Last Tuesday, Mer and I headed over to our friend Clarice’s apartment for a game night. In addition to the three of us, there was Clarice’s boyfriend Matt, and two former Fools with whom I have stayed in touch – Josh and Kristen. It was a great crowd.
There was pizza, but since Mer and I had eaten before going over, I was good and passed on the food. Mer had a little. After the food was munched on, we decided to play Scattergories. Scattergories can sometime be contentious because people can come up with lame answers to the category, but this group was mellow and mostly laughed at lame answers (and then turned the answer down). For those who have never played, you must fill out a card with 12 categories on it, using a word that matches a random letter; so, you might have a category of “A sport” with the letter “F.” You could use football, and maybe foosball or frisbee. We had a fun time. I made up a “Unit of measure,” the Waynon, claiming it was a physics unit. I fessed up once everyone gave it to me. Clarice had everyone chuckling with “A world record” when she came up with “Womb width” (which we turned down as an answer).We decided that must be what a Waynon measures.
We finished the evening with a quick game of Catch Phrase. It was boys versus girls, and we won because poor Kristen kept getting stuck with the word when the timer would go off, and she had no time to give clues. Matt made us laugh when he was trying to get us to say “do not disturb” and he had to resort to “when you’re in a hotel, with a woman!” Lots of laughter that evening.
Wednesday was social for us as well. CVCA has six people who are retiring this year. Normally, nothing public is done, but these six have over 170 years of service to CVCA, and over 250 years in education. Since this is quite a distinguished group and a huge event, CVCA decided to throw a dinner in honor of the retirees, and opened it up to the entire CVCA community.
It was quite the event. There must have been close to 500 people in attendance. Mer and I got there a little late, and we had trouble finding a seat. Happily, Craig and Dubbs saved us a seat. There were people there who had come in from New England, Canada, Colorado, the Southeast, and more. It was amazing to see a room so full of people, many of whom I actually knew.
The evening started with a meal while some slides of the retirees were shown on a screen. Mer and I both thought the slides would be shown all evening, so we did not pay too much attention to them. We ate the dinner and socialized with our tablemates. The food was excellent – some of the best beef I’ve ever had. Anyway, we were both a little sad that once the dinner was over, the slides were turned off.
After supper, each of the retirees was introduced by a colleague, who shared some stores and praised the person. Each speaker also read one or more letters or e-mails about the person retiring. Then, each retiree got to speak. Many nice things were said, and several things were very funny (especially those said by CVCA’s president, Roger Taylor, who has a great sense of humor).
The entire evening lasted about two-and-a-half hours. At the end, Mer and I did not really try to work our way up to the front of the room to greet the retirees since they were pretty mobbed. It really is great to work somewhere where you like the people with whom you work .