I totally got my butt kicked and I’m actually ok with that. It was fun. Here were my problems on the game.

1. I never did figure out my timing on the buzzers. I’d ring in too soon and get locked out but if I tried to slow down I’d wait too long.

2. Blanking on things I know I know. I’ve been semi-obsessively listening to the song “Online” for a week. So, for $2000 who sang it? Totally blanked. That one made me mad.

3. Taking educated (but wrong) guesses when it probably would have been better strategy to keep my mouth shut so I lost a bunch of money.

4. Not getting picked for the games that included the categories “Those Darn Equestrians” or “A Day at the Dog Show.”

But I did get a daily double and got it right and I got final jeopardy right. I ended up taking third so the trip out here is paid for and it really did end up being fun.

After I wrote my last post I went up to my room to unpack. That’s when I realized that I left the bag containing everything I used on Monday morning on the sink in my bathroom. No toothpaste, brush, hairspray, etc. Yep, I’m going on national tv without a brush. I look lovely. They did our makeup but they don’t have hair people. Oh well. It wasn’t that bad. I tucked most of my hair behind my ears so you can’t tell it is out of control.

Then we met in the lobby of the hotel at 7:30 AM yesterday. It was an interesting group of people. Everyone was really nice and friendly. The contestant coordinators are great. They are very upbeat and had us all memorized from our awful polaroids so they could talk to us as soon as they saw us. I walked in and the one guy yelled, “Heather! Fax girl!” since I had a horrible time getting the crappy fax machine at work to fax my info back to him and had to send it in 3 batches over several days.

The guy that was helping me study gave me a pin as sort of a good luck charm. I didn’t have any pockets in my outfit so I pinned in on my bra. I thought that was smart. I was wearing a shirt and jacket so it didn’t show. Then I had to go through a metal detector. All I could think of was that I was going to have to strip down to get this pin off me because there was no way to do it discretely. I decided to chance it and went through the detector without setting it off. Thank god since I really didn’t want to be stripping outside to get that pin off.

We spent the first 2 hours or so going over all the rules and stuff and getting makeup done. Then we went and rehearsed on set. We also had to write our local commercials – all except me and a guy from Philly. Our channels didn’t want anything cute. We just had to say the time that Jeopardy was on that night. Everyone else was so jealous.

We were randomly selected before each game. I didn’t play until the last game so I watched the four games before me. I also got free lunch since I was still there at that time. It was more interesting watching the games since by this time we sort of knew each other and our basic life stories. If a category would come up that was good for someone we’d know it plus there was more involvement just because we knew each other.

I think I can claim this as a business trip because when I was getting my makeup touched up before my game the makeup artist was asking me a bunch of questions about her dog with cushing’s disease. Then on stage one of the guys was asking my opinions on whether he should get a labradoodle or a goldendoodle for his allergic wife.

During commercials Alex would talk to the audience and a little kid asked why we wrote our names so sloppily. He was explaining how hard it is to write with electronic pens while the contestant coordinator asked me if I wanted her to go kick the little kid’s butt on our behalf. Alex also had the Golden Girls theme song in his head from an earlier show and kept singing it during commercials. Now it is still in my head.

Overall it was fun. I’m actually surprised that I’m not upset about losing but by the time I actually played it was almost like the game was secondary to just hanging out there and having fun.