I brought along both laptops (the old creaky full-size laptop Thalia, and the netbook Disaster Area) though I only wound up using Thalia.
I called MissKat partway there, and we chatted cheerfully until she had to go see to her lobsters.
It was good to see JD and Ryan. I got there just as they were ready to put the cookie dough in the oven, and I snagged pictures of the process. The cookies were a little larger than intended. There were silly moments with JD and the spoons and his fierce look of concentration when getting the dough put just right. Ryan and I are comfortable with cookery; it is still an Adventure for JD.
Gallery
We started getting down to business. The whole point of the party was to get the status-pending stuff in lj_userdoc
I got distracted by my inbox, IRC, and suchlike. I uncovered some wonders and showed them to Ryan; the gallery catches his expressions upon seeing the wonders for the first time. My inbox emitted further wonders/horrors, and I related the saga of One Person Against the Machine (and what they found there) through nearly too much laughter to breathe. (Pro tip: sometimes one can take a passion for organization a little too far.) Kat_fw's tale of the mummified seagull led to me relating the tale of Shawn and the mummified squirrel, and what one shouldn't ought to do when high in the woods with a mummified squirrel. (Soup, as suggested in Kat's comments, is a tame solution.)
I spared some attention for Twitter as well; the situation in Iran is worsening. Prominent Twitterers are calling for peaceful protests, but peaceful protesters are getting hassled, and a police station was blown up, and chemical warfare and shooting and beating, and goodness knows what other heartbreak because I do not know.
There was extensive debate about dinner (including the stupid huge size box of frozen orange chicken, and exactly how much bigger than Ryan's laptop it actually was); we settled on pizza. We hit up Papa Murphy's:
GRILLED CHICKEN & BACON STUFFED PIZZA™
Creamy garlic sauce, grilled chicken, crispy bacon, Roma tomatoes and onion mix. Garnished with Roma tomatoes and crispy bacon.
While we waited (in retrospect, we should have called ahead) I shared some insights about a Very Special Heartworming Moment, and we clung to each other in solidarity. JD proposed spelunking or zip lines or skydiving; Ryan declared JD perhaps crazy, and definitely reading the brochure from the counter too much. Ryan and I had several instances of hivemind in action.
Pizza in hand, and earwormed several times over (really, is it my fault that Pandora would choose to play Beyonce (yes, Durandork, *that* song) after I'd seeded the station with Poker Face, Just Dance, Circus, Womanizer, Cry Me a River, and 4 Minutes? And is it my fault that now Just Dance will earworm me with That Song?) we determined that we would stop at the S-Mart on the way home. (I got another *pang* -- my dear best friend recently declared himself Surprised that he hadn't sat me down to watch That Trilogy, so I was a bit goopy over him, and oh my dears, it's been too long since I've seen him.) And so we stopped in, amid my declarations that we needed some vegetables, and JD's declarations that the pizza had plenty of vegetables; he had personally seen how many onions they had put in. (Sigh.)
We emerged with several bottles of soda and one very large vegetable tray later, after checking out the cute cashier that JD always checks out. (Not checking out *with* him, as he'd been in the back stocking at first.) Upon arriving home, the pizza went in and we started in on the vegetable tray.
JD blames the fact that he was not even able to finish his ginormous slice of pizza (and in fact did not have room for any dessert) on the vegetable tray. I snicker at this.
Docadminning got in full swing, although JD first knocked over his cup of fruit punch (or was it kool-aid?) on the table and on some cards, and perilously close to Ryan's laptop. Later, in the middle of docadminning, Ryan turned with his laptop to show JD something, and knocked JD's beverage over again; this time it was Coke. Hilarity ensued.
MissKat calls Ryan "Teshypants". This is hilarious to all involved and several onlookers. Kiri, watching the twitter stream emanating from the docadmin festivities, declared herself willing to become an acolyte for admittance to the general genial debauchery of the docadmin parties. (Muahahaha.) FAQs were examined, wordings thrown about with impunity, things were done, new queries were opened, staff were poked, code was dived (diven? dove? cannonballed?) into, my declaration of change (for new FAQs; dismantling and splitting apart legacy FAQs is not in the current game) was ratified by two other sitting docadmins, the roommate from the shed out in back declared war on the router which had got itself into an evil DHCP loop, weapons of generalized mayhem were compared and discussed (the Large Butcher Knife, the Cast-Iron Frying Pan, the Bonky Flashlight, and the presumed gender of all wielders), and the UK's war on 'I before E' was decried, with especial attention to the noble 'weird'.
Pictures of the vegetable tray, in many states including the 900% decimated state, may follow. Clearly vegetable trays are a Good Thing, despite JD's declarations to the contrary.
And we weren't even drinking.