SEMMantics Weekend & A New Kit!

The final table at the Poker Tournament
Dana (upper right) , who was also on
the winning Mensa Bowl team, won it all!

This past weekend was SEMMantics, Southeastern Michigan Mensa’s regional gathering, the one where David and I met in person. This year, the gathering started on the three-year anniversary of our first date.

It was a fun weekend! Mensa gatherings are always fun. We get to spend time with good friends that we only see a couple of times a year, try new games, see interesting speakers and poker! This year, we both played in the early Saturday morning tournament. I didn’t win, but I outlasted David!

Friday was a lot of hospitality, talking and chocolate! Melissa gave her presentation of pictures she’d take in China when she was in college. It was some great slides and informative discussion. You know when you go to something to support a friend and walk away thinking you would have missed something great if a stranger had been doing it? That was me after Melissa’s presentation. It was very cool, from the glimpse of the world of communism to the world’s largest Buddha, all of it very fascinating! (But I wouldn’t want to do the freezing miles of mountain walking for fun!)

After Melissa’s talk, I stopped at the ice cream social and brought David a sundae cone at the Euchre tournament where he was finishing up his game. I got little razzed and asked if I was taking ice cream orders, but after all, that was our Dativersary dessert!

Saturday evening was the beer tasting. I’m not a big drinker. I like my “adult beverages,” but I don’t drink them in excess or even with any regularity, but I like to take advantage of the opportunity to try new tastes! I discovered some that weren’t bad. A few that were okay, but not a beer I’d buy and even a couple that I promptly poured into the waste bucket and asked for more of the first one to get the taste out of my mouth!

We played a small buy-in cash game in the evening and I was out before David but not until after I sucked in a few chips with FOUR ACES! I looked back at my hold cards and my mouth was trembling inside as I kept the wide smile off my face until I’d finished my betting. David said he thought maybe I had an ace to go with the 2 on the table, but the whole table erupted when I showed the two aces in my hand. It felt good to hear people saying how well I played the hand. A couple of hands later, Shirley relieved me a bunch of those chips with a nut-flush. I debated for a while and finally decided she was bluffing when she went all-in. Note to self for future - Shirley doesn’t bluff!

After the closing ceremony and awards, we went with a small group to Max and Erma’s for lunch before saying goodbye and sending everyone home or back to the airport. David and I chased a few trains with the remaining daylight hours.



Yesterday was a headachy, eye itchy day. Bleh! I’d heard that the pollen was supposed to be bad this year. I felt awful when I woke up and when David came back from getting gas for the lawn mower, he said he knew why. The truck was covered in powdery yellow tree pollen! So, I deal with it. Not that I have a lot of choice! I mean, where can I live that there are no trees?

I was still stuffy and a little achy last night while David was at work. Last week was a busy week for me and I have a bunch of calls to make for the middle of this week because of it. That’s a great thing! At least, I really hope it is. But a busy week followed by a Mensa gathering weekend means little time for scrapbooking! So, I sent David off to work on the night shift and got ready for an evening of laundry, baseball and scrapbooking!

There is still more laundry to do, but I got a good start on it. The Reds finally won, although a certain someone sent me a “Red Sox Win!” text from work to rub it in. Yesterday a Red Sox win was a Tigers loss. And I got a kit done that I’d designed in my brain on Sunday.

“She Said Yes!” is the new kit from Digitalegacies. The kit shares its name with a song by Chad Brock which chronicles his meeting and engagement to his first wife. So the kit is a romantic one just begging to scrap hearts and bling! It’s also my entry for this month’s color challenge at DSO.

My sample layout features a Christmas Eve photo from when my parents were engaged.

Credits - Kit She Said Yes! by Digitalegacies, font - Lucida Handwriting.

And here is “She Said Yes!”


sorry, link is expired.

As always, I’d love to see layouts with any of my kits! In fact, very soon, there will be an incentive plan to show me some!

Send me your layouts or any questions or correspondence to chroniclesofnani@gmail.com