Sunday night

This weekend brought the first tube run of the summer. Kristie, KoKo, Rachel (KoKo’s on again off again best friend), and I went both Friday and Saturday. With all the rainfall the river went from being ankle deep to well over our heads. We were able to avoid the crowds that flock to the local tubing place, so we spared the kids all the drunkenness that tends to take place on the river during the weekends. It was nice to get some sun. Thanks to some good old SPF 45, I only reddened a bit.

On Sunday evening Kristie and I played “Spot Toss” a bean bag toss game we purchased the previous evening. As usual, I lost four consecutive games to Kristie. I argue that she is a competitive freak. She jokes, “I’m not a competitive freak; I’m just good at everything.”

And she is.

And don’t think it doesn’t drive me nuts.

She dominates in trivia and word games. I don’t even want to discuss our Scrabble games. One of the first times we ever played, she ended up using all of her tiles (which I believe is an extra 75 points. Like she needed an extra 75 points!). I tihnk I can count the number of times we’ve played Scrabble since on one hand. Then we moved on to Boggle. Same result. Even at parties and holidays, team games like Cranium, Phase 10, Catch Phrase, Taboo, and Pictionairy . . . her team always comes out victorious. Part of it is talent. She knows so much about so many different things. A larger part of it is luck. One time stands out - we were playing Cranium. Of course, to be cruel, the gaming gods pitted Kristie and I against each other in the sherades portion of that game. The topic was “Taming of the Shrew.” The guys on my team not only had never read any Shakespeare but likely had no idea what the hell a shrew even was. So we began acting it out. Within the first few seconds of watching Kristie’s antics, her teammate shouted, “The Taming of the Shrew!” Luck! All this time later I could still be trying to act that title our and my teammates would never have come up with that.

I used to pride myself on being a master of the word jumble in the Grand Forks Herald. I used to drive Mom mad with how easily the words unscrambled for me. She even went so far as to by a small hand held dictionairy and thesarus to help her. It was no surprise when Kristie and I began dating that she too enjoyed the word jumble. However, it took me a few times to realize that Kristie is herself a walking, talking dictionariy and thesarus. At my best, I can get three words unscrambled by the time she has not only finished the fourth word but solved the word puzzle too.

If I could just find an NFL trivia game or a music trivia game, maybe I could level the playing field. But I’m not holidng my breathe.

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Monday marks my second week at the ALC. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t counting down the days left. For the most part it has been fine. Most of the kids are willing to work. A few even want to. But several of the students need so much attention. Several come from hellish homes, so they just want to be heard. Others have no direction in their lives, so they need to be harped on constantly. This wears me out. Having students simply read a story and take a quiz is nearly impossible. But at least this experience makes me appreciate my regular classes.