The Golden Broccoli Award

Today in seminary I gave the class a “pop quiz”, which I do fairly often as a good way to start discussion and get everyone talking at 6am. Because we were discussing the Word of Wisdom and being healthy, I made a little trophy for whoever did the best on the quiz. I called it the Golden Broccoli Award, and it was breathtaking.

Yes, I actually spray-painted a sprig of broccoli, then painted a base, and mounted it. Awesome.

Of course Laralee thinks I’m the biggest dork she’s ever married.

That’s food?

I opened the fridge and seriously thought we had a bag of birdseed in there.

Apparently I’m uncouth and uncultured, because I didn’t recognize that it’s quinoa. I told La she can call it whatever fancy name she wants, but it still looks like birdseed.

I’m gonna be rich! Or, something

I just got an email from some random guy who said:

I am Attorney representing the late Eng. Michael A. Schroeder, who died during the 2004 tsunami while on vacation with his family in Thailand. He seems to be related to you hence I have contacted you to discuss this matter with you.

I don’t know what “Eng.” means– maybe Michael was an engineer? Or perhaps he was English. Or a really engaging conversationalist. Or an enigmatic sort of guy.

In any case, I suspect that when I respond I’ll learn that Michael had a lot of money, and the Attorney (capital “A”) representing him is going to offer to split it with me in a clever and very professional-sounding scheme. Personally, if the Attorney representing my estate waits fifteen years before contacting my heirs, I’m going to come down from heaven and give him a stern talking-to.

Bowlin’

Julian visited us again this weekend, so we decided to get some lunch at a new sandwich shop in town and then go bowling. Yes, bowling. I figure it’s one of the dumbest games ever invented, but with the right group of people it can be a lot of fun. It turns out we had the right group of people.

Zaque’s strategy was to use a lightweight ball and put just enough juice on it to get it to the pins.

As it turns out, that was often not enough momentum to actually knock down enough pins, even though his targeting was pretty good. So he’d often end up with splits or a couple of stalwart pins in the middle.

I, on the other hand, believed in using a heavyweight ball (15 pounds, oof!) and hurling it down the alley with all the force I could muster. My aim was terrible, but sheer inertia did a lot of damage.

Julian definitely had the best form, and managed to start off with a couple of strikes in the first frames.

Laralee looked good too, although apparently I caught her after a particularly bad bowl:

In the end, we all had a good time playing a dumb game.

Power Grid

At my request, Mom gave me the board game Power Grid for Christmas. I think I described it to her as “complicated but fun”. I’d played it once, many years ago, and remembered it as a great game. We cracked it open on Christmas Day and learned how to play (it had been a while for me, and as I said, it was complicated).

It has cool little houses you build across a map of the United States (or Germany, the “B side”):

There are four different types of “fuel”, represented by little wooden pieces:

In the game, coal is represented by little brown cubes and oil is a black cylinder, but it drove Laralee absolutely nuts because she kept insisting “coal should be black!” So after the game we took permanent pens and painstakingly re-colored all the coal cubes to black, and the oil drums to silver. Actually, she was right– it felt much more clear after we finished.

We’ve played about half a dozen times since Christmas, teaching Hannah and Julian last weekend. Both of them liked it. In today’s game, Julian and I both felt a little bit like this:

… because Laralee is the absolute queen of this game. I can’t quite figure out her strategy, but it’s amazing. She wins every time. Today I was crushing her and Julian, on pace to win the game handily, when I suddenly ran out of money and couldn’t buy one last city to finish victorious. That gave Laralee one extra turn, and she managed to squeak out a victory using tie-breaker rules. Wow.

She celebrates her victory by imitating Wonder Woman:

Despite continual losses, I really enjoy the game and now have a goal to figure out how to beat her. (She reminds me this is pretty much how she feels every time she plays any other game against me, so I guess fair is fair…)

Inflation

Today it’s Retro Day, so I’m jamming to my awesome 80’s music. Young MC just came up in the playlist, with his classic “Bust a Move”. I caught these lyrics:

The movie’s showin’
So you’re goin’
Could care less
About the five you’re blowin’

Hah! Five bucks for a movie… boy, those were the days. (Actually, they were the days, since this song was released in 1989.) The last time I went to a movie, the four of us– me, La, Alex, and Zaque– paid $56 for the privilege. Sheesh, inflation.

It’s new! Except it’s not!

Shopping on eBay is sure fun these days. I’ve been using eBay since its birth, and generally speaking it’s a great platform to buy and sell stuff. But whenever I want to buy something that’s new I struggle because most sellers now use “new (other)” to indicate an item that’s been “lightly used”. In other words, “new” now means “used”. So it’s an exercise in wading through a ton of listings to find an item that’s actually honest-to-goodness new. Sigh.