People Will Say We're in Love

We celebrated our second wedding anniversary last month, and a few days later on Randy's birthday we celebrated the four year anniversary of when we started "officially" dating. The time that I have spent with Randy has been eventful, but he was my best friend long before we shared our first kiss, so it has been very worth it. If we had our way, every day would be date night. Unfortunately we have to be contributing members of society and do the whole "grown-up" gig, more especially now that we have Wes, so we rarely go on real dates. Who am I kidding? Even before we were married we rarely went on real dates. I guess we just aren't "event" kind of people. But we do like to date our way.

Date night for us consists of a deck or two of cards by the side of our bed that we pull out and play together for maybe a half hour before we go to sleep. It is a fun way to unwind and do something little together before ending our day. We can talk about school, and work, and family things while we do it, and it is fun. No matter what the day was really like, I believe that it should at least have some fun in it.

One game we play more often than not is Castles. Our friend Krystal turned us on to it soon after we were married, and we have played it ever since. For all you who like to play cards, here are the rules:

Shuffle the deck.
Deal one pile of four cards, then another pile of eight cards to each player. You may look at the eight; the pile of four is placed in a horizontal row in front of you (with no peeking). Place four of your best cards out of the eight in your hand face up on top of the four face down cards in front of you, leaving four cards in your hand. At this point I should explain the value of some of the cards. If playing with a standard deck, Ace is high--for those Rook card enthusiasts, 1 is high. A 2 will clear the discard pile, and a ten will reset the discard pile without clearing the pile. This leaves 3 as the low card. The person with the lowest card in their hand opens the round--in the event of a tie you may duke it out. Play proceeds clockwise, each player discarding one or more card (you may play doubles, triples--quadruples clear the pile) of the same number that is higher in numeric value than the card(s) played by the person to one's right. At the end of each turn you take from the draw pile the same number of cards played, thus always keeping four cards in your hand. When the draw pile runs out, you then use the cards in front of you--first the cards face up, then the ones underneath which remain hidden until played. In the event you canot play a card higher than the person to your right, you take the entire discard pile and add it to your hand. The object of the game is to be the first person to get rid of all their cards.