This week at work I’ve been meeting with the external user provisioning team here in Oklahoma City. Emily, Johnny and I (all locals) make up 3/8 of the group; the other five members hail from Washington DC, Seattle, Austin, and Atlanta (the location of our last meeting). During the week I found out that both of the guys from Atlanta (Earl and Curlen) are in to videogames, so I decided that Thursday night after dinner I’d invite the team over for some videogames and beer (two things that always go well together).

I’m not exactly sure how Susan got the house cleaned while we were all out to dinner, but she did. All the piles of junk and clutter normally scattered around our home magically disappeared while I was gone. Someday, I hope to locate all those things again. After dinner, when my co-workers and I finally made it back to my house, I was as surprised as they were at how clean the house was. Someone commented on what a nice touch it was to have a candle on the table that sits on our front porch. The funny thing is, I’ve never seen that candle before and I’m pretty sure it just appeared that day.

Some of the people showed up to play games, some showed up because it sounded like fun, and some showed up because they didn’t have anything else to do while out of town on a Thursday night, but everyone who came had a decent time. Wednesday night I moved all three of my newer gaming consoles (Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360) upstairs, where they were connected to the projector. Emily and several others enjoyed rocking out on Guitar Hero III on the Wii. Curlen, the master of all driving games, ended up unlocking several cars on the Gran Turismo HS demo (PS3). Curlen also took on Mason at a couple of Wii Sports games, including bowling (winner: Curlen) and Tennis (winner: Mason). After showing off a few other games, Earl and I ended up playing a full game of Madden 2008 on the Wii. Neither of us had played this particular version before and Earl had never even played a Wii before, so to his credit he was definitely at a disadvantage. Despite Earl returning two separate punts for touchdowns, I was able to squeak out a 3-point victory. In honor of my victory, I wore a football jersey to work on Friday just to rub it in.

My home is personal to me. I don’t open it up anymore to people like I used to do. It really meant a lot to me that these people would come over to my house and hang out for the evening. I have a bad habit in my blog of simply referring to these people as “co-workers,” when what I really mean is “friends I happen to work with.”