Alex (figgies) and Seth(happyfeet)'s Wedding Weekend 9/11/15-9/13/15

Several months back, our good friends Seth and Alex had announced that they were ready to tie the knot! The date and location they chose for it was 9/12/15 at the Wyndham Hotel:

Avenue of the Arts Wyndham Hotel
50 Avenue of the Arts
Costa Mesa, CA

Seth asked Danny to be one of his groomsmen and Alex asked me to make her cake topper and hired me to make custom arrow necklaces for the bridesmaids as well! I'd never made a cake topper before but she gave me an idea to start with (penguin for Seth and cow for her on a dance pad) and I think I did okay bringing it to life!

Danny and I drove down the day before the wedding so Danny could attend the wedding rehearsal. Before leaving Vegas though, we had to run a few errands like getting some coffee for me (I'd only gotten 2.5 hours of sleep the night before!), getting Del Taco for breakfast, filling up on gas, getting Sean some snacks, and dropping the dogs off with Danny's parents so they could watch them while we were gone. When we got to Danny's parents house, his mom was the only one home. I hadn't seen her in so long and it was Sean's first time meeting her. She hadn't changed a but though! Still as sweet as ever. :)

We'd left our house around 9:30am but the errands took awhile, we got stuck in traffic and delayed for just under 1.5 hours, and we didn't arrive at the hotel til after 4pm. I drove the whole way, was surprisingly fine, and didn't even feel tired despite not getting much sleep at all in advance! (Of course, I would've had one of the guys take over otherwise.) I was happy to have coffee on hand just in case though. Lol

The hotel had cost us around maybe $230 for two nights (best deal we could find there). It wasn't the very best hotel price in the area but it was way more convenient staying at the wedding venue and the hotel was so nice it was definitely worth the extra $30 or so per night over, say, Motel 6 prices. Anyway, we got checked in and settled in our room, watched a little TV for a bit, and made me some more coffee (there was a Keurig coffee maker in our room!). Then Danny went to the wedding rehearsal while Sean and I relaxed in the room for a while longer and then went to explore the hotel.

Later, Danny went to dinner with the bridal party and Sean and I went to use the little fitness center. We were still working out when Danny got back though so he came to join us for a bit. We all got sweaty and I even jogged a little more than a slow 5k-probably the furthest I'd ever run on a treadmill before!

Then Danny went back to the room to shower, Sean went for a dip in the pool, and I lounged in the sauna (inside the fitness center) for a few minutes before joining Sean in the pool. The pool water was actually warm! Not hot at all but warm. It felt really nice. After a few minutes though, we traded it for the bubbly hot tub next to it. It felt sooooo good! Unfortunately, the fitness center and pool area both closed at 10pm so we had to hop out then but we'd gotten good use already anyway and "there's always a tomorrow!"

We headed back to our room from there to relax for a bit, watch TV, and have a nice bath together. Danny wasn't in the room when we got there and was, instead, hanging with the bridal party. He got back shortly after our bath though and brought Alex/figgies with him to get the cake topper and arrows from me. Then he went to hang with Seth and the groomsmen and play Yu-Gi-Oh for the super nerds bachelor party they had going on in their room. Alex, Sean, and I went with Alex to get some things from her car and then went with her to the girls room to say hi to the bridesmaids before they headed out for their equally nerdy dance game bachelorette party at the Round 1 in Santa Ana. Lol

Sean and I went to our room again after that and chilled out watching TV for a few hours. Danny got back later and watched TV with us for awhile til we all finally fell asleep by 2am.

Day 2 - 9/12/15 (Wedding Day!):

Sean and I woke up a couple of times during the night and morning and watched some really interesting science stuff on TV. Danny was in and out of the hotel room later, having to leave for various pre-wedding activities. Sean and I slept in a bit though, Sean til about 1:20pm and me til noon.

Once we were finally up and about though, we made our way to the fitness center for some sauna time and another workout. Amongst other things there, I did a couple more miles on the treadmill. Sean did much more than me, of course, but we both got a great workout before going to the pool (which was actually cooler today) to cool down a little and the hot tub to heat back up again.

