We all went to Jeanie, John, and Loren’s house for Loren’s birthday and spaghetti. John is a looking-for-work Eastern mechanic. John has two aquariums, a big salt water aquarium and a smaller fresh-water one. The smaller one has lots of gold fish. It’s filled with waves of darting oranges and gold. He uses these to feed the big salt-water fish that putt around waiting to be fed.

The kids like to watch John feed the little flashes of gold to the big flash-eaters. They all yell, “Oooooooh!” Then they ask him to feed the big fish more little fish.

I was thinking about getting Danny and Nicole two gold fish in a gold fish bowl.

The four adults played several rounds of a word game called “Balderdash.” One person picks a card and reads a word out loud. Everyone writes down the meaning of the word (the words are very uncommon or out of date, so rarely can you figure out what it is.) The card-chooser then reads everyone’s definitions randomly, including his or her own, and including the actual definition. Then all, but the chooser, tries to guess which definition is correct.

My crowning achievement was getting everyone to guess that Aliosis was “brittle fingernails.”