No dice

Grandpa came over for Easter dinner on Sunday and after we finished eating we decided we'd play around of Zilch, a game of chance that requires six dice.

Not a problem; we have plenty of dice.

Andrew uses Zilch to teach his students about probability and risk-taking and things like that, so a few years ago he bought a big ol' bag of dice. We're talking a hundred pieces—ten sets of dice in ten different colours. It's a lot of dice! 

We went to retrieve it from the game shelf, but...no dice. It simply wasn't where it should be, so we launched a full-house search.

We checked the downstairs game shelf (because, yes, we have one upstairs and one downstairs), we rifled through things on the credenza (that isn't supposed to have anything on it, but which tends to be a catch-all spot), we searched the music room, we looked around Andrew's office.

We retraced our steps.

Andrew was the last one to have them! He took them to campus for Probability Day (that's not really a thing, but for the sake of this story, it's a thing).

"Yeah," Andrew admitted. "But I know I brought them home with me."

"But did you put them away?" was my question.

"I did not," he admitted. "Because Kelli was staying in that room and so I just set it on the end table. Someone must have moved it."

We searched all through the room Kelli had stayed in (our entertainment room, for lack of a better word). We pulled out all the various boxes of games to see if the bag of dice had been put in the wrong box. We looked behind the game shelf. We looked on the organ (because although we have an organ in the music room we also have one in the entertainment room; you can never have too many organs...they're vital). We looked on the fireplace and mantel and...they were no where.

How does a huge bag of dice simply...disappear?

It was vexing, to say the least. 

We played Tsuro instead.

And then yesterday a package from Amazon arrives. It's a new package of dice. 

"Why?" I asked Andrew.

"Because we can't find ours and I need this for class."

"But...we have a whole month to look for it. The semester doesn't start until June!"

"Actually," Andrew corrected me. "I don't need them until probably September."

"Then we had the whole summer to look for them!"

"Well, we have them now," he said, and he set them on our big case of DVDs.

*****

I checked out a Bill Nye video about sound, since that's what we've been reading about in our science curriculum, and this afternoon I decided to put it on for the kids. 

On a tangential note, Alexander always calls Bill Nye "Bob Nye." It's unfortunate his videos aren't just on Netflix or something because we'd watch them all the time! As it is, the kids associate Bill Nye with science documentaries even though he's not featured on many that they watch because...his shows aren't streamable. Anyway, they've been watching on-and-off "Welcome to Earth," which is hosted by Will Smith, and "Our Great National Parks," narrated by Barack Obama. Now, Will sounds like Bill and Bill and Bob like Obama and suddenly Alexander and Zoë have completely conflated Bill Nye, Will Smith, and Barack Obama into a single entity and to hear them talk about "him" is rather hilarious.

Anyway, our television was hooked up to the laptop (for Rachel's FHE lesson on Monday) rather than the DVD player, so I had to rearrange a bunch of cords. And then I noticed that someone had taken out a DVD and just...left it sitting out...rather than putting it away in the DVD case. So I began to clear off the DVD case so that I could open it to put away the DVD. 

Recall that this is where Andrew had set down that big bag of dice. I know it's not the old bag of dice because I watched Andrew unpackage that bag and set it down right there on the DVD case (claiming he'd/we'd put it away properly later).

Just beside this bag of dice is a box—just a little one, about the size of a DVD. 

So I picked that box up and underneath I found...the old bag of dice. 

Andrew put the new bag of dice down on the case of DVDs touching the old bag of dice, which I believe he also put on the case of DVDs. It just so happened that in the, you know, two months since he originally put the original bag of dice down on the DVDs someone put a small box on top of it. 

It wasn't even completely covered! 

And then Andrew set the new dice directly beside the old dice!

We've spent the entire rest of the day laughing over this discovery. 

*****

Andrew plans to take the new set of dice to his office, where it can live with the rest of his teaching props.