Come and Gone (The Weekend, That Is)

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Someone asked me on the phone at work late on Friday if I had any plans for the weekend. I did not have a ready answer. Even after thinking for a moment I could not think of anything. I was hesitant to answer, "No" though since the person on the other end of the line appeared to put great stock in having plans for the weekend and no matter what I had to do, it would likely pale in comparison to whatever they had planned. Even now as I sit here on the couch at 6:30 on Sunday evening I can't think of anything I did that was planned. I finished up working on a friend's computer but that mostly consisted of hauling it over to mom's house where there was high speed internet for a ton of Microsoft patches. And other than church this morning, the family and I pretty much stayed home and played games or watched movies. We have re-rediscovered Boggle and the wife did manage to find "The Sound of Music" for the daughter to watch. She, of course, loved it and has been singing several of the songs from the movie all weekend (I have given in to writing my own lyrics to "My Favorite Things" to break up the monotony – Ice cream on root beer and green chewy skittles…etc).

A game we play a lot since Christmas is Guitar Praise. This is sort of a religious version of Guitar Hero but is only available for the PC/Mac. Fortunately for us, I have our computer hooked up to our 32" flat panel TV so the screen is not too small to play it on (like it would have been on our 19" monitor that we used to use). We even went so far as to buy a 2^nd guitar however our 3 ½ year old computer can't quite keep up with all that strumming so we will have to wait until we have a faster computer before we can challenge each other at the same time. I thought we might grow tired of the game sooner or later but we show no signs of that happening. We also have a game called Dance Praise which is similar to the dance games you can get for the PS3 / Wii / Xbox game consoles. It is not quite as fun (and requires actual movement) so it gathers dust for now. Maybe once we get a faster computer and another dance pad, that game will be more fun. As for Boggle, I have had to keep two separate scores. One is the normal score and the other is the score I would have if the son was not playing. I have blogged in the past that he thinks more like me than his mother so he tends to mark more of my words off than of hers. This second score is how many points I would be ahead of the wife if she were not playing with a handicap (namely, the son stealing my points). I had a slight blow up when at the end of one particularly hard Boggle board I had found 4 hard to find words. The wife did not have them on her word list so I thought I was home free. The son, however, did. I responded as any sane man would. I ripped up my score sheet and threw it away along with taking the Boggle dice and timer and hid it. The family found my anger particularly funny and after I had cooled down (and dug my score sheet out of the trash) we proceeded with the game (which I did eventually win).

As bedtime nears tonight, we are going to sit down and watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie. We are toward the end of season 7. Having received seasons 8 and 9 for Christmas, we are now not so stingy with the few episodes of season 7 that we have left. The wife might make some popcorn and then we will settle in to the late 1800's and the tales of Walnut Grove. Well I had better put the computer away for now.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon