happy new year

Last night, we rang in the new year with style, playing party games with friends: Pictionary, Gartic Phone, Jackbox (job job!), and Codenames. The whole gang was there (except Lopen).

Codenames incident of the night: numbers gave the clue “Indy 2” because “crystal” and “skull” were his tiles. Unfortunately, he was saddled with the culturally oblivious team of me, HGR, and newbie, who possibly have never watched a whole Indiana Jones movie between the three of us. (newbie might have. HGR and I definitely haven’t.) We thought he was referring to the Indy 500, with me noting an outside possibility of indie games and/or music, and we picked “crash” which was a neutral tile. Meanwhile, Dante, the enemy spymaster, dished out an obscure movie clue that Luis got instantly. (“Oh, ____, he was diagnosed with paralysis of the eye. Also, he played James Bond, a secret agent.” Which was correct on both counts.)

For the next game, HGR was spymaster for Team Drunk (numbers/Dante), and Luis was spymaster for the rest of us. Luis gave the clue “Olympics 2,” and we picked England for one of the choices (wasn’t the Olympics supposed to be in England at some point?) and that was the assassin. RIP. Luis said he’d been angling for us to pick Eiffel Tower (??). HGR was bummed. He had a master plan to win the game in three moves.

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The first day of the year brought the first winter storm of the season. I made sure to take my daily walk down to the station before the snow started. Other than that, it was a very lowkey day. I didn’t realize how lowkey it was until evening, when my roommate was like “What have you been doing?” and I realized I hadn’t particularly done anything all day. I made salmon and rice for dinner, so I guess that’s something. (It was Sitka salmon from my parents’ stash. I seasoned the salmon with salt, pepper, and Cajun seasoning, and topped it with bacon, cheddar, and diced onion. It was good, though not quite as good as Mom’s salmon.)