Monthly Archives: November 2012

Nov12

Playing Airsoft!

Posted on by
Standard

Saturday, 23SEP12

 

Daniel’s sister was browsing Groupon a few weeks back, and bought three tickets to play airsoft for a lark. She then realized that she wasn’t really all that interested in it, and never got around to going.

Now, it’s a day before the tickets expire.

And this is when Daniel, Erin, and myself come in.

We’ve just pulled into the parking lot (after a short bicker about whether the directions were right or not), and are about to get kitted out for the game. It’s a fall Sunday, early afternoon, and it’s perfectly brisk out – not too cold, but not warm by any stretch of the imagination. Both Daniel and Erin are kitted out in poofy / heavy clothes, but I’ve just got my normal cargo pants and a light Tee-shirt on – I had remembered how much of a workout Paintball had been, and figured that the running and adrenaline would keep me warmer than any coat could. There’s the downside of extra pain, thanks to a lack of padding, but I figured it was better than overheating and croaking of heatstroke in the middle of a match.

Turns out I was right – though I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. Before we could even start a match, we needed to kit out, learn the rules, and meet the competition.

First – gear. We had the option of using retrofitted paintball guns, or special-issue M16 look-alikes for an extra $2. Yes please, cool looking / good working guns are worth a few extra bucks. And, surprisingly enough, the facemask wasn’t the only piece of regulation armor that we had to wear; we also had a heavy vest that rendered us completely unable to tell when we’d been hit, and a neck guard to protect against airsoft pellets entering my windpipe directly through my trachea.

Second – rules. Blah blah blah, Effectively the same as paintball. No shooting people in the gnads, keep your mast/vest on at all times when you’re on the course, and no hitting people in the face with your gun. Also no shooting the referee, heh.

Third – the field. Unlike at Dave’s Bachelor party, here we’d be playing in a much smaller “office assault” course. It was indoors, and the entire place was set up just like your standard-issue wrecked office building. There were even rolling chairs strewn about… rolling chairs that I may have kicked around corners at people a few times 😛

And finally – the competition. Since it was a Sunday, it was rather light; instead of a huge group of teams waiting their turn to play, there were only three other people around – Perfect for our needs. Two older kids, maybe late highschool or early college, and a younger brother who obviously played WAY too much Call of Duty, and didn’t play enough “go outside and do something real”. Seriously, the kid was super-stoked exactly up until the moment that he realized that he’d have to actually run.

Anyways, enough about the backstory – A rundown of the matches we played:

  1. This match was highlighted by none of us being able to fire our guns. The other team could though. Problem turned out that we didn’t know how to “pre-rack” the magazine so that it would feed the airsoft pellets into the gun so that it could fire. Without doing that first… well, this round hurt, lets just leave it at that.
  2. With working guns in hand, we were able to show our quality. Thanks to one-too-many conversations with my friend Dave, I laid out a standard-issue room-clearing manouver for us to follow: Daniel and Erin went up the middle, concentrating fire to keep the other team moving to the left side of the “field”. But they didn’t advance at all, instead drawing the other team inwards towards them. While they did this, I flanked to the right side, coming out behind them. And yes, I shot them in the backs. That was kind of rude of me, I’ll admit.
  3. Basically the same tactic as the previous match, except that I snuck up behind them and told them to surrender. In a Batman voice.
  4. Two of their team sat this one out, so I played against Daniel and Erin alongside one of their guys. It was fun… but I kinda got lit up like a Christmas tree by Erin. Girl’s a scarily good shot… It may have had something to do with the fact that neither of us could reload correctly, and she reloaded a lot faster than I did.
  5. Normal teams again, but this time Erin and Daniel got hit almost right off the bat… and I was left alone against their entire team. But, Dave had trained me well. By carefully kicking chairs around to distract them I was able to sneak around and ambush their team effectively enough to still pull a win. Lone Wolf = win.
  6. I really don’t know why they didn’t realize that I was going to be flanking, at this point. But if it’s not broke… Daniel and Erin rolled up the center while I flanked around, and we took a clean win – not a one of us was knocked out this round.
  7. They left, so us three did a bit of a free-for-all match. I may have cheated by grabbing one of the “referee riot shields”, but I admit to nothing. Especially not getting annihilated by Erin in a “walk 10-paces and fire” duel.
  8. Screw Free For All games – Duels are where it’s at! We basically just wasted the rest of our ammo on doing 1v1 duels. It was amazing, and rather excellent.
Nov4

Camping at Nickerson State Park

Posted on by
Standard

Saturday, 08SEP12

The morning after a concert is never a quick “lets go right away woo!” morning. But even with my mind foggy and my ears still ringing, I somehow managed to get myself mobile early enough to beat Mike to the Park & Ride where we were meeting up.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait too long for him to show up. Unfortunately, the parking lot itself was rather impressively sketchy – instead of being your standard-issue Park & Ride lot, it was a small chunk of pavement out behind what looked to be an abandoned courthouse, in a small southern Massachusetts town that looked dangerously close to one of those places that murders outsiders.

