I was feeling pretty wishy-washy about things on a recent Thursday afternoon – a day I wasn’t scheduled to work. Did I want to go out for a trivia game? If so, where? Did I want to battle nightmarish rush hour traffic to drive to a place about a half hour south of me only to have to leave early just so that we could get a table?

Nope!

Did I want to play at a gentrified overpriced bar not far from us – or another bar nearby which might force us to park in in the beyond and have to deal with long lines at the bar? Nope!

How about a place only a few miles away with a host I know and like and drinks I know won’t break the bank and isn’t too fancy of a spot?
OK!

I was kind of expecting to see another team that I know playing there that usually kicks a lot of ass on its trivia nights, but alas, they were not there. Oh well, too bad, maybe next time! A couple of players looked vaguely familiar, though honestly, I didn’t get out and walk the room or anything. But there was ONE player that I spotted sitting in the back…and in my intimate knowledge of the local Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor trivia scene that I’ve been a part of for the last decade or so and change…

I knew this solo player would be THE team in the room to beat – even if he didn’t have a team with him on that night! And I had a…feeling – that the feeling was mutual – and that he really wanted to beat us, too!

And so the game ultimately ended in a tie, which I guess was somewhat to be expected. I certainly didn’t expect to win the tiebreaker, let alone make a balls on the dot correct guess! We had to give the year in which singer Harry Nilsson was born. My only thinking was since he had hit songs in the 1970s, that he was probably in his 30s when he did this, so I picked a year 30 ish years back.

But the way my life has been going lately, and the year it’s been for my husband and I – with him losing his father earlier in the year, him losing his job last year, his mother recently coming down with COVID and not being able to attend a recent music festival with us? She recovered quite quickly and is fine now, for inquiring minds…

Yeah, we’ll take that $30 gift certificate and tiebreaker win! We know we’re not usually so lucky and very rarely win any first place prizes. Now to take care of that crumbling old filling pretty soon (ugh it’s always something isn’t it)? Do they take bar gift certificates as payment? 🙂

Even when I do manage to put something resembling a trivia “team” together, we’ve been struggling not only to find good days to play, but to make any real “noise” once we do manage to get out to play. But since trivia is something I really enjoy, I do make an effort to find the time to do it!

When we were playing at a place called McShane’s Pub on a recent Thursday evening, I had a flashback when the two people (including me) were called up to break the tie. Several years ago, I was playing an interactive “name that tune” game with a few other people, and on that night I was called up to take part in a final showdown round in the same spot by the front windows. It was a lightning style name that tune round, and apparently I bested another player by correctly identifying the song”Jungle Boogie” by Kool and the Gang. Fast forward a couple of years after that, the player whom I’d apparently beaten in that round spotted me at another bar and said “Hey, I remember you – you beat me in that name that tune game at McShane’s!” He wasn’t angry or anything – it was all in good fun!

So what’s the moral of the story? Life is hard, trivia wins can be hard…take time to enjoy the little things even when everything in life seems to try standing in your way!