It was a rare day where the wife had to work and I didn’t. This gave the day a strange, Saturday-like feeling all day long even up until bed time when the son asked me if we were attending the early or late service for church tomorrow. The daughter was feeling under the weather and spent most of the day on the couch lounging around with Oreo nearby (he usually hangs out on the couch all day anyway but today someone was hogging his pillow). This left the son and I to entertain ourselves. Before I get into that, I do want to tell you about a strange dream I had though.
For some reason (it was never made clear in the dream) I was back in a house that I grew up in from approximately age 12 to after I graduated high school. I remember there being other people there that I knew but for the life of my I do not remember who they are now. Maybe I just seemed to know them for the purpose of this dream. Anyway, I remember being hungry so I went into the kitchen in search of food. The only thing I could find was some sort of sandwich pack in the refrigerator. I do not know quite how to describe it but you had to assemble the sandwich and then microwave it. The package appeared to have the building blocks for three ham sandwiches and so I assembled one and then headed toward the microwave. I decided to read the heating instructions on the side of the package and they read something like this…
Place sandwich in microwave and start oven. Count like one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, etc until you reach forty-five Mississippi and then the sandwich will be done.
This seemed extremely odd to me (even in the dream) but I followed the instructions. After I reached twelve-Mississippi I realized that the microwave door was open and the oven was still microwaving. I was quite alarmed and no matter what I did to close the door it would not stay shut. I then placed my focus on stopping the oven and no combination of buttons would shut it off. Panicked, I finally unplugged the device from the wall and that was that. I do remember making a mental note to google the effects of standing near a running microwave while it was running (by the way, I did this today and did not find any consistent answers). After the microwave incident in my dream, I went upstairs to my old room and then the dream ended.
I told this dream to the family tonight (with slight embellishment and some theatrics to spice it up) and we all had a good laugh. I can imagine the one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi becoming a running gag now though whenever we use the microwave.
OK, back to how the day went. The son decided this morning that he and I would play some chess. 16 games of chess to be exact. This equates to the number to games in the regular season of the NFL and is the reason for the number of games being 16 (he is really into pro football for some reason this year but did pick an exceedingly bad year to be a Cowboys fan). He decided we would play 6 games today and 5 each the next two days. We ended the day with me having 5 wins and 1 draw. He had me beat in that drawn game but with a queen-king to king advantage he accidently stalemated me and thus the tie. He was quite upset over this but this is one reason to play a losing game. You never know what is going to happen (or what mistakes your opponent might make). He usually beats me about 1/3 of the time so today was a good day for me. I never play down to his level, ever. Even when he was first playing chess (when he was 5 and asked me about the “other” pieces that came with our checker board), I never once “let” him win. I probably won the first 1,000 games before (at age 6) he beat me for the first time. He played competitively in tournaments until he was 9 or so and then lost interest. He did get to be ranked in the top 100 for his age when he was 7 and 8 and was briefly the top player in Indiana for his age group. I remember countless (endless) Saturdays at youth chess tournaments. I recall hanging out with the other chess dads (who were all better than me I think). We havn’t played much in the past year or so and it was fun to play against him again. I will have to let you know how the last 10 games go.
Jon
No comments:
Post a Comment