As we usually do, we spent last night at Mark and Yvette’s for their annual New Year’s Eve Drunken Scrabble Party. They’ve recently moved, so this was also a housewarming party for them, which meant house tours for the rest of us. They’re renting an interesting house whose first floor was built in the 1930s (or so), and a second floor was added in the 1980s. Since they’re on a hill, this means the house has a large number of staircases, including a staircase down from the second floor to the guest bedroom/office. It reminds me of some of the interesting organic architecture you sometimes find in New England homes. Anyway, they seem pretty happy with it, and they’re still trying to figure out where everything will go in any event.
Gaming was pretty successful for me (and fun too). We played two games of Apples to Apples and I won one. Then we played two games of Blokus and I won one (and came in second in the other; Debbi ended up using all of her tiles – a good feat – and won that one), and then I played a game of Scrabble with Mark, Subrata and Susan and won that one by 2 points over Susan. Debbi helped a little when I got stuck with all vowels and a blank since I’m not very familiar with the esoteric “Q” words, but I also managed to play “blitz” for the first word of the game, which was 52 points, so I was happy about that. I’m not a very good Scrabble player, compared to Mark and Subrata, at least.
Susan got in one of the best lines of the night, playing “queer” for a big score just after midnight, and observing “2008 has been a much better Scrabble year than 2007 so far!”
We drank plenty of champagne, but were pretty well dried out by the time we left (after 1 am) and made our way home through the relatively busy streets.
This morning we slept in, finally getting up after 10 am. I’ve become hooked on scone mixes from Iveta, so Debbi had some scones in the oven while I was brewing coffee and she was in the shower – when the power went out. It flickered briefly and then went out again, so I knew it wasn’t because of a circuit breaker tripping, and a call to a neighbor confirmed that. Happy New Year – now sit in the dark and cold! I have no idea what happened (I couldn’t find any info about outages on PG&E‘s web site, and their phone number just told me that they were aware of the outage, but not the cause), but the power came on a little under an hour later, which to be fair is a pretty good response time for a utility failure. So at least things are back to normal.
Now to figure out what we’ll be up to for the rest of the day. Plenty of time – it’s only 1 pm, right?