June 18, 2022: Hat Saga Continued

Waffallonia

After dancing in the morning, I went up to my room and worked on my journal. We girls decided to go to Waffallonia for breakfast. However, I honestly wasn’t sure when we were going to eat said breakfast. I eventually grew hungry and then, at 9:30 am, went and stole a pop tart from JC‘s stock (apparently, pop tarts don’t count as sugar because they’re breakfast). (it wasn’t really stealing because he let me do so but whatever)

At 10:17 am, Laura sent in the pre-MOP chat that they were going to Waffallonia and were already at the intersection. So I tore out of the dorm and joined the lot of them.

There were three different groups walking to Waffallonia, though there was technically only supposed to be one. The first group left early, the second group left around the same time or maybe a bit later, but definitely close enough to catch up. However, the second group was kind enough to wait for (some) people, so the first group pulled way ahead. Based on various photos that were taken, the groups were:

• In the front: Turtle, RW, EW, EB, CH, AZ
• In the middle (using everybody – front – back, because we didn’t actually send a selfie-for-going-out): ZS, LiT, MK, LZ, VT, DX, AGu, RQ, LH, Me 
• In the back: JW, AGe, DD, VH, KWu, KS, EL

It was a bit ridiculous because the whole point of going to Waffallonia in the first place was because MG (who’s leaving today!) really wanted to go. Yet she didn’t realize we’d left until 11 am :((((((. 

She did end up coming to Squirrel Hill, but by then, we’d basically all finished eating. So soon after she arrived, we all left again.

It was all quite sad.

While we were sitting on some steps at Squirrel Hill, some people (JW, AGe, VH, others; you know, the usual Fish suspects) started playing Fish. RIGHT THERE. ON THE STEPS.

Lol, I think some people may like playing Fish a bit too much. 

After eating waffles, we returned to Stever. We hung out a bit. Then I wanted to go play spikeball because I knew that DebL had gone to the effort of getting a new spikeball set, so surely it would be fun? 

Frisbee-Related Events

Mom made me bring sunscreen to Pittsburgh. I have yet to use any of it, so knowing I’ll be playing spikeball in the very hot sun, I decided I might as well finally put it to some use.

At that point, JC texted me asking if I wanted his hat. Clearly, I did, so I went to find him in Tepper. When I got there, I hopped around a bit to try to get his hat. Then, he needed to return to Stever to get Catan, so I went with him. On the walk, we talked a bit and he kindly bestowed his hat upon me. Once we returned to Tepper, we walked through the first set of doors (it’s one of those entrances with two sets of doors) and then I turned and bolted. He shouted after his hat, but it was gone already. 😛

By the time I got to spikeball, which was situated on the grass near the statue of people walking into the sky, I found that four people had already started playing spikeball and some others were starting to play frisbee. Now, as frisbee is clearly much more fun than spikeball, I joined the frisbee players.

At some point, there was this really adorable dog that I said hi to. We noticed the dog because we were throwing the frisbee too close to him and were kind of worried that we’d hit him, so we had to move our goalposts (which are just backpacks) a bit. While they were off moving the goalposts, I was asking the owner what the dog’s name is—a far better use of my time, if I must say so myself. 😛

Let’s see if we can figure out who played (I think this is who played, but also it’s been 24 days): JW, VH, AGe, KS; AZ; some Indian kids; AB, maybe?; CH, for sure; KWu, probably some others.

After playing frisbee, JW, VH, AGe, KS, and I wanted to get water. First, we went to Resnik hoping that we could steal some of their lemonade, but no such luck: all the doors were completely locked (we even went from behind, from the track!). As such, we wandered off, hopes disappointed, and went to Entropy, instead, to actually buy drinks. The others got some Gatorade, but I didn’t get anything for the sake of hEalTh. (I say after eating sugar waffles and ice cream for breakfast. Actually, I probably shouldn’t be rubbing my unhealthiness in my parents’ faces. SOrRy parents, I guess forget this last paragraph)

It was very amusing because we spent, like, five minutes trying to get into Entropy in the first place. First, we tried pulling on the door leading into the shop, but that door was locked. We noticed a sign on the window telling us to try the “center door,” but that arrow seemed to be pointing at the door we were already trying. Eventually, we realized that we were supposed to go into the building, Jared L. Cohon University Center, and then go into the store from inside. Except it was very strange because the “center door” should logically be the revolving door, except that door was chained? And there were signs on the revolving door pointing clockwise telling us to try some other door, which would make sense except, you know, those signs were pointing in the opposite direction because it’s a circle.

