are running. On it, we're going to be talking about Starcraft stuff and we're hoping to make this our niche in the Starcraft community. I will be posting about my SC related experiences in Korea on that site, but I will also be posting them here, so fear not if you don't want to check that all the time.

Until I am in Korea, peace out.