Last night after school, Mer went to CVCA’s Academic Challenge practice. Academic Challenge is kind of the competitive trivia team for high schools. Mer was an AC stud when she was in high school, and she still likes it. Since our AC team is small and it is helpful to practice competition, Mer will on occasion “scrimmage” against the team. I came in (after Fools practice) just in time for the end of practice, and the “lightning round.” The lightning round is rapid-fire trivia questions, and Ombudsman (the coach) let me join in with Meredith. We did quite well, and I enjoyed it. It got me in the trivia mindset. This brought Damon’s restaurant to mind since they have interactive trivia. I mentioned the idea of going to Damon’s sometime to Mer and to Ombudsman, and they liked the idea. We figured we’d go sometime in the not-too-distant future.

On the way out, Mer and I ran into Dubbs, who was selling basketball tickets. I mentioned Damon’s, and she suggested going. That night. So, being happening folks (newly armed with Christmas and birthday monies), we agreed. We decided to meet at the restaurant at 6:30. We called Ombudsman, but he was not able to make it last night.

We met Dubbs and her husband, Nate, at the restaurant (Dubbs actually was there first, and Nate came along shortly after since he was coming from home instead of CVCA). We got a booth right next to the trivia screen, ordered some food (burger night!), and went trivial on everyone’s butt.

We played two games. I hate to whine, but our first handset did not work well. Often, it would take several seconds to input an answer (which cost us points), or on rare occasions, the handset would not register at all. Not too surprisingly, we did not do too well. We were not doing too well with answers anyway, but the handset did not help.

We got another handset, and this time we did better. We were right in the thick of things early on, but we had two or three questions (out of fifteen) that stumped us. We scored about 12,000 points (out of 15,000), but that was only good enough for second place. Darn. It was still a good time – Dubbs and Nate are fun. I guess I need to go back for more Academic Challenge practice.