Pokematic's Oktoberfest 2025

Hey everyone, so my church does an Oktoberfest every year as a fund raiser and social event around the end of September/beginning of October. It's quite a fun time, there's beer, polka music, dancing, games, and raffles. The raffles are the big thing for my wife and I, mainly because this year we were kind of in charge of the basket raffles. About a month prior to Oktoberfest parishioners donate baskets of things and everyone is given the option to enter raffle tickets to win the baskets. These cover all kinds of things; bird feeders, alcohol, american girl dolls, lego sets, luggage, lottery tickets, coolers, gift cards, action figures, activity zones, and others. There was also the premium raffles of a 65 inch TV with PS5 and game, and a trip to Mexico, each with individual premium tickets. We sold tickets before and after mass many weeks, and bought about $200 worth of tickets over the month. In total there were 103 baskets, which I think was a record. The cool thing about the tickets is that they are "buy a sheet of the same number, write your name once," which saves a lot of time. Leading up to the weekend mskate was doing lots of things to get ready, organizing baskets and setting up decorations.

Friday was family night, a night of activities more geared towards kids and families. We had a petting zoo, pony rides, Disney music bingo (from the same guy who does music bingo for us at other times of the year), a "Taylor Swift concert" with a look alike lip syncing to songs, a videogame trailer, a kid spa trailer, minigolf, and pumpkin painting. It also had some normal Oktoberfest things like the beer garden and sausages, and the basket raffle (which we were kind of in charge of). My volunteer shift started at 7PM, so I had time to come a little early and enjoy the festivities. Well, it was also VIP day at Chuck E Cheese, where pass holders got free dipin dots, 500 tickets, and 30 points (on top of the daily points they already get with their pass). I decided to go to chuck e cheese and get my VIP stuff, and "speed run" my points so I could get to family night. Normally 40 points lasts me about an hour, but I also play "longer games" and take my time, but I had to go through 70 points and so I played the "token eater" games, basically jumping from one game to the other before it fully registered. I made a couple hundred tickets on this, and kind of fulfilled a childhood thought of "how fast could I blow through my tokens." Lots of fun regardless.

I got to family night around 5 PM. I had a sausage for dinner, and played some minigolf. There wasn't a whole lot for me, but was kind of fun looking around. It ended up being a good thing I was there since the volunteer that was working the videogame trailer didn't show up and they needed someone to be "the rule enforcer." The videogame trailer was either 4 or 5 TVs set up with multi-player games (minecraft, mario kart, lego marvel, and something else I didn't see), and a long couch for everyone to sit on. Players were only to have 15 minutes if there was a line, but could have more time if there wasn't a line. I had to make sure the line was managed, kids weren't overfilling the trailer, don't let kids with food or drink in, and to pay attention to if kids have had their turn. A couple of times I helped set-up Mario Kart since I know Mario Kart. I didn't have to end the turns very often since it wasn't very in demand. Once I helped a grandpa get in the trailer to look for his grandson. It was a pretty cool thing. Some people asked me for business cards and I'm like "I'm with the church, I don't know the business, talk to the guy with the blue shirt." A little after 7 someone came to relieve me, it was his shift. Young guy, showed him what to do, and all went well. Hopefully he was able to be "authoritative" considering he seemed to be around the same age as some of the teens that would go in.

After that I went to help mskate with the raffle. I was going to help enter tickets, but there was some confusion over the numbers which meant we didn't enter the tickets that night. The POS system was square, which is what we use for when we do art fairs. This came in handy when I rang up some items wrong, which made canceling them easy. The Taylor Swift "concert" was pretty good. The impersonator looked pretty close to Taylor, and she had the sparkly jacket, and did all her mannerisms that I know. At first I wondered if she was actually singing, but then I heard the "studio production" in the songs and knew it was lip sync. Oh well, still a good concert. Eventually she joined the audience to dance with the kids, and this is when things got a little weird. The DJ "ran out of Swift songs" and started playing Katy Perry songs (firework and roar are the ones I remember). I'm like, "ok, now you're just breaking character." Oh well, I don't think the kids were paying that close of attention. At the end of the night we moved all the raffle baskets into the social hall, which was kind of involved since we wanted to keep the same layout as the tables while keeping all the ticket buckets with the baskets. Also at the end of the night the left over food was free, so I picked up some sausages to have for breakfast and lunch tomorrow.

