Today while making a grocery run Jennifer looked at me as she grabbed two huge bags of Tostitos and said, "See, we know what we're doing now." Our grocery cart was stacked with boxes of granola bars, cereal, bags of fruit, cheese and an economy pack of English muffins. On our first visit, last week, we'd spent money on organic cereal. We'd foolishly purchased just one box of crackers. We had learned. Living in this house, today eight people (the number will soon grow), and six of them boys, is like living in a black hole of spontaneous, thoughtless consumption. It's not mealtimes that drive us, but what is available, and when. New jar of salsa? Devoured, instantly. 30-packs of beer are just starters for the evening, and by the end of the night we're pouring ourselves small glasses of Courvosier (here when we came) because that is, literally, the only alcohol in the house, and we're just not ready to go to sleep. Last night I stayed up til 3:30. I woke up at 11 this morning. This sort of behavior has become unheard of in my normal life, but Maine is bringing it back. This house, filled with enthusiastic participants in, well, whatever, is reminding me of a long gone ability to rebound.

The reason for the late night was that after sitting around watching television for a few hours, and making a huge dinner of three boxes of spaghetti, a salad, and meat sauce with peppers, Alaina, who had to leave this morning, asked just what exactly we were doing and ordered us into the kitchen for the most complicated drinking game I've ever played. I won't even go into all the details, because you'll get a headache, but basically it involved rolling a pair of dice, choosing an opponent if you received certain sets of numbers, and then staging a little competition that I didn't really understand until halfway through the thing. Luckily at that point we made up some new rules, because it wasn't confusing enough, including one that you had to call everyone by dinosaur names. As we didn't all agree on the merit of some of the new rules, certain people thinking they were rather harsh and senseless, the game became a hysterical shouting match. "I AGREE WITH NICKOSAURUS! WAIT! CARACERATOPS, DRINK!!! SHUT UP! PETERDACTYL, SHUT UP!"