Anyway, it was all very confusing. I made a joke about “How many MOPpers does it take to open a door?”

After the Entropy adventure, we wandered outside and I took a glance at the tennis courts. We had supposedly reserved the tennis courts, so JW and I were trying to figure out if two figures on the tennis court (we were quite high above the tennis courts, so it was hard to tell) were MOPpers. At first, we thought that one of the guys was too old, but then we realized that he was probably VW, an instructor. The other person was some Indian boy, so we started shouting Indian MOPper names until he looked up 😛 (we were actually lucky enough to guess his name on the first try).

Hat Saga

Then, we went to Tepper. The puzzle hunt stuff had by that point already started, but most people weren’t working on that: instead, they were just playing card games and stuff. I sat down with Evan Chen and SA (who, still not being cleared, I was supposed to pretend was just a stranger; she was in Korea and that’s why it took so long). SA took out this card game called “Werewords,” which is sort of like One Night Ultimate Werewolf except you want to try to guess a word (lol, I don’t want to explain it, so just look it up. Here, I looked it up for you). I think RW joined us, then DX joined us, then DerL, then IZ. Or something like that order, anyway (I only know these people joined us because of DX‘s blog, in all honesty).

After playing some Werewords, we started playing Nertz. We played in teams, though, by which I mean some of us started playing and then other people started looking over our shoulders and helping and so eventually we were just playing in teams. My team was me, DerL, and KWu. It was very fun and a lot easier than normal Nertz because I had three people looking for stuff instead of one, so I could just focus on playing Solitaire while they kept an eye on the middle. CH was on a team for a while, but then some people left and she wanted to play on her own. Evan Chen played on his own because he’s too good. DX, IZ, and JW were on another team (and once again, these teams are by courtesy of DX‘s blog: the only people I really remember are DerL, KWu, CH, and Evan Chen, and I only remember that Evan was there because he’s almost always there in a game of Nertz :P. The game was too chaotic to really notice anything).

While all these games were going on, the hat saga carried on. Pretty soon after I’d entered Tepper, JC had managed to steal my hat. Once again, I did some hopping and jumping around to steal it back but, being unsuccessful, I went to play Werewords.

Then, one time as I looked up, I notice that the hat was no longer on JC‘s head! Sometime after that, VinL came over to me and whispered that it was in ESh‘s backpack. So I got up and wandered casually over to ESh‘s backpack, took it, and walked away, opening the pockets as I went. And I almost got away with it, too! But someone was like, “Hey ESh, isn’t that your backpack?” And he looked up and he saw! So I unwillingly relinquished the backpack back to ESh and return to Nertz. Multiple times, when we had just finished a game of Nertz or something and needed to shuffle, I would get up and wander over for the hat, but I never met any success. 🙁

After that, I went to do some puzzle hunting. I think I did it with LiT and VinL because we were all bored and had no teams. The first puzzle we did was a slideshow of strings where each slide contained a string of letters that consisted of two countries sort of put together (without permuting the order of the letters), so FRANCE + GERMANY might be GFERMRAANNYCE. Then, there was a sort of relay, where we were supposed to have four problems and four students, and each student did a problem, ran to the next student, handed off the solution, and so on. However, as there were only three of us, LR just let us do the problems without the relay aspect.

We did the relay, but then LR told us we did the first problem wrong. At that point, I really needed to go to dinner if I wanted to get to the seminar, so I left for Resnik.

Thus, I went straight to dinner and then to FW‘s seminar. His seminar was called the “Triple delight.” It was not, however, an American Chinese dish. Rather, it was about three related questions in (I think? I don’t remember) linear algebra that he really liked.

