My mother held a Games Night in honor of my sister's visit
We did try to get a invite to the Mystery House folks and tendyl, who Mom wanted to see on her whirlwind tour through the New England Area, but it didn't happen. Ah well. My (first) cousin Mike, (Pescuma -- Mike Tresca is my second cousin), his sister Lindsay, and her boyfriend Darren (who I thought she broke up with, but nobody tells me anything) were there, along with Lis and me, my parents, and my sister Leila. Leila's friend Danielle also showed up later on.

We started out with a couple hands of Texas Hold-'Em, mainly because I'd never played before. I tend to like poker games with a fair number of known cards -- heck, I like five-card stud. Texas Hold-'Em seems to have a number of really dumb characteristics -- what the heck is the point of burn cards? But, in general, it was fun, although I think I still prefer seven-card stud. Not like I've ever played poker seriously, or, really, for money of any amount.

I had been doing pretty well until the last hand we played, in which I just got totally creamed, as I guessed that Darren was bluffing. And, well, as it turns out, a straight beats a pair of eights.

After that, we played Apples To Apples, which I won, and we ate pizza, and then played Cranium. Lindsay and Darren were one team, Mike and I were a second, and Mom and Leila were the third. Danielle showed up just before we started playing, so she joined Mom and Leila. Dad snored on the couch, and Lis worked on her notes for a blog post she'd been working on. Except I tagged Lis in once for one round when Mike and I both accidentally saw the answer to a question, so neither of us could guess it, and everyone else let me swap her in.

Cranium is a sort of meta-game, which involves minigames like charades, Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, and so forth. It's a game which is guaranteed to include at least ONE thing you suck at.

There were a few memorable moments. Danielle had to do charades to get Leila and Mom to guess "blowfish." Danielle made swimming motions around the room while blowing out her cheeks, and, eventually, Mom guessed it.

Leila said, "I was thinking that, but you were making swimming motions with your hands, and blowfish have lateral dorsal propulsion, so I figured that couldn't be it. Then I was thinking, 'there are fish which use front fin propulsion and also use spitting for hunting, but I don't think Danielle knows about those, so that's probably not it. . . '"

Leila then demonstrated how SHE would have acted out how blowfish swim.

Leila is a marine biologist, by the way. This was clearly a case in which having a certain amount of specialized knowlege was NOT an asset.

The Danielle, Mom, and Leila team didn't do all that well. Leila and Danielle were convinced that the AMA still considered homosexuality a mental illness.

Mom disagreed, but they overruled her. This is rather embarrasing becase, well, Leila and Danielle founded the gay-straight alliance in their high school. And they used to date. So I kind of figured they'd know better.

Danielle also completely failed to whistle "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" well enough for her teammates to guess. The rest of us thought she was whistling "Goin' To The Chapel". But they had fun.

Lindsay and Darren did well. They missed very few questions.

Michael and I . . . well, Lis won the round that we swapped her into. I suck at pictionary type things, but we nonetheless managed to mostly survive that sort of round with only minor damage. We missed no dictionary definition questions or trivia questions, managed to survive the spelling questions.

Michael managed to figure out that I was sculpting a hamburger out of clay, which says more about his astueness and luck than my artistic ability. I panicked and couldn't remember how "Light My Fire" started, so just kept whistling that one line over and over again, which wasn't enough for him to get it. But then, later on, I had to do charades to get the concept of "carburetor" across. Everyone on the other teams patted me on the shoulder sympathetically, since I was so clearly doomed.

I decided to attempt to do it by sylables, which started with "car". He figured out that I was trying to get across "car", but didn't get that I was trying to do sylables. So he started randomly guessing parts of the car. "Ignition! Transmission! Carbuncle! Carburetor!"

We asked how he figured it out. "Well, those were the only names of car parts I knew."

I mentioned that a "carbuncle" isn't a part of a car. He hadn't known that.

We won.