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Ever Play 21? Why Not 21 Trivia?

I was websurfing the other day, and found a fun little trivia game, completely by accident. It's called the 21 Trivia Competition, and it's actually a competition. I think it's sponsored by an online casino, but it seems pretty harmless. It's a simple raffle drawing, basically, but with a twist.

The twist is, before you can enter for the prize, you have to play a trivia game about the number 21. The questions are bunched in groups of 3, and you can't go on until you complete a group. Each set of questions is harder than the one before. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

Well, it is. The rules of the game even allow you to go googling for the answers (in fact, they encourage it!). I don't think they want anyone to get any wrong answers, really. Because once you've gotten to the end, and answered all the questions, you can enter the prize drawing. The prize is $21,000, which of course is a thousand dollars for each question, so that's a pretty good rate, I think.

And now, you ask, did I play the game? Yes, I did. And I found all 21 correct answers. Some didn't need much finding (3 times 7 is ?), but some were a bit of a challenge. And did I enter the drawing? Yup. I actually did. So now I wait.

Keeping it together

I have a large plastic container hidden deep in my closet underneath piles of other random things that seem to have no other place. This plastic box has a green handle that pops up for easy carrying. The box is rather heavy, although all that is in it are photographs, spanning my entire life; obviously from the days before digital photography.

Do you have an old repository of photos and aren't sure what to do with them? Go out and buy a photo album or even just a sketchbook, or even a notebook, if you don't mind lined paper. Then, go through your photos and categorize them and place them in your new scrapbook!

Scrapbooking - makes you think of old age, of lace, and flowery things, perhaps? Not at all. For those who like it simple, just paste in your photos and give them dates and captions. If you're a little more artistically inclined, try cutting things out of your favorite magazines, phrases and pictures in bright colors and gluing them around your photos in interesting and creative ways. And nothing says that your photos need to be glued straight, or in a line in the center of the page. Be different, be unique, do it your way.

In the end, you'll have volumes of visual testimony on your own life. And not only will it be yours, it will be a valuable resource for generations to come. The more I get into researching family history, the more I wish that my ancestors had preserved something attesting to their identities and lives.

So give it a try. You have my word.

A Good Read

The other day, I started cleaning out the boxes of stuff in the basement. These are the boxes left over from the last two times we've moved, and for some reason never quite unpacked everything. Just to put in perspective, the last time we moved was 2002, and before that, 1998. At least one of these boxes had been sealed up for 9 years.

Most of the stuff in the boxes was just crap. A lot of old college papers, some old newpapers that I don't remember why we kept them, and a few odds and ends. God bless the Hefty trash bags, because that's were most of it ended up.

But one box, a fairly small one, yielded up a bit of treasure. It had books. About thirty of them, mostly paperbacks, and some that I had been looking for since the last time we moved. Finding them put me in hog heaven.

Among the books was one of my all-time favorites, The Caine Mutiny. I hadn't read it in years, but I still remember the story. It used to be one of those books that reread every year, just so I don't forget it. The movie was great, too, with Humphrey Bogard as Captain Queeg. Unforgettable.

So the last few nights I've been sitting up on the couch after everyone has gone to bed, and I've been reacquainting myself with a favorite book. Does it get any better than that?

Who Blogs for Fun?

So, I have been keeping this blog for a while, talking about all sorts of things that I do for fun, or have found to be fun, or just plain like, but it never occurred to me to blog about ... blogging! Let's face it, I wouldn't be keeping this blog if it wasn't fun, or if I didn't like it.

So what's fun about it? I mean that question, but only in a semi-serious way.

What's fun about blogging? I'm sitting here, at a computer, throwing my thoughts into the void, and sometimes I even wonder if anyone reads them. The truth is, though, that readership isn't really relevant: I would do this anyway, even if I knew for a fact that no one would ever read it, or ever care.

So why do it?