Not many people went to that seminar. Also, the lovely fuzzy blue blankets we had for the first seminar disappeared :(. There were still sheets and less comfortable blankets, and there were enough for everyone because so few people came, but it was still sad.

After the seminar, we had a special assembly outside Tepper for Po’s birthday! Because it’s Po’s birthday today! Po was literally pinged so many times in the DC Live discord. Even better, the channel banner for that discord was changed to Po with a birthday hat! It’s great!

We were trying to figure out something special to do for his birthday (besides the assembly), but the best idea that anyone came up with was to splash him with water balloons. And I really, really, really wanted to do it, but also I didn’t want Po to be mad because he’s so cheerful that him being mad would be very strange and scary. And I like that he has a semi-good opinion of me. So we didn’t do it :(.

So at the Special Assembly, we sang “Happy Birthday” to Po and sang many many other songs, because DebL had already brought the piano there, anyway, so why not? (All the special assemblies thus far have devolved into singing random songs, but it’s fine, it’s fun!)

At the special assembly, we also continued the hat saga: JC started wrestling ESh for his backpack, and then other people joined both sides (I joined JC in trying to get ESh‘s backpack). He was very resistant to all our efforts to get his backpack, which we took to mean he had to have the hat. But then, VinL suggested perhaps it was because he was trying to throw us off the scent and the hat was actually with someone else. Eventually, we managed to get ESh‘s backpack, but then we couldn’t find the hat in any of the pockets! So we started to think the hat had been passed off to someone, but then ESh‘s seemed to imply that we had not checked all the pockets.

So then we went back to trying to get ESh‘s backpack, but he would not relinquish it this time.

Eventually, we had to give up.

I think at some point someone told me that ESh had given JC‘s hat away to some MOPper or other as a prize? 

Then, we had Po’s storytime in Tepper because it was a bit cold in the backyard when we were doing the seminar and we were already by Tepper, anyway, for the Special Assembly. His topic was “going against the crowd.” It was fun! I think he was sort of talking about how everything he does is going against the crowd? And that, it’s, like, a good thing? 

… idk, it’s been 24 days 🙁

Once we got back to Stever, the search for the hat began anew. I was upstairs, in my room, getting ready for my shower, when JC texted me, asking if I would like to help him find his hat. I said, of course, I would! So after my shower, I popped downstairs and sought him out. We wandered around a bit downstairs. Then, he got distracted by some people doing geo and I got distracted because Turtle was playing and some people were singing. Eventually, we un-distracted ourselves and got back to looking for the hat.

At this point, VinL and DiaL, along with FY, had somehow managed to join us in our hunt. We received info from somewhere that AR had the hat, but when we confronted him, he said he’d already given it to some Person B, but then confronting Person B, they said they’d given it to AR?

It was all rather confusing.

Person B had been sitting in the fourth-floor lobby playing a board game, so we decided to go back downstairs and write this all off as a bad job. The children decided to race with us down to the main lobby, where we would take the elevators and they would take the stairs (VinL likes to do this racing thing where on every floor, he’ll run to press the button for the elevator so that he can slow the elevator-taker down. It’s really funny). JC persuaded me to play a prank on the children by sending the elevator down to the first floor but the two of us not actually going down there.

Instead, we wandered around to some of the other floors, and then when we heard the children shouting, we snuck into the side stairs and wandered around there.

Once we got tired of that, we returned to the main lobby and did some more wandering there. Later, when VinL asked where we’d gone and I’d explained it all to him, he was like, “But we looked on the side stairs too!”

Lol.

Anyway, once it grew a bit late, we started wandering back upstairs. As we were on the second floor and JC had returned to his room, DD suddenly rushed out of his room, went all, “Hey Sophie, want JC‘s hat?” and shoved the hat at me!

And then DiaL, that giggly darling, ran over to JC‘s open door and went all, “SOPHIE HAS THE HAT!!!!”

And I ran.

I shoved the hat between two couches in the lobby near the elevators in the boys’ wing of the second floor, hoping to hide it there until I could retrieve it so I could honestly say that I didn’t have the hat. But then I realized that I was being utterly ridiculous and just took the hat and ran for my room. 😛