The Keenan Family 411

Bitin' the Bullet, Baby!

This is a historic post for KF411 as it's the first one that legitimately requires a warning about "strong adult content".  In fact, I think we're running a decent risk of Typepad shutting down our weblog after this one.  However, this particular post is well worth running the risk of a shut-down.

Our New Year's Eve activites included a rather spirited game of Pictionary before bedtime.  It was a three-way couples' match up:  Sue & Al, Kerri & Tony and Me & Amy. 

Kerri & Tony inexplicably executed an unprecedented beat-down on the rest of the field.  Within a few eyeblinks of the game starting, the Fasig's were 3/4 of the way around the board while the other two teams were floundering on the first straightaway. 

That's when things started getting a little scary. 

Sue and Al, a seemingly respectable and upstanding couple, were required to draw "bite the bullet" with Al drawing and Sue guessing.  Al kicked things off by drawing a human's mouth with what I thought looked like a somehwhat phallic shape being inserted into it. 

Now granted, I was a little tired and giddy, I had some Long Trail Ale in my system and I was a little desperate to create a distraction.  So I made a mild comment about how Al's drawing seemed to be evolving into something dirtier than what the creators of Pictionary would have intended.  But admittedly, it was a stretch.  The shape may have been phallic, it may not have been; different people could have interpreted it differently.

Then, to everyone's jaw-dropping astonishment, as if Al intended to erase any and all doubt as to whether this was a "dirty" picture or not, he proceeded to draw a new shape next to the first one which was undoubtedly phallic!  If you think I might be making this up, please refer to the above photograph.

Needless to say, after seeing Al's second drawing Sue was much too flustered to even attempt any more guesses for the rest of the evening.  

After that, Kerri & Tony quickly went on to win the game, and everyone agreed that this seemed to be a perfect time to put ourselves and the year 2010 straight to bed.

Birth of a Real Estate Mogul

Cameron and Owen strongly consider some hotel construction during the family's first Monopoly game on Sunday night.  Owen (with some help from Mommy, his investment advisor) went on to clean everyone's clock!

 

Our Little War Strategists

It appears that all of that time that Cameron and Owen spend watching the Military Channel is starting to provide some practical benefits.

In a recent game of "Stratego", the classic war strategy game (our version includes dragons, wizards, knights, etc.), Cam & Owie teamed up against Amy and I.   Despite our best efforts, the boys handed us a good, old-fashioned slaughter.  We were unpleasantly surprised by how adept they were at leading us into pre-set traps.  It's not unlike the way that they arm themselves with Nerf guns, hide and then wait for unsuspecting victims to walk into what they call their "kill zones"

An only slightly-less disastrous Stratego pairing was me and Shane.  Pursuant to his adamant insistence, Shane is in charge of setting up the pieces on the board at the outset of the game.  He does a fantastic job of putting the pieces on the squares.  Unfortunately, despite the name of the game, he employs absolutely no strategy in setting them up. 

For instance,the flag (the capture of which ends the game) usually ends up being placed as close to the enemy's front lines as humanly possible.  And he seems to favor placing all of the "traps" (which are generously provided by the game's creators to help you protect your flag) as far away from the flag as he can get them.  Not only that, but he also likes to set the traps up in such a way that they enclose one or more of our most powerful game pieces, thereby rendering them useless. 

Once this strategy-free set up is in place, his job is done and I'm left to do the best I can with it.  Cameron and Owen are usually pleasantly surprised when the first piece they attack turns out to be my flag and the game is over.  Sigh!