Saturday was the big night, full Oktoberfest. During the day we figured out what was going on with the ticket numbers, and got all the tickets entered. We also were running out of tickets the night before, so we ordered more on amazon prime to be delivered to our house. We got to the church around 4PM and did the set-up. I set-up the computers for entering the ticket numbers in the look-up table, and as we were selling tickets I was entering them. There was a slight problem, I needed the wifi password and I couldn't find anyone to give it to me; well at least not immediately, I found someone who had it pretty quickly. Mskate also brought here laptop, and it was kind of funny how I had my gaming laptop next to her basic business laptop. Oh well.

About an hour into the night I got dragged into an event. They needed people for the mug holding contest, where you hold a beer mug out perpendicular to your body, and as the game went on they'd add beer to make it heavier. I wasn't really planning on participating, but one of the old ladies who knows us was like "come on I'm sponsoring you in the contest." I'm all "uhhhh, OK I guess." I get up there and I get this 5 pound glass mug. I was saving my arm for the competition, as was everyone else. Once it started I held up my arm, and my arm started cramping. Not quite sure why, I was shaking my arm out and warming it up, but I basically immediately started feeling the burn. I was one of the first people eliminated, and only had a little bit of beer poured into my mug. I was going to hang around and see what ended up happening, but there was a bit of a problem with my laptop and I had to run back to the table and fix it. I was able to fix it no problem, basically someone minimized the web browser or clicked off the tab and lost it among my sea of tabs, and all I had to do was pull my browser back up.

I think sometime around this time is when mskate went to our house to pick up the raffle tickets we had to amazon next day delivery order. The night before we were running low on raffle tickets and mskate said "I'm going to order more tickets because we're going to run out." That was good because we would have run out had she not ordered more. Well they were supposed to arrive before the night began at like 3:30, but they kept getting delayed and arrived at 5:45. Mskate ran home to get them when she got the notification that they were delivered, and that was really good because we ran out like soon after she got back. Later in the night I had a sausage for dinner, and then got a soft pretzel as a long snack while entering the tickets.

It's now nearing the end of the night, which means we were now doing the raffle drawing. After the ticket was drawn one of the other volunteers doing the drawing would give me the ticket and prize, I would look up the number, and mskate would write the name. One of the tickets was entered wrong and we had to have a completely different volunteer go through all the tickets looking for it. It was generally well organized, but not perfect. We figured it out though. As I was going through the numbers we ended up winning 3 baskets; one of the alcohol baskets, the crock pot basket, and the hands on science center basket. Also, with the admission bands there was a raffle for a trip to the Bavarian Inn, and mskate won, so in total we won 4 things. Unfortunately I didn't win the big screen TV and PS5, but here's the funny thing, it was our music director's 7 year old son. His dad was both happy and not happy, because while it was a great prize now they had to find a place for it. Some people picked up their baskets that night, but a lot didn't and we had to put the baskets in the social hall. We loaded our baskets into our car, and in the morning I unloaded them.

I'm going to go over all the stuff by basket.

• The Crockpot Basket
• A crockpot
• A box of 3 crockpot liners
• A set of salt and pepper shakers
• A $25 Meijer gift card
• 3 cooking utensels (a slotted serving spoon, a non-slotted serving spoon, and a meat masher)
• 2 packets of crock pot seasonings
• garlic salt
• a cookbook or recipies
• Alcohol basket
• A bottle of strawberry wine
• A bottle of tequila
• A bottle of fireball whisky
• A bottle of rum
• A bottle of spiced rum
• A bottle of of dry gin
• A bottle of of vodka
• A reusable wine bottle
• A case of Local's Light American Lager
• A case of smirnoff ice zero
• A pack of solo cups
• A pack of solo shot glasses
• A novelty giant solo cup that was the basket
• A sign that says "bar open proudly serving whatever you bring."
• The hands on science center gift certificate
• A $400 gift card to Bavarian Inn Frankenmuth

Sunday was a great end of the weekend. I went through the baskets and got some of the stuff put away, all the liquor and wine (and sign and cups) fit in my liquor cabinet, and the smirnoff ice fit in the fridge door (and the beer is just sitting in the hallway waiting for the next family party). The utensils went in the utensil drawer, the seasoning went in the seasoning and cooking cabinet, and the gift cards went in the gift card drawer. I still had to find a place for the crock pot and novelty solo cup, but those would go into the storage locker. Still haven't found a place for the cook book yet, but that'll come.

