Dinner Party

On Thursday (this is the reason I didn't post) we went to a dinner party at the home of one of Wayne's co-workers. He and his wife are empty-nesters with thousands of interesting stories to tell and a ton of unusual things to show in their house. They had a beautifully renovated kitchen and a metal shop outside. I took particular interest in a harpsichord that he had made by hand and on which his wife had done the detail painting. I tried to sightread some music that they had, going back to my long-ago days of playing oboe and percussion in high school. Not pretty.

After dinner, those who were left migrated to the den for parlor tricks designed to show us all how stupid we were. They set nine magazines on a table, in a 3x3 arrangement. One would go into the wetbar area (yet another home we've seen that has a wetbar) and close the door, while we all selected one magazine at random. When we were finished, she came back in and tried to guess which magazine had been chosen. Her husband would point a long stick at several magazines in no apparent order and ask "Is it this one? How about this one?" She got it right every time. There were about a dozen times I thought I had it, but I was looking for the wrong pattern. Instead of paying attention to which magazines were selected before the key one was picked, I should have been looking at where on their covers they were tapped. It was funny to see a bunch of engineers and programmers getting whooped in this game. We all were convinced that we "almost had the secret" when in reality we weren't even close. No one wanted to believe that we couldn't solve the puzzle. The one other person who did pick up on the secret admitted that he had played the game before. Lesson learned.

This makes me more excited about hosting a wine tasting in a month or two. I may put up a poll on this blog about that.