Blog Number 245

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Sorry for the long delay between blogs.  It is not for a lack of things to blog about really, but a lack of free time to blog.  The whole family went to a Christmas party that was at my manager's manager's house.  Since I just switched managers, I did not know a lot of folks there but my wife wanted to go anyway.  The highlight was the gift exchange part of the evening.  Everyone who wanted to brought a gift and then we drew numbers to see who would go first.  When it was your turn, you could steal someone else's gift or pick out a new one.  If you had your gift stolen then you got to steal someone else's or choose a new one.  Once a particular gift was stolen twice it was "frozen" (meaning it could not be stolen again).  At any rate, we were number 22 out of 25 so I thought we were in a good position for a nice gift.  Once it was our turn, we stole a Pirates of the Caribbean 3 DVD.  The #23 person immediately stole this from us (freezing it).  We then opened a new gift (a few Starbucks gift cards were already frozen).  We got a nice book of Escher drawings which person #24 then stole from us.  People were laughing at my frustration.  In the end, we ended up with some snowman picture holders.

A couple of weeks ago we were at another party for people in our ABF (Sunday school class).  I decided to continue a tradition that was part of a Christmas party that we went to every year that we were in Kokomo.  Each year there were 3 jars of candy and each person could venture a guess as to how many pieces of candy were in each jar.  The person who was closest won the jar.  This was always a lot of fun and the winners were held in high regard.  Try as I might, each year I failed to come even remotely close on any jar.  I finally won after 5 years (last year) and I wanted to see if it would be as much fun being the person in charge.

Step 1 - Buy some candy

Step 2 - De-bag the candy

Step 3 - Get some jars

  __________

Step 4 - Fill the jars

 __________

The pictures are a little deceiving as the jar on the far right was the biggest.  Jar 1 ended up with about 180 pieces, jar 2 had about 50 and jar 3 had a little over 500.  I did a 4th jar that contained only gumballs (so the little kids could play) but did not get a picture of it.  It had about 75 gumballs in it (my daughter guessed 4,000 - hey think big!).  Anyway, it was not as big of a hit as I had hoped but I had fun filling the jars.  For the record, my wife was nowhere close on her guesses (though closer than the daughter).  I hope to do it again next year.  There was a gift exchange at this party and we did get the best gift (a t-shirt of the "I triple dog dare ya" scene from A Christmas Story) so the evening ended well.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon