Brandon Notices

We decorated the living room for Christmas yesterday and today. We moved the sofas into more an an "enclosing" arrangement to allow access to the fireplace.



I was totally in charge of assembling the artificial tree and hanging ornaments, but the tree is very much the same as it's looked in previous years, except there are more lights (there's 300 bulbs). I love my new Jelly Belly tree ornament. I found it at Cost Plus--they happen to have a lot of Jelly Belly stuff there.

I also created the construction paper chain that lines most of the room. It took me several hours to complete. I made most of it watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I found the secret to making the chains look good is to use only two colors and to make thick, tight chain links.

It's very windy outside. I was just walking to the HUB from my chem lecture and a big gust of wind caught the blue canopy tent of a group set up outside (to hand out study bibles). The canopy blew completely upside-down. It looked like it was going to strike a couple people, but it didn't. They fixed the canopy and it looks like no harm was done.

I was outside yesterday afternoon and saw Jesse and Dylan (two of the little neighbor kids). Jesse was playing with Dylan's little electronic casino toy. He was playing blackjack.

"Oh, you know how to play blackjack?" I asked.

"Yep," he said.

I watched as he was dealt a 2 and a 3. "Hit or stand?" the game's electronic voice asked.

"Stand," Jesse declared aloud as he pressed the button.

Little kids are funny. I wanted to teach him at least what I knew of blackjack (I'm no expert, but I know better than to stand on a 5), but I had stuff to do.

I heard my cat meowing loudly and urgently at the bottom of the stairs, so I ran down to see what he needed. He was walking in circles in front of the closed basement door. I began opening the door so he could enter. Before opening it more than 6 inches, he began to wedge his way through, then continued into the room and rushed hurriedly to the big bowl of water in front of the fish tank and began lapping up the water. The odd thing is that just a minute ago, he was here, upstairs, in the dining room within five feet of his regular water bowl. My cat is weird.

Tonight, I went to my high school's Bingo Night with my family and cousin Kevin (but Stephanie went to sit with her own friends). I was mildly surprised to see Brandon Johnson there; he sat next to me. We also had the pleasure of sitting next to Khader too. I went to Bingo Night two years ago. It's lots of fun. I wanted to go last year but it was the night before my SATs. This year was very much the same. They had pizza—I had pepperoni—and some popcorn.

I was upset by something, though. They didn't have a blackout round! How angering. It was so tense the last time I was there—very exciting. But not this year. There were several groups of high school kids there who kept making shreiking noises at the wrong times, and the bingo caller kept pausing to say, "Do we have a bingo?" It was a bit annoying. I wasn't incredibly mad that I won nothing—it's fun to play bingo. But still, I was upset by the poor sportsmanship of many of the bingo players, booing players who had shouted "Bingo!" Come on, guys, be good sports!

Oh, we won some stuff this year! I personally didn't win anything, Khader won the very first game (regular 5-in-a-row bingo) and got some peppermint patties. Mom won a raffle and got some "relaxation" stuff (mostly cookies and some kind of pillow footwear). And Kevin won the "I"-or-"G"-row game and won a gift certificate to Sparta's Pizza.

I brought my bingo cards home and counted them. Counting the free spaces and wild spaces that could have helped me win bingos, I marked 250 squares. I mismarked one square—I marked 61 when I thought she had said 51.