It was time to get dressed and ready for the wedding then but when we got back to our room we found it full of groomsmen! There had been minor complications with the hotel not holding up its end of some bargain so Seth, Danny, and the rest of the groomsmen were in our room preparing for the wedding. Once they'd finished up and headed down though, Sean and I were able to quickly get ready and rush down as well. Then it was wedding time!

The wedding wasn't very long but it was beautiful, silly, and adorable and was followed by a great reception with tasty food, ridiculously fun and hilarious dancing, and so much more! Undeniably, one of the best parts was that so many of our good friends were there to share it with us.

While waiting for the bridal party to finish pictures and for the reception to begin, we chatted with other friends there and enjoyed delicious appetizers and champagne coctails.

At the reception, we took advantage of most of the activities and treats provided. Candy bags, photobooth pics, the thumb print guest book, unlimited tea and coffee, the delicious dinner and champagne, wedding cake, crazy dancing (especially to speedcore and other dance game music those nerds had playing at their wedding! Lol), romantic slow dancing together..We did it all and had such a great time I doubt even the bride and groom enjoyed it more than us! :p Also, I thought my cake topper looked good on their wedding cake so I was really happy about that. :)

Once the majority of attendees had left and it was about time to call it a night, around 11:30pm or so, Seth and Alex decided to wind down the night by inviting those of us who were still around for a post-wedding "meal" at one of their favorite restaurants: In-N-Out! It wasn't far so we all drove over and hung out for awhile before saying goodnight. Then those of us who were staying at the hotel headed back and went up to our rooms. In our room, Danny went to sleep pretty quickly but Sean and I were too excited to go to sleep without a little quiet, mellow, adult fun in our bed first.

Day 3 - 9/13/15:

In the morning, Danny, Sean, and I got all of our stuff packed up and ready to check out of the hotel. We still had some time to kill once finished though so Danny hung out in the room and Sean and I went for a brief splash in the pool and hot tub.

Then the 3 of us headed out to get breakfast and drive back to Vegas. We got our food at a Boudin cafe we found down the street. (Sean's first time at any Boudin location.) Sean and I shared a delicious clam chowder bread bowl and Danny gave us a salad he didn't want that'd come with his meal. Bellies full, we got on the freeway and headed straight home. Short trip but definitely a memorable, wonderful one!

IPF Pump It Up Tournament and DDR 2014 Trip 8/15/15 - 8/16/15

It was several weeks or maybe even a couple of months before the player-organized, Andamiro-sponsored Pump It Up tournament known as the International Pump Festival (IPF) when American PIU players started talking about participating in it this year. It would be America's first year being able to take part in it. Rather than hosting the tournament in one spot and having all participants in America travel to that one location, organizers decided to try and host it in multiple locations and coordinate between them regarding things such as what the songs to be played in the tournament were, which players would be eliminated, etc. In the end, only two locations ended up being able to set anything up: Los Angeles, CA and New Orleans, LA. Sean and I heard about the tournament right away and eventually considered going to the California venue. It was just a few weeks til tournament time then.

We spent some time training up and Sean coached me to help me get good at PIU as quickly as possible. Things like bills, work, my sister and her fiancé coming to visit, and so forth made it hard to spare enough time to practice (though my sis and Kyle's visit was WAY more fun than just dance gaming.) We also don't have PIU Prime (the PIU version the tournament was being run on) in Vegas so not only had we not played let alone seen almost any charts in the game but we hardly had a chance to get a glance at our tournament songs and seemed to be some of the only entrants not yet to have played the songs. When the tournament date rolled around, I didn't feel ready at all. Not only that but we got so busy we didn't end up starting our 4 hour drive to the tournament til the middle of the night before the tournament after having been up since 6am the morning prior! It didn't matter though, we knew we'd have a good time no matter what happened!

