Saturday Train Dominoes

In the morning, instead of taking my Saturday Zumba class, I did phonebanking for 34th District Democrats. It was handy having the training Zoom session remain open so I could submit questions in chat. It was extra handy using Google Voice instead of my cell phone, because I could copy-and-paste phone numbers instead of keying them.
I don't know how much good I'm getting done, but I suppose I must have faith in the process.
I took Shadow in for her post-dental surgery followup, and she is mostly fine although she somehow got food into the gap where the removed teeth are healing. I'll have to monitor that for problems although I'm not sure how. The soft food diet seems appropriate for her, as she actually gained a little weight since surgery (!).

I've Been to Mt Holyoke College

In the evening I went to play dominoes on Hannah and Julie's back deck outside, with their neighbor. I guess that's conforming to social distancing protocols. They had picked up a set of Mexican Train Dominoes at a yard sale, and was eager to try them out. The one other time I'd played Mexican Train was at the Kinch's, before COVID, and I won handily, so I have the self-image of being good at it. This proved not to be the case. It appears that being able to start your train early is critical for dumping a lot of tiles at the start. The 2nd hand I didn't draw a tile that would let me do that, and rather than dumping one tile at a time as other trains permitted, I dried drawing more in the hope of eventually getting the one I needed. After all, there were 13 in the boneyard. Well, I never did draw them and ended up with 244 points. In the next hands I tried the less risky path, but I still ended up with over 500 points over, which was at least 300 more than anyone else. I thought this was tremendously funny; clearly I have to study the strategy a little more, but I still have fun. It was a chance to practice math adding up scores; which lead to a story about watching teaching math on TV.
As it grew dark, it got noticably cool. Hannah lent me a sweatshirt which reminded me that I had myself been at Mt. Holyoke College many times, mostly while visiting the bookstore across the street. I remember now taking in plays in their summer series often, including the Tom Lehrer program that probably included the New Math song; I'll have to send them the link.