Contender for the Worst Board Game (and how I ended up with it)

My family has a Christmas Eve tradition of gathering at my grandmother's house for a big spread of munchies -- cheese balls, cookies, oyster soup, etc. -- and an evening of board games. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I got to my grandmother's house this year and heard a chorus of voices: "What games did you bring?"

... At which point, I realized I'd brought nothing but food and presents. (Isn't that enough? I had tasty food and nice presents.) Mom said, "We thought about calling to remind you, but we knew for sure you'd remember to bring games."

They give my memory too much credit. They've never seen me go to the store for sour cream and come home with everything except sour cream. This happens. Often.

I love sour cream.

Anyway, I was feeling guilty, so I snuck out the door, telling Paul to cover for me as long as he could without the family getting suspicious. I drove to Wal-Mart, but it was closed. (I didn't even know that was possible!) So I doubled back to Walgreens, the only store with its lights on and parking lot full.

It looked like a war zone; people filled the aisles, half-heartedly grabbing at whatever giftable merchandise was left. "A five-piece tweezer travel set in an attractive carrying case? I'm sure little Tommy will love it! He didn't need those over-hyped Transformers anyway."

I squeezed onto the toy aisle (remaining merchandise: jigsaw puzzles and electronic Sudoku), and weighed my guilty conscience against the quality of the remaining games.

... which is how I ended up with The Singing Bee Board Game, based on the TV show hosted by Joey Fatone and FEATURING HIT SONGS FROM THE SHOW! AS SEEN ON NBC! YOU DON'T HAVE TO SING IT WELL, YOU JUST HAVE TO SING IT RIGHT! (For 2 or more players. Ages 10 and up. Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.)

This is by far the lousiest game I've ever played, even beating out my longtime Worst Game champion, the Deal or No Deal card game.

The Singing Bee game has major flaws (although it is slightly redeemed by Joey Fatone's smug expression on the cover). The lyrics are printed on cards and players are expected to sing the lines to other players, which assumes you have an encyclopedic knowledge of pop, R&B and country songs from the past 50 years AND that you can recall their tunes at a moment's notice.

Can you just off the top of your head sing these lines from "We've Only Just Begun": And when evening comes we smile/So much of life ahead? Because I can't.

Nor do I want to. There's no need to play crappy games if you can blog about how much you hate them. Like me. Here. Now.

Sleepy Sunday morning miscellany

How 'bout them Tigers, huh? I thumb my nose at you, Hoyas! It was a great game yesterday — sold-out crowd, lots of energy. I'm so glad Paul convinced me we needed season tickets. And that's all I'm going to say about basketball this morning. :)

Gosh, I can't believe it's two days 'til Christmas. I haven't finished all my shopping yet. >_< This is quite a predicament, isn't it? And, like blogging, it's one of those things I put off and put off because I didn't – and still don't — know where to start.

I got about four hours of sleep this morning. I won't bore you with details, but it involved Johanna, Matt, Paul, attention deficit disorder, fighting, Lie Detector, and a spilled drink. Except all of it was much, much more complicated. I'm being super-duper overdramatic, but I really haven't had much sleep and all those things really are to blame in one way or another.

My latest blog project has been to fix the things that broke when I changed web hosts: the RSS, the archives, and the pictures. The pictures seem to be working fine. The RSS and archives are operational but hobbled because of some problems with folder permissions. I'll finish fixing that later, probably with Paul's help. The RSS URL has changed, so if you previously have been subscribed to the feed, unsub and resub and you should be mostly good to go. (Some details are in my previous post.)

And now I need to take my sleepy butt downstairs and start making a list and checking it twice. Those Christmas gifts aren't going to buy themselves ... unfortunately.

Archives

In the process of fixing the archives. It's annoying in the first place that they stopped working, but now I'm really annoyed because I wanted to cross-link a post.

Can't be that hard to find them and fix it, right???

