Trivia

After Jim Pass died and his business closed where I used to work part-time, the Chinese restaurant in the other part of the building also closed.  In their place a new Mexican restaurant opened, Las Fajitas, which will celebrate its one-year anniversary next week.  A few months after opening, they started having a trivia game every Tuesday night, but I couldn't go because that's when I was auditing those college classes.

Some of us wanted to go and finally Paige, her daughter Virginia, and I made it.  Teams have to have names, so we called ourselves The Bell Jars.  Not exactly sure why but that's our morbid sense of humor.  We're not suicidal ... at least not now.  Tina and Hope joined us along with Paige's husband Carl.  During the summer Brian and Brendan came down and played.  We've added and subtracted various team mates and have a friendly competition with this other team who said they were going to name themselves The Hammers so they could beat us.  Not so far!!

Anyway, we finally have a most excellent team by adding some guys Hope teaches with.  So it's the four of them, Hope, Tina, Sue, and me.  Paige and Carl will be rejoining us now that she's doing better after her knee replacement.  We have been winning or placing second most weeks except when we talk ourselves out of a right answer or betting the wrong amount.  Our new team name is Smart Aces.  That team that keeps not beating us is Nobody Likes a Smart Ace. 

This is how the game works - there are three rounds of three questions.  We can put 2, 4, or 6 points on each question of each set.  So we have to decide how sure we are of a question.  Tim, the host, announces the categories.  He asks the first question which we write on a little notepad provided us and turn a sheet in after each question.  Tim announces the scores after the first round.  Then we have a question with 5 parts that count two points each.  After that are 3 questions we write on one sheet and assign 3, 5, and 10 points to.  Tim announces the scores before the final question which we bet from 0 to 20 points on.  This has been the downfall or victory part several times.

Our trivia game is Brain Blast Trivia and has a page on Facebook.  Tim posted our photo on it last week.  I asked him to take one of us on my phone and posted it on my FB page and down below.  This is so much fun whether we win or lose.  Twice we missed only one question and are going for a perfect score.  We lost big time week before last because we outwitted ourselves on that last question.  Nobody Likes a Smart Ace did, too, so they lost by more than we did.  Someone way behind got the right answer but put 20 points on it.  We got the right answer and put 0 points.  See what I mean?

What helps is that we have team members from a range of ages, some with young children, and some with various interests.  Our weakness is sports, but sometimes we luck up.  We have four English teachers, one history teacher, a fifth-grade teacher, an art history major, a military person, a science teacher, and several science fiction and Monty Python geeks.  We do well as long as we don't self-destruct.  Prizes are gift certificates for first, second, and third place for meals there. 

Tina, Paige, and Carl weren't in this photo, and Brian and Brendan don't drive down from Nashville while school is going on.  They did week before last when Brendan had fall break.   Here we are - the Smart Aces right after a win!

That's my t-shirt I bought at Old City Coffee in the Reading Street Market when Tina and I went to Philadelphia.  It has a caffeine molecule on it. Such wonderful memories of spending time with my nephews, Maddie and David!!