sawyl | A Greek themed evening out

Had an exciting evening at climbing centre's Greek themed quiz.

For no terribly good reason, we dressed up as grease monkeys — see what we did there? — complete with overalls and in the girls' cases, faux grease. (R had a particularly impressive set of smudges on her forehead that made her look like nothing quite so much as an extremely surprised Lady Asaji Washizu in Throne of Blood — a fact I wisely kept to myself).

After tucking in to some excellent veggie moussaka, which I suspect R may only have eaten after I called her a murderer — ahem — and some fantastic baklava which we shared out, we got down the serious business of the evening. The quiz didn't exactly start well: we couldn't answer a single question in the opening climbing section and the opening of the general knowledge section didn't exactly start off well either:

A-M:	[asking the questions] What does a philographer collect?
M:	[confidently] I know this! [writing down "STAMPS"]
Me:	No, that's philately...
R:	Maybe it's postcards. Stick that down...
Me:	I don't think that's right either... [pausing to think] Because philo is loving and graphos is writing, so it must be... Autographs!
R:	It'd better not be postcards or this might be the end of a beautiful friendship!

Thankfully I was right and it wasn't postcard collecting — deltiology, apparently — and we finally hit our stride. Kudos to me for knowing some bits and pieces of chemistry — I'm apparently able to name all the gaseous elements but unable to count them up on my fingers! — to R for knowing the number of bones in the adult human skeleton, to L for knowing everything there is to know about cinematic villains, and to M and the others for knowing everything else.

Once we were done and the answers graded, Anne-Marie did a quick check of the numbers and started reading out the results in reverse order. Only half listening to the results — all I was interested in was whether we finished ahead of our sensei's team — it took me a few seconds to realise why M was punching the air: against all expectations, we'd won! For which, we got a mixture of t-shirts, gadgetry and chocolates which we promptly distributed to all those who hadn't immediately left for home.

Now all we have to do is defend our crown in the next quiz. R is already swotting, although I can't quite see how reading a Nora Roberts novel is going to help all that much...

ETA: Took the last remaining handful of chocolates in to work to palm off on the rest of the gang only to feel horribly guilty when W tried to eat one and was promptly plunged into agony by the filling his dentist put in last week and which still doesn't seem to have settled down.