Time for another backgammon party to get everyone together after the long Summer! I thought we should celebrate the passing of Labor Day and the official end of Summer. And a party to get off the beach and have some fun out of the sun!

Because this was a "get off the beach" theme, I told everyone that they needed to wear casual beach goin' clothes and to bring sunglasses and a beach towel. I threatened: "No gear - no food!" and as can be seen in the pictures, we did this one right! In my invitation I announced: "We are reclaiming this area as ours now that the tourists have departed. So now we can dress like fools the way they did and make fun of them all." And that's just what we did!

I fixed Italian pasta with herbed scallops. We went on a real quest that afternoon to find the big sea scallops and to gather all of the other stuff needed. Earlier in the week I had gone over to David and Kerra's in Rye, NH for dinner and some backgammon with David. Kerra had given me all sorts of greens and herbs from her garden as well as a bunch of regular and cherry tomatoes. That formed the base for a terrific salad that Rachel had a recipe for. The salad actually took longer to make than the scallops.

The scallops were prepared in a low fat sour cream, garlic, shallot, white wine, and vegetable stock sauce. It was terrific, and unless they were all lying at me: everyone enjoyed it. I had also bought a couple of great loaves of fresh bakers bread and we had that with 4 different kinds of Italian herbed dipping sauces.

And of course there was the backgammon. Tim House was the first to arrive with his beach towel over his shoulder and sunglasses on. He and I sat down and started to hammer it out as other continued to arrive - 17 in all! It was a great time and we had a terrific party.

I had told everyone that we were going to keep score this time and that the two top scores would get prizes. Scott Williams and Tim House ended up battling it out in the grand championship match which was a best out of 3 point series with Scott taking top honors and the winners prize of a DVD of Jurassic Park III. Tim took the second place prize of a pad of sticky notes.

All the rest of us "looooos-ers" got out of it was a sharpened pencil. Rachel had determined that no one should go home without a prize and had brought a box of multicolored pencils with her. I had to call Rick Downs up before he headed over to bring a sharpener with him. By the way, Rick - you forgot to take it home with you; you can pick it up next time we play!

Speaking of " looooos-ers " - I include myself in that sad category. I couldn't hit the table with the dice when I threw them. It was that bad. I played the most games with Sherrie, but was only able to prevail a couple of times and I'm sure that was only because of the constant barrage of trash talk that I kept up. No amount of mo-jo or incantations - not even a "Standing Throw" or even the dreaded "Chair Throw" worked. Maybe "next time"...