More Scattergories

Early on in the year, when lockdown was still in force, I had spent an evening playing Scattergories with my sister and Jaco and Marjan. (I have the Norwegian version called Gruble, and my sister has the Finnish version which probably goes by an entirely different name altogether.) It had been fun! We decided we should do it again. But as things go, it ended up being somewhat kicked into the long grass. But when my sister reached out to Marjan for her birthday, the enthusiasm for another session was rekindled, and soon we had one scheduled.

We added loads of categories ourselves 

Somehow the task fell to me to organise this. I didn't want to spend my evening off on my work computer as I spend more than enough time staring at it, but I also didn't want to play on my phone as the other players would be very small pictures on my screen. The obvious solution was to use my old laptop. Since having moved my office computer to my home office, this computer hasn't seen an awful lot of use, so when I started it, it was a bit of faff to get software like Zoom working. In the end I gave up, had my sister get everyone together in appropriate software, and used my work computer after all. So be it.

This time it was only the three of us; Jaco was on fieldwork. And we set to work!

We had some fun coming up with answers, and also with judging whether the answers we gave were correct. Is "beggar" a profession? Are breakfast parafernalia outdoor gear? What is a jackdaw in Dutch, and does it live in the woods? Why could only two out of three Dutch women come up with "the Netherlands" as a country starting with an N? Is alcohol and drug? Is hornfels a material?

We had a good time. I even won! I suppose my biggest pile of points gathered in one round in which we had to come up with adjectives starting with a B. That is just a question of opening a trapdoor in your mind and letting the words tumble down! But it seems that not everybody's brain works that way. My brain is perhaps not very structured, which is a problem when I am trying to do any coding, but it can produce large amounts of fairly random information. So I need throngs of colleagues to help me write some simple scripts for plotting up faunal data, but I can win a game of Scattergories all by myself!

Altogether I think we had a good night. I'm sure we'll do it again! But it could be a few months…