Sunday night was pretty cool, it was the big 50th anniversary dinner after the mass celebrated by the arch bishop. Since the arch bishop was there and there was an attack on a Mormon church earlier that day, there was quite a police presence and they secured the perimeter. It wasn't just the arch bishop, there were also all the past priests who came to celebrate, including the first priest from 50 years ago (he was in his 80s). It was a pretty cool mass, it's been a while since I saw a mass celebrated by the bishop. Dinner was pretty good. I had a rum and ginger ale, and for dinner I had green beans and beef tenderloin. It was a good way to end a good weekend. Mskate still had some work to do with the baskets, calling people to tell them "you need to pick up your basket," and one lady thought it was a scam since our area code is from our hometown and not where we live, but that's just kind of her story. Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.

The Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2024 Blog

Hey everyone, my how time flies, it's already Thanksgiving. I got an email from dogechain saying they were going to shut down completely and I had to back up my wallet or else I'll lose about $100 worth of doge I got back in college. I set-up my old college laptop, installed dogecoin core, and loaded my wallet information into it to import there. This required updating the blockchain, and it's been going for about a week now and isn't even 70% done. Whatever, time for the holiday. This year was kind of different due to my grandpa passing and aunt going to her brother's out of state instead of staying home, and my grandma no longer living independent and having even more mobility problems than normal, but even then a lot of things stayed the same. Wednesday was a normal work day, and then we went to the in-laws for the evening so we would be ready for the fun of the weekend. Pretty basic day, just spent a lot of the evening going through online black friday ads and watching some tv. Got a pretty good list ready. Something that caught my attention was Target selling an XBOX 360 for $75. I called IRA to see it since it was so weird, and he got excited since his 360 red ringed and he wanted a new one. OK add Xbox 360 to the list.

Thursday Thanksgiving day. I bought a news paper to get the black friday ads because I like to have the physical paper, but I think this will be the last time I do this because it didn't have any of the big players like walmart, target, meijer (I'm mid-west), BJs, gamestop, or others and that was kind of the same as last year. Oh well. About 1PM we went to my parents house for the party. Because of nursing home preferences and rules, we had dinner and celebrating a little early. Normally dinner is around 4PM and accordion sing along is around 6PM, but this year we shifted everything forward by about 1.5 hours. The moving is where things got kind of complicated. My grandma had broken her hip earlier this year and it just made it harder to move, and the dementia makes it all the harder to have her move herself properly (don't grab the walker handle, grab the arm rest, I said don't grab the walker handle, OK I guess we're using the walker but don't fight too much when we have to lift your arms). God bless her but it does complicate things by a lot. Dinner was great, ham and green beans for me, everyone else enjoyed that and turkey and stuffing and such. Great meal. Getting grandma back to her chair for the sing along was hard too, but this time we remembered that we had a wheel chair from my grandpa after he passed.

The sing along was fun like always, over the river, apple peaches pumpkin pie, and some other fun songs. After the sing along it was time for desert. Time for some comical problems. The accordion friend likes to bake and always makes a cake and a pie, and she forgot the pie at home; there was some confusion or something and the pie was left on the table in the garage. Whoops, oh well. There was some more visiting and after a while it was time for everyone to leave. Getting my grandma back in the car was a major production. We got her into the wheel chair and just walked her to the back door where it's easier to move, and then we just picked her up in the chair and carried her down the steps, just like what we'd do with my uncle who was always in a wheel chair. Brought back a lot of memories for us. Once we got her in the car we brought up my parent's Christmas decorations and assembled the tree. After that it was a calm early night at the in-laws because IRA and I had black friday shopping to do early in the morning.

OK, now it's the heavy time, early morning shopping. IRA woke me up at 4:30 so we could get to stores when they opened. Basically everything opened at 6AM except for gamestop opening at 5AM, so first stop on our loop was gamestop. We went to one that was somewhat close that had a target really close (same shopping district) at about 5:15, but when we got there they didn't have any of the games I was looking for, and directed us to go to a store that was further away on the rout but not exactly close. Change of plans, went to that store and found 2/3 of the games I was looking for (Hogwarts Legacy and Tomb Raider Anniversary). Score. Afterwards we went to the target that was fairly close and only had to wait in the cold for about 15 minutes. Because there was some big Taylor Swift promotion they had to have an employee come out and give us directions on what the limits are. Wild thing is the employee was someone I went to highschool with, He was one of vikingpolak's friends and I didn't really recognize him (and he didn't remember my first name, just my last), but it was pretty funny. I had no need for the Taylor Swift stuff, but the CD was under $20 and she's really popular right now, so I picked up a copy to try to resell later. I also picked up Kirby Forgotten Land, a pop socket for mom in law, and a bullseye squishmellow for mskate. We couldn't find the squishmellow and so we asked the highschool friend where it was, so that was pretty cool. As for the XBOX, when I asked the employee in electronics he said "we haven't sold xbox 360 in years, we're stopping XBOX ONE even, you'll have to go to a retro store for that." I then said "the ad lied to me, it said you had XBOX 360s for $75." It wasn't a console, it was a megablocks building set. Why the confusion? It shipped in a box that was a replica of the xbox 360 box, looks extremely close to an xbox 360 in a low resolution scan, and comes with a replica copy of halo 3. The employee said "yeah if we had them I'd get one just for nostalgia." Oh well. After Target we went to Walmart, I was looking for the basically half off gaming laptop since I need a new laptop (my current laptop is about 8 years old and is starting to fail, and I want a computer that can actually play all the games I get for free with prime), a cheap dresser unit, and a wire rack. All of them were online deals, dang, that was a waste.

