We Won Wow

It's time to head back to the softball diamond.

Well, the perfect record's gone. Our half-assed softball team actually won a game.

We didn't mean to; after a summer of straight defeats, we'd sort of come to a conclusion that it'd be sort of fun, in a really perverse way, to finish the season (it ends the last weekend of this month) with that "perfect record." The catch: we couldn't throw a game. We were hell-bent on finishing the season with no wins, but our pride prevented us from losing on purpose. Every game had to be honestly played.

Well, that came back to us, and we won't have that perfect record.

Last weekend, we won. Admittedly, we only beat the team with the league's second worst record, so that now we are tied for the bottom spot, but we did win a game. And it wasn't even a close call that could have gone either way. It was a blowout that called in the fifth on the mercy rule. Going to bat, at the bottom the fifith, we were ahead 23 to 1. Our opponent hadn't even had a hit since the third inning.

Some of the guys on the team were genuinely upset. I guess they felt there's a sort of cachet to finishing 0 and 17, but the rest of us just shrugged that off and let the losers buy us some beers. It actually felt pretty good.

Summer Festivals - Festivals rock.

It's summertime, and all over the place, towns are having, planning, starting, or cleaning up from, their summer festivals. You know what I mean; those outdoor art fairs, and carnivals, dance festivals, and what have you that it seems every town in America puts on in the summer.

'Til recently, I lived in suburban Detroit, and had the good fortune to get to choose from some really good festivals, all just a short drive away:

There was the great Ann Arbor Art Fair, the smaller Royal Oak Art Fair, an even smaller (but still fun) West Bloomfield Art Fair, and for the last several years, the fun Arts, Beats, and Eats in Pontiac.

There are others, but those are the ones I usually went to. Of them all, I think that Arts, Beats, and Eats was my favorite. You can probably tell from the name, but it wasn't just an art fair. Restaurants from all over the Detroit area had booths there, and there were scores of musical performances as well. Last year, I stayed up late to see Verve Pipe. They're good, but I think that they were better back before they got big. One of the best shows I ever saw was Verve Pipe at a cheesy little meat-market of a dance club in Kalamazoo, back in 1993, I think. That rocked.

There was plenty of good stuff in the art booths, too. I found some really cool earthenware goblets, with food-safe glazing, and bought six, just to have set of wine cups. They're nice; heavy clay with plenty of heft.

And I'm starting to go on and on. I wanted to talk about summer festivals in general, not this one in particular. Anyway, I'll talk more about this later.

Ciao!

This is Something I Have Wanted for a Long Time

Don't tell anyone this, but I have a deep, dark secret.

I wasn't always such a cool guy. In my youth, I was even a geek.

Yup, it's true. And my inner geek is still with me. A few days ago, it got out.

You see, while I was web surfing, I found this page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/

This web page is geek heaven. It's all the great text adventure games by Infocom in flash format. I'm sure you remember the text adventures; you were given scenarios, written out (hence the name, text adventure), and you told the game what you wanted to do. I used to love these games, Zork, Planetfall, and the rest, when I was a kid. And now I have just found them again, for free...

It's been at least 20 years since I've played the, of course, so I didn't really remember the walk-throughs. That was no problem, though... A short Google search later, and I found the solutions to all of the games on that site. The solution pages also had links to maps, and other information about the original Infocom releases of these games.

I'm not sure that Infocom (or at least, it's game division) exists anymore. These games are all from the 1980s (a few are from the early '90s), and of the pages I found with other game-info, the most recent was last updated in 2000.

So try out these games; they're a blast. Some of the puzzles are pretty simple, and others will keep you up at night. And you'll notice that I didn't include any link to the "cheats!"

Painting the Rooms

Even the worst household chores are better when you do them with your kids.

Last weekend, we painted my daughter's room pink. There are three things you need to know about this, to truly understand how this impacted me.

First, I hate house painting. I just really hate it. It's the one chore that I absolutely cannot stand. My wife actually likes painting rooms, and she truly enjoys planning out the colors, and has fun with the whole process. For me, though, it's the only chore that will always be just another chore.

Second, my little daughter looked up at me, with her big brown eyes, and asked, "Please, can you paint my room pink, Daddy?"

Finally, my daughter's four. And she's a really big girl, now. And because she's four and really big, she insisted on helping.

Put all this together, and it means that I spent last Sunday afternoon moving furniture, spreading dropcloths, pulling pictures and posters off the wall, and, after all that, washing two gallons of pink matte finish off a four year old. Oddly enough, the room looked pretty good at the end. You can't even tell which parts I painted, and which parts she painted.

That part, her help, actually turned out better than I expected. For a hyper little kid, she listened very well, paid attention to what she was doing, and kept at it, putting a coat of pink on the lower half of one wall, for almost 20 minutes before she got bored. I guess even a four year old can get the nose to the grindstone if it's a grindstone they like. I'll have to remember that particular lesson in parenting.

We didn't even get any paint on the floor. So even though I don't like house painting, it was still a pretty good Sunday.