This is week 83 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment. This edition was a lost episode that was written later and back-posted just to keep the dates straight.

Sunday (Day 574): Board Game Test Runs

I made breakfast for #1GF! and found out that a friend of hers would be dropping by in an hour to see the house. We rushed to get showered and looking normal before she showed up, even though it was past the time when normal people would’ve been showered already. #1GF! expected me to act like it was an intrusion into our Sunday morning, so she said, “Well, you wanted to get a house by the beach so people would just drop by…”

“You’re right. I absolutely do,” I said. I just need to get in the habit of being ready for people to drop by. You know, like having some extra food on hand and not stinking like crazy.”

Her friend came over with her two year old, who I had never seen because I never really understood the whole “go over to the house and see the new baby” thing. #1GF!’s friend seemed to like the house (but what is she going to say, really?) and the two year old ran from room to room alternating between saying “Wow” and “Oh, man”. I was getting tired just watching him. They only stayed for a short amount of time, and headed back out leaving #1GF! and I alone. Once again the house felt empty.

#1GF! and I sat at the table and tested out a new (to me) Christmas game called Ticket to Ride. I have no tolerance for books, movies, or games that involve the 1800’s, but the reviews on the game were so good that I couldn’t resist asking for it for Christmas. Thankfully, the game had simple rules that got us up an running very quickly, and involved enough strategy to keep me interested. #1GF! and I both agreed that it was a surprisingly fun game.

After a couple of rounds of Ticket To Ride, we played a little Grass. We were supposed to have a “game night” at my parents’ house the next day, so I wanted to make sure that we were clear on the rules of the games that we were bringing. Nothing slows down the fun of a game night more than not having at least one person who knows the rules of a game that’s new to the group. After Grass, I was gamed out.

The weather was unseasonably warm, and #1GF! wanted to go for a walk. I’ll never understand why women like walking, but I figured that it wouldn’t do me any harm to get out of the house. As we walked around our town, we noticed what houses were for sale and which ones were being renovated. We entertained ourselves by talking about how the owners should do this or should do that to make their houses nicer. This was coming from a couple of people who can’t seem to get their own house finished.

When we got home, we played a game called Jambo, which I also got for Christmas on the strength of its excellent reviews. It’s not a bad game, but it had too many parts, too much card reading, and the game play is too odd to be anything more than mildly entertaining. After a few rounds, I was gamed out once again.

I sat in front of the TV watching Dr. No while #1GF! plowed through half of Nicholas Sparks book.

Monday (Day 575): It’s Game Night! Jimmy Kicks For Everyone!

We were awake fairly early, but #1GF! had the day off, so we lay reading in bed until 11:30 AM. #1GF! finished off her book, even though her annoying boyfriend kept snatching the book away and saying “Ok, time to get up now.”

We were scheduled to go to my parents’ house to play all the games we gave each other for Christmas, so we headed out to the store to grab some chips and soda because it’s a known fact that board games and junk food go hand in hand. #1GF! was feeling a little queasy, so she didn’t have a lot of input on whether we should bring cream soda, Yoohoo or Fresca. I’m just kidding. She would’ve had a definite opinion on those beverages if I mentioned them, but she seemed to approve of the normal drinks and snacks that I was picking up.

For the game day, we played Ticket To Ride, which turned out to be strategically a lot different in a group than it was when just #1GF! and I played. We also played Incan Gold.

In Incan Gold, players are exploring an ancient ruin. The further they go into the ruin, the more chance they have of coming out with treasure or losing everything and getting stuck in the mine. Even though Incan Gold is a “press your luck” style game, the rounds ended long before anyone really got to press their luck. Without high stakes and long runs of tension, pushing your luck isn’t all that exciting. I don’t know how the game got such high ratings from gamers, unless they were modifying the gameplay by removing some of the disaster cards to increase the tension.

After Incan Gold, we tried Smarty Party, where the group is presented with a list, and the goal is to be the last person to guess a correct item from the list. It’s sort of the same basic mechanics that drive Family Feud. This was a pretty good party game, but for some reason, I expected it to be a little more rowdy. Mostly, everyone just sat and quietly thought about their answers, making Smarty Party a game that sort of kills the party.

Once all the thinking was over, we introduced everyone to Grass, which is a card game that is nearly identical to Mille Bornes, except instead of being race car drivers, each player takes on the role of a drug dealer. You have to move your product and hassle other players to end up with the most money at the end. Sometimes you even need to negotiate with other players to get the cards you need.