We decided to give one more gamestop a try since I still was looking for roller coaster tycoon adventures delux, and so IRA looked up where the next closest gamestop was. He gave me the directions and when I got close I'm like "wait a minute, I know which gamestop we're going to, it's the gamestop right by where my grandma used to live, we'd go here back when it was funcoland." They had Roller Coaster Tycoon for PS4. I was hoping for switch, but PS4 works for me since I have a PS4. Since we were in a neighborhood I knew, we went to the dollar general that used to be the family video we'd rent movies from on Friday nights. I got us dawn soap, command hooks, pedialyte (mskate needs it for her electrolyte deficiency), and garbage bags. Since it was now like 9AM and were close to where the accordion friend lives, we called to see if they were up and able to give us the pie (they wanted us to have it to share with everyone). They were and we got the pie. After that we went to my grandma's condo just to look around since my mom had the house completely redone (new paint, no carpet, no furniture), and go to the bathroom. It was pretty surreal; it was familiar but completely foreign. Walked the house probably 1 last time. There was one more place, we went to the shopping center about a mile down the road from my grandma's house to go to 5 below to see if we could do the squishmellow $20 bag. They were completely out, it was just something for the first 100 people, but that's OK because we still have a big bag of stuffed animals from other big sales. That was OK though because there was a new retro store in the shopping center and they had some black friday deals. For me it was the buy 2 get 1 free on games, so I picked up 6 PS2 games and IRA got some movies on buy 2 get 2 free. On the way back we stopped at BJs where I got a new TV for the bedroom (our TV was the TV I bought for my dorm room years ago, and it's not very good) and some gift cards on discount (I think it was subway, disney, and uber). Once we got back I unloaded the car and took a nap.

Later in the day mskate wanted to do some shopping with us, and so we went out again in the afternoon. We went to bath and bodyworks, CVS, bjs, and the retro store again (because IRA decided he wanted to get an $80 used xbox 360 from them). At CVS we got a peanuts cookie tin for my dad since he likes Charlie Brown and Snoopy. BJs was just a couple more gift cards and filling gas. When we went to the mall with bath and bodyworks we found a store that was just gochapon. I looked for a machine with figures I would be interested in, but didn't find anything too interesting. IRA decided to though and got a digimon figure. At bath and bodyworks we got soaps and lotions for the moms on buy 3 get 3, and then got hand sanitizers for the workers at grandma's assisted living center. This is when we discovered that IRA didn't have his debit card, meaning he lost it. That was pretty bad, but we retraced our steps and went to the retro store where he last used it. That's where it was, and apparently he wasn't the first to do it. He got his xbox and some more movies, so crisis averted. Rest of the day was pretty low key.

Saturday was a simple day. We went to my grandma's assisted living to get her apartment all decorated and just visit. We already had a little tree set up, but it didn't have a lot of ornaments and we bought some garland to hang on the wall and put some ornaments on it. I'm glad I bought the command hooks because we needed them for the garland. We got it all set up while she was still at lunch, and once it was decorated we brought her to her apartment and just visited. We didn't have a lot to do with her, so I put on the wedding video I made for my cousin (the one we saw in Hawaii earlier this year). She doesn't know him, he's on my dad's side and she's my mom's mom, but she really likes little kids and half the video is just my 2 year old niece-cousin being cute, so it was a great little thing and she especially liked watching the part where we went to Disney Aulani for the character breakfast. After that we just walked her around her floor until it was time for their activity. It was a good little visit. The rest of the day was pretty calm, just unpacking the stuff and trying to find places for it. Later in the evening we went to a drive in theater to watch The Polar Express and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We saw Red One and Elf the week prior, and figured out how to keep warm without turning the car on better than we did that time. It was a good fun time.

Well that was Thanksgiving weekend. Glad I can finally get this out at a reasonable time this year. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.