b-i-n-g-o

no, i haven't given up on blobbing, i just was hibernating for a minute and avoiding human interaction. NO BIGGIE.

one of my favorite things that happened over the holidays was bingo night at the lion's club in new palestine. let me give you a minute for that to sink in.

....

this whole thing started because julie's sister -- older sister -- asked for a bingo set for christmas. i thought that was a completely ridiculous thing to ask for. silly me. it only took one evening of rolling the little cage around with its little number balls for me to become completely obsessed with bingo. and so i decided i needed an even bigger, better, more bingo-y bingo experience. lucky for me, julie's sister was able to provide exactly what i was hoping for.

if you haven't played this kind of bingo, then there is no way i am going to be able to adequately describe what it is like. for one thing, you don't play one bingo card at a time, you usually play 24. and getting a bingo doesn't just include getting 5 in a row. you have to have at LEAST two bingos, in some games three, on the same card, and bingos can include four corners, big diamonds, little diamonds, OR clusters. except there are all these other specifications like if your two bingos are clusters they can't overlap and in some games clusters have to be in the corners, and on and on and it is so much more complicated than i ever DREAMED bingo could be. wonderfully BEAUTIFULLY complicated. so we pay $10 and get our regular 24 card sheets and then some other special ones for the $500 and $1000 (!!!) games. a whole evening of bingo blissfuless.

i wish wish WISH that i had taken a camera with me so that i could include pictures. bingo ladies are CRAZY. they have these lucky bingo charms that they bring with them -- things like troll dolls, and little embroidered thingies that say "i heart bingo," and pictures of their kids, and rotten apple cores (didn't make that one up. didn't.). and they smoke cartons upon cartons of cigarettes, and they have little bingo bags with all of their "dobbers" in them. (there is your new bingo vocab word for the day. a "dobber" is this special ink thing you use to mark your bingo cards. the serious bingo players have them in every color of the rainbow. i only had one -- it was hot pink). it is all craaaazy intense and SO. MUCH. FUN. we sat next to this crazy bingo lady who got really miffed at us because we talked too much during the "warm up games" (because we were trying to figure out what the hell a "crazy cluster game" entailed), but then once she decided we met her standards regarding acceptable character, she talked our ears off about her lucky numbers and how many cashews she had eaten.

needless to say, i have been busily searching for a bingo hall ever since we returned to nashville. haven't found one yet that is open to non-senior citizens, but i haven't given up hope. raise your hand if you want to come play bingo with me. thats what i thought.

no, i didn't win any money. but i do have a memory about winning $100 playing bingo on cruise ship when i was like 3 and all of the grown ups were PISSED that the little kid won. i don't think i ever saw that money.