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Theme #1: food
Memorable meals this time, good food and good company. Sub-theme: eat at restaurants named for the streets they're on. Friday eve was at Downtown Atlantic (on Atlantic), with (I think I'm remembering right) Sax, Story, Ucaoimhu, Teki, Qaqaq, Squonk, Trazom. I had a very nice Asian chicken wrap. Ucaoimhu managed to have us all in stitches with synopsis of a Wonder Woman episode starring Cathy Lee Crosby and with Ricardo Montalban as the villain, which involved a ransom delivered by a burro. According to the episode, a burro's hoofprints are as unique as human fingerprints - how else would Wonder Woman be able to eliminate the THREE DECOY BURROS?
Saturday morning grabbed bagel at Montague St. Bagels. Back to Montague St. for lunch (Lichee Nut). On second pass, we determined that the tent labeled Not Just Rugelach should in fact have been labeled Everything But The Rugelach, and that perhaps all the actual rugelach was in the van (labeled Just Rugelach). Got that?
Saturday, had dinner with my cousin Nicole and her boyfriend Paul. There was a long wait at the spot Paul had chosen (Frankie's, in Carroll Gardens), so we ended up at the Union Smith Cafe (at Union and Smith :-). I had a heavenly papardelle pasta with sweet peas, prosciutto, and truffle cream sauce. Afterwards we picked up dessert at Sweet Melissa's to take back to the hotel. Mmmmm!
Sunday lunch, skipped the Dinner Impossible banquet, instead had brunch with Noam and Tyger at Eamonn's (back on Montague). Slow service, finally got our food just as we were on the verge of paying for coffee and leaving. Decent food, even if we had to inhale it.
Theme #2: puzzles
Friday eve: Yes, KenKen is definitely being overhyped - it's a somewhat interesting puzzle type, but it's not going to be another Sudoku craze (you can't start a craze intentionally). Nevertheless, the inventor's little talk was amusing, the Cole Porter song parody wasn't the trainwreck I'd feared, and I didn't mind having to do a few of the things semi-competitively. Especially since it resulted in a prize.
Saturday eve: Even before Nicole and Paul (both under 30) showed up, we put Paul on a Family Feud family (the Adams family). He seemed to have a good time with them, stayed with them through the trivia game. I joined the KinKin family with Trazom, Ucaoimhu, Story, and Anderson Wang (the youngest competitor, at 14). Too bad we didn't get to see/hear other family names, as I bet there were some clever/amusing ones. In the trivia game, through a series of fluky gut guesses, I got to the final 5 in the second round (as did Sax). For the up-front question - someone associated with spirits who died on Dec. 25th, 1946, the same day as Jimmy Buffett was born - having no clue, I guessed Jim Beam (and Sax guessed Johnny Walker). Actual answer, W. C. Fields.
The crossword competition itself: I felt sluggish (I WAS sluggish) but I made no mistakes, and I'm very happy with that, given last year. I was particularly slow on puzzle 5 - got stuck in the upper left for a long time before finally finishing. I liked my initial wrong answer to 1A (Stunts might be done on it: KAWASAKI) but did eventually figure out the right answer (withheld, but fits _A____KI). The good thing about the sluggishness was that I was pretty sure even after the first 3 puzzles that I wasn't in B finals contention, so I was able to enjoy the rest of the puzzles more and focus on that ever-so-important accuracy. As it turned out, I finished in 33rd overall (out of 685), about the same as last year, and 7th in B. Lyric and I were tied going into puzzle 7, but he edged me by a minute, so we swapped our Upstate New York placements from last year (thanks once again to Tyler for leaving Troy). Second place Upstate still meant a trophy, my third. Amazing how satisfying those little statuettes are.
The drive home was uneventful: no four hours of pouring rain, no being on the wrong side of the fork for the Manhattan Bridge (though in that case I was able to negotiate to the Brooklyn Bridge without too much trouble). And I was plenty far away by the time the snow hit NYC.
I appreciate and enjoy getting to hang out with so many brilliant, witty, interesting people. Thanks to all, and wild horses won't keep me away from Baltimore this summer. (Oh, and there's a very high probability I'll be at the Boston crossword event in early April, too.)