Between birthdays and anniversaries and several other projects I didn’t find the time to whip the upstairs room into shape for our monthly Nasty Pirates gathering. Fortunately, Jeff stepped up to the plate and graciously offered his home for our August party. Not only did Jeff and his honorary Nasty Pirate wench Heather surprise us with more food, snacks and drinks than we could have consumed in a week, but he also had two large televisions with couches and chairs arranged in the living room for some XBox 360 head-to-head gaming.

This was a great plan except for one thing: none of us have actually done it before.

Jeff was prepared with a gigabit switch and plenty of cables — networking is nothing new to this group — and getting everything wired together was the easy part. Then came the software configuration which, embarrasingly, befuddled and confused we cavemen. Er, pirates.

Our first stab was with Halo Wars, which does allow system linking, but best we could tell, only supported one player per console. After spending much time trying to solve an unsolvable problem, we moved on to Gears of Wars 2, which supports both system linking and multiple players per console. With controllers in hand we waited anxiously … only to have my 360 tell me, “Your console is out of date. Please update.”

It is a hard thing to admit defeat, but we did. In the end, we did the only thing a bunch of head-scratching technophiles can do; we called Jeff’s nineteen-year-old son, Curtis. And come to the rescue he did. Within fifteen minutes Curtis had added his Xbox Live account to my 360, updated the dashboard, downloaded all relevant Gears of War 2 updates, and had us up and running.

With much glee, we rejoiced by drinking Coronas, eating snacks, and shooting one another in the head until four in the morning.

Even if all we do is sit around drinking beer and playing video games, I have to say I’m so, so glad we decided to instigate Nasty Pirates Night. I enjoy telling the guys what I’ve been up to (although they usually read it here first) and love hearing what they’ve been up to. I think it has made all of our friendships stronger. Who would have known back in high school that we would all still be hanging out and having fun together? Friends are good. Life is good.