I Got a New Digital Watch

I got a new watch. It's digital, it's Sony, and it has more features than I will ever need in my lifetime.
There's an alarm, of course, and stopwatch and timer features, but also a multiple time zone feature which will allow me to set the watch, in advance, for up to 10 cities. There's a calculator option, as well as a calendar.
And now I'm sitting her at my desk, it's getting late at night, and I'm trying to figure all of these features out, without using the instruction book. This is an uphill battle, to say the least.
But for the moment, it's entertaining. And it's keeping my mind off the serious issues in life. And no, I really don't want to talk about those. I know that some people use their blogs to talk about all of the "big issues" that are happening in their lives, but that't not me. I use this blog talk about fun stuff.
And right now, that means my new watch.
I just made it beep, twice, very loudly. Not much else happened, though. Trying the other button, the screen flashed the world "error" at me.
Setting the time, which I did earlier today, was easy. Setting the multiple time zones was also pretty simple. Getting the watch to cycle through the times, so I can see my local time again, after checking on DC, London, Rome, Jerusalem, New Dehli, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Los Angeles is not so easy. The watch doesn't want to stop scrolling.
I'm thinking that if I can't this working pretty soon, I'll either break down and open the instruction book, or I'll open the back of the watch and pull out the battery.
I don't really want to do that, though, because I'll lose the current settings, and invalidate the warranty for 500 meter water resistance.
Ah, decisions, decisions....

I Went Out on a Date

Karaoke night. What else is there to say?

Yup. Like the title says, I had a date recently. With my wife. It was a lot of fun. We arranged a baby sitter, and then we went out to a little bar and grill not far from where we live, where they have Rolling Rock for a dollar, and the best chicken fingers in town. And karaoke.

We didn't know about that last. We found out that it was karaoke night when we got there. After a brief consultation, we decided not to sign up. This had more to do with my wife's perception that I cannot carry a tune, and my perception that she cannot carry a tune (honestly, I am not sure that either of can, but we both think we can), than it did with any sense that karaoke isn't fun.

Because it is fun. It's a lot more fun to sit and watch, though. Especially when there's dollar beers to be had. So we just found a table in a relatively dark corner, sat back with our chicken fingers, barbeque sauce, honey mustard sauce, and Rolling Rocks, and watched the show.
And what a show it was. If we thought that we can't carry tunes, we soon got a lesson in poor singing. Now, maybe it's not nice to have fun like this at other people's expense, but these people were volunteering for it. First, they were drunk enough to act stupid unselfconciously, and second, they were belting out 80s and 90s hits like they thought they were stars.
I think I know how the judges on American Idol must feel, when they get those contestants who are bursting with enthusiasm, but have no skill at all. It's scary.

It was also a blast to watch. Especially because we knew most of the songs, and were mostly sober, so we could just sit back and sing along quietly with each other, while all around us, drunks were making fools of themselves. A sociologist could have written a paper on it...
Eventually, it was time to go home, and so we did. But we'd gotten out together, and had a good laugh, and that's what really counts, of course.

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.

There's a National Ice Cream Day?

I love ice cream. Really, I do. Every now and then, I'll swing by 31-Flavors and pick up a pint of my absolute favorite, World Class Chocolate. It's a little bit of heaven down here on Earth.

So, when the opportunity presented itself (in other words, when she got old enough to appreciate it), I took my older daughter with me on a special, super-secret, late-night (8:30, but it was past her bedtime) ice cream run. We even had Mom's approval, because she'd eaten a good dinner, and taken a good bath. The kid had, not the Mom.

I gotta say, parenthood delivers a new lesson every day. I was really impressed with my 4yr old's behavior at B&R. I was afraid she would demand extra ice cream, or want a flavor they didn't have, or just throw a tantrum, but she didn't. She tasted 5 different flavors before setting on bubble gum (it's vile, but it's also pink!), and then ... she insisted on a cone.

I should have seen that coming. After all, I had a cone (with World Class Chocolate, of course).

I got her the cone, and we sat down. She looked confused. I showed her how to lick the ice cream around the edges, to avoid a mess, and five or six napkins later, she'd caught on. It was very cute; I was sorry I didn't have my camera with me.

And there we were, out past bedtime, eating ice cream, and she told me all about her day at the summer day camp.

"Daddy, I colored a beautiful flower, near a rainbow, and then I wrote "Mommy" on it. And then I played dress up with another girl, and then we all went and played in the water."

I hope that we can make this father/daughter night a regular thing, because it sure was a lot more fun than playing poker or baseball with the guys.

Of course, I don't think I'll tell anyone that!