The Luck of the Draw

It's strange about cards.  We've been playing 65 for so long that I can tell within the first couple of hands whether this is going to be a good day for me, or a bad day.

We were on round 5, which meant that in addition to the joker, 5s were wild.  This was the hand I was dealt.  The previous two hands had been good, but this one was amazing.  I knew it was going to be a good day for me!

And it was.  Actually, it wasn't a bad day for any of us.   My mother won 5 games, I won 4 and Peach won 2.  My mother was particularly happy, as you can tell from this picture of her looking at her growing pile of coins.

At the end of the day, she collected all of her winnings in the little flower pot where she keeps the coins and was happy that the level had finally started to rise.

Actually, what she doesn't know is that I've been feeding her pot for awhile now.  Winning and having that pot full of coins is very important to her.  It really doesn't matter to me, so when I see the level of coins is starting to look low, I slip a handful of coins in there--enough that it makes her feel good about having "enough" but not enough so that she would know that I was giving her money.  It makes me happy to see that she is happy about the level of coins in her little pot.

It was a very nice cousins day.  I had made some cheese crackers and found a recipe for a vodka martini that used Kirschwasser (cherry brandy) in a book I'd bought at the book store, and that was my contribution.

I also brought lunch, since Jeri had clued me in before she left to return to Boston that my mother was fretting about what she was going to serve us for lunch.  Peach brought a delicious Chinese chicken casserole for dinner.

And we filled the time with endless games of 65.  We took a break after dinner to watch Survivor and Criminal Minds, have an ice cream, and then head off to bed.  When the others went to sleep, I sat in the dark and listened to my audio book until I was starting to feel sleepy, so as not to wake the others.

I haven't felt right about taking our traditional "toast" picture ever since Kathy died, but I did take this picture of Peach and my mother before we left this morning.

As I said, it was a good cousins day.  We all felt good about our wins, my mother's memory was better than it was over the weekend, and a good time was had by all!