Adventures of BigKat

Old School Breakfast

2011-02-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

Mrs BigKat made me some toast and asked me what I wanted on it.

This is what popped into my head, so I told her I wanted some...

I don't think she thought it was as funny as I did though.

I still don't understand how this could happen...

2010-11-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

Mrs. BigKat was at the computer this morning. It was a little cold so she was tapping her feet up and down on the floor.

BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM...

Now what would you say in that situation? I bet you would say exactly the same thing that I said:

Her feet: BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM

Me: FLASH!!! A-aaaaaahhhh!!!

Savior of the universe!!!

And it would be funny, right? WRONG! Mrs. BigKat had NO IDEA what I was talking about! SHE HAD NEVER HEARD OF FLASH GORDON!

I still don't know what to say about this...

Here's the song in case you spent your childhood in a hole in the ground like my wife apparently did:

Underwear

2010-09-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

The kids usually take their baths/showers in the evening. Which means that this is when LilKat2 changes his underwear. Well, it seemed as if LilKat2 was running out of clean underwear more quickly than he should. We found out that the reason for this was that he was changing his underwear right when he woke up in addition to after his shower. Mrs. BigKat told him that since he took a shower in the evening, he didn't have to change his underwear again in the morning. That way, he wouldn't run out of clean underwear so quickly in his underwear drawer.

Unfortunately, I think he took this underwear conservation concept a little to far. The other day, he says 'Mom, guess what...I think I've worn this same underwear for FOUR DAYS!'

I hope he at least turned it inside out after day 2...

Darrel

2010-08-31T14:11:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, my cat Darrel died. He was 13 years old. We have a bunch of cats at our house and Darrel was my favorite.

Here's why:

He was the most dog-like cat I know. When I would go out, he would wait at the front door for me to come home. Mrs. BigKat said that he really missed me when I left. When I went on business trips, it would drive him crazy.

He was smart, but he used his brains for evil. If he was a person, I think he would've been Lex Luthor. Okay, maybe he wasn't really evil, but he did like to do funny things just to bother people.

Here's an example: A long while ago, I had a roommate, Lisa. When she left for school/work in the morning, she would close the door to her room. Sometimes, Darrel would quickly run in and hide in before she had a chance to shut the door. Then she'd have to spend the next 10 minutes searching for him. One time, she was running really late and didn't have time to catch Darrel. She asked me if I could go in there and find him for her, so I said sure. Right after she drove away, I looked over and saw Darrel slowly walking out of her room. I think he just loved getting a reaction out of her. But she left and the game was over, so he went to go find something else to do.

He loved to get into places where he wasn't supposed to go. Okay, maybe this wasn't always good, but it made for some funny memories. Here's a picture of when Darrel got into one of the cupboards. Mrs. BigKat was cleaning out the kitchen. She left one cupboards open that was pretty high up. Darrel saw his chance so he got in (I'm not exactly sure how he did it. He must've got onto the stove and then took a superleap into the cupboard. I guess he just wanted to know what was in there). It kind of surprised her.

Here's a picture of Darrel when he got on top of the refrigerator. Again, I'm not sure how he got up there. One time, Mrs. BigKat and I were sleeping and we heard this huge CRASH downstairs. Now some people might think that maybe there's a robber, or that maybe the noise came from outside. But Mrs. BigKat and I both thought the same thing...Darrel...

It turns out we were right. He had gotten on top of the refrigerator and knocked off this huge glass bowl.

He loved being on top of my head. When I met him at the animal shelter, the first thing he did was climb on my head. He loved being up there. I used to wear a hooded sweatshirt when I worked at home. When he was little, he would go inside the hood behind my back and lie down in there while I worked. Or sometimes, he would just go on the top of my chair. When he got larger, he couldn't really fit on the top of my head very well, so he would often just try to climb up me and sit on my neck or back.

He had very soft fur. I mean really soft. It's much different than any of our other cats. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed petting him so much was because of how neat his fur felt.

He would do things to drive me crazy. Here's one of my favorite Darrel stories. When he was little, I used to get into work really early. I'd get in at around 4am, which meant that I had to get up around 3am. I tried to get to sleep as early as I could, but it wasn't always easy. You see, Darrel had this thing where he wanted to stick his nose up into my nose and ears. Now, he didn't do this all the time, only when I wanted to sleep! So I had to try and sleep with my covers pulled over my head and tucked under my body. But Darrel would still try and shove himself himself under the covers so that he could get at my face. If I accidentally had the covers too close to my face, he would just try and bite my nose through the covers. Eventually, I'd have to stick my head out so that I could breathe and he would immediately go attack my face. This would go on for hours, with me pleading with him to leave me alone, and him happily purring away. One time, I got smart and brought a squirt gun with me to bed. It worked for a little while. I'd squirt him and he would run away. But then he got smart. Once, he let me squirt him and just stood there and took it. I squirted and squirted until I ran out of water. When I had no more water, he continued with trying to stick his nose in my ear.

He was a big huge cat (I think 16 pounds at his heaviest) and acted like a tough cat. But he never hurt anyone. In fact, you could totally manhandle him and he would never fight back. Our children have grabbed him and picked him up in all sorts of undignified ways, and he never once got angry at them. Sometimes if I grabbed him for too long, he would start huffing and puffing at me (something I've never seen any other cat do), but I always thought it was cute so it would make me grab him for longer. I think he was just pretending to be angry, but was really happy with all the attention. Here's a picture of him with a baseball cap on his head. He probably wasn't very happy with the hat on his head, but he let me do stuff like that to him and wouldn't complain (too much).

We loved being around each other. With our other cats (and probably cats in general), it seems like they come to get petted when they feel like it, and then walk away when they're done. Darrel liked being with me pretty much all the time. He'd hang out with me all day while I worked. He would sometimes sit at my feet (recently, he had a new trick where he'd lie down behind my office chair. It was sneaky because it would trap me in my desk. I couldn't stand up without moving my chair. He knew I couldn't move it backwards because I would smash him. But when I'd try to nudge him out of the way, he'd just lie there, ignoring me). When I'd come home tired from basketball and collapse on the floor, he'd rush over and lie down with me (and try to stick his nose in my armpits, which I didn't like so much). The night he died, was was sleeping in my work chair. He never did that. I'm guessing that he knew he was going to die and laid down in a place where I sit most of the time. Maybe he went there because he knew I would find him. Or maybe he just wanted to be in a place that he associated with me. It makes me happy to think that he was thinking about me during his last moments.

I miss Darrel. I told Mrs. BigKat that I don't want any more pets after our cats all die. But if I saw a cat that was exactly like Darrel, I'm pretty sure I would buy him again. The other cats seem like they are trying to make things easier for me. A couple of them have suddenly turned a little Darrel-like. Alice has recently been waiting around for me when I leave the house and will often follow me around when I'm at home. Bill has been sitting at my feet while I work, and today wanted to sit on my lap just like Darrel used to do (it wasn't the same though because Bill kept wanting to bite my fingers when my hands would get near him. Plus he farted a bunch and made it stink).

I'm not sure what happens to animals when they die. There's not really anything mentioned about it in the Bible that I've read. If I had to take an honest guess, I would say that God made animals different than he made people, so there's probably not a cat heaven like some people would like to think. But who know. Either way, I feel blessed to have been able to spend 13 years with the best cat the world has ever known, my friend Darrel.

Deal of the Century!

2010-08-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was on slickdeals.net last night and saw a great deal on basketball shorts. They were on sale for $6 each. Plus there was a 10% coupon and a free shipping coupon as well! I ended up buying 15 pairs of shorts and 2 shirts for $95! That's like $5.50 per item!

I was going to toss some stuff out of the shopping cart, but Mrs. BigKat made me buy everything. I don't buy clothes very often (some of my clothes are at least 10 years old. According to Mrs. BigKat, that's too long), so for some reason, it was important to her that I get a big pile of new clothes.

The really nice thing about basketball shorts is that because I work at home, they serve as my work clothes as well my basketball clothes. Plus they're made with stretchy waists so I can get really fat and still fit into them. Now I should be set for clothes until at least 2020.

Like Father, Like Son

2010-07-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

Want to know how brave LilKat2 is? Today, he had to have an Ear The Cow. Which is kind of crazy to me. I had never even heard of this insane procedure before. Now, our family has had 2 in 2 months.

Recently, it has seemed like LilKat2 has been ignoring us sometimes. We talk to him and it just seems like he's not listening to us at all. He's actually gotten in trouble for it a couple of times. Well, it turns out he really isn't listening. Because one of his ears was all clogged up. I noticed that when we were praying together, he would start praying while LilKat1 was praying. That clued me in that something was wrong with his ears. So last night, I gave him a little hearing test. I had him close his eyes while I made little sounds around his ears. His job was to wave his right hand if the sound was on his right and wave his left hand if the sound was on his left.

He failed miserably (and yes, afterwards, I felt really bad for scolding him for not listening to me).

So today, he went in to the doctor's and got his ears checked out. The doctor saw that one was clogged (so clogged in fact, that for the first few shots of the Ear The Cow, no water actually went into his ear). And he bravely sat there while they squirted water into his head. The nurse was very impressed! She said that most kids try to run away and hide in the corner. Not my son! He just sat there with his eyes closed until they were done (which is pretty much what I did too).

More Lemonade

2010-07-27T00:25:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember this? Well, guess what! Pretty much the exact same thing happened again today. Except this time, instead of $25, I got $100!

And once again, I went right out and ordered another pile of boardgames (not for me though! They're gifts! I'm serious! Ok, a couple are for me. And one expansion. But the rest are for other people! Really, I'm not being boardgame-greedy! Well, maybe a little. Just a tiny bit boardgame-greedy. But I just got a free $100! What do you expect?).

Roots

2010-06-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

This picture made me laugh. I'm guessing that the game came out before the miniseries.

Ear Lavage

2010-06-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

I had an Ear Lavage today. Sounds interesting right? It's pronounced 'la-VAJ', like it's very fancy and French. It sounds like 'la vache' (which I think means 'the cow' if I remember my French from high school. So I guess I came very close to having an Ear The Cow).

Well, if you've never had one, let me tell you, it is not very fancy. It's actually very gross and weird. This was done at the doctor's office. The doctor said I had too much gunk in my ears. So she had a lady come in to give me an Ear The Cow. The lady gave me a plastic tub to hold under my ear. Then she took a squirt bottle with a special attachment and unloaded about a gallon of water into my ear.

It kind of sounded like this:

SQWSSSSSSHHHH-SQWSSSSSSSHHHHH-SQWSSSSSSSHHHHH-SQWSSSSSSSSHHHHHH

except for like a hundred squirts and not just 4. And it feels like someone is jabbing you inside of your head in an area that was never meant to be jabbed. Then when she stops squirting, it sounds like your ear is full of bubbles.

Every once in a while, she took a break to empty the tub of water/ear goo. And if I was lucky she'd say 'Hey! A nice big chunk came out that time!' Then she'd look inside my ear to see if it was clean yet. If it wasn't, she'd go back to trying to shoot water into my brain.

Anyhow, my ears are now free from gunk. Which I guess it's good. I just hope they stay un-gunky so I don't need another Ear The Cow. I really didn't enjoy it.

Dreams

2010-06-07T10:24:00.001-07:00

Have you ever had that dream about falling down? You know the one I'm talking about?

The one where you trip and fall down and scrape up your hands on the asphalt. And the scrapes get all dirty and end up with yucky things inside of them. Like bug eggs.

And then the bug eggs hatch under your skin. And when you look at your palms, you can see creepy bugs crawling around inside the skin of your hands.

And so you scratch at them, and your skin bursts open and a bunch of those roly-poly potato bugs start crawling out of your hands. You know the dream I'm talking about?

I had that dream last night. Twice. I didn't sleep very well.

GPS

2010-05-24T12:00:00.001-07:00

I need this:

Round-abound...hehe

According to this slickdeal, you can get a TomTom GPS for $89. Too bad we already have a Garmin or I would've bought one for sure.

16 again

2010-05-24T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday today. Which means that my driver's license is expiring. I got the reminder a while ago, but forgot to renew it. I was planning on going to the DMV today to take care of it, but then I realized that the DMV here is closed on Mondays. That means that I will have to wait until tomorrow.

The problem is, I won't be able to drive myself because my license will be expired. I thought that maybe Mrs. BigKat could drive me, but then we'd have to take the kids with us which would be a hassle. So I called my mom. She said that she was available and could drive me there.

Yes, tomorrow, my mom is driving me to the DMV to get my driver's license.

This makes me giggle.

2010-05-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

In my Sunday School class, I've been making movies to help illustrate our lessons. Over the past few weeks, we've been studying Acts. Acts is great because it talks about God's AMAZING, UNSTOPPABLE power. God had a plan to have the Good News about His Son Jesus spread all over the place and nothing could stop it!

Here are a couple of movies that we've watched that help illustrate what we've been learning. I use LilKat1's legos to make the movies. This first video talks about God's amazing power to change lives.

This second video talks about how nothing can stop the power of God.

These videos have been working out great in class. The kids love them, and they help reinforce the lessons that we've been learning about God and the Bible.

Bullitt

2010-05-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

We watched Bullitt last night. Here's the famous car chase scene. Who would've guessed that San Fransisco had so many green VW bugs? When the first bug came up (around 3:20 on the youtube clip), I pointed it out to Mrs. BigKat. The next 3 made her laugh.

Something's not right...

2010-05-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

This is an actual cake purchased by an actual friend of mine. I don't know what else to say...

The Bento Lady

2010-04-29T11:25:00.001-07:00

Each week, Mrs. BigKat and I go out on a Date Night while my mom watches the kids. We normally go to this local Bento place. The food is simple, tasty, and inexpensive. Mrs. BigKat gets the pot sticker platter, I get the teriyaki beef or spicy pork (and every once in a while, the yakisoba), we get 2 orders of egg rolls, and 2 drinks (large for me, small for Mrs. BigKat). And the total is always $13.70. We've gotten to the point where the owner (who I call the Bento Lady) starts writing down our order right as we walk in the door.

A few weeks ago, instead of going to the Bento place like usual, we decided to go to the taco place down the street instead. It was a nice change of pace, so we went there again the following week. Well, when we went back to the Bento place, we wondered if the Bento lady had noticed that we had been gone.

Yeah...she noticed.

As we walked up to place our order, she started grilling us:

Bento Lady: So...haven't seen you guys in a while...
Us: Oh uh...yeah...we haven't been here for a couple of weeks.
Bento Lady: Oh...I see...I guess you haven't been able to get a babysitter then...
Us: Oh no, we have a baby sitter! We just...ummm...uh...can I get the terikayi beef?

Even her husband, Bento Guy acted different towards us. When he brought us our egg rolls, it wasn't "Here's your egg rolls! Enjoy!" or anything like that. Instead he just kind of flippantly tossed the plate onto our table without looking at us as he walked by. I told Mrs. BigKat "We cheated on the Bento Lady. I feel like Tiger Woods."

