Frame of my Mind

I went back to Milton Keynes on Saturday. A World of Warcraft TCG tournament was being held in the city centre and one of the people I play the game with (hereafter known as Vorty) was coming from Derby to participate so we four guildmates decided to meet up for pizza and drinks afterwards.

Me and Ath arrived at Milton Keynes early on in the afternoon but it had been snowing ever since I was there earlier in the week (seriously!) so Justin was a little delayed in meeting us. We walked to the city centre taking routes around the back of some buildings to play in virgin snow. I dodged most of the snowballs that Justin threw at me, but then I fell and made a huge assprint in the snow anyway. It’s pretty hard to walk in when it comes up past your ankles. x_x

After some time we made it to the city centre and caught up with Vorty who was getting his ass handed to him by fellow geeks. He explained to us that there would be at least four more rounds at one hour each so we had a lot of time to kill. Justin told us that the police had put tape around the snowdome (yes, Milton Keynes has indoor snow – useful at any other time of year!) because of the risk of outdoor snow falling from the sloped roof so we headed over to have a look and settled down to eat some KFC. Finding that KFC could only occupy so much of our time we decided to see what other activities the snowdome could offer us (besides indoor skiing). I was quite surprised that they managed to fit arcades, restaurants, bars, a cinema and bowling alleys in there, too. Unfortunately for us the bowling alleys were fully booked, and the cinema wasn’t showing anything of interest so we headed to the pub for some drinks and chat.

A few hours later, we went back to the TCG venue to see how Vorty was doing. Still getting his ass handed to him with more rounds to come, we decided to play a bit on the computers they had running. Free internet access, with WoW installed. I considered it a huge security risk given that all computers were running on a Windows admin account (I can only assume due to the difficulty in running some games as a limited user) but went ahead and played anyway. The machines were high spec and Ath managed to get WoW running at 200fps, but I really disliked the primary input device. Special WoW gaming keyboards (complete with pretty WotLK motif) with far too many buttons – really not suitable for anything but WoW gaming, and even then it was awkward.

Not content with playing WoW for ages, me, Ath and Justin decided to try and find somewhere that we could play pool whilst we waited for Vorty. We walked from one end of the city to the other to no avail – not a single pool table in sight so we settled into a bar for yet more drinks. Vorty finally finished and met us outside the bar past 8pm and we headed to Pizza Hut. :9 I was absolutely looking forward to tucking into some cheese crust pizza by this point. Alas, they had none! I moaned at the waiter who seated us, and then as I was ordering a deep pan pizza a second waitress told me that only Italian bases were available so I moaned some more. >:o Vorty suggested that they should give us discount for every order they couldn’t fulfill! Between us we consumed two large pizzas, garlic bread, nachos and salad. Then we went back to the bar.

It had been strangely quiet when we’d sat in there before and we even made comments on this fact but when we returned it had transformed into a fully fledged meat-market. I suddenly felt very out of place amongst the scantily clad women but we found a corner sofa at the very back of the top floor and turned it into our very own geek corner where we sat and danced to the music (which consisted of the likes of Beyonce, Britney Spears and Girls Aloud) and drank our woes away. Me and Justin managed to chug through a whole pitcher of some peachy cocktail between us, yummy. :spin:

At about 11pm we started making our way back to the station to catch the last train back to London which proved to be an arduous task. All of the snow that coated the pavements earlier had turned into ice. There was no salt or grit. Even holding tight onto Ath and Justin’s hands it was very difficult not to fall backwards. Maybe I should have slipped and claimed some compensation. ;) We did make it, though, and I fell asleep on the train right away – I was pretty drunk. In all, I had fun, and no hangover! :D It was nice to meet another one of my on-line friends for the first time. That makes thirteen, unlucky for some.