I was so tired Friday that I managed to forget to eat. Allow me to explain why.
September 26-27 was my fraternity's 12th Annual Race Around the Rock. This year we were holding it in support of the Calgary Emergency Women's Shelter. The premise is basic. We take a couple of scooters, and make sure to keep at least one of them travelling around the rock at the University of Calgary for a full 24 Hours, all the while bugging passer-bys for donations.
Well, that's not exactly true. We're not going around The Rock, since we needed a better location, one with a flat surface that we can set a volleyball net up on. So we grabbed one from Banff National Park and stuck it in the middle of the lawn.
Things were going well. Oh so very well. We did a preliminary count at 6:00 PM, and just with the quarters, Loonies, and Toonies and various bills, we had raised over $1000. This combined with about $900 that we had raised from friends, co-workers, and neighbors beforehand, and the $1000 grant we had gotten from the Student's Union to cover all our expenses, and we were doing well. This is considering that the net total for the full 24 hours the year before was only a bit over $1400.
Fast Forward to about 2:00AM and we still had a ton of people out there, mostly drunk folk who were headed out from the Den, back to res. We're all out there having a good time and such. Until it starts raining...
It's just drizzling at first, not too bad. We throw a tarp on the stereo equipment and keep going. Just enough to get us a fair bit wet.
And then it starts snowing.
This is about 3:30 AM. My god it's cold, and wind chill is NOT your friend.
And of course, during this entire time, we have to keep the scooter going. So, we took shifts of about 45 minutes each, while the rest of us tried to sleep, either in the tents or on the floor of the student's center, just inside the first doors, since the inner doors were locked.
I remember one of the guys saying to me that if it is a subjective definition of suffering, that he now knows what hell is like.
In all honesty, it wasn't all *that* bad. I figure I managed to take a nap of about an hour, which did help. Once it was my turn to take another shift on the scooter, the sun had risen, and it was starting to warm up fairly quickly. I still had a lot of fun, because harrassing random people passing by is always a blast.
Kept on doing that till noon, and then we took down the tents, the volleyball net, the stereo equipment, and headed home for some well deserved rest.
And it looks like we managed to raise over $3100 for a good cause, which is always a bonus.