That was last week. This week, when we went to Date Night, the Bento Lady was still hassling me. I ordered the Hot and Spicy chicken. She looks at me and says "Are you sure you want that? Are you ok with spicy food?"

Wait a second...she's asking ME if I'm ok with spicy food? I was appalled! The guy who puts Frank's Red Hot on everything? The guy who only enjoys chili if it makes him sweat? Yes I'm OK with spicy food! I love spicy food! And to show her, I was going to eat all the spicy food on my plate in record time!

Only I didn't...

Now, normally, I eat all the food on my plate when we go out. The portions at the Bento place are a nice size for me. But it just so happened that I wasn't particularly hungry that day. I don't remember if I had a late snack or had a lot to drink before we left or what. But for some reason, I just wasn't that hungry. I only ate about half of my Hot and Spicy chicken.

Well, the Bento lady sees that I didn't finish my meal. She walks over to our table and says 'Oh! Was it too spicy for you? We can make it less spicy next time!'

GAAAAHHH!!! That sneaky Bento Lady! On the outside it appears like she's this sweet old lady who's concerned about one of her customer. But we both know that what she's really doing is calling me a spicy food wimp to my face! TO MY FACE!

After she left our table, she went into the back and told Bento guy what she said about me. They both laughed at me and high fived each other. Ok, maybe I made up that last part, but I wouldn't be surprised if it really happened.

Only the Warriors...

2010-04-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

This happened in the Warriors/Blazers game last night. The Warriors ran out of guys and ended up having to put injured guys in the game so that they'd have enough players. Stefen Curry and Monta Ellis played all 48 minutes. So did 2 D-League guys. Chris Hunter (another D-League guy) started, but then got hurt early. So Devean George (remember him?) played the rest of the game.

The worst part about it is that the ended up winning! Now, instead of being tied for the 3rd worst record, they're tied for the 4th. This reduces their chances of winning the draft lottery by about 4% I think. They can't even lose properly!

Not so green

2010-04-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

Do you like Sun Chips? Well, PrincessKat does. She asked for a bag at the store the other day, so Mrs. BigKat bought it. However, this bag was a bit different from other bags we've purchased in the past. It was LOUD! Really LOUD! Like if-you-were-getting-some-chips-out-of-the-bag-you-couldn't-hear-the-person-next-to-you-talking loud.

One time I was trying to get some chips and LilKat2 scolded me because he said he couldn't hear the video game he was playing on the computer. Another time, Mrs. BigKat had to keep repeating what she was saying to me because I couldn't hear her over the bag crinkling (ok, fine...so maybe I was crinkling the bag on purpose to annoy her).

It turns out that there's a reason that the bag is so crinkly. It's a specially designed compostable bag. Instead of throwing away the bag, you're supposed to be able to put it in your composter. Wow! Seems so environmentally friendly!

Well, the funny part is that Mrs. BigKat couldn't stand the loud crinkling. So you no what she did? She took out the chips and put them in a big plastic ziploc bag. The company spends all this time and money designing a fancy schmancy compostable bag to reduce waste, and my wife gets rid of all that work with her non-compostable plastic bag. For some reason, I really got a kick out of this.

However, she is still planning on putting the Sun Chips bag in the composter!

Child's Play

2010-04-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

PrincessKat is now 3 years old. Know what that means? Time to get her started on BOARD GAMES!!!

Now, finding a good game for a 3 year old is not nearly as easy as for a 5 year old. But there are some good ones out there.

Let's start with her first game, Go Away Monster! Go Away Monster is an excellent first 'game'. The fact is, it's more of an activity than a game because there aren't any winners or losers. But there's taking turns, placing items on a board, some sharing, and some surprises. When PrincessKat first got this game, we must've played it 10 times that day (and the following morning too, if I remember correctly). Basically, you're taking turns pulling items out of a bag. The items are things you find in your bedroom, a bed, teddy bear, chair, and a picture. When you get one of these things, you place them onto your board in the appropriate spot. Every once in a while, instead of bedroom furniture, you pull out a monster. When you do, you say 'Go Away Monster!' and toss them into the box. That's it! That's the game! Sounds simple, right? Maybe even too simple? Well, it's actually perfect for 3 year olds who are learning to play games!

Another game that I found was Batik. This is one of a series made by Gigamic games. I really like the Gigamic games series. They all have very nice looking wooden components. Gameplay for the ones that I have played is super simple, yet interesting. I purchased Batik from another local gamer at a coffeeshop. PrincessKat was with me and we immediately started playing the game while enjoying our hot chocolate. She picked up on it right away! We probably played 6 or so games right there. Each person has a set of shapes. You drop the shapes into this vertical wall (kind of like Connect 4, but with only 1 large slot. If you drop a shape in, and any part of it is sticking out of the top, then you lose. That's it! Again, perfect for a 3 year old.

The last game I'm going to mention is Gulo Gulo. This is a highly regarded game on boardgamegeek.com by boardgaming parents. However, I was never that big of a fan of it. I originally bought it for LilKat2. We played it a few times, but he never got that into it. PrincessKat, on the other hand, LOVES this game. And the funny thing is, she can beat me at this game, even if I'm trying my hardest. This is a GREAT feature to have in a kid's game. In Gulo Gulo, you move around the board by grabbing little colored eggs out of a bowl. There's also a weighted stick in the bowl. If you can get your egg out without knocking the stick over, you can move ahead. If the stick falls, then you have to move backwards. Simple enough. But grabbing those little eggs can be hard! Especially when you have big fat grownup fingers. 3 year olds, however, have little tiny ninja fingers, perfectly made for stealing colored eggs out of a small wooden bowl. And there's a nice built in catch-up mechanism, so that even if you fall behind, you're never really that far back. Again, another great thing to have in a kids game because it means that everyone is always in the game.

You want more? Ok I'll give you one more. Walter Wick: Can You See What I See is a game that is based on a series of books (kind of like 'I Spy' books). In the version that we play, you have a set of tiles. Each tile has a picture of an object, like a rubber duck or a thimble or a yo-yo. In the middle of the board is a set of larger tiles. Each of the larger tiles has a bunch of pictures on them (so one might have a tricycle, a yo-yo, a top, a spool, and a clothes pin). On your turn, you pick one of the tiles in front of you (say, a frog). Then you have to look at the bigger tiles in the middle. If any of those tiles has your picture (the frog) on it, you get to keep it. Each big tile you have at the end of the game counts as a point (some tiles have a special picture on them that make them worth 2 points). That's pretty much it. I thought LilKat2 would like this game because he likes his I Spy books so much. Well, it turns out that all 3 kids like this game quite a bit! And one nice thing was that I was able to pick this one up at Toys R Us (I usually have to go to online retailers to buy my games).

Anyhow, if you have a 3 year old and want to have some fun things to do together at home, these are some great choices for you.

Snake

2010-01-27T10:37:00.001-08:00

Mrs. BigKat and I were watching Food Network the other night and saw Kenny Stabler. He was tailgating at a Raider game with Guy Fieri. Turns out Mrs. BigKat had no idea who Ken Stabler was. I was SHOCKED! She grew up in northern California and didn't know who the Snake was? Back when I was a boy, that was who we all wanted to be. It was basically Superman, Batman, Fonzi, or Ken Stabler.

Well, today, I googled Ken Stabler to see what he was up to these days (other than eating chili burgers and ribs on Food Network). I saw he had a website, so I sent him the following email:

Hey Snake!

Saw you on Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives the other day! My wife had no idea who you were. And I said 'Are you kidding me?' I told her about when I was a boy, you were they guy that all of us on the playground wanted to be. 10 or 12 boys running around yelling 'I'm Ken Stabler!', 'No, I'M Ken Stabler!'
Her excuse was that she grew up watching the niners (her family only started watching them because they found out that they had a quarterback that looked like Barry Manilow and they liked Barry Manilow).
Anyhow, just wanted to say hi!

Thanks!
BigKat

Well, he wrote back to me! The Snake wrote back to me! He even signed it 'Snake' at the end! Here's what he wrote:

BigKat

What a fun e.mail....I played with and for a great group of people and we played for all the right reasons..for each other, the city, ownership, and fans like yourself.
All the best to you and yours
Snake

I'm so happy. I feel like I'm 6 years old again. It's cool knowing that Ken Stabler is my new best friend.

Things Kids Say

2010-01-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

I went to help out in LilKat2's Kindergarten class today. When I came in, the new music teacher was there singing songs with them. I had never met him before. The old music teacher was a very kid friendly, chipper, younger lady. The new guy was quite different. I was trying to think of a way to describe him and the best thing I can come up with is Niles Crane from Frasier, but not funny.

Anyhow, while I was in class, I heard a funny story about him. Apparently, he was singing songs with the kids when he got to a part where he started to sing in a very looooow voice. The kids thought that this was very impressive. They said to him, 'Wow, Mr. ___! You sound just like a REAL man!'

Too Many Games

2010-01-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

This morning, I was at the computer and I logged on to boardgamegeek.com. I started looking at some gaming articles, nothing with pictures or anything, just text. Anyhow, PrincessKat saw what I was doing and must have recognized the logo on the website. She immediately ran over, jumped on my lap, and, apparently imitating me, started yelling 'I WANT THAT GAME! I WANT THAT GAME!'

That killed me! Me and Mrs. BigKat were both laughing for quite a while. But the whole time, I was thinking...Do I really act that way? Maybe I do have too many boardgames...

Telemarketers

2010-01-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

I enjoy having fun with telemarketers. One time, a guy called who said that my car's warranty had expired and they wanted to extend it. I told them that my name was Dennis Anderson and that I had a 1950 Ford truck. I said that I had made some modifications to it and wanted to know if that would be covered under the new warranty. He asked me what model my truck was, so I told him it was Gravedigger. He said he wasn't familiar with that model, and I said something like 'You've never heard of Gravedigger?!?! It won the Monster Jam World Championship!' I think I thought my joke was funnier that he thought it was.

Anyhow, I was on my favorite board game website, and I ran across someone describing what they say to telemarketers. It's a little mean, so I guess I shouldn't really suggest that anyone actually say this to someone. But it made me laugh (is that bad?).

*ring*
Me: Hello?
TM: We'd like to sell you blah, blah, blah (for a few seconds)
Me: Um, excuse me... excuse me.
TM: Yes?
Me: (in a low, conspiratorial voice) Look around you.
(I can usually hear a bit of movement as if they are looking to see if they've called a co-worker.)
TM: What?
Me: Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?!

MFWL story by MFWLW

2010-01-06T14:14:00.000-08:00

Remember My-Friend-Who-Lies (MFWL)? Well, his wife (MFWLW) has a weblog. The other day, she wrote about a funny story that, oddly enough, MFWL has never told me about. They had a baby last June, and this story is from right after the baby was born when they were leaving the hospital to go home. Here it is in her words:

I hope (My-Husband-Who-Lies) doesn't mind that I post this, but one of the ones that still brings a smile is when (MHWL) was getting the car to pick us up to go home. His sense of direction got turned around in the parking garage and he couldn't find his way back to the main entrance where we were waiting. (The baby), the person who pushed the wheelchair out, and I sat watching the poor guy drive all around trying to find where we were. The parking garage is maybe fifty feet from the main entrance. :)

I love this story. And it doesn't surprise me one bit.

Stir Crazy

2010-01-04T15:18:00.001-08:00

I have always loved popcorn. I could probably eat popcorn every day. But I'm not a big fan of microwave popcorn. I like the convenience, but don't care for the taste so much. For a few years now, my popcorn popping method of choice looked something like this. I would get out my stainless steel bowl, add some popcorn, oil, and salt, cover the whole thing with foil, and jiggle it over the stove for 3 minutes. Simple, tasty, but kind of a pain.

For Christmas, my mom gave us a Stir Crazy

popcorn popper. I love it! Instead of me jiggling the popcorn around, there's a metal stick that does it for me. And there's no need to get out the aluminum foil or my Nomex gloves or anything else. There's even a place at the top where you put your butter.

The steam escaping from the popcorn melts the butter. The melted butter drips into the bowl and spreads evenly around all the popcorn. So you no longer have to have sections of dry popcorn and sections of wilted, butter-saturated popcorn. I believe that I will never eat popcorn in my house again that does not come out of a Stir Crazy.

Want to know another reason why the Stir Crazy is so cool? Each week, I roast coffee beans for Mrs. BigKat. My coffee roasting method is really quite similar to my old popcorn popping method. Except instead of jiggling the bowl, I stir the beans with a stick. And instead of doing it on a stove, I use a heat gun. And during the winter, instead of hanging out inside a nice warm house, I will have to sit outside freezing my bottom off for 15 minutes. Well, if the Stir Crazy can help me make popcorn, do you think it can help me roast coffee? Apparently so!

Some people have taken a Stir Crazy and combine it with a Turbo Oven (a small 'As Seen On TV', Set-It-And-Forget-It style convection oven) and made a home roasting rig out of it. The Stir Crazy stirs the beans and the Turbo Oven provides the heat (I believe that most people disconnect the Stir Crazy heating element). And from what I've seen, it seems to work pretty well! Now, I'm certainly not going to dismantle my new favorite popcorn popper, just to make coffee roasting easier. So my next job is to scour some thrift stores and see if I can find these 2 units for cheap. Then my days of sitting in out in the cold rain, huddled over warm bowl of coffee beans, while stirring like a madman will be over.

If you want to see a video of the Stir Crazy/Turbo Oven (or the SCTO to coffee geeks), you can check one out here. Notice his awesome cooling rig too. That's next on my list...

World's Record

2009-12-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

LilKat1 and I were at Costco looking at the books. LilKat1 found a book about World's Records. He found some interesting things like a guy that set the record for putting on the most t-shirts at one time. He saw the High School Musical kids who apparently had the World's Fastest selling soundtrack album. Then he came to a picture of Britney Spears. He looks at it for a second and says, "Dad...is this the record for the World's Smallest Shirt?"

Advent

2009-12-10T17:18:00.000-08:00

Wow...it's been busy around here lately. I started a new basketball clinic for kids at our church. It's kind of a pilot program right now. It's a small 4 week session made up of kids from my Sunday School class and around the neighborhood. In January, I'm planning on doing a larger session that's open to everyone else. So that's one thing keeping us busy. But we've also got ADVENT!

A couple of Christmas's ago, we started doing a new thing where we give our kids almost all of their Christmas presents before Christmas. The idea is that getting the presents out of the way will make it easier for us to truly celebrate Jesus' birthday. And it's been working great for the past 2 years! I like it because less importance is placed on the presents. The kids like it because they get their presents early. (Mrs. BigKat is not as thrilled about the new system as I am, but she does see the need for it and enjoys the fact that it's working so well.)

Anyhow, at church, they asked us, as a family, to light the Advent candle this Sunday. And my job is to tell about our family traditions that help us keep Jesus as the focus of Christmas. Now everyone at church will get to hear about my crazy idea!