Well, it's a good way to keep a journal, for starters. And it's a good way to organize some thoughts. I have a private blog, that no one will ever see, where I keep the dark and dirty secrets or the serious ventings and rantings that I know my wife would never like, and I also keep a semi-private blog, where I post pictures of the kids for friends and family to see. And there's this blog. The one that's public.

I keep this one because sometimes, I just need to shout from a rooftop. Maybe what I have to say isn't earth-shaking, shattering news, or even of any particular importance, but we live in a world where it's increasingly hard to say anything, and increasingly hard to get noticed in any way. So maybe this is just my way of bypassing the standard routes.

The internet makes it possible. Anyone can publish virtually anything (which is not always good; look at the rampant anti-semitism on Wikipedia, for example), and that has introduced a new sort of freedom to the freedom of speech.

And maybe that's why I do it.

Nah. I just like to talk.

Date Night

My wife and I went out on a date last night. An honest to goodness date. We arranged a baby sitter for the kids, and then I knocked on the front door, and told my wife, when she answered, that I was there to pick her up. It's a funny little ritual we have, and we start all of our dates that way. It makes us feel like we're in high school again.

Which is the point of date night. We do it to break the routine of grown-up life. It doesn't matter where we go. Sometimes we go out to dinner, sometimes we go mini-golfing, last night, we went bowling. Occassionally, despite our low-brow tastes, we get ambitious and go out to a fancy restaraunt. We've even gone to plays and musicals; Rent and Les Mis were date nights for us.

What's important for us, is to do something that we don't normally do in the routine grind of our lives, and to do it together. We want to make sure that we can keep ourself feeling young and fresh about each other.

So, last night, we went bowling. To put it in perspective, I am probably the world's worst bowler. I once bowled a 12, and I was stone cold sober at the time. My wife's not so bad; she's pretty reliable about rolling a 120, which means I've never beaten her in all the years we've known each other. Between you, me, and the Staten Island Ferry, I think that's why she keeps playing the game.

Last night was fun, though. We got to wear silly shoes, and through heavy balls down a slick wooden lane at a bunch of 10-pins, and drink a few brews while were doing it. What could be better than that? We had some laughs, which is what we were after.

That's what makes the pick-up ritual so important. We'd both had lousy days at work, but we'd planned date night well in advance. We knew it was happening. When I knocked on my own front door, and told my own wife that I was there to pick her up for her date, it helped us to get outside the pattern of the day, and start something new. I have psychologist friends who've told me that we're tapping into a vital principle of relationship building when we do that.

I'm not a psychologist, so I don't know about that. What I do know, is that we never talk work or kids on a date night, and always start date night with the same little ritual. And that among our circle of friends, we're one of only three couples that's never been divorced.

Scavenger Hunting at the Grocery Store

So I took my daughter, the four year old, to the grocery store yesterday. I was getting ready to head walk over (it's right across the street), and she was begging to come with me. So, I let her come. And did not reget it.

To start with, she was on her good behavior. She listened to me, she did what I asked her to, she helped to push the shopping cart, and she even helped to find groceries.

That last was part of a scavenger hunt. As Dad, I held the list and navigated us through the store. As the scavenging hunter, she looked on the shelves for the items I told her we needed next. It actually was a workable system.

Some things were easy. Noodles, for example, were very easy for her to find. She loves them, and recognized them right away. She even knew which shapes I should buy.

Oatmeal was a little harder. She knows the Quaker Oats container, but it was buried in the cereal aisle. She had to look down the shelves on both sides, twice, before she found it. She wanted the really huge size, but we only needed the smaller one.

She couldn't find grated cheese. I have to admit; that one was the "trick question." It was at the cheese counter, and was grated fresh for each customer. I held her up, so she could see what the cheese counter lady was doing. They both liked that.

We went through the whole store that way, and she managed to find about two thirds of the items on our list. I was pretty impressed with her. Normally, she's not so well behaved at the grocery store, but this time, with something important to do, in a fun way, everything worked out just fine.

Heck, even I had fun.