First off, wish me luck as I start applying for jobs again. I'm hoping for a peak-time position at Chevy Chase Bank - pay is lucrative and I'm pretty sure I can handle money with little difficulty. I'll probably see about bugging Best Buy too.

Several unique events on the axon hunt today. I'm going to go ahead and write a detailed narrative, to be pasted to the unfiction forum.

Because the ranks were spread much thinner than last week, I decided to once again go to Union Station, and at the last minute, added Georgetown Cinema to my list of spots to hit. In order to hit both, it required me to drive to DC rather than to park at the Metro and take the rail in. So, leaving work early (after starting not as early as I would have liked), I barely made it to Union Station, hitting about the amount of traffic I anticipated. Getting there was pretty straightforward though, despite the fact that I very seldom drive within DC.

Parked, ran in, and waited by the phones next to the car rental place. A while later, Chappy arrived, and told me that INCyr had also made it. This is a step up from the morning discussion where it was just me covering Union Station alone. I was also poorly equipped to handle the live call exercise, so it was a good thing they were there. INCyr started off with the phones on the other end, near Au Bon Pain, while we waited by the car rentals. Some recorded calls came trickling in, and I manage to activate all but one of the three or so that I picked up. In the middle of this, Chappy got a live call. Unfortunately, we didn't make the exercise in time - we got the correct answer, but not within the time limit. We did chat with Melissa for a while, though, and the phone was passed off to me to make an introduction.

Melissa started by asking my name and rank, then asked how to spell my name (I told her "StarCreator" of course). She immediately asked if there was a private communication channel she could call, and I gave her my cell phone number. She also spit out the usual deal where she says the call would not be made by her personally, etc. She then asked if I had been monitoring the transmissions. I said I had been, which prompted her to ask me if I thought Durga was rampant. This took me by surprise, and I said that she might be. When asked what made me think this, I eventually managed to spit out that her voice had been "sounding weird" at various times. She asked again if I thought she was rampant, to which I replied that it was too early to tell. This prompted Mel to ask if that meant we should monitor her, to which I quickly answered yes.

She then went on to something a bit different - she said that the subjects may be preparing to do something that will interfere with her ability to transmit data, so she will be broadcasting what she receives live on Sunday, rather than transmitting recordings on Tuesday. She told me to relay this information to the others. (A few people were told the same thing and beat me to it.) She seems to think something big will happen on Sunday, and the field exercise was a test to make sure the crew could operate tightly and efficiently, even if something should happen to her broadcast systems.

She finished off by basically apologizing that we couldn't complete the task on that particular call, and commented that the DC Axon Hunter Signal Corps are one of her favorite teams before hanging up.

Quickly relaying what she told me to Chappy (and I hope I haven't forgotten any important details as I write this now), we head out. Chappy heads out to get some more axons while INCyr presumably went home. I stayed for a bit to eat dinner at Au Bon Pain, unfortunately not finding the food at this one to be as good as the one I frequented during Anime Boston this past year. Rock-hard sandwiches and undercooked meat aside, I wandered the station for a little bit before setting out back onto the DC roadways to try and make it to Georgetown Cinema.

This proved to be an interesting journey, since I quickly learned that the directions I had printed from Mapquest were completely useless. Left only with the knowledge that the parking garage entrance was at the intersection of K St. and Wisconsin Ave., I explored the DC roadways for just under 50 minutes before I finally took K St. in the right direction, taking me out of the urban city area into Georgetown. After I triumphantly parked my car for the second time, I walked to the theater, where Chappy and aliendial had been sitting outside of for quite some time. We went inside and they ordered some fast dinner-type stuff at the concession stand. Of course, I already had my fill of dinner from beforehand.

It isn't too long before the phone calls start, and the first or second one up is a live call. Unfortunately, we again failed to offer the correct passphrase, sending aliendial to her cell phone to re-verify. A few recorded axons start going off, and the one I pick up doesn't go hot. The voice recog software really just doesn't like me. I refrain from picking up any more after that. The last call of the night is yet another live call, and we give another shot at the passphrase - we give one incorrect guess, and finally we manage to present the correct passphrase - but Chappy pauses after relaying the passphrase, and not the rest of the information. I was only further confused when he asked "Princess?" then gave a bit of a chuckle before he hung up the phone. Naturally, this was the call that doomed the Sleeping Princess. Oops.

Interesting things to note about the Georgetown Cinema calls - neither live call asked for the identity of the person on the line. Only the standard question/answer challenge was given before launching right into the passphrases, and no idle chatter. Of course, this final axon spike was credited to entire Washington DC Axon Hunter Signal Corps when it went on the site.

That was certainly a fun way to end the day's axon hunt. Now that the deed had been done, we parted company and I headed home.

... or so I thought. I must have somehow missed the exit for the GW Parkway, and I ended up in Crystal City instead. This led to an amusing phone exchange between Kevin and myself...

Me: Hey, are you working right now?
Kevin: Uhh, no...
Me: Okay. I'm in Crystal City, how do I get home?
Kevin: (paraphrased) Huh?

(Honestly, I was perfectly capable of getting myself home, but I just wanted to hear how he would react to that statement. =p)

So, instead of going home, I end up going to Kevin's house. I explained why I was driving around DC, as he hadn't heard of the ILB thing. Played some controller DDR since he still hadn't unlocked everything in Extreme US (and I'm not sure if he ever really will), and he watched the last episode of Initial D 2nd Stage after we got sick of that. (I still fail to understand how or why the series is so popular.)

Finally headed home after that, and started typing this up. And now, I get a ridiculously inadequate amount of sleep for the third night in a row. And the Ohio trip is coming up this weekend...