Madcap (South Carolina) Mensa Weekend (#SFWApro)

So Friday, TYG and I took off for  Greenville, SC for the Piedmont Area Mensa’s annual regional gathering. The RG is always good, more so now that I spend much of the week at home with the pups (we boarded them). Among events of the weekend:

•Seeing the peach water tower in Gaffney, SC.

•Driving past a beef jerky outlet store. Seriously? They need an outlet store for jerky?

•Hanging with friends, of course. Most of the attendees we only see at Mensa events, so that’s a big incentive (though we got a couple of new attendees from the local group).

•Attending my friend Neil’s “world championships of everything not sports” presentation, covering events including Scrabble, pun contests and stage magic. I missed another presentation, on traditional medicine-shows, because I wound up chatting with friends instead.

•A friend’s five-year-old daughter decided I was her bestie for the weekend.

•Hitting the local library’s very affordable book sale (picked up a few at the RG book sale too).

•Watching TYG take second place in the poker tournament. I think she’ll take a first one of these days.

•Competing in Blonde Bowl, a college bowl-style quiz game, so named because the last clue is so obvious, it’s blonde (e.g., the answer to one question was Orwell’s 1984 so the end of the question is ” … George Orwell novel set in 1984.”). I missed one question by just a hair (I immediately recognized the answer as Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” but I have a habit of calling it “Blank Slate” and guess which popped out of my mouth?) but I performed well on other questions and our team took first place.

•Playing Werewolves of Millers’ Hollow, a card game where each player is either a werewolf or a villager (with some special villagers such as the Hunter). Villagers try to identify and hang the werewolves; the werewolves kill a villager each night. I’ve never survived more than a couple of rounds, and sure enough i died by the end of the first round. Though I’d like to think that’s because I scared the werewolves—first game I correctly identified two of them, so I’m sure they wanted me out of the way.

•Playing Cards Against Humanity. Twenty drunk Mensans is not the ideal setting because there’s so much side conversation which creates lots of white noise. However if I relax and think of it as hanging out and occasionally throwing in a card, it works out fine.

•Catching up with TYG’s mum and brother, who live nearby.

•Competing in Culture Quest, a Mensa written quiz that teams all over the country participated in. I think I did better than usual (it seemed like I answered a lot more questions than usual), though there were a lot neither I nor anyone on the team answered. Hopefully lots of other teams were stumped.

•Driving home, listening to the 1986 Top 40 on Sirius’ Eighties Channel. Apparently I wasn’t listening to much music that year, because we got down to #25 and I recognized maybe three of them. More generally we did a good job dividing up radio time, with TYG getting Pitbull and me picking Broadway and 1960s. There might have been some belittling of each others’ taste, of course …

Food wasn’t as good as usual, with very poor vegetarian options Saturday night. Despite that, we both had a great time. We picked up the pups this morning (and given how TYG loves to get back to them, I really appreciate her waiting until today so that I could play Culture Quest Sunday afternoon). They have been insanely needy this morning but much as I enjoyed taking a break from parental duty, it’s lovely to be back with them.