The great food and social quest continued last Wednesday and Thursday. Every spring break for the last five years, I have gone with CVCA’s service group, Diakonos, to help out a community project, usually Habitat for Humanity. Last Wednesday, our friend Lesa held an end-of-year party for the Diakonos kids at her house. Mer was a bit reluctant to go along since she had not gone on the trip, but I convinced her that spouses were welcome. She ended up having a pretty good time, since about 3/4 of the students at the party were hers.

There were about 15 kids at the party, and tons of junk food. The real food was roast-your-own hot dogs, which were fun and tasty, but the real prize of the evening was the dessert spread. Whoa. There were warm chocolate chip cookies, the best no-bake cookies that I have had in years, s’mores, my chocolate-peanut-butter bars, and other various cookies and treats. I was better than I could have been, but it was not a temperate evening.

We had fun eating and chatting, and then we headed inside to watch the DVD of all the movies that had been taken on the trip. It was funny to watch the kids ham it up for the camera. We also watched the annual talent show that had been taped, and that went well. Some of the individual videotaped “confessionals” where students could say anything they wanted went a bit long for a party atmosphere, but it was still a nice evening. Mer and I had to leave toward the end of the video because it was getting late for me (I had to work the next day).

Thursday we headed over to Clarice’s place for another game night with Clarice, Matt, Josh, and Kristen. We started the evening with Tribond, a game where you have to guess what is the similarity among three words. That turned out to be a frustrating game. My team only got to go twice – Mer’s team won by going twice, almost “running the table.” It is not a whole lot of fun to sit for 30+ minutes not getting to play. If we play the game again, we need to have three teams of two, and not two teams of three. It turns out that out of all the questions asked that evening, our team did not know two of them – the two questions we were asked and missed. Ah, well.

We then played a semi-improv game that Shannon and Jo had given us called Don’t Make Me Laugh. To a large extent, it was like charades, but with very weird things to act out (like “Be a buoy in a kiddie pool”). Since five of the six of us have done improv before, we had a really great time with that game. It was a nice bonus that Clarice and I ended up winning, but even before we knew that, we had a great time.

Mer and I almost broke the food chain after the party, but I had a Dairy Queen craving, so I stopped. That kept the (what ended up being) 10-days-of-big-eating-in-a-row steak going.