We had our office holiday party and it was excellent. My boss has a perfect house for parties, especially this one. We ate a bunch of food upstairs and no one was allowed downstairs until time for ... Survivor Burtonsville! In the past, the entertainment xAnn and I have devised required some participation, but it mostly consisted of watching us make fun of agriculture, academia, and our colleagues. This time, the emphasis was on getting our coworkers to do stuff.
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As they entered the room, they drew a bandana (xAnn insisted on calling these "buffs"), the color of which determined their team: orange was the Phytophthera ramorum team, purple was the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy team. Tasks included (thankyou, thankyou, thankyou efbq and ednoria!) roundfile paper toss, papercup stacking, sharpshooting (xAnn has an extensive collection of Duplo people, so we were able to assign one for each team member. We lined them up on a table and the team members shot Nerf darts to knock down members of the opposite team until only one Duplo person was left standing--his or her team was the winner.), pictionary, an endurance event involving standing on one foot while balancing a ping pong ball in a plastic spoon in each hand (this came down to the martial arts guy vs. the dancer/skater girl and I'm very glad we had two good balancers because the next task required some time for setup and everyone else failed too quickly), soda taste test, word unscramble, and ag trivia. As people dropped out, they got a prize from our somewhat less-than-fabulous prize pool. The ultimate survivor will likely reign for life, since xAnn and I like to make up a new game each year. It was great! Even the people who are not usually very jolly about participating in, well, anything seemed to have a good time. And, of course, I got to unload a lot of junk from my prize closet at home. Win-win.

We had lots of food left over, so I brought the dessert stuff to reception night. Another win! I have a fridge full of veggies, though.