Last Saturday, I started the day out with my friends Nate and Jason, and we headed down to the Valley to run on the Towpath at 6:45 am. I think marathon running shrivels the brain or something. Nate was on a short week, so he ran 13 miles with me and Jason, and we finished up with 5 more for a total of 18 miles. It was a good, strong run (with a very pretty sunrise).

After I got home and showered up, I decided I was hungry after burning 2500 calories, so I got Mer into the car to head to Akron. Jason had recommended Wally Waffle as a great breakfast place, and I wanted to try it. It was a very sunny and pretty day, and we had nothing on the agenda for the afternoon, so neither of us minded the 10-minute wait. After much agonizing, I decided I needed to try a chili omelet if only for the novelty. As it turns out, the chili was more like salsa, and so the omelet was okay instead of the exciting taste sensation I had hoped for. The home fries were great. Next time, I am certainly getting the chocolate chip waffle with whipped cream!

After our brunch, we wandered outside into the bright Ohio sunshine, and lo! there was the Goodyear blimp. Even after nine years of seeing it fairly regularly, I still love seeing it. Mer and I also stopped and enjoyed the newly-blooming flowers in the small park outside of Akron’s Children’s Hospital. We then headed on home for a mellow afternoon.

The evening was a good time. One of our colleagues, Brittian, goes to a church where they have a fundraiser for a school in the Dominican Republic. The fundraiser proceeds go to feeding the children for one year. It was a pizza and dessert dinner, with a small silent auction, and…get this…competitive team trivia. Talk about a great combination – food and fierce displays of why I never had dates in high school.

Brittian told me that last year a guy at the church put together a team of pre-meds, and they cleaned up. So, Brittian put together his own team this year – Brittian and his wife, Dubbs (who knows a stupid amount of trivia), Meredith, me, Nancy (who was on Jeopardy!), and Brittian’s in-laws. It was a formidable team. We figured we would be competitive at the very least, and we were.

The trivia was harder than we had thought it would be, and that made for a challenging night. The church wisely sold “mulligans” that would allow you to pass on one question per round. There were 10 rounds of 10 questions. They had some bonus questions as well, so a perfect score would have been 120 points. They posted scores after every two rounds, and after round one, we were tied for second, behind by one point. After round four, we took over the lead and never gave it up. We ended the evening with 99 points (out of 120), which beat the second-place team by only three points. Much fun.

Meredith rocked the Arts category, knowing 9 out of 10 of the questions, and we used our mulligan on a question from Tom Sawyer (“What does Huck Finn say a dead cat is good for?” – curing warts). I actually contributed to the team, knowing:
– How Clementine (from the song) died – she drowned
– The first NBA player to score 100 points in a game – Wilt Chamberlain
– What URL stands for (which I got slightly wrong, saying Universal Resource Locator, but they gave it to me)
– I was able to identify Argentina’s flag, because it was “my” flag when we did luge in Maine
– I had correctly identified Gone With the Wind as the first $100 million film, but was overruled for Jaws (a very good guess)
Anyway, we did win, which meant we each won $40. Since it cost $20 to get in, we made $20 on the evening. The church raised $17,000 for the school in the Dominican Republic, and we had lots of good food. It is hard to do much better than that!