Dinner Parties

Two dinner parties in one weekend!  We sure are busy people.

The first was one of our friend's birthday celebration.  We had fondue, which was amazing, homemade pizza, and homemade cheese cake!  It was a lot of cheese.  Luckily, I love cheese.

The birthday girl chose to play Challenge The Zodiac, a game I picked up at the Goodwill for 2$.  It was made by a woman to be fun and educational at the same time.  It teaches you about the astrology and the planets.  Everything in that game is WRONG.  Josh and I played it once and had to add several rules that were left out.  They mostly involve the set up.  First, you must drink a beer. Yes, we did turn it into a drinking game, but for this one, that's necessary.  Just compare the level of fun being had between the people not drinking and the people who were drinking.  Then second, and most important,  I can't emphasize enough how important this rule is...make sure you decide when the game will end before you start it.  There is no ending to the game built in.  There is no winner.  So if you don't want to play it all night and get wasted, decide the end first.  One of the players never got off the first square, ever.  And not do to his failing at something.  There are just about 3 different squares that you land on that send you back to the first square in the first row.  If you are luckier than him, you get to answer poorly written questions about the zodiac and planets.  Sarah and I (the geologists) were outraged, OUTRAGED!, when one of the cards said that the Earth was 4.6 million years old.  Wrong.  Oh so wrong.

Then we played charades, which I haven't played I think since Easter when I was nine.  I loved it!  I totally got them to guess Shawshank Redemption b/c I was shanking imaginary people.  Josh got Bonanza, and kept on making us guess boner.

Last night we went to a Thanksgiving dinner at the leader of my Christian group's house.  Several girls in my bible study had wanted it and helped plan it.  They are new girls that I don't know very well.  They are first year education master's students at Vandy, and I know at least 2 or 3 or maybe all, of them went to Vandy for undergrad.  They are very happy, very Christian, and do not yet have their souls and love of life forcibly crushed out of them by grad school.  Since they are education students, maybe they'll get lucky and it won't happen to them.

It was a little awkward for Josh and I b/c I thought some of the people I've known for longer at the bible study would be there, or the leaders, or someone, but they weren't.  It was just super optimistic younglings with very strong hipster tendencies, and Josh and I.  One girl documented the whole thing and took pictures of all the food...she used to document all the food she ate and put in a blog.  Hipster.  I only document some of the food I make and how I make it.

We played a game called Cranium I think, where you have a song, fad, movie, or tv show and you have to either act it out, sculpt it with clay, draw it, use dice with letters, or hum it.  And depending on what you do, those are worth different points set by the opposite team.  I got the song Rocket Man, and they made humming worth the least amount of points b/c they didn't know I can't hum at all.  I acted it out.  First I did man, which involved me referencing my chest.  And they got man, then I became a rocket and took off.  They totally got it.  Referencing my chest is something I try very hard not to do when I am at a Christian Group gathering.

Next we played Pictophone, which I love!  Everyone gets a piece of paper and rights a sentence down and pass it to the right.  That person draws a picture of the sentence and folds the sentence over and passes it.  The next person as then to write down the sentence based on the drawing and fold the drawing over.  And so on.  I got one sentence, and it was "The cat is high." I wasn't quite sure what sort of high this was referencing, so I drew a bad pot leaf, a cat, a joint with smoke, and I put it all on a tall table.  The next guy was sooooo confused and thought the cat was smelling a sausage.  The host saw it and thought it was hilarious.  He totally recognized what I had drawn.  I was a little worried for a while that this was all too crass and inappropriate for a Christian gathering, but it wasn't.