Edit 3 (Sunday a.m. - even later): The archives are kind of working -- you can read them by month but cannot click on individual posts. Not a huge deal because most people don't do that anyway. The rss feed is kind of working too; you can see post previews but can only click through to the main page instead of individual posts.

Some permissions must be wonky in my archives folder. I'll have Paul fix that later. But at least you can see the pictures (!!!) and the archives (!!!) again. ^_^

Blame it on my unsophisticated palate

I know nothing about wine.

This would be neither here nor there, had I not been obligated to buy a bottle of wine tonight for the office Secret Santa exchange tomorrow.

Our Secret Santa exchange goes something like this: Draw name. Panic. Visit the Secret Santa sign-up list and hope your victim, err, recipient has signed up for easy-to-buy things, such as a Macy's gift card or a Frampton CD. Buy and bag your $15 to $20 gift. Put a gift tag with your name on it, nullifying the concept of Secret Santa. Give it away, go home, have a merry Christmas.

This well-oiled machine breaks down when (a.) you draw the boss's name, and (b.) he doesn't put anything on the sign-up list. And that's precisely the situation in which I found myself.

After a bit of hemming and hawing, one of my coworkers was able on Tuesday to pin down what my giftee wanted: a bottle of Beaujolais.

Uh oh. The only thing worse than not knowing what to buy is finding out you know nothing about what you are going to buy.

So I went to the biggest wine and liquor store in the area, Buster's, which has 8,500 wines and spirits, all of them foreign to me. I walked the aisles, slack-jawed. I wandered past the South Africa section at least four times. I tried to look as helpless as possible, hoping to attract the attention of a clerk -- any clerk -- hoping to make a sale.

I was standing somewhere in the Alsace section when a cheerful woman walked by. "Do you need some he--" "Yes!" She raised an eyebrow a little and told me to hang on a second. After a couple of minutes, a young man came up.

"Help," I mumbled weakly. I explained the situation -- right from the beginning -- because I wanted somebody, anybody, to feel the anguish I was feeling.

He nodded sympathetically and picked up a bottle. "For that price range, this is what you want. It was named to the Top 100 list of..." (He kept talking but I stopped listening at this point because it was lost on my non-connoisseur ears.)

Wine in one hand and a little bottle of Disaronno in the other (hey, I deserved a little something for my trouble), I headed to the cashier and got the heck out of Dodge.

But I'm not out of the woods yet. I've still got to wrap it and get it to work without dropping and breaking it or, more likely, popping it open and drowning my frustrations. And maybe learning a little bit about wine in the process.

Everything old is new (to me) again

The Scalia speech Monday was pretty cool. He's a witty guy. And I found non-18th Century clothes to wear to the event: a gray tweed skirt and black blazer. I didn't even know I owned a gray tweed skirt.

... which brings me to my next point.

We have a room in our house that had become a black hole of boxes, sucking into it everything that hadn't been unpacked when we moved into the house. A few boxes -- and I'm ashamed to even say this -- were from our first apartment and weren't unpacked during the entire time we were in our last apartment.

Clothes, computer parts, wedding gifts we didn't have room to display ... everything was in boxes. In a Not-Really-Spring Cleaning blitz (it was more like the beginning of summer), we began sorting through many of the boxes with the goal of one big honkin' charity donation of clothes and miscellany.

Sunday night, I excavated a lost civilization. Four boxes of my clothes apparently escaped the apartment-to-house move in late 2004 and the cleaning earlier this year. Four boxes. Somewhere in the back of my head, I knew I owned more clothes than the ones hanging in the closet (and, admittedly, covering parts of the floor -- but you didn't hear that from me). And these were cute clothes, too!

But the big find was the collection of hoodies I amassed a few years ago during my "I'm not buying that unless it has a hood" phase. It was a time in my life kind of like Picasso's blue period, but with cute headgear attached to the back. And now I've re-entered hoodie heaven with this find.

