You are looking at RT and the home of the 2007 Van Buren Point Trivia Challenge champions! We’re supposed to get some sort of a trophy from the Women’s Club, but who knows when that might happen.
Last night, we started the evening at the annual Hymn Sing. The previous host of the bash passed away in the last year or two and a different host promised Frank she’d take over.
After some very yummy appetizers, we all went into the main living room area of the host cottage and did our best impressions of hothouse flowers, sweating through a list of hymns. It was plenty comfortable on the porch, where I hid through the first several hymns before I decided that I was obligated to join in.
I muddled through the next few numbers (having no familiarity with what we were singing), and my dad promptly bailed on me. In his defense, it was easily 90 degrees in that room and everyone was sweating profusely.
I was happy that I at least knew the melody of one of the last hymns (please don’t make me name it, because I can’t, but I think the music was Mozart), then we finished with Amazing Grace and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. For those two, and those two alone, I was mildly bummed that we were only singing the first two verses of each song.
Following the Hymn Sing, we chatted on the porch for a few minutes then stopped at home to pick up the baby brother and headed over to the Community Center.
Four teams showed up for Trivia Night. “Team Symons” was me, my parents, my brother and my sister-in-law. Our most formidable competition was “Team Blackburn,” comprised of my Favorite Old Curmudgeon (Bill Blackburn), his wife Joann, their daughter and son-in-law (parents of my good friend Doug, who I haven’t heard from in ages), and Linda from down the street. Joann used to be the librarian and Bill a history teacher at the public high school I would have attended in Pittsburgh. They have been married for 55 years and are now retired, summer at the Lake and winter in Tampa.
Anyhoo, each team was handed six sheets with 10 questions each. Categories included “Ad-Words” (words that start with “ad”), Geography, Logos (a visual category), Animals in Music, some category where we were given three words and had to figure out what they had in common and Organizations. Our Quizmaster had gotten the questions from a trivia league in Pittsburgh. We did the best we could with each sheet and were able to drop one category. We had 45 minutes to puzzle out as many answers as we could and decided to drop Geography, which turned out to be a brilliant choice.
Any score over 40 was supposed to be pretty impressive. Team Blackburn checked in at 45, and we had 46! They would have kicked the crap out of us on tiebreaker (your score on the dropped category), so we would have lost on a 6-category test. Still, it was a fun evening. I will try to make it up to the Blackburns by delivering two months worth of Wait Wait when I get back up to the Lake on Friday. They moved to VBP in May and the NPR station out of Erie doesn’t carry that show … and they love it as much as I do. Since I get it on Podcast, I’ll burn ‘em all onto audio CDs so they can get all caught up.
Today was not a beach day, although it would have been perfect for just about anything else, even if it was outside. But, since beaching didn’t seem to be a great plan, mom and I headed southward. I finished Prisoner of Azkaban in the car and am now a few chapters into the Goblet of Fire. I don’t own Year 6, so I’ll have to get it out of the Library or borrow it from CE and Erin, which is the copy I read to start with.
We stopped at Grove City on the way home and I hit the 30% off sale at the Jockey Store, then drooled over the stereo/radio that I reallyreally want for my kitchen. Too expensive. For now. If I’m good for a while, I can save up for it.
That’s it until I start attacking Eisenhower again tomorrow morning. On the agenda: Get the prescription for my bee sting (it’s not getting better … not worse either, but …), be there for the electrician who is fixing the plug for the new dryer, make an Ikea run with mom to pick up the bookshelves I am buying for fabric storage in Quilt Central, and possibly stop at the Home Depot to buy a new grill. We left our old one in California (it was natural gas and therefore unusable here … plus they charge by weight to move us)
I’ll leave you with one more shot of RT from his beach trip this morning. That rock has been right there for as long as I can remember.
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