Strange and disconnected weekend

I feel so odd right now, and the best way I can describe it is say I feel disconnected. From Diana, from the world, from life. It's so hard to be more specific than that, other than to say that I don't like it.

Friday started off poorly. I was having printer difficulties while trying to print stuff for the event this weekend. Then I had to fight Word just to make the name tags line up right. When we started our journey, at least two people tried to kill me in a parking lot only a mile from home. It felt like a really bad way to start things. Fortunately some BWW put my mind at ease for the six-hour drive.

The weirdness fired up again when we stopped for dinner about a half-hour from Holiday World. We went to a place called O'Charley's, which is apparently a chain we don't have up here in Northeast Ohio. The service was glacially shitty. Our waiter creeped us out. There were a bunch of hilljacks in the parking lot just hanging out in their truck. The food was mediocre, about as bad as Applebee's. It just set a crappy tone for us after being in the car for five hours.

When we got to Lake Rudolph it was dark, which was a bummer because we hoped to get there earlier. But we stopped at the camp store for some firewood. I figured it'd be dry enough to not use lighter fluid, but it wasn't so I gave up. We were pretty tired anyway, so we gave up and went to bed. I surfed a slowly on the Wi-Fi for a little bit, and passed out myself.

The event went pretty well overall. We ended up having about a hundred people, which is more than last year. Diana's mad box office skills certainly made life easier for me. We hung out most of the day with Mike Graham, who I've always hit it off with but unfortunately don't see that often. It was very cool to meet his wife Corrie too, which is a relief because I though he was making her up. Her and Diana are now BFF's.

Raven was running exceptionally well, and I love riding it in the front. Legend is a shadow of what it used to be, and I'm not sure why exactly. It tends to jackhammer through certain sections, so by the time it gets to the helix it's remarkably unimpressive. The Voyage is still completely nuts. It doesn't run quite as fast as it did in previous years, but it's still killer. It's also still hard to re-ride a ton, but I discovered at Mike's urging that the front seat is actually very easy to ride in, even on crazy night rides. I loved it. And they ran two trains too!

Sadly, things went back to shitty when we left. We got back to our rental RV to find that some bastards stole our chairs. What the fuck? Is nothing sacred anymore? I mean, that's just not the kind of shit you do. And it's not about the five dollar chairs (I suspect the wood sitting there was worth more), it's about the fact that even in the middle of nowhere, at a camp ground full of kids and Halloween festivities, there are assholes. Camp Rudolph was pretty much "sorry about your luck," and I suppose I don't know what I would expect them to do otherwise, but it just annoyed me.

We made the best out of it and did the fire while sitting on the picnic table. Our backs were not pleased of course, but we had beverages and snacks and tried to cuddle and make the most of it. Again, it wasn't a big deal in the bigger picture, but it just colored things the wrong way.

On the way home, we saw the Browns-Bengals game getting underway at the stadium (or rather, people watching it), and then we stopped for lunch at Cheesecake north of Cincinnati. I finally got something different for a change, and liked it. I let Diana drive the last two hours or so because I was wiped out.

It was a great event, but the before and after were suboptimal, and I feel strangely out of place with the cosmos. Hopefully tomorrow will be better, although trying to get into a routine at the new gig is tough, especially since I'll be deployed soon.