Eric and Barb
threw a small little get-together last Friday to show off their
beer-making prowess and have a bit of holiday fun. I showed up on time
at 19:00 yet nobody else was there so for a few moments I thought that
maybe I'd gotten the date wrong. But no, everybody was late. Still, as
long as I was outside pacing and working up the nerve to go in first, I
took the opportunity to take a picture of their house. It's on a
relatively steep hill, which I don't like parking on so I park at the
top of the hill a couple hundred feet away.
The Joppa-Rowe house is not that big (it's only a two-bedroom
domicile), but it does have a big front and back yard (though I haven't
seen the back yard the two times I've been there). The household
includes a largish and enthusiastic dog named Shiva, as well as a cat
named Simon and I think another cat that never shows itself. We watched
"Iron Chef" while we waited for more people to arrive (the ingredient
of the day was rice cakes and boy did both chefs have trouble using it,
though Iron Chef Chinese won the contest).
Everybody showed up within an hour. There were Chris and Melissa, who I
think are two of Barb's co-workers. Melissa's husband Mateo, who sounds
uncannily like Chris Van Horn's friend T. From the gaming group, there
were Donald, Dave Sweet and Dave Woo. We don't mingle much and it was
especially noticeable when Eric left to pick up the pizzas. The gamers
stayed on one end of the room and Barb and her friends on the other
end. I can understand me -- I'm rather afraid of strangers -- but
usually the others are more sociable.
There were too many people for one game, so Barb, Chris, Sweet and I
played a game of... something whose name I forget. It's a card game
that takes place during the French Revolution and the objective is to
execute as many high-value nobles as you can. Anyway, it was a quick
game which Chris, who had never played the game, won. The others played
Apples to Apples and that took much longer than our game. Chris left at
this time, saying that he had to get home to walk the dog -- must be a
British colloquialism.
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Then everyone else but me played
another game of Apples to Apples. I was getting tired and I was full
from the food so I listened in. Then they made me play a game of Apples
to Apples wherein I scored no points. And then we played a sentence
writing game that Eric had seen once. We didn't have the actual game
but the concepts are easy so we just improvised the specifics.
So you take a book and randomly choose the first or last sentence. The
controller (which moves around clockwise after each round) reads the
jacket cover or whatever marketing summary the book has. Then the other
players write down the first (or last as already determined) sentence
of the book, or at least a sentence that might be the first (or last)
sentence of the book. The controller meanwhile writes down the actual
sentence on a piece of paper.
The controller then reads all the sentences and the players each get a
vote to try to guess the actual correct sentence from the book. If you
guess the correct sentence you get a point. Each time someone guesses
your sentence you get a point. If nobody guesses the correct sentence
the controller gets five points.
I tried to write funny sentences and just have fun. I got like three
points just because people liked my obviously not-correct sentences.
Another four points on the two sentences where I did try to write
something serious, and two points by guessing the correct sentences
(not that I was trying, I just picked the sentence that most amused
me). A fun game but kind of long. We ended at about 01:00 and that was
it.
Oh, and the Joppa-Rowe brew tasted like normal beer to me.
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