For the first time since August 21, I spent a night where I wasn't either working or on call. How did I celebrate? Let's call it the Nerd's Night Out.

First stop was the Natick Mall, where Sarah and I got to weigh candy in preparation for making wedding favors. We could save ourselves a lot of trouble by going the charitable donation route, but given some of the "outside influences" on the wedding we'd probably still wind up with baggies of Jordan almonds on the tables.

We stopped into a Hallmark store to get a couple of cards, and while I am still livid that they already have their Christmas stuff out, I did find my favorite new tree ornament - Kobe Bryant. Apparently he's part of their Keepsake ornament line. They still wanted the $14.95 retail price, which was too much for a possible TRASH prize (at least for regionals, where sometimes all of the prizes didn't cost that much).

Not surprisingly, the only other sports-themed ornament left besides Bryant was Jason Giambi.

We then went over to Owen O'Leary's, an eating and drinking establishment that also happens to have NTN. We joined the first couple of BU college bowl, Matt and Allyson Harper-Nixon, for some catching up and interactive trivia.

I actually did really well on two games, finishing 8th nationally during a Topix game where all the questions were about movies with swimming pools (go figure) and fifth nationally in a Retroactive TV game. Sometimes, it's good to be old.

And no, there were no questions on John Ritter. In a later game, when we were talking about Johnny Cash, a question came up involving "Ring of Fire." The music games tend to favor Mrs. Harper-Nixon, though between her and Sarah I think they know all the lyrics to any song released in the United States over the last 50 years.

After that we headed homeward, stopping at the event I mentioned yesterday - Late Night Bingo! Our campus center director was looking to do some late night programming, and her research over the summer found that late night bingo was becoming really popular on the college level- nearby Assumption College, for example, had over 500 people for their first bingo night this year.

We didn't do quite so well, but we did have over 200 show up, which is amazing for a late night program without alcohol.

We played 10 games over two hours, and go figure that Sarah would win the last game of the night. There was a catch, of course; one of my colleagues had won a DVD player earlier in the night to some grumbling, so having the fiancee of another staffer win would have been worse. So to defuse things it was announced that Sarah messed up, and a student wound up winning on the next ball (perhaps not that big a deal, considering we would have won a digital camera, one not as good as the one I have to boot).

We got home a little after 1 am, our latest night in some time. Who says dorks can't have fun?