These Creaky Bones.

This is something like the dozenth year we've had these official family reunions on this side of the family. I just love them. Before that I really didn't know many of my cousins or aunts and uncles, but now I'm good friends with a lot of them. (To coin: the term "iblings" to refer to aunts and uncles. And this blog should be renamed The Mint for all the coinage I'm responsible for. Rimshot.)

Last night we united our board game collections, accrued over years and years of research and extensive field testing, and played a couple until late into the night. I tell you, my arthritis is due to start manifesting soon enough, because I was over-ready to go to bed by eleven. My ten-years-ago self would be ashamed; my ten-years-ago parents would be elated.

Weakness can't halt the forward arrow of tradition, though. We ended a couple of hours after that, when none of us were truly self-aware any more. We have genuinely begun these game sessions in years past at the same time we were cleaning up last night. Our stubbornness kept us all from yielding altogether to fatigue, though, like the Black Night's "flesh wound" from The Holy Grail.

Board games at family reunions: proof that the human achievement is destined to exceed the impossible. Just kidding, functioning cold fusion systems would do that. The parallel I've heard most often about rallying my family members to a single cause is "herding cats." That's unfair to cats, from a family whose motto is "I'm the boss of my own self." As documented on the T-shirts a few years back.

One dear cousin in high school reminded me of the time I had a hip-hop hit in my head a couple of months ago, which upon my stuck-in-the-head performance she said, "Isn't that song from, like, ten years ago?" Mockery ensued. That song is current, hip, happening, fresh, now, I said. For a high schooler I was astonished by her slippery grasp of pop culture. Well that's what Wikipedia is for, team: she looked it up and showed me it was genuinely exactly ten years old. Okay, then. Mockery ensued. I tell you, I need to either get with the times or get out of the temporal kitchen.