I wore the black one today. I looked good ... at least in my head. I didn't ask anyone else if they liked my hoodie, because I don't really care. Well, I do care -- too much for my own good -- but I didn't ask anyway. I think I'll wear the gray one tomorrow. And then the blue one. And then the pink one (surprise, I own something pink). And eventually I'll make it through the box and a half of hoodies and can move on to the next fashion phase that's been tucked away upstairs.

Finding those boxes was like, as the saying goes, Christmas in July. Except this is more like Christmas in December. Or Christmas nine days before Christmas. But that sounds kind of lame, doesn't it?

Johanna buys shoes that make her feel better about herself

Skirting the issue

What does one wear to meet a U.S. Supreme Court justice? I have to figure it out by Monday, when Antonin Scalia speaks to the Memphis Bar.

Most of my wardrobe would be better suited at a bar than at the Bar, which is kind of funny when you consider I spent the first 18 years of my life dressing up for school chapel services and church three times a week.

So I turned to the smarty internets for skirt-ish inspiration, and came across this picture. (Obviously, I was searching for info in all the wrong places.)

Eighteenth-century panniers. Makes your skirt flat in the front, flat in the back, and really honkin' wide in the middle. As in, "Honey, where did the front door go--err, oh, hmm. Okay then."

From the Wiki page:

By mid-eighteenth century it had been developed into the robe à la française, which ensured that a woman took up three times as much space as a man and always presented an imposing spectacle.

Other sites mention the alternate term "hip improvers," a term obviously coined by someone from the More is Better school of thought. (Probably an ancestor of the person who invented the Burger King Quad Stacker.)

I know times have changed and we whippersnappers would never understand, but come on. I'd be mortified to wear that to a party. With my keen ability to run into doorways and trip over my feet, that dress would be a disaster waiting to happen. Oops -- there goes the parlor table. And the porcelain. And the children and servants.

So I've got all weekend to figure out what I'm going to wear.

I could make my own pannier -- who doesn't want to spend a weekend slaving over a sewing machine stitching steel rods into a petticoat? -- or I could just go out and buy a sensible, conservative, knee-length black skirt.

Tough choice.

The hardest part about going away...

... is trying to catch up when you get back! ^_^

It didn't happen that -- poof! -- I was suddenly inspired to write again; in fact, I've been thinking about it for a while. But then I realized there is no simple "picking up where you left off." Disappear for a few months, and suddenly there are 200 things to say instead of 20.

That sounded much more profound in my head.

Anyway, the thought of saying all those things I'd been waiting for months to say became overwhelming, and every time it intruded on Real Life, I took a Xanax and a bubble bath and got over the urge pretty quickly. And now I've written for five minutes and said nothing of value. Gee, this isn't easy.

So let's start over.

I'm Kate. Remember me? I'm in my mid- to late-20s, married, two cats, no kids. I have obnoxiously fine, straight, dark hair that my right brain wishes was red and curly, but my left brain knows I'd probably hate if I had it. I like tea. Lipstick is my impulse buy, which can be semi-expensive (but I justify by saying at least I don't impulsively buy, say, antique dollhouses or red convertibles). I use parentheses too much. My greatest strength is that I am well-balanced between logic/numbers/analytics and language/creativity/intuition. My greatest weakness is that I'm too apologetic. My second-greatest weakness is that I'm very Type A. My third-greatest weakness is chocolate chip cookies.

I bought a bright-blue, hybrid Saturn Vue in October. I got contacts -- sorry kids, no more emo glasses -- and you can see the new non-glassed me on my MySpace page because I'm too lazy to upload a photo right now. I'm moving next year, but I don't know where, and that's the scariest thing in the world to me. I haven't traveled nearly enough since Paul started traveling for work, and that's the boring-est thing in the world to me. I haven't put up a Christmas tree, which makes me feel Grinchy.

I think that's a good stopping point for tonight. You're at least halfway caught up now. I think.

I still love you guys who've been e-mailing me little notes reminding me to blog. You're the best not-Real-Life friends a gal can have. ^_^