The large room in our basement used to be roughly split in half by a couch, forming the east half-Family Room and west half-Computer Room. My mom and sisters and I were sitting in the family room watching tv. I could hear the tv sounds coming from behind me, so I spun around to see what was going on. All the way across the room, against the wall, was another television. And the harder I looked, I realized that the room had become a pool. The dividing couch, which I was sitting on, was one of the sides of the pool. The distinguishing feature of this pool, as pointed out by the announcer who appeared on screen, was that it was a bubble-pool. There were huge mounds of sudsy bubbles, some of which piled almost all the way up to the ceiling. Soon people sttarted walking into our basement, taking off their robes, and climbing into the pool. These were glamorous soap-opera types, not just any old boring people. The announcer celebrated this as "Naked Bubble Swimming!" but I know he was lying cos they were all wearing suits. I was feeling mischievous, though, so I stripped down and jumped in. It was no big deal, because the layer of bubbles was very concealing.

When I got in, a business suit-clad man walked up onto the deck of the pool and began instructing us on water safety and then started drilling us in several water fitness routines. He gave us more than enough time to move from station to station, so I would flip and roll about in the water. It was a lot of fun, and I remember really enjoying myself. However, he saw this as unacceptable misbehavior, and would constantly chew me out.

As time passed, the pool became larger, and the room became more and more NOT my basement. It was like we were in a pool placed under a construction frame of a large building placed inside a gymnasium. I remember looking up and seeing I-Beams all around. Anyway, after a while with him, I was put in a bad mood, and then a new instructor showed up. The pool was now a normal ppool, without bubbles, but it's okay cos I now had swimming trunks on. Well this lady was down-right mean. And thanks to my bad mood, I started smarting off (well, knowing me, I probably would have anyway). She wasn't going to take it, so she made me go swim in the corner. That even turned out okay, because my friend Josh Smith had to come swim in the corner a little later.

I had to get out, though, because I had to go to my Grandpa Obermeyer's birthday party. Oddly enough, it was held in the front lawn of my Grandpa Shew's house. And odder still was that it was warm, sunny, and green, even though his birthday is December 24th. I wasn't one to complain about that. The whole family was there.

The tree in the front yard had grown quite a bit, and the branches reached down so low that if you stood up closer to the house (the yard slopes down from the house to the tree) you could actually climb up into the tree and have a seat. I decided to do just that, and it was pretty fun just sitting on that limb, gently bouncing and swaying 3 feet above the ground. I should have paid more attention to the time, because as tradition would have it, 4pm meant it was time for the birthday boy to spin the tree. At first I thought it was just the wind picking up, but then when I moved farther I realized that I was going for a ride. Grandpa was standing there beside the trunk cranking the handle that made it spin. And I was sitting on an extremely thin branch, soaring out above the street and opposite block. I wanted to jump out when I got back to the other side, but the tree rises about 5 feet when spinning, and 8 feet was too far to jump at that speed. So I just had to sit there and clutch onto weak branches and hollar down, hoping someone would hear me.

No one did, but I survived the entire duration of the ride, which lasted probably 5 minutes. When I got down, I sat over in the corner of the yard to take a rest. Erica and Bailey (sister and cousin, respectively) came over to see me, and along with them came a dog. It was the slobberiest, noisiest, hairiest, most disgusting dog I hhave ever seen. It was probably 1.5-2 feet long and maybe 1.5 feet tall and it had curly white hair. Not tight curls like a poodle, but loose ragged curls like a stupid dogg. It drooled all over me and then turned around and peed on me, so I stood up and kicked it out into the street. It ran around yelping some more.

Either Erica or Bailey had a new doll that they were showing me. Its head had come off, and they asked me to fix it. The thing had just popped off, so it wasn't going to be a problm. But then that demonspawn canine ran up and grabbed the head in its teeth, right out of my hand. It ran off across the street with it in its mouth, with a firm trail of drool flowing behind. I gave them the doll's body and took off after the hairy turd with legs.

It was over in someone's yard on the next block, and I dove on it and got it in a headlock. Then I yanked the doll's head out and turned the dog's head so that I could look straight in its eyes. I said "I told you that if I see that coming out of your mouth again, I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap!" and then the dog said "Yeah, but you're all talk!" So I grabbed the fecal furball by the collar and dragged him to my house, where I took him into the bathroom and washed his mouth out with Dial, then Zest, and then Lava--so he could FEEL my wrath.