Grass seemed to do alright with a group, even though people were constantly asking for the rules to find out what certain cards meant. The first time through, the game takes a fair amount of explanation, which can turn less patient people off, but once people get the hang of it, Grass is a fairly fun card game.

Last, we played a game that I bought for my sister. I was a little worried because even though the reviews were good, the game sounded like it could either be really fun or a horribly painful dud. The game was called Why Did the Chicken…?

Essentially, the game goes like this: one person draws a part of a joke and two nouns from the deck, and creates a riddle out of them such as, “Why is a bear better than an apple?” or “What do you get when you cross a donkey and a spatula?”. Everyone has two minutes to write down as many funny answers as they can, and the two best answers (as voted by the person who drew the cards) receive a point each. Sounds painful, doesn’t it?

Initially, it is. The first couple of rounds in the game are brutal. No one can think of anything clever, and some people lock up and can’t come up with an answer at all. After two rounds, everyone realizes that they don’t need to come up with the perfect answer, so things loosen up a little and get a lot more fun.

Like a good game of Scattergories or Beyond Balderdash, Why Did The Chicken…? devolves into a laugh riot with running jokes forming between rounds. I was laughing so hard that I was crying, which I don’t do very often. Mostly, it was because the game started revolving around at least a couple of answers in each round mentioning “a kick in the jimmy”. This did not make my mother very happy, which made it even funnier.

The game night lasted until 10 PM, with the title of top honors going to Ticket To Ride, even though my vote was firmly cast for Why Did The Chicken…? We completely ran out of gaming steam at 10PM (possibly do to the Why Did The Chicken…? ab workout), so #GF! and I headed home.

When we arrived at our house, we heard a weird noise and we both thought that it sounded like someone was in our basement. I made a little nod to #1GF!, grabbed a shovel and literally ran headlong into the basement to take out some aggressions on whatever fuckhead had decided to invade my domain.

A thorough check revealed that there was no one there. I went through the rest of the house and it was clear with no way that anyone could’ve escaped unnoticed. It was only then that I realized how stupid and strange it was that my reaction was to run towards possible danger with a shovel and a smile. I think there may be something wrong with me at times like that. I’m soft on a plumber who intentionally installed the wrong boiler, but I’m ready to fuck someone up with a shovel for sniffing around my basement. I think that sends mixed messages about my personality type, but then, I’ve never claimed to be properly tuned for my age or the modern world. I’m getting there though. Hopefully, I’ll hit my stride before I’m eating prunes for breakfast.

Tuesday (Day 576): Out Of Context Is No Excuse

#1GF! had the day off, so we showered late and sat around watching TV all morning. It’s kind of weird when you can spend a lot of time with someone without having to do anything. It’s almost like we’re fed this line that relationships are a lot of work, so that’s what we expect in life. When you find a relationship that makes every day easier, you feel like there must be something abnormal about it. But, then, you don’t really care because you’re having so much fun.

It was supposed to snow again the next day, so the two of us went to the supermarket to pick up the ingredients to make spaghetti sauce. While looking walking down the paper aisles, a guy looked right at me and said “Jon!”. I stood there staring at him with no idea who he was. My brain was querying every database it could, and coming up with 0 rows returned every time. The guy eventually had to say his name before I recognized him.

I practice names of people I meet over and over to avoid making someone feel like they’re not worth remembering, so not remembering a guy I worked with for years made me feel pretty stupid. I think it was that he was so out of context that I just couldn’t figure out who he was. I was used to seeing him among the lifeless cubes of corporate America, and not in a baseball hat among supermarket paper products. Then again, I had a beard, and he picked me out of a crowded store, so I don’t think I don’t see “out of context” as a really great excuse.

We talked for a few minutes, and #1GF! walked over and we talked a little while longer. We went our separate ways, and #1GF! and I spent the rest of the day inside doing nothing better than sharing each other’s company.

Wednesday (Day 577): New Year’s Eve Without Coffee

We got up to make pasta sauce and realized that we had no basil. As we know from Dominic’s Sauce Recipe, there was no way that we’d be making twelves quarts of sauce without basil. We also know that there was no way that #1GF! would be making me look like a bitch again by running out to the store in a snow storm.

I threw on my coat and headed to the local market to grab some basil, and nearly killed myself by slamming into the automatic OUT door. I think I might’ve startled the checkers, because sometimes, I’m smooth like that. Once I made my way around to the automatic IN door, I got in without a problem.

