In the eight months since I’ve been home, I’ve come to enjoy our trivia nights. Perhaps it’s the routine of it but I prefer to think it’s because of the good company; it’s also educational. And because I’ve come to enjoy pub trivia, I try to go even if my “usual” team can’t. Such was the case of tonight.
Dee and I were planning to attend, but we were having great difficulty putting a team together. One after the other, the people we tried to wrangle up turned us down. It got to be around 7 pm when Dee called and asked me if we wanted to just go anyway. I was perfectly happy to be a dynamic duo and thus readily agreed.
Now the last two Mondays have been kind of deserted; there are usually a lot of regular teams that show up but as I said, the last two times have been kind of slow. When I walked in to our usual room, I was concerned that such would be the case again since it looked like only two other teams were there. I sat down at Dee’s usual table, took out scrap paper, and my book to read.
A few more people trickled in, or so I heard (I was trying to hide in my book), but when I looked up at one point, a very familiar face walked in.
“Tim!” I was out of my seat and to the door. Now, I show affection by violence, but before I could throw a punch, Tim caught me in a sideways hug. It was perfectly acceptable. As it happened, Tim, his brother Petey, recently returned from Uganda for a visit, and his parents brought along some people including one Logan. “I tried to get your sister and your brother-in-law to come, but they were lame.”
“Yeah, I think I must have sent Chris a dozen e-mails.” We thence proclaimed to true and utter lameness of the Ordonii. (What do you want from us? We wanted you to play!)
“Dude! Come play on our team! It’s just me and Dee!”
Tim was gonna beg off, saying they had already kind of established teams. But after a bit of arm twisting, I persuaded him to join us.
“Where’s your brother?”
It wasn’t long before a shaggy Petey walked in, his team and a Logan in tow. There was more punching and loud exclaiming (mostly on my part), and then there was a little dealing.
“I want a Logan.”
“You can’t have him. He’s on our team.”
“I will buy you a drink for a Logan.”
“Deal.”
“Hey, wait, don’t I get a say in this?”
Silly Prices, thinking they have a say in things…
Teams got established. Drinks were ordered. Game on.
It was gonna be a big night, too. I didn’t count all the teams, but there were at least two teams of complete newbies. They even had to add tables.
It turns out the combination of Tim, Logan, Dee, and myself is quite good. We had about three perfect 10′s, and decently tallied other rounds, but three very sad rounds. Our score ended up being 65, I think the winning team was in the low 70′s. We were pretty proud of ourselves, though – I was even helpful! I knew a lot more than I usually can contribute; it probably helps that there was a whole literature round. Dee and I joked that we should abandon our usual teams and permanently form a team with Tim and Logan who both said they would try to play again.
The most important thing to take away from this post is that Logan is worth one beer.
Amongst the dishes were: fried wonton, chicken and leek bao, sesame chicken with steamed rice, and chicken fried rice. It was quite the fare! (The wonton was not quite as massive as it had been when Darya made them back in 2006 — you know, ‘cuz we had enough to last us a month — but we did have wonton on a Wednesday, and I liked it as a title.) I would like to say I made a great contribution, but really, all I did was bring the party rice cooker. You know, since every Asian household has multiple rice cookers and one of them is always the “party” rice cooker. In sooth, I had not seen that one busted out since the late 90′s, back when my family actually hosted parties and the like. I had joked with Toni that my presence there whilst she cooked would bring positive Chinese energy to the cooking; it was all very Feng Shui. 