Next time we will try trading livestock, or gourds of wine or something

Last night we had dinner at our friend's house - a house that has been spectacularly re-decorated by using wedding money. Maybe Bud and I will stop living in sin, if nothing else for the money we could bring to Ikea. Their bedroom now has all black furniture, not your ordinary black furniture but furniture that says, We Are Cool And We Are Different but Not So Different That You Can't Relate to Us. The perfect, jealousy inspiring combination. I like to think Ikea makes that kind of jealousy easy but you never know, it could just be that I have a terrible case of the Gimmes and I will suffer for the rest of my life. After eating, and wine, and some more wine, we played a card game called Cadillac (I will not go into to it now, but once, when we were first dating, Bud and I saw a TERRIBLE, no really, ears-bleeding-terrible, band that seemed to have ONE song all night. The lyrics consisted of "Cadillac Circles! Cadillac Turns!" accompanied by the lead singer miming the turning of a large steering wheel. I don't think I was high (please don't take this literally, mom) but there is almost no other explanation for that night). It's not hard - you pull cards from a stack and decide whether to keep or discard, all the while trying to reach 31, by adding up your cards. As with almost all card games you really just have to go a round or two to understand. We played with peanuts because we have no money and the other people? Well, they'd spent theirs on furniture at Ikea. The problem was, Bud and the host, kept eating their peanuts. They'd lose a turn and we would shake our heads and say, "aha! you lose a peanut!" at which point one of them would look down and say, "what peanut?" YOU CAN'T EAT COLLATERAL! I felt like a little kid again, trying to micro-manage my own birthday party. We're playing in this room! If you don't quit playing in the toilet, I'm calling your mother to come get you! But that obviously just made Bud hungrier for the nuts I kept replacing. And the game, it was fun, but rendered useless since there was nothing to hang over the heads of the losers.