Unfortunately, the store didn’t have any basil. How does a market not have basil? I didn’t understand that at all. I had to drive up to the supermarket in the next town over to buy some. I had just turned a five minute store run into a twenty-five minute trip.

I ran into the supermarket and beelined right for the spice aisle. I grabbed the biggest canister of basil I could find and turned toward the registers before stopping myself. I figured I should pick up some coffee beans while I was there, so I made my way over to the bulk coffee aisle. When I got to the canisters, I found that someone had stolen all the bulk coffee bags. Aren’t there better things to steal? That made less sense than a market without basil.

Did the Coffee Liberation Front steal all the bags to fight the power and free the beans? Did some green nut steal them so that people would save the forests by carrying out the beans in their cupped, shaky, decaffeinated hands? Or did an angry, acid tripping stock boy get caught standing on top of the aisle and peeing into all the coffee containers, and the lack of bags was a quiet way of telling the consumer, “You do NOT want this coffee”? I wish I could say that my imagination hadn’t gotten the best of me, but I decided that I didn’t want to take any chances with any pee beans. I took my basil to the register without asking for a coffee bean bag.

When I got home, I started my pork based sauce, and #1GF! started her lamb based sauce. After about an hour, my sauce entered its eleven hour low-maintenance mode, so I sat down to learn a solution for the Rubik’s Cube. Yea, I’m about thirty years late on that boat, but it was something that I always wanted to do. Plus, I thought it would be a neat party trick… if I had a giant nerd party for nerds. Either way, it seemed like something I should know how to do. Whatever. I spent some time learning the solution.

Once I had memorized as much as I could of the cube, #1GF! and I sat down to play a round of Blokus. The game is sort of like head to head Tetris, and seemed to go better once #1GF! stopped saying that she sucked at spacial relations and started playing. She beat me by the second game. At one win each, we quit and I went back to learning the cube.

I went out later to shovel about a foot of loose powder from the walkways and driveway, and thought about shoveling a neighbors house, but didn’t want to just shovel their driveway if they weren’t ready to do it. I know if I looked out the window and saw someone shoveling my driveway, I’d be grateful, but possibly aggravated at having to immediately drop what I was doing to rush out to help. I didn’t want to do that to anyone. Instead, I sort of kept shoveling more of my house just to stay out in the snow.

As I was finishing up, the woman across the street came out, and I went over to help her shovel. It only took a few minutes to get her driveway done, but it topped off my shoveling need, and I headed back in.

#1GF! and I watched Step Brothers, which I didn’t want to like because of the stupidity of the concept of a forty year old man-children living at home. The interaction between Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly was too funny not to enjoy, and I ended up laughing like hell at it.

Later, I convinced #1GF! to stay up to say goodbye to 2008 and all of its rotten luck. As we were flipping the channels to watch the festivities around the world, we caught a glimpse of Dick Clark. Holy shit. What the fuck happened to Dick Clark? He looked like an older version of the host that I remembered, but sounded like he had been possessed by Darth Sidious. Icon or not, his voice and face did not match at all. In fact, that shit was a getting a little freaky and I thought it made sense to change the channel before I got took up arms against the Rebel Alliance. Once the danger of moving to the dark side was gone, #1GF! and I watched the ball drop on Times Square, feeling like 2009 would be a much luckier year for us.

Thursday (Day 578): All Is Quiet…

#1GF! was off again, so we turned on our pasta sauces for a little longer in the morning just to make sure that they were as good as they were going to get. It was new year’s day and MaBeGroMo basic was officially over, so I gave my beard a little trim. I left my mustache alone, because I should be trying new things in the realms of facial hair, right? I think that’s supposed to be part of my thing. I think this may be the year of the 1800s mustache.

I have little noted for the rest of the day, so I really don’t know what happened. All I have a couple of notes that say “6:09.5″ and “5:24.1″, meaning that I had gotten comfortable enough with a Rubik’s Cube solution that I was timing myself. This would prove to be a bad thing to start to do.

Friday (Day 579): A Very Dramatic Day

I spent the morning solving and re-solving the Rubik’s Cube. My best time was 5:05. Considering the fastest solver in 1982 was around twenty seconds, the impressiveness of my time was confined to being the best in my house.

