I have converted this diary into something I only use to tell people stuff that they can help me with. That's terrible. So today, I am going to write an entry about a fun time I had just to write about a fun time I had.

Last night Jenny (not the Jennifer in my pictures, BTW) I got a ride with Elizabeth and Ryan to free non-Sodexho pizza and broom hockey on the ice. :D

Pizza was at 9:30, but the (real) hockey game that was going on didn't end until 11:00. Jenny and I played Dance Dance Revolution in the meantime. IT WAS SO FUN! I love that game and I love that I am getting good at it! Well... Good... That's a relative term. :) I can do Light fairly well, but not at a REALLY fast speed!

It was some good exercise, too. Not that I wasn't going to get any playing hockey, LOL. But it passed the time and it was FUN.

At about 10:45, bored, we wandered into the ice skating rink, where half the NNU people who had showed up already were. A LOT of people came!! There must've been 200. It was so cool.

Anyway. We sat and watched the game with everyone else. I didn't know hockey only had 3 periods... You do learn something new every day! :D

The two teams'... Oh my gosh. I cannot remember the name. Costumes. Outfits. Apparel. What are the suits that athletic teams wear called?!

UNIFORMS! Oh my gosh. I can't believe that... It totally was not even there. I had to look it up on thesaurus.com. Wow. Can you tell I'm not terribly into sports?

Uniforms. Good grief.

Okay, so, the two teams' uniforms were green and yellow, and yellow and black. Jenny was laughing and telling me that the green team looked like the Mighty Ducks, and she was saying how much she loved that movie. I saw it a long time ago; I only vaguely remember it (I'm not much of a movie person either), but Jenny was just going off about how great it was... Guess I'll have to see it again. It sounds cute. :)

Anyway. One whole half of all the seats we went over to were FULL of NNU Students, and the other half there were several scattered around. We sat on that side and watched the two high schools play on.

At the first goal I saw the green side make, the entire side full of NNU students erupted into cheering, yelling, clapping. Completely threw me off! I hadn't expected it. It was funny, because it was just that whole side of the seats!

A little while later the gold team scored. This time, the NNU side, plus the side Jenny and I were on, erupted into all sorts of support.

I could not stop laughing over it! That was absolutely one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed in my life!! "We're just cheering whenever someone scores!" Jenny and I laughed together. "That's hilarious!"

That's how it went, too; whenever either team scored, our colleagues just exploded with noise! Wow. It was so great.

When the game ended, no one was really sure who had won, because the scoreboard said "Home: 6, Guest: 3," and no one knew which team was which. {shrug} N'importe. We just had fun cheering! :)

Someone finally called out after the game was over, "All NNU students over here!" We each paid $1 and got our hands Xed with dry-erase markers. Then, basically, we were free to do whatever we wanted on the ice. They didn't smooth it out for us, on purpose. So we simply flooded on, all in our shoes, as a guy came out with a barrel full of "broomsticks." They weren't real brooms, unfortunately. :) They looked more like elongated ice scrapers. Anyway.

And then, anarchy. LOL! The rink was huge; we divided ourselves to both sides of it and just had at it. Anything went! No rules! It was pure, unstructured, childlike fun, and it was a great time.

The people running the scoreboard set up the time for 10:00 like in real hockey games and we just played. The ice was surprisingly unslippery! I mean, I knew it'd be pretty scratched up with all the ice skate marks across it, but it was practically like running on snowy cement--except in a few places, like where the hockey players' goals had been. Those were SLIPPERY and a lot of people fell on them! I fell twice--OW!--and got my hand whacked once. That REALLY hurt! It was partly my own stupid fault, though. And afterward, I looked on at it as a "battle wound." :D Like, "Look! Stephanie played a violent game and had fun!!" LOL!

I regretted having to give up my broomstick at the end of the first 10 minutes. But while the second game ensued, Jenny and I did "figure skating" on the ice. Man, I wish I could've been a figure skater. It was something I always dreamed about... Looking that graceful. Gliding around that easily. Flying up in the air! That's the coolest part. :) I still wish I'd done it, but, you know, the opportunity has basically passed. I probably will learn to ice skate backwards some day, though, and just do ice skating on the side later in life.

The second game ended and Jenny and I got sticks. We decided to go try the other side of the rink, where the other game was going on. But there were all the people who were actually SERIOUS and COMPETITIVE! We didn't last long there. They were ballhogs, too. I hate it when people hog the ball!!! I don't play sports/games often, but that is one of two things I cannot stand when I do! The other one is cheating... If you cheat, especially obviously, in a game I'm playing with you, forget it; I leave. >:(

Anyway. Enough ranting. So Jenny and I migrated across the rink to the other side and joined in on the fun game. :)

One of the funniest things about that game was at the beginning, no one really had a "side." If the ball came at you one way, you hit it the other! LOL. Eventually, though, people chose sides. I think we ended up with about 24 going "my" way and 18 going the other. :) That's pretty even, isn't it?? LOL.

Another part I found hilarious about the game was how elementary-school-like it was! Oh, man, talk about being a kid again. :D They herded after the ball, 10 from each side clustered around it, attempting to whack it their own way, and the other 30 people chasing after! Sometimes I just had to stop and just laugh at the wonderful absurdity of it all.

I also liked starting out defense, switching to offense, then going back to defense again when I got tired. And I liked switching sides in the middle of the game, LOL. That I only did once, though. When you play one side for a while, you just get used to it and it makes playing the other side harder. So I eventually switched back.

The fun came to a close at 1 AM, when Elizabeth and Ryan decided it was time to leave. Jenny and I were tired, too, so we agreed readily. But before we went back to NNU we four plus some of Elizabeth's other friends made a Wal-Mart run. Yeah Wal-Mart Superstore!! :D

We got in trouble... :S We parked closest to a door that was closed and said, "Please use other entrance." We were turning around, but one of the girls with us said, "Hey, guys! I can just open it with my hands. Do you want to just go in this door?" That made me uneasy, but Ryan readily said, "Yeah! I don't want to walk clear down to that other door when I parked right here..." So we all followed suit and went in. :/

When we got into the door, one of the Wal-Mart workers came up to us and said, "Hey, the reason that door says 'Please use other entrance' is because this side of the store closes at midnight."

All conscience-stricken, we answered with a guilty, "Oh... Sorry."

I forget what the guy said, but we were allowed to go on our way. There was a general murmuring of "Oops...", but the guilt quickly dissipated as we got further into the store. I know we won't do that again, though.

Good grief, it's 3:00 already. I write forever-long entries.

We all went separate directions to get stuff. I went to the clothing department with Jenny to look for nice pants. I'm very short on nice pants, but I need them for my field experience for Teaching. I found a cute pair of khakis, which is exactly what I needed, and got them for $15. (I didn't really have time to search through the clearance racks... Oh well.) Jenny got herself some workout pants. Then we got lost.

Well, not quite. Wal-Mart Superstore is huge, however, and there didn't appear to be many people in it. (At one in the morning? Imagine!) Jenny and I started to have qualms about getting left behind...

We wandered the store for a good 20 minutes, in search of our friends, even considered asking some other stray NNU students who had stopped by for a ride back, but fortunately we finally found Elizabeth at the end of the store with the seasonal stuff in it. (Valentine's Day is coming! Aw!! Hearts and pink and roses and love... Valentine's Day is my second favorite holiday.) Thank goodness! I really was not liking the idea of possibly walking back to Ford at that hour of the night/morning, especially without the pepper spray I had just gotten that day.

So we got back to NNU safely and happy around 2:00 and crashed. :)

What a fun night! :D

-Stephanie