There's more to Oz than the Yellow Brick Road

 A slightly more personal post this time around.

Probably the biggest thing to happen for me is that I finally attended my first Super Bowl party.

I was never much for sports in my youth. I did a couple of years of Little League baseball, but was generally nonathletic. The one time they let me pitch during a game, I couldn't get the ball over the plate and was replaced in mid-inning by a girl. She was one of our regular pitchers and really quite good.

And sports on TV was a sign that my beloved Saturday morning cartoons were over. That or the westerns that my dad liked to watch. So no real love there.

The only time I particularly cared about sports was when I worked at a pizza joint. Sports, especially football, were strongly correlated with pizza. Learning the home teams and the big games helped me prepare for what business would be like on those days. Super Bowl Sunday, of course, was a madhouse. The Black Friday of the pizza business.

When I left that job over 3 years ago, I was determined to blissfully ignore the Super Bowl. I did try out a season of Fantasy Football, just because of all of the jokes about how fantasy football is like D&D for sports people. (For the record, it's very different. There's a minimum of agency once you've picked your team and you have to wait for the results of each player's performance over the week.)

When a friend of mine invited me to his Super Bowl party this year, I was very interested. For one thing, I make a point of going to as many of his parties as I can. He's one of the first people to welcome me to San Diego when I moved here. Also I know he doesn't care that much about sports either, so this wasn't going to be about the game. Just an excuse to have a party. I also thought it would be an interesting opportunity to enjoy Super Bowl Sunday, rather than dreading or avoiding it.

Things went pretty well. I brought some of my famous Four Food Group Mac & Cheese. I say "Famous," but this was the first time I made it for someone other than my wife. It's still darn good and I think the people who tried it liked it. But it was competing with a lot of other things that other people had brought, so I wound up with plenty of leftovers. More for me!

Since I knew that there would only be a modicum of attention paid to the football game itself, I thought I would bring some other light games that people might want to play. The one that got some play is Zombie Dice from Steve Jackson Games. It doesn't require a lot of space to play and the rules are simple enough that you can teach it to drunk people. I actually played it with the host and he enjoyed it enough that he got his own set. Maybe next time, I'll get to throw down one of the Fluxx games.