There's another Advent activity that LilKat1 and I are doing. It's actually something that I'm doing with my Sunday School class. We're doing an Advent Calendar, but it's a little different than your normal Advent calendar. You know the calendars where you open up the doors and eat the little chocolates (or get Legos or whatever)? Well, instead of getting things, we're giving things. Each day leading up to Christmas, we're giving a gift of service to Jesus. On our calendar, we write down something we can do to share God's love with someone else for each day of the month. Then, as we give our gifts of service, we draw hearts around whatever day it is to mark down what we did. For example, one day LilKat1 spent some time with his sister playing her favorite game. Another day, he emailed his favorite Bible verse to his grandmother. Another time, he helped make cookies, which we sold to help raise money to buy blankets for poor people in India to help them stay warm during the winter. So on Sunday, I'll be able to talk about our Advent Calendar too!

Here's a little video I made for my Sunday School class to illustrate the idea:

Sunday School Video #2

2009-11-17T10:46:00.001-08:00

This is the video I did this week for Sunday School. The kids enjoyed this one quite a bit. I enjoy these videos because they are reminiscent of the puppet shows that I used to do in class. Those puppet shows were great. The kids LOVED them. Even the grownups liked them. Our youth pastor would actually try to make time to be in our class when we were doing the puppet shows so that he could watch. They were one of the main highlights of the class.

But then my puppet show partner went to a different class, and I couldn't do them anymore with her. Mrs. BigKat filled in and did them with me for a year after that. But then she started helping out with the littler kids. I didn't have a partner anymore, so we had no more puppet shows.

For the past couple of years, I've been trying to think of a way to bring them back. I remembered a friend of mine doing a video for a class in high school using his GI Joes and Star Wars figures. I figured that with my new Vado, it would be fairly easy to get a set of toy-based videos like that done. I'm hoping that I can put these out every week or two for the kids. Now that soccer season is over, I have a bit more free time (and energy) to do stuff like this.

Here's the video:

Sunday School Video

2009-11-08T07:54:00.000-08:00

Today at Sunday School, I'm teaching about Joseph. We're learning about how, no matter what happened to Joseph, God was with him. Even though Joseph went through all sorts of bad times, God was able to use them for His good purposes. To help illustrate how God can make great things happen from our bad situations, I made a little video using some of LilKat1's toys. I'm showing it in class this morning. I hope the kids like it!

Here it is:

You want a What?

2009-11-05T15:39:00.001-08:00

This conversation just happened at our house:

LilKat1: Mom, I want a French bagel.

Mrs. BigKat: A what?

LilKat1: A French bagel!

Mrs. BigKat: What’s that?

LilKat1: (thinking)

LilKat1: AAAAA! I mean an English muffin!

Turducken 2.0

2009-10-12T15:54:00.001-07:00

Just saw this link. When a regular turducken isn't enough, now you can get your turducken stuffed inside a pig. Sounds like a good idea, but I'm actually waiting for the next version when they stick the pig turducken into a cow.

Black is Positive

2009-10-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

I was leaving the parking lot after LilKat2's soccer game today, when an African-American guy asked me if I could help jump start his car. I parked my truck next to his car and popped open my hood. He hooked one end of the jumper cables up to his car and handed me the other end. Then he said:

Ok, red is positive, black is negative...well, black is really positive...but you know...society...

I thought it was pretty funny. But he felt he had to tell me that black was really negative a couple of times, just in case I didn't understand his joke and tried to put the cables in the wrong place.

Box Tops

2009-10-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

This week at school, LilKat2 learned that if his class collects the most 'Box Tops', then they'll get to have a party. Well, I don't know if his teacher told him that they're having the party at Disneyland or that maybe that Boba Fett's going to show up with an ice cream cake. But whatever it was she said...it worked. LilKat2 is a highly motivated little boy when it comes to Box Tops.

Yesterday, he was searching through cupboards, pulling out boxes of cereal, scanning the tops and bottoms of anything cardboard and rectangular for the pink Box Top picture. When I came downstairs, I saw him holding a huge pair of kitchen scissors, wearing a very determined look on his face, about to carve off the bottom of a full box of Kleenex.

Here's the conversation we ended up having:

Me: LilKat2, you aren't allowed to cut open that box. There's stuff in there.

LilKat2: But my teacher says we need Box Tops. We need to get the most so we can have a party.

Me: But there's stuff in the box.

LilKat2: But we need them.

Me: But you can't cut it open. We need it to hold the stuff.

LilKat2: But we need them.

Me: Besides, you aren't even allowed to use those big scissors.

LilKat2: But we need them.

(and so on)

He is a boy on a mission. I am fully expecting to find little rectangular holes in any box in our pantry from now until June.

New Goals

2009-10-01T08:47:00.001-07:00

Remember back here, when I talked about the 6th grade girl who could beat me in a 400? Well, I saw her this Sunday. She's now in 7th grade, and I asked her if she's gotten any faster. She informed me that she can run a 6 minute mile.

Ugh...

Well, I've decided that the 6 minute mile is now my new goal. I gave it a shot this morning to see where I stood. It was good running weather, not too cold. Just nice and crisp. I did a mile warmup to get myself ready and then took off.

Within the first 100 meters, I knew that I was in trouble. I figured I was running close to a 6 minute pace, but I could feel my legs already starting to get mad at me. At half a mile, I was starting to get pretty tired. At around the 3/4 mark, I noticed that I was breathing really had and had slowed down considerably. I picked up my pace as much as I could so that I could finish strong. My final time:

6:56...

I have a lot of work to do...which is actually fine by me. Having silly goals like this makes my running a lot more fun.

School Bus II

2009-09-24T16:21:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote about how fun LilKat1's school bus is. Turns out, it's even more fun that I thought it was.

Every once in a while on a Friday, the bus driver will declare that it's 'Jelly Bean Friday'. Know what that means? Jelly beans for everyone! You don't even get stuff like that on airplanes!

Our bus driver is also good about making sure kids cross the street correctly. If they cross without looking, he'll make them go back and do it again. Back when I was a kid, I don't think the bus driver cared if you got home. As long as you got off the bus, that was good enough for her.

Our bus driver has also changed our designated stop so that it's closer to our house. Our stop is supposed to be down at the corner of our street (about 50 yards away). But since LilKat1 and LilKat2 are the only ones to get picked up at our stop, the bus driver will just stop wherever we happen to be standing. Over the past few days, LilKat1 and I have tried standing closer and closer to our house to see how far he'll go away from the designated stop. Today, we stood right at the edge of our next door neighbor's house and, sure enough, the bus stopped right in front of us. When I was a kid, I think our mean bus lady would probably have done the opposite and driven around the corner and made us run to catch up with her.

And here's the most recent cool thing that has happened with our bus driver. LilKat1 and I were standing at the bus stop, when we saw the bus come around the corner and pick up some kids down the street. I heard him saying something to them over his speaker, but couldn't quite make it out. When the bus come over and pulled up in front of us, I noticed that there were no kids in the bus. LilKat1 got on and started walking to the back. Right as he got to the middle of the bus, all of the kids jumped up and once and said 'HAHHHHHHHHH!' Oh, that was too funny! It really made me laugh.

Then, LilKat1 quickly hopped into his seat and joined the others in getting ready to surprise the kids at the next stop.

When LilKat1 go home, I found out that they did this at all of the stops. Some of the stops were better than others (they said 'HAAHHHHHHHH!' a bit too early at a couple of places). But it sounded like a very fun time.

You know, it's too bad that they don't do stuff like this on regular buses and trains. I think that public transportation in general would be more popular if they did.

Phone Fishing II

2009-09-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

Remeber my Phone Fishing story? Well, I got a good one today! FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES!

Know what worked for me? Everytime I heard her start to say something, I said 'Hang on a minute! I'm almost done!' I think I must've said that about 10 times.

Hopefully, I'll be able to break the 5 minute barrier at some point!

New Logos

2009-09-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to finishing the boys' soccer team logos. Here's LilKat1's logo. His team is the Bakugan Battle Blazer Penguins:

LilKat1 liked this logo. First of all, it has one of his favorite Bakugan's on it. And second the penguin is in his Super Mario Smash Bros. game, so he works for both 'Battle' and 'Penguin'.

Here's the logo for LilKat2's team:

Ok, this one was kind of funny. The boys didn't know what to make of it. First of all, LilKat1 told me that the firecracker wasn't a firecracker. It was a bomb. And they couldn't figure out where the coyote was.

Our conversation went something like this:

Them: Dad, who's that guy in the picture?

Me: Who's the guy?!?!?!?! That's the Coyote!

Them: That's not a coyote.

Me: Of course it is! That's the Coyote! Wile E. Coyote!

(puzzled stares)

LilKat1: He looks like a rabbit.

So of course I had to fire up YouTube and find a RoadRunner cartoon for them to watch. So now they know who the Coyote is. Kids these days...

Vado HD

2009-08-20T14:38:00.001-07:00

A little while ago, I saw the Creative Vado HD go on sale for $99, so I picked one up. It's a compact video camera that fits in your pocket and records HD video. I've been wanting something like this to carry around with me when I'm out with the kids. I don't always want to lug around my standard video camera when we go to the park or the beach or the zoo. I want to be able to capture all the fun, cute, spontaneous kid moments that pop up all the time and be able to easily share them with my friends and family.

I knew there would be a couple of downsides. First of all, there's no image stabilization, so if you don't hold your hand steady, things can get a little shaky. Another downside is that there's no zoom. I considered waiting to see if the price would drop on something like the Canon Powershot 780IS (a fancy point and shoot camera that does HD video and has image stabilization). But since my main priority was to get something that was super-easy to shoot and share video with (and pay under $100), the Vado HD won out.

Turns out it works quite well! The video quality is quite nice, better than my old (non-HD) camcorder. The image stabilization isn't too big of a problem since I'm just taking family movies. I like being able to plug the Vado into the HDMI port on our tv and watch videos right away. And the software installed on the Vado for uploading to Youtube and Photobucket is very convenient.

Here's a video that I made while playing around with it. It's a tour of my home office and boardgame collection.

In the Toy Aisle

2009-08-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

I was at Target the other day looking around the toy aisle. A mom and her sons were near me. They were buying a birthday present for someone and were having a hard time picking it out. It was pretty funny to watch. Some of the stuff was funny because it's stuff that I've said many times in the past when picking out presents, but some of the stuff was brand new. Here are a few of the highlights...

Mom: Now remember...we're not picking out something for you. We're picking out something for Brandon...

Boy 1: We HAVE to get THIS! He needs THIS!

Mom: Does he even like G.I. Joe?

Boy 1: What's G.I. Joe?

Mom: Ummm...that thing in your hand...

(Boys are trying to decide on which Transformer to get their friend)

Boy 1: Oh, we should buy this one!

Boy 2: No...we can't get him that one...That's from the OLD Testament.

(Boys can't decide on which Transformer to get. Boy 1 wants Transformer A. Boy 2 wants Transformer B. So Mom comes up with a brilliant idea.)

Mom: Ok, I'm putting these both behind my back. And whichever one gets picked, that'll be the one we get. And no complaining!

Boy 1 (pointing to his mom's left arm): THAT ONE!

(Mom looks at box...it's Transformer A. Boy 1 is very pleased...)

Mom: You were peeking! That's why you chose that one!

(Mom not sure about what to do...)

Mom: Fine, I'm just going to pick one.

The Donut Store

2009-08-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Our church does not have a fellowship hall. After church, if you want to hang out and talk with your friends, there really isn't a great place to do that. There is an area right outside the main room that people just kind of stand in if they want to talk. But it's not very wide and if you hang out in one place, you basically get in everyone else's way.

For the past few summers, I've been suggesting that they take some tables and chairs and put them outside on the patio. That way people can sit outside and have a comfortable place to chat. Unfortunately, I no one's listened to me because it's never happened.

Well, the other week, Mrs. BigKat and I decided to make it happen. Not only that, but we also made it into a cool service project for kids! As a parent, I know how hard it is to find good service opportunities for young kids, so part of what I do as a Sunday School teacher is to come up with creative ways to get the kids involved in ministry. Last winter, our Sunday School class found out about a need in India. There are families there who have no doors on their houses and no blankets to protect them from the cold in the winter. So our class raised money during February to help provide blankets for them. I had planned on having my class do another 'Blanket Month' project in September. But we saw a great opportunity to have the kids get it kick started in August. That led to the creation of...

THE SUNDAY SCHOOL DONUT STORE!!!

Here's the plan. Each Sunday in August, between 1st and 2nd service, our kids will run a Donut Store in front of the church. We'll have tables and chairs so that people can have a comfortable place to relax and enjoy donuts with their friends. There are a bunch of different jobs for the kids: making signs, creating table decorations, passing out flyers, serving lemonade, collecting money. The donuts cost a dollar each, and the money will go towards buying blankets for families in India. So not only do our kids get a chance to help out people who need help, but our congregation gets a place for people to socialize after church.

Last week was our first Sunday. I wasn't sure at all how many donuts to buy. At first, I was going to go with 3 dozen. But we decided to bump it up to 4 dozen. We had considered 5 dozen, but really didn't want to be stuck with any leftover donuts, so we just stuck with 4.

Turns out we really didn't have to worry about leftovers! After first service, people started lining up at the Donut Store. And I mean EVERYONE! The 4 dozen donuts were gone in a couple of minutes, and there was still a line going into the parking lot. And people were very generous. Our 4 dozen donuts led to $128 in donations. That's 25 blankets! Next week, we've decided to bump it up to 15 dozen and see how that works.

I think this will be a great illustration for the kids to show that God can use anyone for ministry. When we're helping others in Jesus' name, God can do amazing things through us. We might be limited, but He is not. I am very excited to see how the next four Sundays go!

Fixed

2009-07-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

This is a great idea. Next time our house needs fixing, I'm raiding the boys' Lego bins...

You can see more pictures here.

Pizza Videos

2009-07-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

I think we're having pizza night on Friday. Seems like a good opportunity to try to beat this guy's record:

I also saw this video. Nice to know that if I ever get lost in the woods, I'll be able to survive on pizza instead of having to eat bugs or something.

Get Clean...FAST!

2009-07-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

I pride myself on being able to take fast showers. I think showers take up too much time, especially if your exercise routine or yardwork or whatever has you taking multiple showers a day. I realize that people need to take them in order to not be stinky, but each minute wasted in the shower is a minute that you could've been doing something else, like playing boardgames or eating fudgsicles or learning how to whistle by putting your fingers in your mouth (something I've recently been trying, unsuccessfully, to master).

