Carcassonne, WORT Festival, and Smells
Well, the weekend is over. And when all is said and done we incurred about 80,000 calories, a progressive music festival out side my window, an epic bocce ball tournament metldown, at least 84 cans of Miller High Life, two and a half bottles of scotch, a Brewers shit-pile, and one dog complaint by my “downstairs neighbors” (i.e., jerks). I hate to be nudge, but could we get this story started? I’m leaving to go camping in a few hours…
Wwhazz and parker got here on Friday afternoon. Timmer was already here on Thursday, so all of us (and o’neil) left at 4pm-ish to go to the Brewers game against the Minnesota (rrr!) Twins. We picked up whitehouse in Waukesha on the way in. We also did it durrty-style this time: parked in a neighborhood off Bluemound and hit the liquor store for Mini-Miller Lite 6 packs and boner beers (plastic bottles like the ones they use in the stadium). Then we went to a bar with a free shuttle, had a bottle of beer, and got down to Miller Park with about 15-20 to go before game time. After slamming 100 8 ox Miller Lite, we each put a boner beer down our pants and went to collect our Paul Molitor bobblehead. Oh yeah.
The game kinda sucked (Brewers Lost) but we had a good time with our obstructed-view seats in the right field (behind the foul pole). Our section was a batch of Milwaukee’s Finest salt-of-the-earth-folk mixed with yuppies with 18 kids or yuppies with skater0punk kids dressed in beige and dark green. I had a fine time sitting behind a 6- and 8-year-old screaming “fuckin brewers!” while sloshing my beer all over the place. The family came in the 4th inning and left in the 7th inning. I’m sure they had a fine time; I scavenged one of their leftover PB&J’s for later on.
We were about to start walking back to the bar area when Wwhazz sighted the Fiesta Garibaldia shuttle. We hopped on that thing and hit the party back at the bar. Free taco bar, free chips and salsa, two hot chicks dressed as slutty referees: they had it all. Lawman designated drove us back to Madison, where we passed out for the night.
Our only plan for Saturday was to cook up a homemade fish fry with the 15-20 bluegills, crappe, and perch that lawman caught on opening weekend . We had lunch at the Old Fashioned, and then decided to give the bocce court in my complex’s courtyard a test drive. Result: we will be starting a bocce league this summer. It was awesome, especially since so much booze was involved. The inaugural best-of-five series saw lawman and wwhazz coming back from a 10-1 deficit to stave off elimination, then to go on to win it while whazzmaster and timmer were 3/4 in the bag on scotch. I cannot stress how fun bocce at my house is.
So after that we reloaded our booze and took off for lawman’s pad to make our epic dinner. While lawman prepared the coating and got things ready, I was deep in the zone of potater-preparation. The idea: potatoes au-gratin with ramps. Somehow. We ended up boiling some Yukon Golds (not too soft, though), then slicing them and laying them in a glass baking dish. Then we sauteed the ramps, some green onions, and a regular white onion down. We cooked some half-and-half with about half a block of shredded cheddar, and then combined that mixture with the saute and spooned it over the po-taters. Cooked that in the over til the top was crispy, and voila. It was tasty, but not as tasty as the delicious panfish lawman fried up. We garnished things with fresh veggies, summer sausage, and High Life.
Oh yeah, and Springer was there. That’s right; he came, he saw, he took our money in poker, he departed.
Sunday was a Day of Rest: games of all sorts were played. We started things off with a breakfast of leftover fried bluegill, scrambled eggs, leftover po-tater au-gratin, sausage patties, donuts, and bread. We basically went back and forth all day between the NES emulator on the Xbox, the new board game I got wwhazz for Xmas (Carcassonne), and another bocce tournament. Things were made… odder by the fact that WORT was staging a street music festival about 20 yards from my window. We found a SNES game in my ROMS folder called Vegas Stakes, and spent many hours running our $1000 buy-in up to $1.2 million. You can play craps, roulette, blackjack, slots, and 7 card stud (spread limit) poker. We had some early luck when a zombie-man offered to wipe our shirt off, and to thank us he gave us a lottery ticket that won us $80,000, which became our nest egg. We ran that $80K to about $400K in poker by breaking off this poor schmoe named ‘Johnny’, and then took the $400K to over a million in high stakes craps. We ended up betting $1.2 million on the odds behind our point (5) in a no-limit craps game, and busted out. We will be more careful next time; Johnny is easy money.
The second bocce tournament saw another epic collapse by Timmer and whazzmaster. This was just a best-of-three set, but they came from behind in the third game to put us down.
Sadly, the pounds and pounds of fried food, eggs, coffee, scotch, and High Life made hay of our buttholes; it smelled constantly like farts all day on Sunday.
On the upside, though, we are starting to get good at Carcassonne, which is probably the funnest board game I’ve played since Thunder Road. Knowing Scientist’s love of Dice Wars, I’d be interested to see his reaction to this game.
So, that’s about it. This morning spacebee and I leave to go camping up near The Dells. We’ll be gone until Thursday or Friday, so be good you little scamps. I’d love to see a discussion of Carcassonne strategy, or barring that maybe just some plans for our bocce league this summer. Man, this is gonna be fun.
