Going out by yourself is never an easy task, especially when you have no social skills.  Luckily beer can help with that.  So I decided to go to the bar that brewed its own beer.  A logical choice for me now that I’m a homebrewer.  I think the bar was called Fitgers or Brewhouse but it was very unclear the whole night what exactly they wanted to be called.  Who cares, I guess.  Anyway, they had about a dozen or so different brews on tap ranging from Wildfire (a spicy brew which had 9 different peppers in it) to an Oatmeal Stout.  So I set out to try as many as I could figuring I needed to develop my palate and beer snobbery as much as I could so my brewing could continue to improve.  After a few beers, let’s call it three, a conversation was struck up with the newly married couple sitting next to me.  We immediately had things in common; we were both from out of town, we both asked for a listing of beers with a short description of each, we both got told no such list existed and we both made our own alcohol (they make their own wine).  Their names were Dana and Andrea (from right to left in the pic above) and they were originally from Northern Minnesota but are now living in North Dakota.  As luck would have it Thursday night was karaoke night. We all agreed that since we were from out of town, we didn’t care if we made fools of ourselves.  We got the big book of karaoke songs and started thumbing through.  Dana suggested we do the Dukes of Hazard theme song and of course I did not argue with that. We filled out our little slip of paper and handed it to  the karaoke guru.  A few minutes later he came back with the bad news telling us that the song, although listed in the book, was not available.  So we decided to do the song, “I like beer” (for the Binghamtonians out there, yes, this is the song that Pat Kane used to sing).  So we went up there, sang it and over the next hour or so ended up going up twice more.  The next time was Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and the third time was “Cecilia” (don’t know who sings that one).  We became a quartet for “Cecilia” as we convinced Stephani Jo to join us (I thought I had seen all the different spellings of Stephanie already; I was horribly wrong.  I guess her parents thought the ‘e’ at the end was extraneous.).  She must have been impressed with our first two songs or she was just mocking us.  Either way it was fun.  And then karaoke night was over.  Had a few more brews than headed to another bar called Dublin.  I had split ways with Dana and Andrea at this point (although I might see them on Sunday night as they’ve offered me a night’s stay on their pullout couch if I need a place to stay when passing through their town; very nice of them I thought - How many people in NY do that?) and was now traveling with some scottish guy.  I understood about 50% of what he said but it sure beat drinking alone.  At Dublin we met up with one of waitresses from the previous bar who had done the closing finale of karaoke with the karaoke guy.  They sang the Meatloaf song “I would do anything for love” and it was really good (well it seemed that way at the time anyway).  She was planning on cutting her hair the next day and donating it to benefit leukemia patients.  Then the inevitable last call came at 2:00 and the party was over.  Well I did stop at the casino on my way home just because it was on the way to the hotel. I played a nickel slot machine and lost interest after about two and a half seconds.  I cashed out my five bucks and change but don’t remember if I had originally put in 5 or 10 dollars. Oh well, fun night anyway.