Here are some tips to help you minimize your time in the shower so that you can have more time for doing fun stuff:

The most important thing is to stay focused. Your goal is to get in and out as quickly as possible. No wasted movements. You need to be efficient. (But at the same time, don't cut any corners. You still need to get clean!)
Those poofy sponge things may look like they're for girls, but they will definitely get you clean faster. Yeah, your friends might make fun of you. But you know what? They're the ones wasting their precious minutes with inefficient washcloths or whatever else they're using. I figure that over the course of a year, your time saved using the poofy sponge will have allowed you to have mixed and drank at least 300 glasses of chocolate milk more than your slow friends. Who's laughing now?
You need to figure out the right amount of shower gel to use. Using too little is a huge mistake. Having to reopen the bottle and squeeze out more soap is a big time waster. Better to use a little more than you think you'll need. Don't use too much though, because you'll end up wasting time at the end wringing the excess soap out of your sponge.
Keep your hair as short as possible. Shave your head if you can (this will also save you money, since you can do it yourself without having to go to the barber). Less hair on your head means less hair to clean, and less soap to rinse out. Most importantly, it takes less time to dry.
A shower gel that says 'For Hair and Body' will make it so that you only have to open and squeeze one bottle. Definitely a good investment.
Make sure your water temperature is a little too hot or a little too cold for your liking. This will help prevent you from wanting to hang out in the shower.
If you have glass windows on your shower, you'll need to wipe them down. I use a squeegee thing with the following technique: Bend your arms and/or back so that your shoulder is positioned midway between the top and bottom of the window. Unless you have an unusually tall shower door, this should allow you to clean the window with up and down arm movements only (moving your back or legs will slow you down. Arm movements are much quicker.). Start on one side and use a shuffle-step to move on as you wipe off each section.
For clothes, t-shirts and baggy basketball shorts are by far the fastest clothes to put on. I try and stick with those exclusively. And try to get socks that aren't too tight. Remember, getting dressed is part of the deal too. You don't want to waste any time here either.

Now, you might be a little skeptical. You might be thinking to yourself, can I really save that much time doing these things? Well, let's see...how long do you normally take in the shower each day? 15 minutes? 20 minutes? A half hour?

Well, yesterday, I used my stopwatch and timed myself. I was able to get cleaned AND dressed in 3 minutes 59.31 seconds. Clean and dressed in under 4 minutes!

While you were wasting a half an hour with your bar soap and your washcloths and your singing and your separate bottle of shampoo and your just right temperature water and your shirt with buttons, I was able to get cleaned, dressed, eat a bowl of cereal, and watch a whole episode of Happy Days.

See? I knew you'd begin to see it my way. And don't worry. With the right focus, the right tools, and a little practice, you too could be a Sub-Four Minute Showerer. Good luck!

..and NEW World's Champion

2009-07-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

To start off, I have to give a little background...

About a month or two ago, I had a 6th grade helper, E, in my Sunday School class (the sister of one of my 1st graders, S). We were at the part of class where the kids tell me interesting things that they've done during the week. S told me that his sister won 1st place in the 400 at a track meet. I asked her what her time was and she said that she ran a 1:09.

I wondered if I could run a 1:09 too. I used to run track, but I hadn't done any middle distance in a looooong time. Well, the following Monday, I went to the track to see how I would do. I figured if a 6th grade girl could run a 1:09, surely I could run something close to that.

WRONG!

I ran my lap and clocked in at a very unblistering 1:25. I was glad that E wasn't there racing against me because it would've been embarrassing. As it was, it probably just looked to everyone like I was doing a slow warm up lap. (Oh, by the way, E was very encouraging to me. I told her that I had run a 1:25 and she said 'That's not so bad! I have a friend who ran a 1:23!' I asked her what grade her friend was in, and she replied 'Fifth'. Great...)

I decided that I was going to start training to beat 1:09 so that I would no longer be slower than a 6th grade girl. I started doing interval training during the week instead of my normal slow jog. My workout was a mile and a half warmup followed by a couple of 400's and a couple of 300's (or 200's if I was too tired).

It didn't take long to see the results. Within a week, I was down to 1:13. The next week, it was down to 1:11. And finally...a 1:09!

I saw E at church and proudly told her that I had tied her time. She told me that that was really good! She also informed me that her other friend (also a 6th grader) ran a 1:07!

yay...

Ok, so now I had a new goal. But it wasn't so bad. I got my 1:07 just last Friday!

I think that I can now safely say that I am faster than all 6th grade girls in the entire world (doesn't count if their last name is Bolt, Lewis, Devers, or Joyner-Kersey).

Oh yeah, and that thing about the NEW World's Champion? Well, running my 400's has also helped speed up my one and a half mile warmup time. It used to take my a little over 12 minutes to run it. Today, I clocked in at 10:47! My own personal best! It seemed pretty fast, so I looked up what the Track and Field World's Record is for the mile and a half. Turns out there isn't any! There's records for the 1500, mile, 2000, and 3000. But no mile and a half. I must be the first, so I guess that makes me that Champ. I just need to figure out who to email my time to at the US Track & Field Association, so that they can update their World's Record page.

Phone Fishing

2009-06-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

People don't usually think of telemarketer calls as fun, but you know what? They can be. Today, I got a call and decided to find out how long I could keep them on the phone for. They asked for me and I told them that I would go get 'him'. I set the phone down and started the clock. While they were waiting, I would say something every once in a while to keep them on as long as possible. You know, kind of like trying to catch a big fish: They start to hang up...and then ('Yeah, it's for you!'), you reel them in a bit...then they start to hang up again...and then ('I think they're still there, just pick up the phone!'), you reel them in a bit.

Unfortunately, they gave up sooner than I was hoping.

Final score...3 minutes, 30 seconds. I'll see if I can beat that score next time.

Fooled

2009-06-22T16:20:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting all day for the UPS guy to come. He's got a case of my new favorite-boardgame-that-I've-never-played-before-but-I've-read-about-it-and-it-looks-really-cool Monsterpocalypse (or MonPoc as the cool kids call it). I ordered it last week and have been not very patiently waiting.

Well, a little while ago, I heard the knock at the door. My wait was over! The UPS man was here to hand over my box full of plastic dinosaurs, robots, aliens, and other monsters ready to do battle on a paper map amongst tiny plastic buildings. I flew out of my chair, tossed open my office door, avoided plowing over Mrs. BigKat in the hall, and sprinted down the stairs, all in about 4.5 seconds (seriously! If it took me any more than that, I'd be surprised).

I got to the front door only to find...LilKat1 tapping on the door with a big smile on his face.

Grinning at me from ear to ear, he says 'It was me!'

So now I'm back upstairs...waiting...

Too Late

2009-05-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

I just saw a video of this dice rolling machine:

It's 7 feet tall and can roll 1.3 million dice per day. It has a computer that takes images of the dice to figure out what was rolled.

My birthday was last Sunday. I'm a little sad because if I had seen the video sooner, I could've asked for one. But now it's too late...

My Birthday

2009-05-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

My birthday was last Sunday, so we had a nice long birthday weekend. Here are the highlights:

Saturday

Took the whole family out for a round of frisbee golf. There's this elementary school not too far away that has its own frisbee golf course on it. It ended up being perfect because the holes weren't too far away from each other, so the kids had an easier time with it. And the whole place is fenced in, so we didn't have to worry about PrincessKat running away somewhere.

Mrs. BigKat took LilKat1 shopping, so I was able to have some time with LilKat2 playing boardgames. I showed him a couple that he'd never played before: DVONN and Carcassonne: The Castle. I thought he might be a little young for them, but he caught on to the rules for both of them quite easily. He actually thumped me pretty good on Carcassonne. I think the final score was 101-38. Sure, I helped him a bit on his turns, but he really did quite well for himself.

Sunday

I taught Sunday School. It was my last regular class of the year! Next week, we're having an in-class celebration. And the following week, we're having awards and games. After that, it's summer. I'm a little sad to see all of my 2nd graders 'graduating' out of my class!

After lunch, I got to open my presents. I got a bunch of cool stuff! First, I got a whole bunch of boardgames:

Yspahan - I've been wanting this for a long time. A fairly quick, family oriented boardgame that uses dice in an interesting way. The rules are pretty simple, but there are a few different ways to score points, which I like.

Powerboats - A fast paced boat racing game with a modular board. Mrs. BigKat and I tried it out right away. It's quite fun. The interesting blue 3 sided dice that it comes with are quite cool. I'm looking forward to showing it to the boys.

Jamaica - Another racing game, but this time it's pirate ships. I still have to read the rules, but it looks like something that will be fun for grownups and kids to play together.

Stratego - Did you know that there's a revised version of Stratego? I showed LilKat1 how to play the original version a while ago, and we had fun with it. He bought me the revised version. In this one, all of the pieces have their own special abilities. Can't wait to try it out!

I also got a big pile of candy. Did you know that they made chewy lemonheads? They're really good! And they come with apple, grape, orange, and cherry too. They're called something like Sour Chewy Lemonheads AND FRIENDS. The only problem was the PrincessKat got ahold of them, put a whole bunch in her mouth, decided they were too sour, and spit them on the carpet, leaving a kind of rainbow colored shotgun blast of candy stains on the carpet.

In the afternoon, I got to cook. I made paella! I was going to make it with chicken and linguica. But I don't know how to get the chicken to be done at the same time as the rice. So I cheated and made the chicken separately on the grill (using my new favorite chicken grilling technique that I saw in last month's Cook's Illustrated). The paella turned out pretty good, but not perfect. The flavor was great, but some of the rice was undercooked. But I still got to spend the whole afternoon cooking and grilling, which is fun for me.

I did take one break from cooking. The ice cream man came by and LilKat1 bought himself a missile pop with is own money. LilKat2 felt left out, so I grabbed my wallet and chased the ice cream man down the street. Just like when I was a kid!

That evening my mom and My-Friend-Who-Lies (MFWL) and his wife (MFWLW) came over. After the kids went to bed, we all played a couple of games of Cash 'n Guns. It's an absolutely silly game where you're a bunch of gangsters trying to split up the money that you got from robbing a bank by threatening each other with orange foam pistols. I lost pretty bad at this game. And it's quite possible that I will never win at this game. It turns out that everyone likes to shoot me with orange foam pistols. I don't know why. But even though I lost, it was still a lot of fun.

I think the best part, though was when Mrs. BigKat said that she would never let the kids see this game. After all it uses real foam pistols!

REAL...FOAM...PISTOLS!

Ok...I should probably stop making fun of my wife now...

But REAL FOAM PISTOLS! It just makes me smile everytime I think about it.

Oh yeah, MFWL also got me the expansion for Galaxy Trucker, bringing my birthday boardgame total up to FIVE!

The next day was good too. Got to beat MFWL in a round of 18 holes of frisbee golf (although he did lose Mrs. BigKat's frisbee by throwing it over a barbed wire fence...that wasn't so good). I also got to spend some fun time with LilKat1 shopping for Star Wars legos. And I bought myself a small game: Hula Hippos! I'm definitely going to have to make a video for that one.

Kobe

2009-05-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't been able to watch many of the NBA playoff games this year because we don't get ESPN or TNT. But I was able to 'see' the game on the computer last night (and by 'see', I mean taking a break from cleaning the bathroom, going to the computer, and clicking refresh on the Yahoo Sports page).

After the game, I went to tell Mrs. BigKat that the Nuggets beat the Lakers. Her response?

'That's good, right?'

I wasn't sure what to say. It was a bit startling. I immediately tried to think of some other situations where something similar might have happened...

Luke: Hey C3PO! It worked! We blew up the Death Star!
C3PO: That's good, right?

or maybe...

Penny: Uncle Gadget! We finally captured Dr. Claw!
Inspector Gadget: That's good, right?

or possibly...

Aquaman: Superman! It worked! We got him to say kltpzyxm!
Superman: That's good, right?

Well, the only thing I could come up with was...

Ummm...it's KOBE!

Which apparently was good enough for her.

Pants

2009-05-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

I rarely wear pants. Working from home, I can wear whatever I want, so it's always shorts for me. In fact, I can't actually remember the last time I wore pants somewhere. My guess is that it was a wedding or something.

Anyhow, I have to go on a business trip tomorrow for a boring conference. Which means I have to wear pants. I went into my closet to look for some and I only had 2 pair. And guess what! They didn't even come close to fitting! Hard for me to believe that I was once that skinny.

I went to Costco today and picked up a pair of new pants. It was the first time I've bought a new pair of pants in...ok, I really can't remember that one. If I had to take a guess, I would say it's been at least 10 years. I can't think of a time when I've purchased pants since I've been married.

I must say though that I think these pants were a great purchase. I put them on and not only did they fit...but they have an elastic thing that stretches out if you get too fat! I figure I can put on an extra 20 pounds and still be able to fit in these pants!

I'm never going to have to buy another pair of pants for the rest of my life!

TracBall

2009-05-15T16:48:00.000-07:00

I found my old TracBall set in a closet the other day. LilKat2 immediately asked me what 'that tennis thing' was. I told him that it was a game that I used to play when I was little and that we could go to the park and try it out sometime when the weather was nice.

Well, today was the first sunny day in a while, so at lunch, LilKat2 asked if I could take him to the park to play the tennis game (I couldn't remember what he was talking about at first, but Mrs. BigKat reminded me).

It was a lot of fun! Turns out TracBall is great for playing catch with small kids! It took LilKat2 a little while to figure it out (most of his first few throws went backwards. Many went straight sideways.), but once he got it, he could throw the ball quite far. He could also catch the ball pretty well too.

Compare this to when we throw the football around. The TracBall rackets allow him to fling the ball much farther than he can throw a football. And because they impart a backspin, the TracBall floats a bit, making it easier for me to chase his throws down when they're off to the side. He can also catch the TracBall easier than he can catch a football. All he has to do is reach his racket out and get the ball to hit it somewhere. And since the racket is so big, he can catch balls that go over his head (something he can't do with a football). I can even whip the ball at him with a pretty good pace. He just sticks his racket out and watches the ball slide down into the pocket (the only thing I have to worry about is keeping it away from his face. I imagine getting popped with one of those hard plastic balls would sting).

I think LilKat2 really liked that he could throw the ball far and that he could catch the ball when I threw it normally (I could zip it in there from far away, instead of having to get close and throw it soft at him). I think it made him feel a little bit bigger.

So if you're clearing out your garage and find an old set, try them out with your kids! You might be surprised at how much fun you guys have!

Overcoming Evil with Good

2009-05-12T00:55:00.000-07:00

The boys are doing Spring Soccer right now. It's basically a soccer clinic that the boys go to every Monday. They do games and drills and learn new soccer skills.

At the last practice, LilKat1 had an interesting incident. During the middle of a drill, another boy came up to him and took his ball. Obviously this didn't make LilKat1 very happy. I was wondering what he would do. First, he asked the boy for his ball back. The boy said no. I was wondering if he would try to forcefully take the ball back from the other kid (it's what I would've done when I was little). But instead, he started looking around the field. It took him a few seconds, but he spotted whatever it was he was looking for and quickly made a beeline for it. He had found 2 soccer balls sitting together. He ran over, picked them up, and raced back to the boy that took his ball. He told the boy that he would give him both balls in exchange for his own ball. The other boy, being greedy, enthusiastically took the deal. LilKat1 was happy that he had his ball, and the other boy was happy that he had 2 balls instead of one.

