Memo · and · random

•It's amazing watching a softball team that really has its act together (usually not ours, alas). One of the teams we played this week moved so smoothly and coordinated together--and of course, without being able to discuss what they were doing--it was like magic.
•Had a wonderful night Tuesday meeting up with my old friend Martin, in town to visit his mother. Three-plus hours of discussing SF, fantasy, comics, movies, what fun!
•More fun last night: madladyred and her husband John came over to watch DR. WHO (also invited moronez but she was pulling a double shift at work). Always a pleasure. And it's a double pleasure to have normal people who find "too many books" an oxymoron, in contrast to Dusty and some of my friends from work.
•Speaking of Dusty, someone rammed into him from behind when he was stopped at a light on 98. He's fine, car is seriously damaged, possibly terminal.

AlienSkin gave me a "really really good but not quite right for us" on my short story "Learning Curve," but I was actually quite pleased this time. I didn't have anyone to beta-read it (I'm fairly picky in who I rely on) so I sent it off hoping it was as good as I thought, and apparently I was right (they even said it was "poignant" which I hadn't been trying for). So on to the next market!

Saturday morning, I woke up feeling exhausted (I have a dreadful inability to wake up late if I stay up late), went to breakfast, then John and Mary Ann took me out on a geocaching expedition (Terri was supposed to come, but they assumed she was still asleep and didn't call her room). In geocaching someone posts to the geocaching.com site, giving directions to a hidden cache; using GPS units, players find caches, then take something out, replace it with a new trinket, that sort of thing.
In this case, John had a tiny airplane taken from Ft. Walton Beach, and we went to a park to put it in one cache ... after about fifteen minutes and some unentertaining scrounging through brambles, Mary Ann spotted some fragments taken from the cache: It had been removed. So we drove to another cache, which Mary Ann spotted under a holly bush, then returned home.
Afternoon was a blast: First, my friends David and Zarya showed up. Then Mensans Arthur and Vera had their wedding (since I'd forgotten about it when I packed, I'm fortunate they weren't fussy about formal dress!). Then one of those present- swap things where you pick a gift, then the next person has the option to swap this gift for yours ... I wasn't participating, but with 40 or so people, it was pretty entertaining to watch the swapping. Presents ranged from hand puppets to Jim Beam.
Then came the Blonde Bowl.

Mensa does Quiz Bowls at a lot of RGs, but the Blonde Bowl is different in that nobody is ever completely stumped: A question about Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, in an earlier game, concluded with "and name this major leaguer whose story was dramatized in THE JACKIE ROBINSON STORY and JACKIE ROBINSON ALL AMERICAN."
While I love the quiz bowl, and have a good (slightly overhyped) record for performance in them, I was a little nervous about being so tired (wired myself with Coke right before going on). More so when I learned they penalize if you buzz in early (unlike other quiz bowls) and get a wrong answer: My strength is that I can guess fast and I'm willing to guess before I'm certain, so I beat people to the punch.
The team I was on made it through the first round in cracking style (eight teams played so we had more rounds than usual) but in the second round I was penalized for too many wrong answers, and froze on one right answer--I was sure it was "fractals" but what if I cost us another five points? So we went down to dusty death, sigh.
I'd have felt better if the winning team (which went on to win) hadn't been so snotty and a little drunk, arguing several times with the quizmaster over picky points (one question had been dropped on a technicality which saved them five points for their wrong answer--and they complained they wanted another chance to guess!). And one time they took so long to think about the answer after the "blonde clue" had been given that the moderator called "time"on them. Boy, were they pissed.
Sitting in the audience, I didn't find as many Screamingly Obvious questions as I usually do (i.e., "My god, why hasn't anyone buzzed yet?") though there were one or two; I can understand nobody buzzing after "His favorite weapon was the Punjab lasso, which he used in his career as a court executioner" (though I'm sure satharn and ms_dori would have) but when you throw in the Paris Opera House and Christine Daea?
Afterwards, a bunch of us (Courtney, Matt, Heidi, Cameron) went out to dinner with Carla (from Courtney and Matt's Mensa group) who was going with her mother to meet Carla's boyfriend and his family. Despite the promise of pizza in the hospitality suite, Heidi had talked a lot about the neat restaurants downtown, including some good vegetarian choices.
Unfortunately, Sassafras, the one we wound up at, wasn't very vegetarian friendly: Salad and sweet-potato fries were about it (I had the latter) Very good but I'd have preferred somewhere with a little more options ... and Carla's mum, who'd been on the winning team, kept commenting "We couldn't have won without you getting all those answers wrong!" which seemed a little churlish (had she said it one more time, I was going to say something about "well, you had so much difficulty doing it on your own, I wanted to help" but she didn't say it).
Still, it was fun hanging out with everyone, and I enjoyed talking to Courtney about our respective love lives and stuff.
And looking at the clock, I see I need to break this off and get ready for the day ... so I'll finish this up in the next post.