#1GF! and I got dressed and headed out to try out our new Costco membership. #1GF! was going to drive, and I found myself reaching for the passenger door handle with a fistful of Rubik’s Cube. I had absentmindedly picked up the cube while putting on my coat and I had it in my hand.

“What am I seven?” I asked #1GF! holding up the cube. “I walked out carrying this thing like it’s 1982 and it’s my favorite Christmas toy.” She just laughed. Most girls would’ve at least rolled their eyes. Some would’ve said, “I can’t, uh, see you anymore,” and locked me out of the car.

As we drove along, I decided to take another crack at solving the cube. I thought it was a little antisocial to solve a cube instead of talking, but #1GF! said to go for it. I finished while barreling down route 24.

“Oh ho ho ho…” I chuckled.

“That seemed fast.”

“Oh that was fast. [very dramatically] Four. Thirty nine. Point four. I want it noted for the record that I broke the five minute mark in a moving car WITH a cowbell song on the radio.”

“Good for you, honey,” she said, sounding like she should’ve been mussing my hair when she said it. I don’t think she meant it condescendingly, but it was fitting because I felt pride that is generally reserved for kids in grade school.

We went into Costco, and I opted to leave the cube in the car. We got a couple of membership cards and wandered the aisles of oversized items. We ended up buying only three things (including the biggest box of Honey Nut Cheerios I ever saw) and it cost us $40. Holy crap. You have to be careful when shopping in a warehouse because the money goes fast.

We stopped into a CVS so that I could look for mustache wax and so that #1GF! could pick up some items for girls. They did not have mustache wax, but they did have all the lady stuff that #1GF! needed. I think that’s pretty sexist. Or beardist. Or at the very least handlebarphobic.

When we got home, I started doing the cube again while #1GF! went in to take a pregnancy test. Halfway through the cube in what seemed like record time, a pregnancy test landed in front of me. I stopped cubing, which for a split second was sort of difficult to do. I thought it was better to stop than have them drag the beach looking for my body. I looked down and thought, “I think she peed on that thing.”

Then, I noticed the plus.

“You’re fucking pregnant??” I blurted out of pure shock.

#1GF! nodded with tears in her eyes. She started crying, and I got up and hugged her. “Everything is going to be fine. This is a really great thing.” And after a pause, “Life is just really, really fucked, though.” I am not the smoothest man on Earth sometimes.

“Are you ok with this, though?”

“Am I ok? I’m great! This isn’t something that was supposed to happen is all.” Because I can’t resist making jokes, I pulled away slightly and smirked down at her. “If this baby isn’t caucasion, you and me are going on Maury. You are NOT the father.” It’s a wonder the woman stays with me.

#1GF! just burried her head in my chest. “I’ll give you a paternity test if you want.”

I held her tighter. “Come on now. You know I was just kidding.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” said #1GF! It turned to a plus instantly.”

“I know. We were supposed to be the cool uncle and aunt. I can’t seem to plan my life at all. It’s so utterly unplannable.”

We stood there hugging in the hall, pondering our new life.

“It’s going to be funny to tell a kid something like ‘when your mother told me she was pregnant, I was speed solving a Rubik’s cube.’”

“…And the first thing your father blurted out was, ‘You’re fucking pregnant?!’”

“Well, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s starting to sound like not such a great story.”

“Well…”

We were both smiling at each other like we had just won the lottery. “I guess I’ll have to get a job then.”

“We’ll see.”

“Uh, and I made it over thirty years without changing a single poopy diaper, too. This is going to ruin my streak.”

We tried the fertility thing a while back and it got so stressful and involved that we gave up and resigned ourselves to not having any kids. That’s why we’re in this little, one bathroom house near the beach. We just expected to live happily until one of us keeled over when we were really, really old. Now, the whole story was being rewritten, and my #1GF! was becoming #1Babymama.

“Are you going to be OK to go out tonight?” I asked.

“I think so.”

“Are you going to be able to act like nothing is going on and keep yourself from crying?”

“I think so.”

“You’re sure? This is pretty huge.”

“Yea.”

Later on, we headed over to our friends’ house for dinner. Both their college aged daughters were home, and each of them had friends over. All the kids were really polite, and there was another Dyer among them. I never met another Dyer that I wasn’t related to before, which I thought was pretty cool.

I looked at the girl’s brown hair and short stature and thought, “She doesn’t look like me at all.” as if having the same last name would indicate a family resemblance. I had the same reaction when I joined a Facebook group for Dyers. None of them looked like me either. I don’t know why I secretly expect them to.

