So yesterday we went down to Somerset to hang out with our friends James and Maggie.  Shortly after arriving at rancho Burke we visited a nearby corn maze to get lost.  It was fun!

The ears of corn were nasty looking.  James said he thought it was feed corn.  I didn't bring my camera so you'll just have to take my word for it.

At first we tried the simple maze-traversal technique (always go left) but that only works if there are no free-standing structures in the maze, which there were.  After discovering that we were recrossing our steps we decided we would have to map the maze.

Not in the cartographic sense really.  It was more like creating a graph of the maze.  Each intersection we came to got a letter, and each time we would note down on index cards what paths led away from the intersection and roughly what directions they went in.  Then we would scratch out on the dirt the letter for that intersection.  Thus each intersection became a node on the graph.

This way we always knew when we returned to a node we had been to before, and could note how they connected together.  This goes a long way to keeping one from re-exploring areas of the maze.  Not long after we started mapping (after about 20 nodes noted) James found the exit and we all got out of the maze.

It was a lot of fun! (I should note at this point that I will likely be teased for posting my crummy maze-graph above.  Tough winkies.)

Then it was back to Rancho Burke for a delicious meatloaf which James baked in a bundt pan (a bundt-loaf if you will... is just me or is the word bundt incredibly funny?)  Our friend Julie joined us bringing gifts of birch beer (yum) and vegetables for grilling.  After a delicious repast we played Apples to Apples for awhile (fun!)  Quite a long while.  We played until James and I could no longer ignore the constant references to chocolate from the ladies and absconded to procure some suitably sweet comestibles.

We returned with Haagen Daz chocolate chocolate chip ice cream, reeses cups, hersey bars, spice drops (for me, I can't eat ice cream), and the dreaded Mallomars.  Oh the dreaded Mallomars were so good.   I ate many Mallomars for which I got some ribbing and concern from certain members of our party.  However since those members each ate a bowl full of Haagen Daz chocolate chocolate chip, sprinkled with chunks of hersey bars, and reeses cups, and drenched in hersey's chocolate syrup I wasn't feeling all that out of place with my Mallomars and spice drops.

During the sugar immersion, we played a card game which I've often played with my parents which they call "Skat!"  After I explained some of how it worked it was made clear to me that it was not "Skat" but was basically "Thirty-One".  Then after playing a few hands I was told that was also not "Thirty-One", at which point several other names for this bastardized version of Thirty-One should be called... "Stupid Card Game" was one such.  But it was fun to play nonetheless, and at one point I was doing so badly I remarked that I was "fucked in the goat ass"--an expression which I picked up from friend with whom I used to play "Magic: the Gathering" that almost always gets a chuckle.  From that point on it was determined that this game would be called Fucked-In-The-Goat-Ass (or FIGA for short).

We played FIGA until about 1 AM.  The kids had long since crashed and we were all getting tired and decided to call it a night.

The drive home took about 2 hours.  Pat drove halfway, while I dozed, and then we switched and I drove the rest of the way.  We got home at about 3:20 AM and wasted no time dragging our tired goat-asses to bed.

It was a great Saturday!  It reminded me of how much I missed college days when we would hang out with our friends all the time.  Thanks for a fun time James, Maggie, and Julie.  We had a blast.

Mmmm.  Mallomars.