We had the first of our late spring/early summer storms a few days ago, and it was a lulu!

Lots of thunder and spectacular lightning and scary winds, but no rain ... (Oh, all right, I lie. It did rain. In fact, I counted 5 drops!)

The storm had been threatening all afternoon, and the radio and television stations were salivating at the thought of all the disaster stories they could broadcast the next day as they intoned their solemn warnings about gale-force winds, torrential rain, damaging hail and all those other elements that make summer so exciting here in Brissie.

The ants were still out and about, which made us a tad sceptical about the rain side of things, but we went around the house and dutifully secured any loose items and generally battened down the hatches as all good little Queenslanders have learned to do in the storm season.

Evening came and went, with dire warnings still scrolling across the bottom of the telly screen; we'd finished our dinner and were preparing for a cosy night indulging in our favourite pastime -- seeing who could fall asleep fastest after choosing the TV programs for the night -- when the lights flickered once, twice, then went out completely. You don't realise just how dark the night sky is (especially now when there's a new moon) until all the lights go out.

(I may have mentioned how brilliant the stars were during our last visit to my sister-in-law's Eden home this winter. She lives, as you'll recall, in the middle of the bush, 15 km inland from Eden on the far south coast of NSW -- there's not a street light within coo-ee, so the stars are just breathtakingly beautiful. I'd forgotten how stunning the Milky Way is. What we see in the cities is a pale imitation of the real thing! You can see some piccies of the area if you scroll down till you find Sapphire Coast and here.)

Hmmm ... Tiny digression there. Now, where were we?

Ah yes, in the dark!

We always have a torch in a handy location, having learned the folly of staggering around the house in the dark at such times, so I gingerly felt my way around the living-room wall and into the hallway -- neatly missing the top of the stairs -- till I found the linen cupboard door, opened it and got out our Emergency torch.

Now, I don't know about you, but torch-light is most definitely not the most flattering of lights, and to my way of thinking, should be reserved exclusively for nights spent in a tent with your little kids telling ghost stories. So after we opened all the blinds and curtains to let in what light there was, I set about recreating a scene from the 'Bold and the Beautiful.' (No, not the ones where they wear their teensy bikinis with high-heels in front of the open fire ... I was  busy lighting candles ...)

Soon, our home was lit soft by candle-light ... And in such a setting there's but one thing you can do ... We decided to play a game! (No, dearie me ... Talk about a one-track mind ... Not that kind of game ...Tch tch.)

We decided to play Canasta!

This is a great game ... have you ever played? We first learned it back in the late 60s and used to have a regular card night each week with friends, one of whom took it very seriously. In those Days of Innocence, we played partners with our partners, and didn't that lead to some ructions! The wife in this particular partnership used to get very tetchy when things didn't go to plan and would often cast a withering glance in her husband's direction as he threw away some card she needed to make a meld and hiss at him, "I hope your chooks die!"

I never could work out what she had against our feathered friends, especially since they lived in a tiny flat and didn't have room for a budgie, let alone chooks, but I mentally lobbed it in with similar expressions along the lines of, "I hope your chooks grow into emus and kick down your dunny door!" which is designed to send a tremor down the spine of the recipient every time he (or she) visits the Little House.

We didn't play for a number of years once we moved from the city and had our kids and set up businesses and I went back to teaching and and and ... But in the past couple of years, we've succumbed to the sweet siren song of the Canasta cards and now have our regular card day every fortnight. But this time we play a different version, and just to show what a cosmopolitan mob we are, how's this? We Aussies play with Swiss friends their Swiss variation of a Bolivian version of a game invented in Uruguay!

Aargh! I know ... does it drive you batty, too?

This has nothing to do with singing or reciting poetry, but rather with one side against another, so the word we want is not "verse, it's "versus."

Our friend "versus," while coming from the same Latin root, vertere, has a quite different meaning. It's a preposition, and it means "against (used especially to indicate an action brought by one party against another in a court of law, or to denote competing teams or players in a sports contest): Smith versus Jones; Army versus Navy."

It's also used to mean "as compared to or as one of two choices; in contrast with" e.g. travelling by plane versus travelling by train.

So, it's Girls versus Boys from now on ... OK?

This week's Little Something Extra tells all about Uruguay, Bolivia, Canasta and more!

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We've adopted many words from our games for everyday use (even though we may not use them all every day). Match these up:

renege, lay-down misere, above board, play your cards right, checkmate, wild card, not playing with a full deck, hold all the aces, chip in, knuckle down

1. to perform or play skillfully to achieve a desired outcome

2. someone who is eccentric, mad or wildly unconventional, bordering on crazy

3. utter defeat

4. to work hard

5. unpredictable person or event

6. to be honest, forthright, tell the truth

7. to go back on one's word

8. to contribute some money to a cause or a business

9. to have an advantage

10. a dead certainty

And did you hear about the two chess players having dinner at a table with a checked cloth -- it took them two hours to pass the salt!

Last week's quiz:

Match the words with their definitions below: magnate, sylvan, terrarium, insulate, inter, aqueduct, aquifer, debonair, deviate, defamation,

1. an underground layer of rock or sand containing water - AQUIFER

2. set apart, detach from the rest - INSULATE

3. to turn aside (from); diverge; digress - DEVIATE

4. a conduit for bringing water from afar -AQUEDUCT

5. of or characteristic of the woods - SYLVAN

6. injury to the reputation of another by means of false, malicious statements - DEFAMATION

7. to bury - INTER

8. a glass container enclosing a garden of small plants - TERRARIUM

9. a very important person, especially in business - MAGNATE

10. having an easy and elegant manner - DEBONAIR

A Little Something Extra

Some interesting numbers about the chances of winning Lotto:

"The chances of winning a lottery jackpot are determined by several factors, including: the count of possible numbers, the count of winning numbers drawn, whether or not order is significant and whether drawn numbers are returned for the possibility of further drawing.

"In a typical 6 from 49 lotto, 6 numbers are drawn from 49, and if the 6 numbers on a ticket match the numbers drawn, the ticket holder is a jackpot winner -- this is true regardless of the order in which the numbers are drawn. The odds of being a jackpot winner are approximately 1 in 14 million (13,983,816 to be exact). ... To put these odds in context, suppose one buys one lottery ticket per week. 13,983,816 weeks is roughly 269,000 years. In the quarter-million years of play, one would expect to win the jackpot only once." (Source)

And there's an article about the maths of gambling here

The men responsible for inventing Canasta here

How to play Canasta (with pictures!) here

Everything you wanted to know about Bolivia here

And Uruguay here

Oxymoron of the week: serious games