2001-03-05 - 02:21:37

Day 1: Asilomar

Every year there is an Environmental Conference held in Monterey California. Since the state does not allow out of state travel to conferences, and since most conferences move around year to year, this pretty much is the big annual conference for my research group.

It also sort of becomes the annual group activity / morale building exercise. Unfortunately not everybody in my research group is allowed to come. Why not? We have a higher up engineer who for some things is a stick in the mud and eventually will convince many of us to move to the private sector (NOTE: This higher up engineer doesn't mind my coloured hair and actually likes my boss and her entire staff ... so I'm pretty safe).

Anyway, the state conference center is held at a place in Pacific Grove (just south of Monterey) that is on the beach. The buildings are either custom made hotel rooms (without phones or TVs) or a dinning hall, chapel or a few small meeting rooms.

Most of my time spent on the first day was listening to presentations. My first presentation had me working as "computer slave" for a DSM2 calibration presentation. Computer slave means I sit next to the notebook and make sure the presenters don't mess up while holding their lazer pointers or advancing their MS Power Point presentations.

Unfortunately the first presenter totally flubbed his presentation. It went pretty bad. He paniced and kept jumping ahead several slides. I tried to get him where he needed to be but he wouldn't take his hand off his stupid radio controlled mouse.

Fortunately the next two presenters (using the same equipment) had no problems. It just went to show that the problem was the first guy, not his slave boy.

Food: while there, we get several meals. If you want to call them that. I think they are nothing more than clever attempts to poison us all.

You can either eat some horrible meat or become a vegitarian. Since I refuse to eat steak or fish, while at Asilomar each year, I become a vegitarian. I even contact them in advance so they will prepare vegitarian meals for me.

Naturally you'd expect they would give me vegie stuff instead of fish when I've contacted them ahead of time. This worked for some meals, but for one meal, me and the serving lady got into a short argument. She handed me my veggie grule and I started to walk away, when she stopped me and said, "Wait, that is veggitarian." "Yes, I want it." "No, you want this meat." "No, I don't like meat." <--- OK I do, but she didn't know I don't trust their cooking.

Anyway, I walked away with the veggie meal. It turns out that the fish they were serving was pretty fucking bad. Some of my co-workers are known for having a very poor taste in food, and they actually hated the stuff too! Now that has to be bad.

Tuesday night, Redwood and I left around 10 PM to find the Monterey Goth club called "American Gothic". Redwood had directions there he got from the internet (directions I looked up before too), but when driving there it turned out that Monterey was packed for Marti Gradis (sp?). Redwood normally is a great driver and good with directions, but have a few police pass him by and he seems to get a bit neverous. It didn't help that I was cranky and tired.

Anyway, we made it to where the club was supposed to be, but there was nothing there but a closed down club and a security guard.

I went up to talk to the guard and explained that I was looking for a gothic dance club. The officer told me that he hated talking to people who were standing outside of his truck while he was still in it, so he stepped out. I just assumed that in bondage gear and with makeup on that I frightened him, so I said, "I guess it doesn't help you the guy you are talking to is in bondage chains, huh?"

He surprised me, "Nah, I do the same myself when I go out and LARP." Live Action Role-Playing. The vampire game or whatever.

It turns out that the cop was a LARPer and pretty fucking cool. He just was a smart cop and wanted to be out where he had an equal footing. What was weird was that he kept telling me that I was a LARPer and not just looking for a dance club. er, I've never _live_ action role played in my life. I am not into LARPing.

And it bugged me that he didn't understand that there are goths were are 24-7 and don't role-play ... we just are different.

So he never heard of the club, which matched what the people in Santa Cruz told me as well. The night before I talked to that married chick and another guy who was wearing the best boots I've seen on a person. Anyhow they both warned me the Monterey club sucked.

How much more sucky could a club be when it isn't even there.

When Redwood and I returned to the conference facility (after I begged and begged him to drive me around all the riots and fights ... I was hopping to find some freaky people, but he seemed tired and worried) we found the rest of our co-workers. We ended up hanging with my boss's boss and a few others and drinking out in a parking lot.

We weren't there for but about 15 minutes when a park cop pulled out and busted me. Actually he just told me to stop drinking and go to bed. High School flash backs! :/ Fortunately my boss's boss just talked to the cop and we all returned to my bed room and drank until about 2 AM or later.

Pretty cool to get sloshed with your boss's boss there.

NEXT: Asilomar Day 2

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