It’s been a while since our last league night because we took December 29 off to play the annual Silver Balls in the City charity strikes tournament. Unfortunately, I didn’t take notes about the night like I sometimes try to do (it helps with my unfortunate habit of writing up the recap two weeks later) and my brain has subsequently been churned repeatedly by a record grading marathon, then the holidays, then scrambling to prepare a new semester. Frankly, it’s amazing I can remember my own name. Fortunately, I do have pictures for you this time, and I can remember a few highlights, so here goes.
Our last league night on December 13th was the fifth of Season 17. We had a relatively small turnout again last time so we played only one bank, “Athena.” I was considering playing two banks no matter what on the assumption that at some point we’ll need to again and so we won’t want to end up with an odd number of banks left. Joseph convinced me I should stick with the rule about playing one bank with fewer than 16 people so that’s what we did. We were missing regulars Pat, Brian, Mike (who let me know he was out sick), and Allen (who was back home in Texas for the holidays). On the other hand, we had the surprise return of Nate F., Jake’s brother-in-law, who hadn’t played this season. Nate walked up to me, gave me a hearty pat on the shoulder and said it was good to see me again, and I was so embarrassed because I felt I had to own up and admit I could not remember who he was. Fortunately he took it in good humor.
Dan asked me what Jurassic Park had to do with the bank theme of “Athena.” I responded “It needed to go somewhere and I couldn’t make everything fit.” I did point out that I was proud of including Rush in the bank because Athena’s symbol was an owl. I realized later that I had forgottne that I did have a reason to put Jurassic Park in Athena. It’s because Athena was the goddess of wisdom, that is, she was a clever girl. (Cactus Canyon is really the one I have no real justification for.)
Danny came very late and since all the groups were done by the time he arrived we just gave him a score sheet and sent him on his way. Joseph noticed he had something like 850 million after ball 1 on Rush, so he let him know that he had already beaten everyone else and could go on to play the rest of his games. I was desperately behind on work and trying to do some work at this point so I think Joseph just wanted to help me be able to go home as soon as possible. Danny was actually able to go back and continue his suspended Rush game, still just waiting for someone to shoot, after finishing the rest of his games for the night. He was still playing as we left for the night.
The Smackdown game was Monster Bash, which I did terrible at. I had a score of 5 million and insisted on playing a second game just so I didn’t have to leave a score that embarrassing on the score sheet. On my second try, I got 3 million. Tim ended up winning the Smackdown, and since we only had six competitors, the B division was played between me and Mark. I had a narrow victory on Attack from Mars. This was Mark’s first official IFPA tournament, though he quickly followed it with a second one by playing at Silver Balls in the City.
Speaking of Silver Balls, I will eventually have a pile of photos from that tournament and I promise to upload them to the league Flickr pool (which exists) and the Facebook group eventually. I don’t promise when.