The Great Day

Yesterday was a very, very good day.

It all started when I woke up and went to church. It was a good week for church, and it helped that I took along a piece of paper on which I had printed out a 15x15 table, which I intended to use in making my very own crossword puzzle. It was great—not only was it fun (and hard) to fit letters into all the spaces, but it helped keep me awake and aware to the various speakers and lessons (much like doodling does for students).

Just as Joey was dropping me off from church, I saw Dave and Megan heading out for JSK's party, and they invited me to come along. I changed clothes and we took a cooler full of orange Crush out to the country, halfway between Guysville and Coolville, to her beautiful house in the hills above Lottridge. There we met friends, continued work on the puzzle, played frisbee, ate hamburgers and hotdogs and incredible potato salad, and looked out over the beautiful Ohio country. Delightful.

But it doesn't stop there. On the way back, Dave dropped me off at Kate's for the Young SIngle Adult Break-fast (I got a nap in in the car). There I found a full page of puzzles in the Columbus Dispatch and got busy; by the time we left I had completed (with help from many) the large crossword, the Jumble, the Cryptoquip, and the other jumble, and I had made a mess of the quintuple sudoku. And I had read my horoscope, which was surprisingly accurate.

We ate Mexican food, including the Barte secret family recipe of Corny Corn and lots of lemon bars.

After dinner, I played Kate's 5th-grader little brother in a game of memory. You remember that game, right? With the cards you flip over and match?¹ Well this was a Monsters, Inc. version of the game, and I must say it was the worst possible incarnation. First off, the cards were not square; they were a festively skewed box-shape, kinda like Arkansas. Secondly, instead of having lots and lots of nicely different pictures to match, it only had the same fourish pictures repeated dozens of times with very, very minor changes. No joke, there was a pair with the one-eyed guy with his hands on his hips (?) and a nearly identical pair with his hands in the air. Then there was a pair with one hand in the air and one hand on his hips. This went on for every character (there's really only three), so what we ended up with was headache.

But I won.

Next I played Battleship against Kate herself. It was pretty fun forcing her to make explosion sounds whenever I got one of her ships, but I was making plenty of them myself. After a hard fought battle, I also won this game, sinking her battleship last of all.

Then a bunch of us played Settlers of Catan in what turned out to be the weirdest match ever. I won't bore you with the details, but you should know I bought 16 development cards since I pretty much couldn't do anything else. It went on for several hours, it seemed, but I eventually won with an army of 9 soldiers and the longest road, but only four settlements (no cities).

Then I came home with a tupperware full of homemade salsa and talked a bit to Dave and Megan while I sipped my fourth and final orange Crush of the day. All told, thats

• 2 parties,
• 2 free meals,
• 1 puzzle created,
• 4 puzzles solved,
• 3 games won, and
• 4 orange Crushes.

What a day.


A fourth and final orange Crush


¹ In my family we just called this the matching game.