(Sunday Paper, Volume III, Issue 10)

Recently we got back into watching Jeopardy!!

I can't remember exactly when it happened or how (probably over Christmas break), but we watched an episode, the girls loved it, then we started DVRing it and watching it together the next day.

And I was going to write about all this one week as a "What I've Been Enjoying" but this week was a big Jeopardy! week.

On Tuesday night I took the online test...and I figured that merited writing a whole Sunday Paper about the show.

Spoiler Alert: I will not be asked to be on Jeopardy! anytime soon.

But I think I'm getting closer.

This was probably my third year taking the Jeopardy! test. I think I stumbled on it a few years ago and then I thought it was something that happened more than once a year so I obsessed over seeking it out for a year then I realized how they administered the test and this year I waited patiently for it.

But unlike the past couple of years, this time I was actually watching the show consistently...and studying up on the stuff I struggle with.

I know my weak spots 100%: I'm not too familiar with Shakespeare (I took a Shakespeare summary book out from the library recently but pretty much all I can remember is Arden and Rosalind...I will need to brush up some more), I don't know a ton about Art and Artists, and I could use some work on international geography - things like African nations.

And I know that this time I did better than any test previously. Some of the questions were just stuff I knew (west coast MLB team that won 3 World Series since 2000!), some of it was fortuitous that I just recently learned it (I wrote a joke recently about Seattle not being the capital of Washington and there was a State Capitals question where the answer was Olympia), and I looked at the three tests given this week (they post all the questions on Twitter after the fact) and I think I took the right test as far as comfort with the content.

Still, though, there were some questions that stumped me. I suppose I won't be getting on Jeopardy! until I'm answering every question on the practice test correctly.

So I'll continue to learn a little bit about a lot of things for the sole purpose of getting on Jeopardy! and winning the respect of my children.

Writing

*This week moved along pretty well until Thursday. With the storm coming I took every precaution on Wednesday to make sure I'd be able to work from home on Thursday no problem, and then the power went out and I hadn't anticipated that. I couldn't do any of it until I found an internet connection later that night. What I should have done was gotten some other work done that I didn't need an internet connection for, but instead I looked outside the window a lot and paced in the living room. In retrospect I could have used my time better.

Change in my work schedule the next two weeks - I'll keep you posted in the next couple of Sunday Papers - but it's good timing with the NCAA Tournament starting Thursday and me being able to stay home.

Comedy

*Last Sunday night I performed at Liquid Courage Comedy Club, which is the Sunday night 8pm show at Somerville Brewing at 15 Ward Street. (In Somerville, in case you didn't put that together.) Week in and week out this show is great and I hadn't done it in a while and - truth be told - I've never had a great full set there. (They used to do a lightning round where you could get thrown up on stage for a minute and a half or something like that and I've had good lightning rounds there, for what it's worth.) Anyway, the point is last Sunday night I had a great set there and it came at a good time because despite the North Carolina Comedy Festival I've been in a little bit of a comedy slump lately. I think I'm out of it now. Also, talking about the shows here and on Facebook brought a couple of Sunday Paper readers out to the show and it was nice to do so well in front of people I will have to see again in public. Monday I hit an open mic and it was a little rough by the time I went up but I tried out a couple of new jokes and they got a response in that atmosphere so chalk that up as another win.

Quiet week ahead...have some non-comedy plans tonight and Wednesday night and then the NCAA Tournament to close out the week...but I'm working at having a pretty full April so I am OK with a slow end to March. (Slow march through March?)

What I've Been Enjoying

*I'll just reiterate how much I enjoy watching Jeopardy! with the girls. They're not bad with certain categories - sometimes I won't have a clue about 'Science' or something and they'll rattle off the answers.

Notes

*I like how last week I was like "I love coffee! I love having coffee first thing every morning!" and Mother Nature must have read it and decided to immediately test me by knocking out our power Thursday morning. A morning coffee was hard to get on Thursday.

*Have we talked about how Matt Sucich (you may remember him) is in residency at Rockwood this month? Every Wednesday in March, 10pm at Rockwood Music Hall. There's three Wednesdays left in the month - I promise it's worth your time.

*The past couple of weeks in the Notes section here I've been telling you that when we were in a Greensboro, North Carolina restaurant, the server at our table recognized Kevin as a professor from the University of South Carolina - three hours away! - but not me as a comedy performer in that very city we were in. And, how, when Kevin explained to her why we were three hours away form the Columbia campus (she hails from Greensboro, that's why she was so far away from the university in which she is currently a student), how he was there to see his friend (me) perform in a comedy festival, she just DID NOT CARE. I just thought this week I would mention that hardly ever crosses my mind and I'm fine about it.

*One more thing about comedy scheduling, which I know I've already rambled on too much about: this week is exactly why I've been a little less gung-ho about scheduling a ton of stuff in the winter months. If I had shows scheduled all week I would have been really angry - Wednesday night pretty much anything I would have done got canceled, and Thursday shows happened but I wouldn't have been able to go out. And then Friday would have been hard to leave the family as well. I learned my lesson about how the weather could affect comedy shows during that last awful winter a couple of years ago - it was reinforced this year.

*For the record, here's how we were affected: Storm hit Wednesday night, power went out somewhere in the 2am hour on Thursday, and it came back around 2:45pm Friday. We spent Thursday night in my sister-in-law's warm Brighton apartment (you know her!) and when we heard school wasn't cancelled for Friday came back early Friday for school and work. We booked a hotel room for Friday night and were able to check in around mid-day - only to have the power come back a couple of hours later. We stayed in the hotel for fun. Part of me felt bad we were taking the room from someone else who might need it without power...but part of me also figured Marriott wouldn't make it an easy process for us leaving a room early but after the housecleaning would have come through and it would have been a waste of money and a room that wouldn't have been made available to someone else.

*Also, Eversource let on early Friday that power would be back by 2pm. As I mentioned it was back by 2:45. How do they know? Is that the equivalent of me telling someone I'll have an article to them by a certain deadline? I'm just kidding. I know it's not the same thing. My writing is hard work. Electricity is, like, magic or something. I have no idea how that works.

*One last thing about the power: I hope I don't sound complainy. It was, all things considered, minorly inconvenient. Things certainly could have been a lot worse and we were relatively lucky, timeline-wise. (And damage-wise. So many tree limbs came down in the neighborhood and we were relatively unscathed.) I want to say it's been five years since a nearby transformer blew and we had a major power outage. Since then we have not lost power when a lot of areas nearby have...so hopefully this was an outlier rather than a return to losing power with big storms.