Immediately, a Bible verse popped into my head:

"If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:20-21

The funny part was that the other boy didn't even get to keep his extra balls (he had actually ended up with 3 because he grabbed another one as well). The coach took all of the extra balls from the kids who had more than one and gave them to kids that didn't have any.

Ok, so maybe it's not like burning coals on his head. And maybe what LilKat1 did was more outsmarting the kid, rather than an act of kindness. but I still thought it was funny.

I was also proud of my son for making a good choice. Like I said, if that was me as a boy, I definitely would've grabbed the ball away from the kid and probably got into an argument or fight. I told LilKat1 that I was proud of him for not making a bad choice like I would've made. That little boy continues to amaze me with the stuff his wonderful brain comes up with.

Science Fair

2009-05-04T09:29:00.001-07:00

Way back before Spring Break, we found out that LilKat1’s school was having a Science Fair and that students from K-5 were welcome to submit projects. I have always looked forward to helping my kids with Science Fair projects. I remember learning how to make electric motors for my project when I was young and having a great time. But I was in 7th grade! I had no idea that people had Science Fairs for 1st grade and younger.

Well, I thought that it would be a fun thing for me and LilKat1 to do together, so I encouraged him to sign up for it. The first thing we needed was a good age-appropriate project. We tried to think of something that he could do himself. We got an idea from an episode of Curious George. We decided to use our Science Fair project to find out what worms liked. LilKat1 named the project ‘Fascinating Worms’.

Here’s how we did it:

First, we needed some worms. So we went to the worm store and got some:

Next, we gathered up a bunch of materials that we thought worms might like. We had soil, mud, hay, cedar chips, pine bits, coffee grounds, styrofoam packing peanuts, cereal, and easter grass.

Then LilKat1 picked out 4 of the materials and put them into a container like this:

Next, we put a bunch of worms in the middle of the materials like this:

Then we waited while the worms figured out where they wanted to go. When the worms were happy in their new spots, we pulled them out of each section and counted them. LilKat1 used a notebook to record how many worms we found in each material.

We did a total of 4 experiments. Here are pictures of the others:

After our experimenting was done, we had to make our display. I think this part actually took longer than the experimenting! We spent a good 3 evenings of cutting and gluing. I thought LilKat1 might start to get tired of working on his project. But he really liked seeing his experiments come to life on the display that we were creating. We actually had a lot of fun making it.

Here’s the display at the Science Fair:

Here is the raw data that he recorded from the experiments:

Here is a table showing how he interpreted the data:

Each of the Science Fair projects was scored by a group of judges. Projects that scored high enough received a Science Star award. We must’ve done a pretty good job because we got one!

It was a little difficult thinking of a good age appropriate project, but I think we picked a pretty good one. One cool thing was that we (me included) actually found out things that we didn’t know before. Did you know that worms liked styrofoam more than coffee grounds? I didn’t! But most of all, it was a very fun thing to do with my son. In fact, on the Scientist Question and Answer section, I asked LilKat1 what his favorite thing about the project was, and his answer was ‘Being with Dad’.

Secret Missions

2009-04-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, I was trying to come up with a good way to teach my Sunday School kids about Matthew 28:19-20, the Great Commission:

So you must go and make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you. And you can be sure that I am always with you, to the very end.

I wanted a good 'hook' to get their attention, and immediately thought of 'Secret Missions'. I thought it would be perfect. I figured all kids know about Secret Missions. I showed a couple of old Inspector Gadget clips to give an illustration of a Secret Mission (most of the kids had never heard of Inspector Gadget...they loved it).

I then posed the question 'What if God gave you a Secret Mission?' They decided that if God gave them a Secret Mission, they would do their best to follow it. That's when I introduced them to the Great Commission. I pointed out that it's not really a 'secret' mission since it's in the Bible and anyone who has a Bible can read it. But it was still a mission from Jesus to those who believe in Him.

Finally, for a craft, I had them make what appeared to be a standard Sunday School craft (a Cross). It looked like a paper cross made nice and pretty with colored paper glued to it. But in reality, it had a hidden panel with their Secret Mission, Matthew 28:19-20 printed inside. The colored paper served not only as a distraction to outside observers, but also helped camoflauge the hidden compartment. Whether or not they wanted to reveal the hidden contents of their craft was totally up to them. All of the kids had a great time with the craft. They loved that there was a secret compartment with their Secret Mission from God. I thought it was the perfect Sunday School lesson.

Until last night...

I got an email from a parent expressing their concern about the word 'secret'. They found the work to be very negative and don't use it in their house. They work as a therapist and mentioned that 'secret' is a word that sex offenders use with kids. They concluded by encouraging me to not use the term 'secret' anymore.

I had never really thought about this before, and spent a lot of last night trying to figure out what I thought of it. Here's what I've come up with so far:

First of all, a secret is basically another word for privileged information. It creates 2 groups: Group A, which has access to the privileged information, and Group B, which does not.

Why create a secret? Because the creator of the secret believes that if people in Group B had access to the privileged information, it could possibly create an undesired (to the creator of the secret) consequence.

In other words, it becomes an issue of trust: Group A is trusted, Group B is not.

Now I don't really believe that the concept of privileged information is bad. Obviously, you have things like passwords, bank account numbers, etc. that should be privileged information. As far as kids go, the idea of privileged information can be used for their protection.

I think that where things go wrong, like in the example of the sex offender, is when somone forces a child to choose to put their parents into Group B: the group that can not be trusted. So maybe the concept of privileged information is not bad. Maybe what makes a piece of privileged information bad is when a child is forced to break an absolute rule that is put in place for their protection (in this case, the rule being 'Always trust your parents').

To protect against this, perhaps it would be good to emphasize trust in the parent/kid relationship so that if a situation came up where a kid was asked to place their parents into Group B, their education and upbringing would force them to make a good choice and they would recognize why creating certain forms of privilged information is a bad idea.

Now, I'm not a therapist, and there's probably a lot of things that I'm not considering. But like I said, I've never thought of the idea of 'secrets' being something that should be excluded from the upbringing of our childrent and I'm trying to figure it out. The parent is quite passionate about their opinion on this, and I'd really like to find out if it has merit. I'd hate to teach something to my Sunday School kids that could potentially harm them.

Sick

2009-04-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Our family got hit with the flu a couple of weeks ago. It started with LilKat1. Then Mrs. BigKat. Then LilKat2 and PrincessKat. For a long time, I was the only one that was not sick. I was really hoping that it would pass me by.

It didn't.

I got hit with a fever last Wednesday. I missed a business trip down to California. But I thought it was early enough that I would be fine by Easter.

Well, Saturday night rolls around, and I'm still not feeling well. I was preparing my Powerpoint presentation when it suddenly hit me...what if I'm still contagious? If I'm still contagious, then I can't go to Sunday school! I did a little research, and it turns out that I was, in fact, still contagious. So we had to quickly switch gears. I ditched the Powerpoint and had to start working on a new lesson plan that my substitute, Mrs. BigKat, could teach (keep in mind that it was about 10pm by this point). Her Sunday School teaching style is much different than mine, so I had to come up with something that would fit her. First of all, I had her read about Jesus' resurrection from The Jesus Storybook Bible (which I consider to be the BEST storybook Bible out there). I also got some songs for her that the kids were familiar with that she could do with them. We have a video that has Jana Alarya performing her songs with all of the hand motions. I thought this would be a fun way for Mrs. BigKat to lead the singing portion. And I already had the crafts part all worked out. So a good chunk of the class was taken care of without too much difficulty.

But I also wanted the kids to hear about the significance of Easter. I wanted to explain to them about God's Plan of Salvation and about how the whole Bible is centered around Christ's death and resurrection. And I REALLY wanted to this part myself.

That's when I came up with my great idea...

I set up my webcam and made a short 7 minute video of myself that Mrs. BigKat played for the kids on the projector. It took me 4 or 5 takes, but it turned out pretty good! Some of the kids actually thought that I was talking to them from my home. I started out doing the 'Christ is risen!'-'He is risen indeed!' greeting, which they picked up on pretty quickly. I had them do it 4 times, encouraging them to get progressively louder (Mrs. BigKat said that they got pretty loud by the third time). It sounds like they were disappointed that I wasn't there, but they were happy that my wife was taking my place and that they were able to see me on the video.

I was glad that I was kinda-sorta able to be in class on Easter with the kids. I was quite disappointed when I realized that I wouldn't be able to go. We had been looking forward to our Easter class for a while now. I had purchased some special crafts for them and everything. But in the end, I think we did a pretty good job of taking a less-than-ideal situation and still making it special for the kids.

You know, this is really an interesting side effect of when I decided to create my own curriculum this year. I knew that creating all my own stuff was a big decision and would require a lot of extra effort. But I decided to just give it a try and see what happens. The funny thing is that now, when other ideas pop into my head, it's pretty easy to just give those a try as well. We did this for 'Blanket Month' where our our class raised $100 in February to help provide blankets for families in India. We did it when we redesigned how our Discipleship Journals worked (also known as D-Journal v2.0). We did this when we started using YouTube videos as a way to communicate important information to parents. And now, thanks to my webcam we're able to creatively minister to the kids on Easter, even though I was sick.

It might not be very traditional. It can sometimes take some extra effort. And it may not work out like I envision it. But for a Sunday School Geek like me, finding new, interesting ways to teach the Bible, disciple kids, and solve problems is a lot of fun. And most importantly, when I'm able to implement one of my goofy ideas, I feel like I'm using the gifts that God has given me and really putting them to use for His glory.

Escalator

2009-04-03T17:12:00.001-07:00

ummm...you're kind of going the wrong...

I mean...you're not actually supposed to go...

Nevermind...go ahead and do it your way...

Games for Date Night

2009-04-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

My wife and I go out on a 'Date Night' every week. It's something that we both look forward to quite a bit. Just some nice time for ourselves with no kids. One of the things that we like to do on Date Night is to go somewhere quiet and play a quick board game together. Here's a video I made that talks about some games that we like to play when we go out:

If you want to find out more about the games I talked about, here are some links for you:

Hive

Battle for Hill 218

Mystery Rummy: Jekyll & Hyde

Lost Cities

Glory to Rome

Race for the Galaxy

I'm sure that there are tons of other games that would be great for Date Night, or could be easily modified to bring on Date Night. I just wanted to throw this idea out there because it's something that both my wife and I have a lot of fun doing. Yeah, we play board games at home all the time. But for some reason, playing somewhere that's not your house every once in a while is just kind of fun!

Videos

2009-03-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

This is a cartoon made by a friend of mine from high school. It's called 'The Infinite Goliath'. It's about a super-powerful space villain that has been captured, paroled, and forced to live in the suburbs. I thought it was pretty funny:

Here's a clip of a deleted scene from the original Star Wars movie that I'd never seen. Too bad they didn't leave it in.

Mario Kart

2009-03-24T09:54:00.001-07:00

You know how much I love my children?

I love my children so much that I spent hours becoming a Mario Kart expert so that they could play on the 'hidden' courses. HOURS!

Now, I enjoy playing games with my kids. And they love Mario Kart. We have the old version for the Game Cube (actually belongs to My-Friend-Who-Lies who was kind enough to let us borrow it. I guess that somewhat makes up for him stealing my 'Great Escape' DVD). Every now and then, me, Mrs. BigKat, and the 2 LilKats will have some great 4 player races.

But I'm talking about playing by myself after the kids have gone to bed because LilKat1 has told me 'Dad...we REEEEAAAAAAALLLLLYYYYYY want to play on the new courses.' Me, by myself, sitting in front of the TV (on a tiny wooden kid chair) when there are perfectly good boardgames upstairs just begging to be played!

Now, it wasn't all by myself. I did play a bit with LilKat2 to try and unlock the courses. We played the 150cc Star course together during my lunch break a couple of times. I remember once, I was very close to coming in first place. Then, all of a sudden, right before the finish line, I got blown up by a flying shell. I said something like 'Aaaaargh! I had it, but then someone blasted me with a flying shell!'

To which LilKat2 replied: 'Oh! That was me Dad!'

So we had to try again...

Well, over the weekend, we finally unlocked the tracks (actually Mrs. BigKat got the final piece of the puzzle with a 1st place on the 100cc Star Course with LilKat2) and the boys have been enjoying the new courses (LilKat2 woke up at 5:30 yesterday to go play them).

As for me...I think it's going to be a long time before I have one of those Mario Kart by myself sessions again.

Well, until we get a Wii and they want me to unlock those courses too...

The BigKat Deck

2009-03-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

My wife and I just celebrated our 10 year anniversary (Yay!). I was trying to think of something creative to give her that would be fun for both of us. I had trouble thinking of anything good, and was about to give up. But then, I found out about a special deal on ArtsCow.com on custom made decks of cards. That led to...

The K-Deck!

The K-Deck allows you to play some of my favorite games, Lost Cities, Battle Line, and Tichu, all from one specially made deck of cards (actually 2 decks smashed together). It also functions as a standard deck of cards. But the best thing about the K-Deck is that all of the cards contain images of our family. For example...

This is what the 10's look like:

Here is an 8:

For Battle Line, here is one of the Tactics cards (used to be 'Fog' in the original game, I renamed it 'Mess'. The picture is from when LilKat2 dumped a whole box of Strawberry Quik on the floor and made sand castles out of it (Quik Castles?) ).

For Tichu, instead of 'The Hounds', we have 'The Cats':

And of course, the single most powerful card in Tichu...the Dragon:

I was quite pleased with how they turned out. Mrs. BigKat got a kick out of them too. On our date nights, we sometimes will go to a coffee shop or library after dinner and play a quick game of something. Now we can bring the K-Deck with us and enjoy a round of Battle Line, featuring our family!

I'm thinking of making another deck for Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, an out of print game that I'd like to play. But instead of being about Jack the Ripper, I'm going to re-theme it to a game of people in our family stealing desserts.

Even I have my limits

2009-03-16T00:19:00.000-07:00

So I own a bunch of boardgames. I have a room dedicated to boardgames. I own boardgames of many different kinds. I have purchased almost all of my boardgames without having seen (in person) or played them first. Sometimes, I'll buy a boardgame just because it seems like a good deal. I've even bought a boardgame knowing that it probably won't get played very much, but it might be a good idea to have for when the kids are older. I buy a lot of boardgames.

But even I have my limits...

I don't think I'm going to be getting this game anytime soon. It's a little too...silly. I didn't think that was possible, but, apparently, it is.

How'd I miss this?

2009-03-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

From Rick Reilly:

"Why is nobody talking about Antrel Rolle!" All he did was lose the Super Bowl for the Cardinals! Rolle, the Cardinals' safety, was on the sideline at the end of the first half when Steelers linebacker James Harrison intercepted Kurt Warner at the goal line and began his unthinkable 100-yard touchdown rumble. That was a 14-point swing for the Steelers and turned the game. But Cards' wide receiverLarry Fitzgerald was close to catching Harrison at the 30 when he ran smack into Rolle, who had stepped onto the field go get a good look at Harrison going past. Fitzgerald slammed into Rolle, pushed him out of the way, had to start over and didn't get to Harrison again until the goal line, when it was too late

Did this really happen? I've long since deleted the SuperBowl from my tivo, so I had to go to YouTube...