So we started our drive, stopping only for gas, energy drinks, and sausages in Barstow. About 20 minutes out from the tournament location, XLanes, we found a place to park in El Monte, CA and got about 3.5 hours of broken, uncomfortable sleep in the very hot car. Lol Then we got as ready for the day as possible and drove to XLanes!

XLanes
333 S Alameda Street, Suite 300
Los Angeles, California

XLanes was located in Little Tokyo in central Los Angeles. I'd been to Little Tokyo a couple of times in the past 9 or 10 years but not since XLanes had opened up a few years ago or since Japan Arcade (the reason I used to visit Little Tokyo) had closed down. This was the first time I'd seen Japan Arcade's former spot completely empty of games. Weird!

At first we thought perhaps some of the games at XLanes were from Japan Arcade but once we went inside Xlanes we realized that was almost definitely not the case, given that XLanes' games were mostly newer and of a different style than those previously at Japan Arcade.

As the name implied, XLanes had bowling but it also had quite a few other things to offer including a bar, billiards, dining, and a large game room. The game room had a variety of games including 4 music games: Guitar Hero, ReRave, and 2 PIU machines. The PIU machines were both running PIU Prime for the tournament but would afterwards be switched back to Fiesta 2 and Infinity.

Parking in the area, particularly for extended periods of time, was usually difficult but luckily an event validation from XLanes sorted us out with free all-day parking in Little Tokyo's parking garage. There was also no fee for entering this particular tournament, which was awesome, but several of us made donations to thank XLanes for letting us use their machines. 

When Sean and I got inside, we ran into several friends as well as quite a few new faces. Many more showed up throughout the day as well.

The tournament wasn't ready to start just then, as Phil was working on the machines, but once things got rolling the female speed tournament was first followed by male speed and, finally, freestyle. I was soooo not ready and I hadn't eaten or slept but I went up and did my thing anyway and ending up doing pretty mediocre overall. (I guess I couldn't have expected more since I'm not used to having to play with shoes or background on.) There weren't many females competing nationwide so it didn't mean much but I did get first in the national part of the tournament and even won a PIU Prime shirt for it. I was beaten by a couple of ladies in America including Alex (the only girl to enter the South IPF tourney, on the other side of the country) and Luz (a girl visiting from Peru) on the point total of the world-ranked IPF songs and therefore placed lower worldwide. That's okay though, I'm happy enough with my national 1st place shirt win and I'm sure I'll do better next time around as long as I actually practice! Lol

As for Sean, he was faced with much tougher competition from the guys but put up a good fight. The male South IPF competitors were, for the most part, much better than ours on the west so only one of the men competing in the USA West IPF tourney even made the cut for worldwide IPF ranking and he wasn't even from here. (We had guys visiting from other countries visiting and competing in our USA West IPF tourney.) Accordingly, Sean didn't make the cut to play the IPF world ranked songs but he tried the songs in his own time later and found that where he would've ranked worldwide would probably have been comparable to where I ranked in women's IPF. Guess we could both use a little practice. :p We both had an amazing time though and loved hanging with, competing against, seeing old, and meeting new friends!

On the way out, Sean and I were still so dangerously sleepy. We couldn't nap there, of course, and didn't want to waste the rest of the night either but we did give ourselves a couple of hours to relax in the car before trying to do anything else.

Finally, we made our way to the Puente Hills Round 1 in City of Industry. We'd heard through the grapevine that that Round 1 was the temporary test location of the new DDR 2014 machine, which neither of us had ever seen in person before, and that the machine would only be there for a couple more days. No way we could miss seeing it, especially with it being on the way home!

We hadn't been to any of the Round 1 locations in awhile. When we got to this one, we found that they'd gotten a lot of new music (as well as probably other) games and moved the ones they'd already had around as well. Pretty sure I'd never seen so many music games in one place before. So crazy! I can't even begin to name them all. I got pics of just about all of them though!

