Saturday (I don't want to blog about politics) night

Spoons.

My brother in law came round last night for a smokey-drinkey and a game of poker. When the poker was finished (Mrs Bucko won again) we were toying with a few other card games to play and I remembered Spoons.

Spoons is more of a drinking game than a card game but we dispensed with the chugging of shots last night.

This is how you play:
You take out of the deck, four equal cards for every player. That's four kings, four aces etc. Add to these, two jokers. You also place a number of spoons on the table, one less than the number of players.

The dealer shuffles and deals four cards to each player leaving two in his hand. He places these two face down in front of the player to his right.

The object is to collect four of the same cards in your hand. Play starts when the person to the right of the dealer takes the two cards off the table. He then decides which four of his six cards he wants to keeps and discards two in front of the player to his right, who then picks them up and does the same.

You don't have to wait your turn, you can discard two before picking up two off the table. The faster you play, the better the game gets.

When one player finally gets four cards the same, he then has to pick up a spoon from the centre of the table. When others see him picking up a spoon, they also must try to pick one up. As there is one less than the number of players, one person will be left without a spoon. They then chug a shot and sit out the rest of the game.

The first person to pick up a spoon must have four cards the same or else they chug the shot, so you can actually try and feint other players by going for a spoon and not picking it up. If someone reacts and picks one up, they chug a shot.

We used to play this a lot when we went on lads holidays in our younger years. We were often rolling over the table and the floor, fighting for that last spoon to stay in the game.


New life.

I decided to do a bit of gardening this afternoon. I planted a lot of veg and salad a few weeks back and stuff has started to grow.

The radishes are doing particularly well and I had to move them out of the pot and into the garden. The carrots are also coming along well.

I have also tried my hand at tobacco and there is sign of life there too. No quite as big as Leg-Irons yet, but trying.

I was digging up a small area of soil, getting it ready to re-plant the carrots when I found a small object. It looked like maybe a bulb from something that had grown there previously. I was holding it in my hand for quite a while, pondering over what it might be when I realised it was a cat turd.

There were many more where that came from too, buried under the soil along with a lot of spring onion shoots that I thought hadn't taken. The shitter cat must have buried them so I had to dig them up and re-plant them, hence the chicken wire.


Cat in the bath.

Speaking of cats, Mrs Bucko ran a bath this afternoon and little Scrappy fell in it. She looked a right sorry sight. There was water everywhere.

We had to de-flea the little buggers this afternoon as well. Never pleasant but always necessary.