Wow...

Harrison barely made that touchdown. If Rolle stays off the field and Fitzgerald doesn't run into him...

CURSE YOU ANTREL ROLLE!!!

Prayers

2009-03-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

Wow, seems like a lot of people I know are needing prayer right now...

1) One of my Sunday School kids, B, is out in Philadelphia right now. He just had back surgery yesterday. If this surgery is successful, it may make it so that he does not have to have another more major surgery later on.

2) A friend of the family, H (9 years old), had to fly our to Utah last night. She's going to have open heart surgery on Wednesday.

3) My dad had pneumonia and ended up having surgery to drain fluid from his lungs on Sunday.

If you could take some time to pray for these guys, I think it would be great.

Crokinole

2009-03-02T09:34:00.001-08:00

Last month, I decided to order a custom made crokinole board. Yeah, it may seem strange to spend a lot of money on a handmade board for a game that I've never played before. But when you're addicted to boardgames like me, things like this are really not out of the ordinary.

There are a few differnent options for nice crokinole boards. I went with the Hilinski brothers. They're a couple of guys that enjoy making crokinole boards for people. Most places have a line of standard models that are all the same. The Hilinski's are interesting each board they make (with a few exceptions) is unique. You can check out their gallery to see some of the interesting boards that they've made.

Anyhow, after a month of waiting, I finally got the email that my board was done. I just sent in the payment, so the board should be in the mail very soon. It's called Chautauqua Here's a picture of it:

If you want to know how to play the game, here's a video that explains it:

Color Blind update

2009-03-02T08:14:00.001-08:00

By request of My-Friend-Who-Lies (MFWL), here are the pictures from the last post after processing them with the color blind software.

Like I said...U-G-L-Y!!!

Color Blind

2009-02-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

My Friend Who Lies (MFWL) is color blind. When we were in college, he would have me help him figure out what color clothes to put on his video game people (What color is this?...Blue...What color is this?...Brown...What color is this?...Red...What color is this?...Greenish Blue...What color is this?...Yellow...Ok! Now for the pants!). His sister numbered his clothes and made him a chart so that he would always know which pants went with which shirts.

So when I found out about this application, I thought of him. It's called Color Oracle, and it changes your computer screen so things look like how a color blind person would see them.

You know what's funny? MFWL's favorite teams are the San Francisco 49ers and the Portland Trailblazers, who both have red as one of their team colors. Take a look at these pictures using the app...U-G-L-Y!!!

Edit: These are the original pictures. For the color blind version, go here.

Ingenious

2009-02-17T09:27:00.000-08:00

Here's an introduction to another tile-laying game: Ingenious.

This is actually one of my favorite games. It's a great game to play with people who are new to boardgaming. I even taught my dad to play this!

It may be hard to notice, but you might be able to tell that my box top is slightly damaged. I bought this game as a 'Ding and Dent' game from an online retailer. Several online retailers sell games with damaged boxes at a slight discount. So if you don't care about what your box looks like, 'Ding and Dent' games are an option that can save you a little bit of money.

Not what I wanted to see...

2009-02-12T16:11:00.000-08:00

A couple of nights ago, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I walked up to the sink and reached over to grab my toothbrush only to find some sort of a white cloth draped on top of it. It seemed pretty strange. I thought it must've been a washcloth or something, but couldn't figure out why someone would put it there. I picked it up and was immediatly thrown into a state of shock, horror, and disgust when I realized what I was holding...

My son's underwear!

LilKat1 had went into our bathroom and tossed his UNDERWEAR on my TOOTHBRUSH! We let him use our shower when his brother is taking a bath in their bathroom. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I can just picture him taking off his underwear and start whipping it around in the air like he was a Steelers fan with a Terrible Towel before randomly flinging it across the room (and onto my toothbrush) as he hopped into the shower.

You know, finding your son's underwear on your toothbrush is completely disgusting and gross...

But for some bizarre reason, it's made me giggle inside every time I've thought about it today.

I love my goofy kids.

Wasabi!

2009-02-12T14:15:00.000-08:00

Ok, maybe I'm starting to have a little too much fun with these boardgame videos...

Now I own several racing games. I own a few detective games. I have a whole bunch of train games. But I only have one game about sushi making -Wasabi!

Here's a short video introduction to the game. Keep in mind that there are a lot of rules that I don't go over. I just wanted to introduce the game and give you a brief overview of what it's about. It really is one of the more unique games in my collection, and it's definitely near the top of the list as far as nice looking games. If you're interested in finding out more details, there's a lot more information at Board Game Geek.

Anyhow, enjoy the video!

Water Baths

2009-02-11T18:54:00.000-08:00

Something I learned while sitting on the potty today...

When you cook a custard using a water bath, the material that you use for your water bath can make a big difference. A cast iron pan can go up to 195 degrees, while a stainless steel pan might only get to 180.

A while ago, I tried making a cheesecake (which is a custard) using a water bath. It tasted fine, but it didn't quite set right. I think part of the problem was that I used an aluminum pan for my water bath. I don't think it ever got up to 185. Next time I'm going to try using cast iron or glass.

Worm Up!

2009-02-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

Recently, Eagle Games had a nice sale and I was able to get a big stack of games for not a whole lot of money (7 games for just over $70! Woo hoo!). One of the games I got was Worm Up! I had never heard of this game before, so I did some research on it. It actually looked really fun, so I picked it up.

Good call by me! We played it last night loved it.

Here's a short video I made so you can see what the game is like:

I forgot to mention one important rule. The lower numbers get to move before the higher numbers. So if you play a 4, you don't get to move as far as someone who played a 7, but since you're moving first, you get first shot at cutting them off.

Anyhow, like I said, I've only played this game one time, but I think it's great. It's fun, it's silly, and it plays really fast. It won't be a 'Main Event' type game at your game night, but it's definitely a great warm-up act.

(By the way, Eagle Games still has several games on sale. They also have free shipping if you purchase over $70. Not a huge selection, but you could get some good deals if they have what you're looking for.)

Hey! That's My Fish!

2009-02-10T08:50:00.001-08:00

A little while ago, I was telling a friend of mine about my boardgames. He asked what kind of games I had, and you know what? I had a really hard time answering him! First of all, I have a wide variety of games, so it's kind of hard to put them all into one category. Also, giving a brief description of a game can give a sense of what the game is about, but may not necessarily show why the game is fun (oh sure...your game about the 1960 election sounds really fun...weirdo...).

I think seeing a game, and watching a small sample of how it plays is much better than me trying to describe it. So I thought it would be fun to make some short video clips introducing some of my games. The first one I did was for Hey! That's My Fish! Here it is:

I forgot to mention a couple of things (like the fact that the number of fish on each tile is the nunmber of points that you get for that tile. So tiles with 3 fish on them are worth more than tiles with 1 fish). But I think this is a pretty good introduction to what I consider to be a very solid family game.

Rock Music

2009-02-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

You know what's cute? Watching PrincessKat put her dollies into her little toy crib, get them all tucked in, and gently start rocking them to sleep while singing...

We will, we will ROCK YOU!

That's cute!

Sonicare

2009-02-02T17:19:00.001-08:00

I love my Sonicare toothbrush. It makes my teeth feel just-like-a-dentist-scraped-your-mouth-with-a-metal-hook clean.

But it has one fatal flaw...the colored rings.

The colored rings are these little rubber circles at the base of the detachable brushes. The rings are supposed to identify whose brush is whose, so that when someone goes to brush their teeth, they don't stick someone else's toothbrush in their mouth.

The colored rings used to work great. They had standard colors: blue, yellow, green, etc. Perfectly useful for identifying toothbrushes. But now, some genius decided that the standard colors didn't look right on the fancy-schmancy toothbrush. So they decided to make all new colors...THAT LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME! They're all grey! It's completely ridiculous!

Now when me and Mrs. BigKat go on vacations, we have ridiculous conversations like this.

'Which one is my toothbrush?'

'What color did you have?'

'Grey'

'Was it dark grey?'

'Ummm...I don't know...Maybe...I think it was kind of bluish grey'

'Ok, then this one is yours'

'But that one's greenish grey. Wasn't yours greenish grey?'

'No mine was light grey'

'Light greenish grey, or light bluish grey?'

'I don't know...I guess light bluish grey...'

'Then this one's probably yours. It's light bluish grey'

'But the other one's light bluish grey too. Just a little greener. Maybe greenish-light bluish grey. Are you sure yours was light bluish grey and not greenish-light bluish grey?'

(pause)

'Fine...I'm just going to use this one. I don't care if I get your cooties.'

Location, location, location

2009-01-30T16:54:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I bought a book that I really thought I would like. It's Harold McGee's 'On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen'. I enjoy watching shows like Good Eats and finding out interesting things about the science of cooking. This book sounded like it contained all kinds of great information, so I thought it would be perfect for me.

Well, I got it, and I flipped through it for a bit. And it did in fact contain some great information.

But it was boring.

It felt kind of like reading an encyclopedia. If I was just sitting on the couch and wanted to pick up a book to read, this would not be one of my top choices.

It sat on the bookshelf unread for a long time. Which made me a little sad. Here, I had a great resource that contained a lot of knowledge that I would like to have inside my brain. But I just never felt like picking it up and reading it.

But then, something happened that made this book a bazillion times more useful.

I moved it next to the potty.

This book is a great next-to-the-potty book! If I'm just hanging out around the house, I would never feel like picking up a reference text and looking for an interesting piece of information that I don't know. But if I'm hanging out on the potty for a while, it's a whole different story! I've got nothing else to do...might as well find out why fruit turns brown after you cut it...or how vegetables are pickled around the world...or what the Maillard reaction is all about.

It's perfect because the articles are concise and well written. You think of a subject you want to read about, flip to the page, go about your business...and BOOM! Now you know something new!

It's a good, thick, comprehensive book, so there's no shortage of topics to look up. I'm guessing that several of the interesting food science facts on Good Eats probably come from this book.

Now, instead of searching (in vain) for something (anything) interesting in an old issue of 'Cottage Living', I can read about what happens when beer is made or recipes for baked goods written hundreds of years ago.

Makes me wonder if any other books that I own could benefit from a change of scenery...

The McDonald's Slide Lottery

2009-01-26T09:43:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I took the 3 kids over to McDonalds to play in the play structure. It's kind of amazing to see PrincessKat easily holding her own with her brothers on such a big playground. Just another reminder that my little ones are all quickly turning into big ones.

But at the same time, PrincessKat is still pretty little. It's kind of funny sitting at the base of the slide, knowing that your 3 kids are going to come down in a single tangly clump and just hoping that your baby doesn't get squished.

I made up a haiku to capture the moment...

Waiting by the slide

Hoping the small one's on top

Sometimes she is not

It's kind of like a kid-pile-lottery. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But either way, you send them up again and keep playing.

A New Way to Waste Time on the Computer

2009-01-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

I was looking around BoardGameGeek the other day and I found a cool new game. Actually, the game isn't THAT new, it's been out for a year, but for some reason, I hadn't really paid any attention to it. The game is called The Battle For Hill 218. It's a card game that uses a kind of a WWII setting (probably why I didn't look at the game. I didn't think Mrs. BigKat would be interested in playing). But it really is more of an abstract tile placement game. So much more like Hive (one of our favorites) or Blokus or even Dominoes than a military simulation-type game.

Each side gets their own deck of cards. There are 7 different types of cards (tanks, infantry, heavy weapons, paratroopers, artillery, special forces, and airstrike), each with their own powers (but again, these cards could've easily been re-themed to be dragons, knights, and wizards, or Ewoks, Stormtroopers, and Wookies. So if you don't like the WWII theme, just try and ignore it. There really is a clever little game here).

The game starts with one card in the middle, Hill 218. Each player has a starting spot on either side of the Hill card. You take turns placing your cards around the hill in kind of a grid form. The special abilities of the cards determine where you can place cards and how you can get rid of the other guy's cards. Some cards can be place next to other cards (like infantry), some cards can be placed diagonally from other cards (special forces), and some can be put anywhere (paratroopers). Some cards can get rid of other cards by themselves (tanks, artillery), some cards need the support of other cards to do this (paratroopers, heavy weapons). The object is to take control of the other player's starting spot. If you can manage to do that, you win the game.

It really is a fun, clever game that plays quickly, like 15 minutes or so. Perfect for when you have just a few minutes at lunch and you want to play something. It's also quite portable; you can fit it in your pocket.

Since the game is just a pack of cards, it's pretty cheap. If you found it in a hobby store, it would probably cost you about $10. Online, you can get it for around $7. But the best thing is that they've made a computer version that you can play by yourself or with a friend (LAN only though). You can go here to try it out yourself.

The AI is pretty good. The first few times I played it, it destroyed me. I'm pretty new to the game, but am starting to get a grasp of it. It took a few plays to begin to figure out the best way to use the different cards. At this point, I can hold my own. I even won once!

Anyhow, if you're ever wanting to waste some time on the computer and find yourself firing up a solitaire game of some kind, try out The Battle For Hill 218 instead. Even if you don't like war games. Just give it a try. Once you start to understand some of the tactics, I think you'll be hooked.

By the way, if you're interested in purchasing the actual card version of the game, this thread might be worth a quick read. It sounds like they're close to selling out their initial print run. But they're considering doing another printing with some extra features.

Clearance Day 2009

2009-01-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

About this time last year, Target put a bunch of stuff on clearance and I was able to get a big pile of toys. They put their stuff on clearance yesterday, so Mrs. BigKat was able to go down and snag a few toys for not so much money.

There weren't as many interesting things as last year, but I did manage to get a remote control flying bug for only $10.

I also got a boardgame to play with the boys: Spy Trackdown: Find-the-Enemy Strategy Game. From what I understand, it's kind of like that old game Stop Thief, which was one of my favorites as a boy.

It's probably not a game that I would choose to play with Mrs. BigKat, but it looks like a fun activity to do with the boys. I think they'll like it. It was just over $6.

And from what I can hear down the hall, LilKat2 is very much enjoying his new Shake 'n Go Batwing Flyer. It was under $5.

Oh, PrincessKat just came and showed me a new dolly. Not sure what it is or how much it costed. But she's quite happy with it.

So nothing super-spectacular this year. But I did hear a rumor that they have Yahtzee Free for All for just over $2. Now that's a deal! If you happen to be at Target, take a look at the game aisle and pick one up.

Edit: Ok, apparently the dolly that PrincessKat got was a Little Einstein's June doll that she's been wanting for a VERY long time. The original price was over $20 and Mrs. BigKat was not willing to pay that much. But I guess she was ok with it for $5.

