Went to a trivia retreat this weekend at our college's estate in Door County. I'd visited Bjorklunden once before, as a sophomore on the Ormsby Hall retreat, and once again I was impressed by the well-appointed lodge, the excellent food, and the near-total lack of things to do.

I should've brought more homework up with me; as is, I finished reading Penguin Island (meh) and listened to way too much Modest Mouse. Only five hundred pages of The Tin Drum to go for Tuesday.

The percussionists and our student programming organization were also up this weekend. The SOUP people — mostly straight-toothed girls and a few suspiciously effeminate guys — were uninteresting but useful. They organized a campfire and a gunnysack race (the Trivia Masters won, naturally), and seem to have set up most of our meals. The drummers were more conspicuous.

They took over the main room in the lodge, and to escape the noise we retreated to a cabin for our first trivia meeting. Afterwards, the eight of us stole the lodge's only classroom from SOUP and had the rest of our meetings in there.

All in all, I contributed very little this weekend. Most of the few comments I made would have come up anyways, and many were better left unsaid. And — even though the Grand Master placed an odd emphasis on it in his "Minutes" email today — our discussion of the webpage I'm making lasted about ten minutes, once you omit the digressions.

(I am glad I'm the one doing it though, and I was even more glad when some of the other masters started urging me to use LiveJournal for our group blog. No thanks, I power Blogger. It's a testament to his ignorance that one fellow trivia master wanted to seek Google as a sponsor but didn't seem to know/care about the fine folks at that Google-owned company.)

We got everything done though, and I'm even excited about a few things in which I play only a marginal role. Obviously I can't tell you everything, sorry.

Bjorklunden has very few permanent staff members: students volunteer for chores when they arrive. I ended up in a room with Representative Man and two drummers who neither of us really talked to, and foolishly volunteered us all for two lunch clean-up duties.

It goes without saying that it took forever to wash the dishes, even with Representative Man doing all the drying. But I really enjoyed it. Washing dishes took me back to Giovanni's, where I did all my best thinking in front of the sink.

Socially, there seemed to be a lot going on, but nothing non-burlap that I could get excited about. We watched Rocky IV but half the masters left before it was over. We played Trivial Pursuit, old masters versus new ones, only to be righteously thwomped.

In the background there was some drinking (apparently the percussionists are notorious for drinking at Bjorklunden, though one SOUP member assured us that everyone drinks up there, "second rule" notwithstanding) but the partiers had as little interest in me as I had in them. I ventured out to the campfire for a little while both nights, but mostly I was content to go to bed early and let the extroverts do their thing.

I'm nearing the point when "extrovert" becomes a bald invective. Or possibly meaningless, as I think I've applied it to almost everyone at this point.

Obviously a bit annoyed that the two trivia masters I know well, Jonas and Jinx, were both out of the country this weekend.

But it was an OK weekend. The path to January is clear.