After dinner, I went down to help install a wireless card. It only took a few minutes to install, but I tried to secure their router, and ended up setting the router to an encryption scheme that the cards didn’t understand. That meant that the cards stopped communicating, and I had to take a little time to undo things. It took fifteen minutes extra, and I would’ve spent fifteen more minutes checking what each card was capable of, but we were supposed to be playing a game, and I was holding things up.

While I put things back to normal, a bunch of the girls went out to the clubs. I didn’t see them leave, and I was told that it was probably better that way because I would probably have tried to get them to exchange their outfits for turtleneck sweaters and ski pants.

A couple of girls hung around to play Mexican Train dominoes with the old people and positively took us apart. Not even my trash talking spared me from their wrath. Isn’t Dominoes is supposed to be an old person’s game? I thought that old people had a natural right to dominate at bingo, shuffleboard, and dominoes as they got older. Although, when I think of it, I always carried a set of dominoes with me when I was in college, so maybe not. Maybe dominoes is a young person’s game now.

Saturday (Day 580): Old Man Dyer Breaks Four Minutes

I ate breakfast and made a cup of tea because #1GF! didn’t want coffee. I don’t know if the tea helped, but I did the cube in 3:53.7, which was my first time breaking the four minute mark. When I was done strutting around claiming to be the king of the cube, #1GF! and I headed out to get a new hand mixer to replace the one that I burned out with Christmas baking.

As we walked through the mall, I showed #1GF! a mug that my sister had been threatening to buy her for the last two years in a row. She never bought it because she wasn’t sure how #1GF! would react to it. I, on the other hand, could visualize #1GF! sitting on the porch, reading the paper, and sipping orange juice out of a chalice that in large, glittery letters read, “Ho Fo’ Sho’”. #1GF! just rolled her eyes and shook her head.

We grabbed a new cheapo mixer, a small rug, and a couple of giant plastic tubs at Walmart (which is a limited sea of genetics on a Saturday), and ended up seeing one of the girls from the night before wandering around. She was talking on her cell phone, as young women are prone to do.

“Hey, Mr. Dyer!”

It took me a second to process that I was Mr. Dyer, but was exactly the polite way that I’d want a kid of mine to address someone who is probably twenty years older than them. Considering that I had recently been laughing at a shower curtain that said “douche” on it, I instantly felt a lot older, but I was OK with the new role. The three of us made small talk for a minute before parting ways.

#1GF! and I threw everything into the giant plastic tubs and carried them between us through the mall.

“That’s what I need,” said one woman as she passed by.

“See, other people want bins to carry their stuff in,” #1GF! said.

“How do you know they just don’t want a bearded man servant to help them carry things through the mall?” I replied.

#1GF! admitted that it was possible, although unlikely, that she misinterpreted the situation. We headed home, both holding to our original interpretations.

#1GF! was a bit worn out, so I convinced her that I wouldn’t think less of her if she climbed into bed for a nap. I sat and watched Smokey and the Bandit even though it was edited all to hell. I let her sleep for an hour and woke her up in time to see the beginning of Smokey and the Bandit II. Marathon!

Instead of watching the marathon, we headed out to get some of the finest Chinese takeout in the area. We brought the food home and sat watching Burn After Reading. The movie was a Coen Brothers project, so I knew it would be weird, but once it was over, #1GF! sat there repeatedly saying “WHAT?” at the screen. I didn’t have any reaction beyond a shrug. I didn’t love the movie or hate it. I thought it was just OK.

Later at night, I got a call from one of our friends saying that he had moved his internet router to another location in the house and that he could no longer get online. I figured that the new location probably wasn’t getting enough signal because there were probably too many splits between the router and where the cable comes into the house.

That seemed to be the culprit, so I spent a little while discussing how we could cut the number of splits in his house without doing anything invasive. He wasn’t going to work on it that weekend, but I told him to call me when he did because I’d be glad to help. I really like planning out wiring. I don’t know why.

What I Learned

• You have to be careful when shopping in a warehouse because the money goes fast
• I’m getting to the point where more people think that I’m old than think that I’m young.
• Ticket To Ride is a really good game.
• Why Did The Chicken…? Is a remarkable game.
• I learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under four minutes.
• Wil Ferrell and John C. Riley don’t need a good premise to make a really funny movie.
• I’m getting more accepting of being called Mr. Dyer by people who are younger than I am.
• Sometimes even long shots come in.

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