Gotta Have God

2009-01-15T17:08:00.001-08:00

I've been searching for a new Bible resource for LilKat1 for a LOOOOONG time.

Last year, we went through My First Message: A Bible Devotional for Kids and it was fantastic. The text that it used was from the Message. I thought this was great. It was more like reading from a regular Bible and less like a storybook. There were interesting questions and activities in each section, which LilKat1 absolutely loved. He could not get enough of this Bible. He looked forward to reading it every day.

The only downside was the limited number of sections. Since we were reading it each night, we blew right through it! And I've been on the search for something as good, or better, ever since.

Well, we've finally found another great resource. It's Gotta Have God: Ages 6-9 by Diane Cory. Here's what I like about this book:

1) A bunch of small sections: I think there are over 100. We're going to get over 3 months out of it!

2) A short Bible verse to look up at the beginning of each section: It's a great way to get LilKat1 used to looking up his own verses. He's still a beginning reader, so having to only read one verse is very comfortable for him.

3) Devotionals are about God: Imagine that! It takes a section from the Bible and uses it to teach about God! I really do not like books that focus on the Bible characters like Noah, Jonah, David, etc. The Bible is a book about God. That's who we should be learning about!

4) Nice pictures: The artwork is done well enough so that it makes the book attractive to my son.

5) Questions: There are a couple of questions for the child to answer at the end of each section. There's even a space to write down answers. This is great! LilKat1 loves writing down his own answers in his book. And, so far, the questions are actually good, relevant questions.

5) Activities: There's a worksheet-style activity at the end of each devotional. My son loves doing stuff like this. They have things like little crossword puzzles or secret decoder pages.

6) Nice short sections: Each section doesn't try to pack to much in. My son never gets to the point where he feels like it's taxing his attention span.

7) Boy/Age specific: The lessons are appropriate for him. There are also similar books available for different ages (2-5 and 10-12). There is also a whole similar series for girls.

This book has been a great resource for helping LilKat1 to experience daily Bible study in a fun way. It makes me smile to see how excited he is to grab his book and do his Bible time with me.

And do you know what I found out today? There's a 2nd book in the series, Gotta Have God Vol 2 waiting for us when we finish this one. Woo hoo!

Spin-4-It

2009-01-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

I made a game order a little while ago and got this free gift attached to it. Here it is:

It's a gadget that you use to figure out who gets to go first in a game. Totally unnecessary, right? But for some reason, we use this each time we play a game now. Part of it is so that we don't have to try and remember who went first last time. But the other part is because the thing is just so darn cool! You give it a little, tiny flick and it just keeps on spinning and spinning and spinning.

Don't believe me? Watch, I'll prove it to you. I'm going to flick it right now and see how long it takes to stop...Ready...Here I go...

...still going...

...starting to slow down...

...almost there....

...ok, it stopped.

See? With just a little flick, it spun around for 59 seconds!

Ok, so maybe you're thinking, 'Hey! That's too long! I don't want to wait that long to find out who goes first!' But it's actually a good thing. It gives you time to go get your snacks, get a nice beverage (which does NOT go on the same table as the boardgame!), go get some napkins (because you are NOT touching my cards without wiping your hands Mister-Nacho-Cheese-Dorito-Fingers!).

If it looks like something you want to buy, buy it from Game Surplus. It's only 80 cents. You'll have to pay shipping so you might as well throw some fun boardgames in your cart while you're there.

Overtime Debate

2009-01-07T08:32:00.000-08:00

I just read this article in which Don Banks and Peter King debate the NFL's overtime rules. I've actually emailed in my comments to them a couple of times about this, but never heard anything about it. Here's what I think:

1) Peter King mentions several times that the current OT rules are unfair because, in roughly a third of all OT games, the team that wins the coin flip scores on the first possession. Therefore, winning the coin flip is too much of an advantage.

I think this is goofy! If you want to figure out if the coin flip is an advantage, you should be looking at the percentage of teams that win the coin flip that go on to win OT. If that number is much more than 50%, then you can say that there's a problem.

2) I believe that there's an easy solution to take away the advantage of the coin flip. It works under the same principle that you'd use when you have 2 kids that want to share a cookie. In the cookie scenario, you have one kid cut the cookie in half and let the other kid choose who gets which half. In OT, one team gets to choose the spot of the opening possession (yardline and direction). The other team then gets to choose whether they want to start on offense or defense. The winner of the coin flip chooses who gets to make which decision. Simple!

So if a team wins the coin toss and really wants the ball, they can get it...but they may end up starting at their own 5 yard line going into a headwind!

I really don't know why no one has ever brought this idea up, it just seems so obvious to me. I have to assume that there's at keast one sportswriter or coach out there who's had to make his kids share a cookie.

2 Good Games

2009-01-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

Since Target stopped selling Heroscape, I haven't been too interested in the game aisle at Target. But on BoardGameGeek, I read about a couple of new Hasbro games that have been getting some pretty good reviews. This weekend, I decided to go ahead and give them a shot.

The first is Yahtzee Free for All. First of all, the box is very cool. The 6 sided box bottom expands into the game board, and the 6 sided box top is a felt lined box for rolling the dice in.

Now, Yahtzee is not a game that I really enjoy very much. I can't ever think of a time where I'd challenge someone to a game of Yahtzee. There isn't any player interaction, the decisions are all kind of the same, and it seems to drag on. Yahtzee Free for All is a little bit different. It still uses the same familiar Yahtzee combinations (Long Straight, 4 of a Kind, Full House, etc.), but you can only use certain ones on any given turn. Three cards are placed in the middle of the board that show what combinations can be played. In addition, player have a chance to STEAL other players cards for combinations that they've already rolled. In other words, you may have just rolled a Yahtzee, but if I get a higher Yahtzee before your turn comes around again, I get your card, and you get nothing! How's that for player interaction!

Now this game is still a Yahtzee game, so there's a lot of luck and dice rolling, which some people just don't like in their games. But if I wanted to play a game with people who are not into boardgaming as much as I am, I think this would be a great game to pull out. It's Yahtzee, so it's familiar to everyone. But at the same time, it's got some improvments that make it a lot more fun. Definitely a good family game that parents and kids can play together.

By the way, this game was designed by Richard Borg, who has also designed a few of my other favorite games, including Memoir 44.

The other game I got was Sorry! Sliders. Again, I'm not a big fan of the original game. Even when I was a boy, I didn't like Sorry. But you know what? It doesn't really matter because this game has NOTHING to do with the original Sorry game at all.

Let me emphasize this important piece of information...this game has NOTHING to do with the original Sorry! game.

Well, ok, there are pieces that look like Sorry! pieces, and you have to move your little Sorry! pieces home. But that's it!

First of all, this game is a dexterity game. More along the lines of shuffleboard or carroms or paper football than a traditional boardgame like Sorry! You slide these oversized Sorry! pieces (each player has 4 of them) that have a ball bearing inside of them down a track towards a scoring area. You get points based on where your piece lands. Scoring doesn't occur until all of the pieces have been slid, so there are many opportunities to knock other players pieces off of their desired locations, knock one of your own pieces onto a better scoring spot, or carrom your piece off of pieces already in the scoring area to get to a good position on the board.

I played this 4 player with Mrs. BigKat and the 2 LilKats. We had a great time! The boys absolutely loved it. I knew that LilKat2 would enjoy it, since he already loves Pitchcar (another great flicking game). But LilKat1 also had a fantastic time with it. At bedtime, he even asked if we could quickly play it again (sadly, it was a school night, so we couldn't extend his bedtime and play).

I like having nice components in games, but in dexterity games, this is crucial. Sorry! Sliders certainly delivers in this area. The sliding pieces actually slide quite nicely on the tracks. You really need to use some finesse to get your pieces to land where you want them to.

So there you go! Two fun family games that you can get right at your local Target/Walmart-type store. No having to go to specialty shops or searching online. Right now, Target it selling Sorry! Sliders for $15. And at my Target, Yahtzee Free for All was on clearance for just under $7 (bargain!).

Cheaters

2008-12-31T09:06:00.000-08:00

I like the Portland Trailblazers. They're now my 2nd favorite NBA team behind the Warriors.

But it turns out, they're a bunch of cheaters...

The Snow

2008-12-29T00:12:00.001-08:00

We don't get a lot of snow around here. Last year at Christmas, it snowed. It didn't stick on the ground, but it was pretty to watch. The kids were disappointed that there wasn't enough to play in. This year was a bit different.

Two weeks ago, we had our first snowstorm. It started as we were leaving for church on Sunday. When we got home, there was a nice layer on the ground. It was perfect for snowballs and snowmen. The kids immediately started playing in it and had a great time. Our neighborhood looked like this:

A few days later, we had some freezing rain. This created a 3/4" thick layer of ice on top of everything. You had to smash your way through it to walk anywhere (although LilKat2 was light enough where he could do his Legolas impersonation and walk right on top of it). Here's a picture of one of the ice chunks:

Here's a picture of me shooting ice from my hands like SubZero:

A little while after that, it snowed again so we ended up with snow/ice/snow on top of everything. Here's my truck:

The weather has finally gotten warmer, and the snow is almost all washed away. On the news, they said it was the most December snow we've had in 40 years. And back then, it was followed up by another foot of snow in January. A lot of people around here were getting tired of the snow, but I kind of miss it. With any luck, we'll get some more in the new year too!

Christmas Music

2008-12-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

Want to know what LilKat1's current Christmas song of choice is?

We've listened to it several times today, and it's cute to hear him sing it...

But if he starts belting out:

'Well tonight, Thank God it's them...instead of YOOOOUUUUUUUUUUU!'

...I'm going to have to cut him off.

R & R Games

2008-12-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

There are 3 kids at our church that have had an incredibly difficult year. Their mom died from cancer near the beginning of the year. Then their dad basically stopped being their dad to them, so they had to go into foster care. Our family has been trying to think of something nice that could be done for them at Christmas-time.

I found out about this generous offer from a boardgame blogger who wanted to buy a game for someone who might need one. I wrote to him about the kids at church. A nice game company, R & R Games, also found out about this offer, and they wanted to help out as well. There were several submissions for people who seemed like they could really use a nice game at Christmas, and they offered to send games to anyone that the original blogger could not send stuff to.

I emailed back and forth with the R & R Games representative and found out that they are going to be sending a very nice Christmas package for the kids. They will be recieving several games, Flea Circus, Horse Fair, Bugs, Birds, and Beans, Take your Best Shot, and First Hand. They will also be getting a very cool toy (actually 2 of them), Hide n Seek Safari.

The only ones of these that I am familiar with are Hide n Seek Safari and Flea Circus. Hide n Seek Safari is basically an electronic version of the 'Hot/Cold' game. Someone hides an electronic stuffed animal somewhere around the house. Then the other person searches for it with this wand. When the seeker gets closer to the animal, the wand starts to light up. The closer you get, the more lights turn on. (The kids will be getting 2 of these).

Flea circus looks like a fun card game for kids to play with their parents. It was designed by a well known game designer, so there is some actual interesting gameplay (which isn't always there in kids games).

I was blown away by this act of generosity from R & R Games. If you like purchasing products that support nice companies, I think R & R Games certainly qualifies. Like I said, I'm not familiar with some of their games, but if you have young kids, I don't believe you could go wrong with Hide n Seek Safari or Flea Circus.

Things are starting to go a little bit better for the 3 kids. They are now living with a very nice foster family (who also go to our church). There was no one in the area that would've taken all 3 of them in; they would have had to have been split up. But this nice family decided that they were going to help out and took all 3 of them into their home. Their dad has not been in contact with them very much. He did not even see them for Thanksgiving. But some relatives on the East Coast found out about how bad the situation was and have started to try and figure out a way to take care of them.

Edit: Since I'm talking about nice game companies, I thought I should mention something that GMT Games did in the fall. They offered 2 free games to anyone who recently lost their job recently. I own a couple of their games, Command And Colors Ancients and Battle Line (which, by the way, was designed by the same guy who created the Flea Circus game mentioned above!). And I'll be purchasing another of their games, Manoeuvre, this week. So there you go, yet another nice game company that produces good games!

Funny MFWL story

2008-12-09T09:16:00.001-08:00

My-Friend-Who-Lies (MFWL) has a lot of funny stories about him. You can read a bunch of them here, here, and here. And these don't even include some of the classics, such as the 'Naked MFWL story' (where my other college buddy who was living with him at the time was sitting on the couch watching tv and suddenly saw MFWL running naked from the bathroom to his bedroom because he forgot to bring his clothes with him when he took a shower) and the one when MFWL went skiing, but didn't have any ski pants, so he duct taped garbage bags around his jeans.

It's been a little while since we've had a really good MFWL story (he's just been doing his normal weird stuff, nothing outrageously weird). But this weekend, the 'MFWL's Lost Cat' story was born. Here's what happened...

Last Thursday, I got a call around 8am from MFWL. He sounded very worried. One of his cats was missing. He couldn't find her anywhere in the house. So I went over and helped look. We looked all around the inside of the house and looked outside as well. No cat. MFWL put up some 'Lost Cat' signs around the neighborhood and went off to work. The following day, there was still no cat. MFWL and his wife both looked around the neighborhood a whole bunch. Mrs. BigKat took the kids on a bunch of walks to see if they could find the kitty. Still no luck. MFWL was getting very worried about his cat so he decided to take drastic measures.

He hired a guy with a tracking dog to come to his house and try and track down his cat. And this was not just any guy with a dog. According to this, this guy is the BEST search and rescue dog guy in the WHOLE WORLD. He's helped find lost cats, lost dogs, lost people, dead people, alive people, people who have murdered other people...this list goes on. The guy came over and his dog quickly found the cat's trail. It led them through all of their neighbors' backyards (including Portland Trailblazer All Star Brandon Roy) about a quarter of a mile down to a big, huge patch of prickly bushes. They couldn't go into the bushes, so the dog guy took his 200 dollars and left.

Now all MFWL had to do was help his cat get from the prickle bush field all the way back to his house. He decided to make a scent trail to help guide his kitty home. Now if he was a dog, he would've just peed on everything between his house and the prickle bushes. But he's not a dog, and that would be disgusting. So instead he decided to be more civilized and peed in a spritzer bottle that he used to spray his urine all over the neighborhood (including Portland Trailblazer All Star Brandon Roy's house).

Fortunately for me, I live in the opposite direction of the prickle bush field.

Now the problem was that it was starting to get cold. His cat is an inside only cat, so MFWL was worried that she was going to get too cold. So he got a kitty carrier and put one of his sweaters inside (because it smelled like him. And no, he didn't pee on it). He brought it over to the prickle bush field so that the cat would have a little shelter. To make it easier for his cat to find the kitty carrier he put urine all around the area (and no, he didn't use the spritzer bottle this time. He just used the regular, conventional method of spreading pee).

Now, you may thing that MFWL is a complete weirdo and totally disgusting for spritzing his urine all over the neighborhood. But you know what? You can't argue with results. Monday morning, MFWL's wife heard a scratching at their garage door. She opened it up and saw their lost cat. Yay!

