Five, Six, Pick-up sticks

I was cold feeling inside and out all day. A hoodie and blue jeans was my attire today and I was still cold, and it has nothing to do with the carton of ice cream I hugged at lunch. Got a blister playing the piano today...somehow. It's on the base of my right thumb. How you ask? I have no earthly idea. I've got a piano post for tomorrow though, so I'll save the other things I was going to say for then. I watched the pilot of "The Office" today. I bought it on DVD (the whole first season) at Target for $17. It was on price cut. Did lots of laughing during lunch.

Our house guest has been here three whole days now, or three days and three nights. She's here for pioneer school. I'll call her Big Affie. Her name is spelled the same way as my first name and we have the same first and last initials, only she's older by two years. That's her only qualification to get the suffix "big." She's actually smaller than Mehsha. It's hard now when someone just calls out "Affie" and two come. Maybe I should actually go by Affie for the next two weeks and make life a little easier. Having her here is great. I'm getting to know her inside out, but I'm not being easy to get to know this week (i.e.- white post). Thank goodness she's staying two weeks. I wish she could stay longer. Really, I am learning a lot about her though and she definitely doesn't act 19 either, or at least not all the time. If you've met her, you know that I look two or three years her senior. It's so much fun. I love having guests. Mom said that she wanted to have five kids, and she would have had it been possible, and ya know, I don't think I would mind as much as I thought I would. Since she's been here, we (me, Big Affie, and Mehsha) have all become serious pick-up stick players. I'm in line for the next challenge. I never played much when I was little, though the Greenparents had a nice set that has come to be a dilapidated set after four grandkids. It was occasional, just like for Big Affie. We have a set right now and Mehsha pulled them out at the mention of them on a television show and Big Affie made a nostalgic comment and they decided to start playing. After I finished getting ready, I too, joined in. Last night, I lost both games I played. Tonight, I'm the undefeated champion, but of course, there are only three of us playing so it's not that hard to be undefeated or defeated for that matter. You get really into it. It takes a lot of concentration to pick out a stick that you think won't make any of the others move and then try and figure out a process to get it out of the pile without screwing the rest of it up. Very complicated. Mehsha started making piles. Hard piles. And the game will literally take an hour or so to finish. So in efforts to stay away from the real world today after I blankly spilled some of my beans on the blog floor (which set my nerves on edge, but felt a little better just knowing someone can see it if they wanted to), I looked up pick-up sticks more for origin of the game, not so much for the name. Most everyone knows that rhyme and the line goes "five, six, pick-up sticks. Seven, eight, made a mistake..." or wait, is that last part from a double-dutch rhyme? I think it is. (I used to kick butt at double-dutch too, before they took recess away from us.) Yeah it is. The real nursery rhyme goes this way: One, two, buckle my shoe Three, four, shut the door Five, six, pick up sticks Seven, eight, lay them straight Nine, ten, a big fat hen Eleven, twelve, men must delve Thirteen, fourteen, maids are courting Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting Nineteen, twenty, my plate's empty ...(I didn't know from 11-20) That's beside the point. The game started in China. All I have to say is: duh. Didn't all the cool stuff start in China? Or almost maybe. The Arabs did have the "0" concept, but they started algebra too, so that cancels out the good thing. In China, sticks of this sort were used for divination and then it became a form of a gambling game. That's kinda what out version is, since it has point scores for each color stick. From China it went to Korea and Japan and then across the Bering Strait, like everyone and everything. I was also surprised to find that they were originally called "jerk straws" then "jack straws," as well as pick-up sticks. And I never thought about it before, but Jenga is a form of pick up sticks. So, I'm being called for a game now and I'd like to defend and keep my title, so I'll stop there about something everyone else probably thinks is boring.