When I had enough of that I went downstairs to see what my sisters were up to (never mind that they should have still been in town at the birthday party...). They were sitting in front of our old brown loveseat, which sits on the Computer Room side of the basement. There was a whole mess of cds lying on the floor in front of a small bookshelf, with the cd player sitting on top. I asked them what was going on, and they told me that over on the other half of the room, a woman was in labor, and her husbband was there to comfort her. Monica and Erica were trying to pick out some music to entertain the couple as they waited for the doctor (and the baby, for that matter). They weren't sure what the couple would like, so they asked me to pick the music. I was like "Cool! I want to show you this single I got the other day!" and played Nancy Boy by Placebbo. Erica tugged on my shirt, and in a very calm, quiet voice, said "Neal, they're in their 30s..." I got the hint, so I took out the cd and played Cars by Gary Numan. Only this wasn't the version I expected--I thought I was putting in the single version, only this was a live recording. I said "Whoa, I haven't heard this in a while." In fact, it was around a year ago, because the only other time I've ever heard a live version of Cars was in a dream.

Anyway, this woman who was in labor was someone I recognized (when I finally turned around to see who it was). She was a regular customer at Hinky Dinky and was often accompanied by a cute little boy and girl. Based on the crowd she had gathered around her, I learned that she had 7 children. One of those was an adopted Korean though. They stood calmly around the bed holding the adjacent sibling's hand, forming a sort of ring around their mother. Meanwhile, the father bounced about, holding what looked like a plunger. I then learned from Monica and Erica that we weren't really in the basement; we were at the hospital waiting for mom to get off work.

Eventually she came out and we all got into the car. As we drove over a viaduct, I remember looking out and down, thinking "It's a good thiing I'm not in Lancaster bus on the upper level, otherwise this would be scary!" We went to Hinky Dinky to get groceries, as was common for her to do after work. When I walked through the soup aisle, Geri (Hinky Dinky supervisor) came up to me and said "Neal! We need you to do pulldown on this aisle!" Not even thinking that I wasn't working, I started just what she asked, until John Gettys (night manager) came up to me and said "Neal, I need you in frozen."

So I walked over to the frozen section, only next to the ice cream coolers were 20oz pop coolers (not usually in the frozen). John had a bunch of L-cards stacked with crates of ie cream and pop, and, fearing they would melt, asked me to come help him get them stocked. He would pick up a crate, dump the contents into my arms, and then grab an item one at a time and place it into the cooler. The crates would just be tossed aside into the aisle. After a while, there was a pretty big mess, and since he didn't empty my arms before dumping a new crate, the load I was holding was almost too big to handle. What made matters worse was that John got a phone call, so he ran off leaving me to hold all that stuff. I couldn't move around to keep my balance, otherwise I'd trip over the crates littered on the floor. Then Jay Burgert came up to me and said "Hey Neal you have bread, chips, and ice for night work." I dropped the stuff on the floor and said "No way! I've already started doing pulldown, they're not doing this to me again!"

(This summer, I encountered the problem of being too efficient: the Dink people admitted to strategically assigning me to too many jobs so that I would do more work so that more work would get done well. They admitted to that, so it's not just my imagination boosting my ego. However I was afraid that on my first day back (which really wasn't even my first day back at all--I was just there shopping with my mom!) they were already trying to do it again.)

So I stomped through the crates and over to the back room where all the carryouts were gathered around the night work list. Mike Buchheit came up to me and goes "Neal I don't know how to do 12s and 24s! It's only my first day!" Philip Barr handed me the mighty yellow notebook. I checked for my name, and Mike and I had been assigned 12s and 24s. So that explained why he came to me with his problem. I said "Come on Mike, this won't be a problem." Then I commented to him that nightwork has become tremendously easier, as the supply has been diluted with the increased number of carryouts, only half of which were needed.

We walked through the breezeway and to the door that led to the back on the North side (in reality this door does not exist--Pamida sits there in the way). This side of the back room was huge and mostly vacant, except for a cone-shaped plywood structure in the center with what looked like ramps leading down from it. Mike and I started to walk on past when Kevin Burgert stepped down from the structure. Apparently he was one of the construction workers or something. I said "Hey Kevin, haven't seen you in a while," and he said pretty much the same thing back to me, and then I asked what they were working on. He said they were building a congregation area at the center of the fairgrounds.

I was like "Fairgrounds??" We were standing inside a stock room of a grocery store, only it didn't look like that anymore. It was more like the inside of a large machinery shed, but with a perfectly clean floor and walls. He said that each of the "ramps" was just a covered walkway (or possibly a chute, I can remember him talking about aspects of each) to the main attractions. He motioned towards the ramp that was closest to completion and gestured out one of the large open doors, saying "This leads over to Pendle where the ferris wheel will be." (Pendle is one of the colleges at Lancaster; it is the furthest south and is next to Grizedale) He told me more features of the fairgrounds, but I interrupted him and said "Looks like I came to Lancaster at the right time!" and he replied with "Not really...this won't be completed til 5005." I shouted "2005?!?" thinking he just misspoke, but he said "No, not til 5005." I started to say something about just having to make a trip back, but then I realized that wasn't an option.

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