Wednesday, 25 December 2002

Critical mass. Yesterday we had an unfortunately rare event: Enough of us card sharks got together to play a hand of Spades. In college at least a dozen of us Crows were card-playing fiends; Euchre must have lowered my GPA at least half a point, and I wasn't the only one.

But, as time went on, some people lost touch, some moved away, some got married and had kids... by the time I moved away myself three years ago, my decks of playing cards were gathering dust on a shelf. We used to "Euchre" a deck of cards once a month (Euchre is played with only the nine through Ace, so those cards get worn while the others stay fresh—eventually you end up with a half-destroyed deck and have to open another one), but now we're lucky if we play once a year.

I should teach the Aussies how to play, or learn if and how they play it. Spades and Euchre are games with regional variations; we didn't allow a Nil hand in our games, mainly because we got to point where every hand was a Nil hand, and that got old after a while.

But it was good to get together and play. We had one player flying in from California, one (me) from Oz, and two from the Chicago area, and it was the first time we've all seen each other in three years.

Today we made what should have been a five-hour drive from Chicago to Marion, Illinois, except that it started snowing near Champaign and turned into about a nine-hour drive instead. This was the worst driving I've ever experienced; we couldn't see more than ten feet in front of us. I spent most of it staring at tire tracks in the snow, fervently hoping that I wasn't following the previous car's tracks into the ditch.... We made it, but it was an experience.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:33 am. comments.