We moved on. The next lot wasn’t any better, the one after that was only day use, and the third lot we checked out had a big “do not park here” sign. Nice. Way to be, park-and-ride.

Thankfully, this is ‘Merica, and we have one place that always lets you park overnight – Wal-Mart.

Yep, seriously.

We left Mikes sweet Eclipse parked in a Wal-Mark parking lot, right underneath one of their security cameras, and headed towards the cape without a second thought.

The ride was quick, though full of random small roads and a few wrong turns, and thankfully we were checked in at Nickerson’s before the sun down. The first order of business, of course, was scavenging around for firewood and food – Firewood we found at the small campground store (you can’t bring out-of-town firewood into MA state parks), but food turned out to be a bit more of a bear. Neither of us could agree on a restaurant, so we headed to the safest one in town – Shaws.

And this Shaws, it turns out, was staffed completely by either sassy black women or young European girls traveling through the states. Seriously – Mike got chewed out for being a hippy (irony, I love you), and I got asked all sorts of questions about traveling around the world by a pair of women from Kosovo who could barely speak English.

My favorite part though, by far, was when Mike tried to make some slightly-intellectual jokes to the guy running the cash register. Turns out that Cape-Cod-Bro’s don’t like smart-asses, especially when they’re making jokes that he doesn’t get. They don’t like it one bit.

So with food and booze in hand, we made a tactical retreat back to the campground.

The night was relaxed. Not in the “we didn’t do anything” sort of way, but in the “stargaze and talk about the universe” sort… the advantage to getting far outside of any urban areas is that the stars are especially clear, and even though there were a few clouds we were spectator to a rather amazing display of cosmic beauty.

To be honest, it was more depressing than amazing though. Seeing all those stars, especially when drinking by a lake, is a massive sign from the universe saying “you don’t actually matter to me”. It’s scary just how large the sky is, and how vast the stars really are…

After a while we did finally head to bed, not minutes before a rather intense rainstorm hit us like a tidal wave.

Sunday, 09SEP12

As happens most morning that I go camping, the first order of business was finding ourselves some breakfast. This time, however, I was in for disappointment – the danger of handing out on the Cape after Columbus Day is that everything closes. Not for a few hours, but for the season. Literally every breakfast place we went to was closed down for the season – not a single one was open, and the one motel breakfast we tried to get into hadn’t even opened due to “lack of interest”.

So instead, Steak and Cheese was on the menu for my breakfast. It was actually quite good, and served the double-purpose of being a great place to pour over the bike map that Mike and I had comandeered from the campground before we left.

We decided to start at a beach called… something. Honestly, I can’t remember the name because one other trait of the beach is burnt into my mind – the smell. It was hellish. The entire beach, from parking lot to ocean waves, smelt of rotting death and spoiled seaweed. We tried to explore it, we really did, but in the end the pure stench of it drove us to our bikes, where we pedaled away without a backward glance at what would otherwise have been a beautiful sand beach.

Thankfully, the rest of the bike path wasn’t nearly as smelly as the start point. In fact, it was extremely pleasant – there was nearly no one on the path, probably thanks to the light rain, and so we were able to easily set our own slightly-random pace as we forged on through the heart of the Cape.

After a short adventure to a random gym off the side of the trail (bathrooms and adventure were required, and the gym had both. And a Subway!) we headed to a real beach. The map said it was only a mile or so off the trail, and sure enough we were on the sand of an ocean-side beach in no time.

The water was freezing, the sand was damp, and the my bike was getting covered in the infernal stuff. But… I didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t the sun, and the clouds were covering any sort of awesome view that may have been had. So why did I want to stay? The surfers.

I’ve gained a new appreciation for surfers since hanging out with Craig in Hawaii, and watching the guys tearing into the waves here, off the New England coast in the freezing Atlantic waters… I was awestruck. The waves weren’t huge, not nearly the same as those I saw at Pipeline, but they were still impressive… and hearing about the rocks mere feet underneath the waves, combined with the shockingly cold waters… well, these guys’re tougher than I am, lets just leave it at that.