Of course, what we were there for was DDR 2014. We weren't highly interested in playing much of it but we definitely wanted to see it, play a credit on it, take lots of pics of it, get a video of it, and say hi to our other friends there. It turned out that not only were some of our Socal friends there but even some of our Vegas friends had taken a trip out to visit Round 1 and do whatever else in Socal. We said hi to people, shared a relatively uneventful 2 song credit on DDR 2014, and played 1 credit each on PIU Prime. As usual, the games weren't cheap but we still had leftover credits on a game card from long ago. DDR 2014 didn't seem very different from other newer DDR versions, at least not in ways that greatly interested us, but the cabinet was really pretty. It was pretty girly looking but I liked it. :)

When we finally left Round 1, Sean and I were both really hungry and thirsty so we got some cold drinks at AMPM and got some food at Del Taco before starting back towards Vegas.

On the way home, we made a 10 or so mile detour towards San Bernardino to a place we'd been meaning to check out called San Manuel Casino. We were too tired to go in once we got there though so, instead, we decided to find some parking in the area so we could get a little rest first and try again in the morning. Our search for parking initially took us to a Food 4 Less but we ran into some drama just after pulling into a spot there. The spot we pulled into was a few spots away from another car, which we hadn't even noticed at the time. Turns out there was another couple (or a man and a woman, at least - not necessarily a "couple") in that car and just after we pulled up the woman started shouting something to the effect of, "are you fucking  serious? Out of all the spots!" or something, not directed to us but obviously intended for us to hear and in regard to us apparently parking too close for her liking. I was in no mood for that! I instantly got out of the car and walked over to tell her off. She didn't own the damn lot anyway. Wtf! Well, she wasn't expecting me to approach her but she was more than willing to argue with and yell at me from the safety of the inside of her car anyway. We got to cussing each other out and name calling though and she still didn't get out so I ended up scooping a nearby handful of trash off the ground and throwing it in her car window and onto her. She rolled up her window but I was still furious. I went back to our car to get our trash bag and pour it all over her car. Still yelling and cussing, she finally started her engine and went screeching out of the parking lot, swerving towards us to try and give us a scare on the way. We were expecting it though so I was standing behind my car waiting for it and when she got too close for comfort I gave her car door a big ass kick. It all happened too fast to see but as she pulled out of there I was pretty sure I'd left her a good dent to remember me by. Dumb bitch. Next time she should invest in a hotel room if she wants to feel entitled to whatever privacy she feels she needs to do whatever dirty things she was planning. Lol

So after that I was still surprisingly not awake at all so I proceeded to find us a nice, dark little spot down some quiet street so we could get a few hours of rest.

It was a little after 5am when we got to sleep and a little before 9am when we woke up again. It was another warm and not highly comfortable sleep but it was definitely better than going without.

Once we'd changed clothes and were feeling presentable enough, we drove back over to the casino for a look inside. It was a fairly large casino and we managed to get freeplay and free beverages there, walking away with $14 profit and quenched thirst.

Then we continued towards home, making several hours of detours along the way. At a Del Taco/Circle K combo, we got some chicken rollers and chips to satiate our food needs. In Barstow, we stopped at TA for some ice and water. It was hot out! Traffic was kinda lame on the freeway at this point too and we were just too damn sleepy to deal with it so we decided to find a park somewhere in Barstow and get a nap. We found our spot, busted out the pillows and blankets, and went to cuddle up. We were quickly and rudely surprised by red ants crawling up us then but it was alright. We brushed them off, moved ourselves up onto a picnic table there, and tried again. It wasn't perfect but we managed to get about 5 hour of rest in each others' arms that way!

Finally, we had the energy to make it home to Vegas. We drove through Barstow to get some gas but on the way we saw a black chick walking down the street with her entire left boob hanging out of her shirt! Not exaggerating at all and it wasn't just some small wardrobe malfunction. No way it was unintentional. Literally the ENTIRE boob -but only the left one - was hanging out. O_o Now, I'm not complaining at all. I'm all for sexual equality and legalizing nudity as well but I gotta admit it was an odd sight to see right in the middle of town there!

Anyway, we managed to get our gas then and make it back to Vegas to rest up, get back to work, and prepare for more Socal adventures the following weekend!