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helpful for a trivia team
Tuesday, February 3 2026
Later this morning as I transitioned out of my morning routine (involving a laptop, a caffeinated beverage, and a fire in the woodstove), I started working in the living room on the hot water replumbing project. I used a pipe cutter to cut the pieces of copper pipe needed to combine all the parts I'd bought yesterday (along with a few others) into a manifold of valves allowing me to run half-inch PEX to whatever faucets need faster hot water delivery than they now receive. Cutting such pieces is typically how I begin the process of making a copper-pipe menorah, which is itself a kind of manifold. With this one, though, I needed to gradually neck-down a one-inch copper pipe, feeding half-inch fittings along the way. These in turn connected to half-inch ball valves and then barbed adapters for attaching PEX.
As I worked, Gretchen was busy in the kitchen nearby making a noodle bake. Some people had come into the bookstore the other day when Gretchen had Charlotte and Neville there, and they told Gretchen that both their dogs had disappeared just before that huge snowstorm and hadn't been seen or heard from since. They had guys flying drones and put posters everywhere, but the dogs were still missing, and one of them looked a lot like Charlotte. Gretchen was so moved by their story that not only had she shared the missing dog poster multiple times on social media, but she'd also decided to bake them a noodle bake.
While Gretchen was off at pilates and delivering that noodle bake, I fired up the soldering iron and did the soldering required to make the manifold. The soldering went well this time, probably because I was careful to isolate the copper from the concrete floor of the garage I was working on. When one solders something like a manifold that mostly has to exist in a single plane, it's tempting to just lay it on the floor. But then there will be parts (such as the handles of the ball valves) that need to be outside the plane, so you find yourself propping up the flat-lying bulk so that things can exist below it. I often use scraps of Wonderboard or Durock for such props, and I did today as well. But to really isolate pieces from the heat-sink properties of the surface it is lying on, I discovered an excellent prop: large drywall screws. I lay the screws like sticks below the copper to be soldered so that it rests atop their threads, making minimal contact. This seemed to help the large one-inch fittings heat up in a timely manner so that the solder could flow effectively into the joints.
At some point today, Ray invited me to go to a trivia night tonight at Keegan Ales. Knowing Gretchen would love it if I did that (since she never has the house to herself these days), I said sure. Then this evening, I drove down to Old Hurley to ride into Kingston with Ray in his newish (to him) Acura. For a Tuesday night, Keegan Ales was bustling, and it was all because of trivia night. Ray had been invited to it by three friends he knows as customers at the bar where he works. Two of them were men who looked to be in their 60s and one of them, the wife of one of the men, might've been in her early 50s. All claimed to be "retired," which I said I might also be since "I don't have a job."
As for the actual trivia, I was a little nervous when I saw that one of the trivia questions had already been given. It was a collection of unlabled photographs of "short" celebrities, and the task was to label them with their names. The only one I could immediately identify was a black and white photo of Queen Victoria. But then as I studied the pictures, I also identified Henry Winkler and Rami Malek (although I probably couldn't've come up with the name of that last one). But a couple people were wearing sports uniforms and there was no way I could identify them. Fortunately, all the photos had already been labeled. But if the trivia tonight was going to be pop culture trivia, I probably wouldn't have much to contribute.
But then came another trivia question, and nobody except me on the team had an answer. We'd been asked to define the word "callow." Ray is (or was) an avid reader and I think he might have a master's degree in English. But he didn't know, and neither did the others. So I said it means "immature," which was close enough for us be considered correct (though "inexperienced" is probably more correct). After that, I was providing most of the answers our team was producing, including the successful identification of some classic rock songs. But I was useless when the questions were about sports. Fortunately, though, Ray and one of the other two guys on the team put their limited knowledge together and ultimately selected the correct option from several choices provided.
The only serious mistake I made was convincing the woman on our team that her tentative proposal that Eris was the asteroid with its own satellite and not one I seemed to think lay out in the Kuiper Belt and would thus have a greater likelihood of having a satellite. (I was wrong and the answer was Eris.)
When a round ended, the answer to the preceding question(s) would be given and then there would be a reading of the scores of all the teams, starting from worst and leading to best. Some teams (such as one named "The Clap" and another with "wolf" in it) had sound effects to go along with their name. When, for example, the MC said "The Clap," everyone in Keegan Ales would make a single clap, a sound that was amazingly synchronized. We started from second place early in the proceedings, but gradually fell backwards to third or fourth, meaning our team never managed to win a round of free beer.
I'd eaten a sandwich before meeting up with Ray, so I wasn't super hungry. But there were free peanuts, and I ate plenty of those. The other people at the table (aside from Ray) all ordered various things, and it's been so long since I saw someone order something that clearly contains meat and not all that much else, something in my brain whispered that they were ordering non-vegan food ironically. But of course they weren't.
Keegan Ales is famous for the dogs that wander around inside. One of those was an overweight white pit bull with delicate features a few small black markings, including a dime-sized black spot and a single black foot. She was cute but uninterested in human affection unless meat was on offer (she was too spoiled to eat peanuts).
Ray had three beers and I had three or four, drinking the last of a Mother's Milk stout Ray had been drinking once he'd decided to wind down before driving us back to Hurley. Though I used to love Hurricane Kitty back when IPAs were a rarity, these days I don't much like anything Keegan Ales makes. They have a very strong 12% DIPA called Super Kitty, so I drank a couple of those (they only come in eight-ounce pours). But anyone who's been to the Pacific Northwest would not be impressed.
Speaking of travel, the married couple in our team said they had lived for years in Mumbai, India, and they plan to be spending time on a beach in the Caribbean in a couple weeks. Ray told me that when they are in the Hudson Valley, they visit his bar two or three times a week.
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