Mike and I did head out after watching a few rides though, and as anyone can tell you the ride home was much quicker than the ride out. It seemed like less than half the time, but by the time we did make it back to the car we were feeling rather good, if somewhat peckish for a bite to eat.

Dinner, we found right near over the bridge back onto the mainland – a small little tiki diner backing on a little fishing wharf. And that fact was what made our night, because we didn’t just get dinner – we also got a rather impressive show. As we ate, the clouds pulled back from the mainland, and one of the biggest rainbows I’ve ever seen stretched out over the harbor, literally from one side to the other. We tried in vain to get a good picture of it, but in the end we comforted ourselves with the amazing seafood chowder, Mai Tai’s, and the perfect ending to a rather amazing weekend.

Nov2

Holy Crap I saw Rush!

Posted on by
Standard

Friday, 07SEP12

 

Rush is one of those bands that I should have been listening to since I started getting into fantasy and sci-fi, but for one reason or another I never really listened to. I’d heard of them sure, but never listened to one of their albums clean through.

Until I was introduced to the greatness that is 2112. After I first heard it and started desciphering the lyrics I was hooked. That one song, if you can call it a single song, kept my iPod busy for nearly half a week straight before I even moved onto their other classics.

So when I heard an ad saying that they were playing Boston as part of their new tour, I immediately called up Mike and informed him that we were going. Of course, he’d already heard of it though, and had a date set and tickets ready to buy.

Instead of Boston we’d chosen Manchester since it was a ton cheaper, a slightly better venue, and nearly a month earlier than the Boston shows.

And so, I headed up. Friday night, Mike and I met at a park and ride a bit North of his place and started the mostly-short drive into Manchester. On the way we had an interesting run-in with salesmen outside a Dunkin Donuts trying to throw paint on Mikes car, so they could show off a hood-cleaner (he nearly killed them), but otherwise the ride up was pretty boring and full of random Engineer-talk.

The fun really started when we sat down next to Rush’s drummer at the bar we’d chosen for dinner. It wasn’t actually Neil of course, but the guy seriously looked so much like him that even I did a double-take as we sat down to the bar. We started chatting with the guys, hearing about their front-row seats (the jerks) and shooting the shit with the Bartender. It was packed to capacity, something that the bartender said never happens, but as soon as word got out that the main doors to the show were open, the place was a ghost town within seconds.

Except for Mike and I, of course. That’s the whole advantage to buying tickets (and thus assigned seats) ahead of time, right? So we leisurely finished up our beers, said goodbye to the bartender and the waitresses, paid out the tabs, and headed over to find our undoubtedly amazing seats.

And they were honestly some of the best in the house. Some people want the front row, and some want box-office suites. Not me – Directly above the stage, a bit to the front, is my ideal. That way you’ve got the whole show lined up right in front of you, and no part of the stage is hidden from what we can see. The cheap seats are the good ones, if you ask me. There is always the danger of being seated right behind a support column though… but thankfully we weren’t so unlucky this time around.

And then, Rush took the stage.

No opening band, no MC, just… Rush.

And everyone saw that it was good.

More than good – the show was epic. I’d never been to a true “arena rock” concert before, and I honestly don’t think there are many, if any, bands left touring that can control an arena quite as well as Rush did. They easily filled the massive Verizon Arena, and the energy coming off the stage was nearly enough to keep me knocked back in my seat. Almost.

The set itself was almost an exhibit of its own – massive “science equipment” pulled straight from a mad scientists lair adorned the whole stage, and every once in a while an extra would walk up and start adjusting the knobs and dials as the band played in front of him. I think there was even a popcorn machine somewhere…

The show went on for ages. Seriously, new-age bands can learn a thing or two about stamina from these three guys. There was an intermission, complete with a few drunken assholes running around like idiots, but the show went on for at least three hours of nearly uninterrupted rocking.

Once it was actually over (they did two encores, one of which was Tom Sawyer, and then had a teaser video on the stage screen) Mike and I headed back to the cars. Traffic was hell, complete with random super-duty trucks trying to drive over us “small fry” – thankfully Mike’s brakes worked quite well, though we stopped with less than a foot to spare. With that, we wisely decided to trust my old-remembered knowledge of Manchester, and took a few winding back roads to find our way back onto the highway, and onto our way home.