My Summer Part 1

One of the highlights of the past four summers has been the company picnic. This year two of my brothers-in-law were here, so six of us went to the picnic together.

The first thing we did was enter the adult-only area where the lines were much shorter. There was a climbing wall:


On the backside of the climbing wall were two trampolines and bungee cords - a perfect setup for some acrobatics. I barely caught this flip on camera:


Flips were difficult to master:


Can you tell which boy had done this before? Actually, I can witness that he really was that good the first time he ever tried it. When I tried it, I never even managed to flip over once!


Next we headed over to the mechanical bull.


Then we found a ropes course to try out. You had to climb up a cargo net, cross a variety of bridges (including hanging ropes, boards, and tightropes), and slide down the pole at the end. Note that one of us was actually able to tightrope-walk without hands!


We had lunch at the enormous Wall of Food - there were a lot of choices (cheeseburgers, hot dogs, veggie burgers, ribs, corn on the cob, yakisoba, strawberry shortcake, ice cream, stir-fry, pot-stickers, and more). After lunch the girls and the boys split up - the boys went to play on more toys, and the girls went to attempt the Puzzle.

Yes, Puzzle is capitalized here. The stated goal of the puzzle was to earn the popular vote and/or president's vote from each planet in the solar system in order to have Pluto reinstated as a planet. To earn a vote, you had to solve a puzzle. The popular vote puzzles were typically easier than the president's vote puzzles (with one exception). The puzzles could be anything from trying to follow a color pattern through planets hanging from strings (difficult to do in the wind and in a crowd), to trying to find the hidden code in the blood types of alien babies, to counting dashed lines, to doing an alien robot dance. Each puzzle actually led to a written answer - the planets had names with one letter in bold, the blood types converted to numerical problems which converted back to letters, the dashed lines made numbers which translated to letters, and the alien robot dance actually spelled the answer out with your body. There were 16 puzzles in all, and it took us several hours. We used up a lot of scratch paper figuring things out, but it was worth it to solve every puzzle!



At the end of the day we were exhausted, a little sunburned, and happy.