Edit: Oops, looks like the garbage bag pants story was in one of the earlier posts, even though I said it wasn't. That's ok, it's one of my favorites, so it can be mentioned twice.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

2008-12-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Big Kat thought it would be fun to put real candy canes on our Christmas tree. When the boys wanted a treat, they could go up to the tree, pick out a candy cane, and eat it. It worked out great at first.

But then PrincessKat saw what they were doing and assumed that we had some sort of a Willy Wonka Christmas tree.

Now she's mad because Mrs. BigKat wouldn't let her eat all of the other ornaments.

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Helping

2008-12-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about Christmas time is that it provides opportunities for us to get our kids involved with helping out others. Mrs. BigKat and I are always looking for ways that our kids can do things to get them personally involved with sharing God's love with people who need help.

Last month, we did a couple of different things. The first was Operation Christmas Child. It's a program through Samaritan's Purse that shares shoeboxes filled with gifts as well as the Good News about Jesus with kids in tough situations all around the world.

We had a great time with it. We took our kids to Target and bought up a ton of stuff to fill shoeboxes with. We had a list of the different types of items that we wanted to get (toys, candy, school supplies, clothes, toothbrushes, soap, etc.) and the kids all got a chance to pick out which things they thought the other children would like the most. The boys even got to spend some of their own money on special items that they wanted included. At home, LilKat1 and I carefully laid all of the stuff out, divided it up, and filled all of our boxes. Then we drove all of the boxes down to the dropoff location. The boys liked being able to see the hundreds of other shoeboxes that were already there. We talked about how God is using people in our community and all over the country to share His love with people all around the world. And of course we prayed for all of the kids that the shoeboxes are going to.

Another thing we got to do was box up food for a local food pantry. At LilKat1's school, there are many families who depend on the free lunches that the school gives their kids. When their kids are home for winter break, they can have problems providing enough food for their families. The food pantry provides them with boxes of food to help them get through the couple of weeks when their children are home from school. Our Bible study group decided to help out with this situation. One of the members of our group was able to get a bunch of food to donate to the food pantry. All of the families got together one night and worked assembly-line style to box everything up. All 3 of our children had a great time with this.

Me and LilKat2 were in charge of canned peppers and boxes of breadsticks. Each food box was to get 2 cans of peppers and one box of breadsticks. As a food box would get pushed in front of me, I'd yell out "Two cans!" LilKat2 would run over to his pile, grab 2 cans of peppers, hand them to me, and I'd drop them in the box. Then I'd yell "One box!" and LilKat2 would run back to his pile, grab a box of breadsticks, hurry back, and hand it off to me to put into the food box.

Mrs. BigKat, LilKat1, and PrincessKat were in charge of tempura mix and rice. LilKat1 was in charge of rice. PrincessKat was in charge of tempura, but under LilKat1's supervision. In other words, if she got distracted, it was LilKat1's job to make sure that 2 boxes of tempura still got into the food box.

That night was a lot of fun. It was great seeing how excited the kids were to do things to help out others. They seemed to really like the idea that they were actually in charge of an important job that was going to really help some people in need.

This month, we're going to be able to go to the store and purchase any other food that the food pantry needs. And hopefully, we'll be able to help distribute the food as well.

I think it's pretty cool that our kids are now getting to the age where they can do things like this. As a Christian parent, I want to make sure that the whole idea of ministering to others and serving others is just part of their normal lifestyle. It's not always easy to find opportunities for small children to do things that they can actively participate in, which is why I think it's important to try and come up with creative ideas.

One idea that I had that I would like to start doing it going around to neighborhood garage sales on the weekend and find jackets and blankets that we can give to the people at church that minister to the homeless. I think I would also like to start making it a regular part of our weekly grocery shopping where the kids can go down the canned food aisle and pick out stuff that they'd like to donate to the food pantry.

Like I said, I like it that there are these great Christmas-time opportunities for our children participate in helping others. But at the same time, I want to make sure that they know that serving others isn't something we do just once a year, once a month, or once a week. It's part of sharing Jesus' love which is an all the time thing.

Prayers

2008-12-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

I was tucking LilKat1 into bed last night and we were saying our prayers. I've been encouraging him to tell God things that he's thankful for. Here's what he came up with...

"Thank you God for giving us food so we don't die...so soon."

Yeah, it's kind if a grim way of putting it, but it's all true! I had to pause from praying for a second because I couldn't stop laughing.

Kids are great. I think I'll have him pray this at Thanksgiving next year.

Tichu

2008-12-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

I own a bunch of boardgames. I've got a whole wall full of them. I've got train games, racing games, city building games, archeology games, zombie games, war games, space games, sports games, mystery games, and many more!

But right now, my favorite 4 player game is a simple card game that costs under $10...Tichu!

Tichu uses an almost standard deck of cards. It's a regular 52 card deck, but with 4 special cards added. I was originally interested in the game because I heard it was similar to a game I used to play in college all the time, Big 2 (although, back then, we just called it 'Big').

Tichu (like Big 2) is a trick taking games (or I guess more accurately, a climbing game) where one player will lead a card (or set of cards) and the other players must play cards that are higher than the previously played card(s). For example, if a player plays a 5, the next player would have to play something higher than the 5, like an 8.

Not only can you play single cards, but you can also play sets of cards, like pairs, triples, or runs. So, if a pair is led, the every player that follows can only play pairs of cards. If everyone passes after a player plays a card, that player wins the trick and gets to lead a new card (or set of cards).

The player who gets rid of their cards first is the winner of the round.

Pretty simple stuff so far, right? Well, the part that makes Tichu interesting is that it is a partner game, kind of like bridge. At the beginning of the round, someone will usually call 'Tichu'. When they do this, they are trying to be the first one to get rid of their cards (they get a lot of bonus points if they succeed, but will also get penalty points if they fail). So your job is to either get rid of your cards first or try to help your partner get rid of their cards first. But you can't actually say what things are in your hands or what you'd like them to play.

And in our house, this leads to some fun times...

...like when I yelled at My-Friend-Who-Lies (MFWL, who was my parter at the time) because I was going for a Tichu and he played a middle ranked single, preventing me from getting rid of one of my low cards.

...like when I passed MFWL (again, my parter for the game) the Hounds (one of the special cards) 3 times in a row and really wanted to pass it to him a 4th time to be funny, even though it would've really messed up his bid for a Grand Tichu (and given us a 200 point penalty)

...like when my mom was using VERY un-subtle hand signals to ask me if I should break up her run of 3 pairs

...like when my mom started woofing as another un-subtle way of finding out if she should play her hounds

...like when MFWL and I start complaining about the bad plays the other person was making, even though we were winning by several hundred points (it's actually quite funny when we're partners)

So far, we've had 2 sessions of Tichu and they've both been great fun. The game itself has a lot of interesting decisions to make, and you also get to use a little bit of creativity figuring out what combinations to create when playing your cards. The rules take a little while to explain, but the complexity level is really quite low, which provides for a nice, relaxing, fun game.

But again, the great thing about Tichu is the partnership aspect. Mrs. BigKat noticed that we laughed a lot more in this game than when playing our regular boardgames. In this sense, it was kind of like a party game, but with the tactical decision making of a boardgame.

If you ever have 2 couples getting together for a game night, this one should be right at the top of the list of games to play. This is one game that I can see playing many years down the line while wearing my straw hat, white tennis shoes, and dress socks after the kids ship me and Mrs. BigKat off to a retirement home.

Hide and Seek 2.0

2008-11-21T20:43:00.000-08:00

Now that the weather's getting colder and rainier, indoor Hide and Seek has become a popular after dinner activity in the BigKat household. Even PrincessKat participates sometimes (and let me tell you, you have not seen cute until you've seen a teeny-tiny 2 year old run behind a coffee table and flop on the ground with her hands covering her face while her big brother is counting).

Well, today, me and the boys came up with a new and improved version of Hide and Seek. We called it the 'Monster Treasure Hunt'. Here's how it works...

First, the Monster (me) gathers up his treasures (3 balls, not too big. Like a kid sized soccer ball). Then he goes upstairs to hide them. The Monster puts them in places that they are fairly easy to see, but also near a potential Monster hiding spot (like in front of a closet). When he's ready, he tells the Treasure Hunters to start counting. While the Treasure Hunters count to 20, the Monster hides near one of the treasures.

When the Treasure Hunters are done counting, they head up the stairs. Their job is to find the treasures and bring them back down. So they search around until they spot one. Then they have to go get it...

Now this is the funny part because they don't know if the Monster is near that particular treasure. And if the Monster is nearby, they don't know exactly where he's hiding. This makes the Treasure Hunters quite nervous as they approach the treasure. Almost like Indiana Jones going into a booby trapped room to get a gold statue. And it is absolutely HI-LARIOUS to see a 6 year old pushing his 4 year old little brother into a room to go get the treasure while he hangs back in the hallway where its safe.

Well, you've probably figured out that the Monster's job is to scare the daylights out of them when one of them gets near the treasure. Then everyone runs screaming down the stairs and gets chased around the kitchen several times for good measure. When the Monster catches LilKat1, his job is to tickle him. LilKat2 prefers not to get tickled, so he just gets hugged and kissed.

At the end, when all the treasures are found, you repeat the whole thing all over again. And again. And again.

Anyhow, if you're finding that your games of Hide and Seek are growing a little bit stale, I highly recommend this new, exciting thrill-packed version.

Roasting Coffee

2008-11-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

At lunch today, I roasted some coffee using the Heat Gun/Dog Bowl method. I tried this once before, but this time, I took pictures!

First, the equipment...

This is the bowl I used to roast in. Ok, so it isn't really a dog bowl. It's just a regular stainless steel mixing bowl. The dog bowl that I got is too big for the small amount of beans I used in the roast. But Heat Gun/Dog Bowl is more fun to say than Heat Gun/Mixing Bowl (and you get more useful hits when Googling).

You can see the beans in the bowl in their unroasted, green state. The beans are Guatamala Huehuetenango: 'A classic acidic Huehue flavor profile with berry accents and mild floral aromatics'. Whatever that means...

Here's the heat gun I used. The blue thing is my Nomex barbecue mitt (in case I needed to grab something that was hot)

Here's my watch. I use the stopwatch to time the roast. But I think I need to get a new watch. Part of the minutes don't display sometimes. The other night, someone at basketball went to look at my watch to see what time it was. I had to explain to them that they could use my watch, but it was set to display military time, and I hadn't set it back from Daylight Savings time. And part of the minutes were broken so you kind of had to figure out what number it was trying to say. So they made fun of me.

This is my bean cooling rig. Hot beans go into the colindar. Shopvac sucks air through the colindar and out the bottom of the box. Keep stirring the beans until they're cool.

This is the outdoor cat that helped me. He thinks he's our cat. But he's not.

Now, the roast...

I did this pretty much the same as last time. Start the roast on the low setting for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Here's a picture of me starting to roast the green beans.

After 5 minutes, I switched to the high setting, still stirring constantly. At this point, the beans are smelling nothing like roasted coffee at all. It's more of a grassy smell.

At about 9 minutes, it hit the 'first crack' stage. That's when you start to hear popping noises, kind of like a campfire.

At about 12 1/2 minutes, it hit the 'second crack' stage. At this point, you start to hear sounds kind of like when you pour milk into your Rice Crispies. I let it stay at this stage for a couple of seconds. Here's a picture of the beans right after I turned the heat gun off.

Then it's on to the cooling rig to kill the cooking process. Turn on the Shopvac and stir the beans until they're all cooled off. There's probably a way to cool these beans even faster, but I just happen to like the little box thing that I made.

When you roast coffee, you end up with a lot of 'chaff'. This is chaff.

And in the end, we have freshly roasted coffee!

Mrs. BigKat is going to let the beans rest for a while before trying them out. Hope they taste good!

Good Eats

2008-11-14T15:25:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite food shows is Good Eats with Alton Brown. I've not only made a lot of the recipies on his show, but also tried out several of his goofy cooking techniques. Here are some of my favorites:

1) Pulled Pork - I actually made the flower pot cooker from this show. It still ranks as one of my most fun cooking experiences. Not only was it the first time I'd had pulled pork, but I also got to make the cooking vessel using pots I'd bought from Home Depot. Kind of a 'Wow! This is the best thing I've ever eaten!' experience mix

ed with a splash of 'Hey! I can't believe this really worked!' I have since moved on to other cookers, but I will still make sure to brine my pork shoulder any time I make pulled pork. I think it makes that much of a difference.

2) Scrambled Eggs - Seems like a pretty simple dish, right? I mean everyone knows how to make scrambled eggs! Well, apparently, I didn't because when I followed Alton's techniques, my eggs came out a million times better.

3) Individual Peach Upsidown Cake - These are unbelievably good...They're the perfect thing to make during peach season. And they're easy too. Me and Mrs. BigKat will work together to make these. One of us will work on putting the butter, brown sugar, peaches, and crystalliz

ed ginger in the cups. The other will mix up the batter. Everything is assembled in 15-20 minutes.

Then just pop them in the oven (although our cooking times run longer than those stated in the recipe). Like I said, too easy! Probably doesn't require the crystallized ginger if you don't happen to have it on hand, but it does add a bit of sophistication too them and works quite nicely with the other flavors.

4) Hamburgers - I will always choose to grind my own meat for burgers now. It makes a huge difference.

5) Beef Jerky - Best beef jerky ever! I wish flank steak was not so expensive, or I'd make this all the time. It is seriously difficult for me to stop eating it. It's just that good! I don't have a box fan (I wish I did though! It looks fun!), so I use my ceramic cooker at a low temp to dry the meat. The result is probably a bit different than what you get if you dry it Alton's way, but it still tastes great.

Here are a couple of things I've tried that did not turn out so well:

1) Skirt Steak - I love the marinade he uses. But you can definitely skip the whole putting the steaks right on top of the charcoal thing. If you're dead set on trying it out, for

goodness sake, make

sure you use lump charcoal and not briquettes. Otherwise, you're going to be eating a nice pile of ash with your meat. My suggestion, if you're worried about flare-ups, just go with a nice hot cast iron pan.

2) Acid Jellies - These sounded like they were going to be so good. They were very easy to make and looked great coming out of the pan. Unfortunately, they never really developed a sugary crust on the outside. They just were kind of slimy. Too bad.

I have more good and bad experiences. I'll try and put some more up another time.

I wanna Pop

2008-11-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

Apparently, brand name carbonated beverages have bumped up in price recently. As a result, I've had to change brands of pop (that's what people in Oregon call soda, although Mrs. BigKat still refuses to do so. She even tells our kids not to say it!).

I used to drink primarily Pepsi products. Now, I'm drinking this...

Christmas Shopping Part II

2008-11-07T10:01:00.000-08:00

My boys love wearing costumes. So my great idea was to head to Target after Halloween and grab all the cheap costumes I could so we could give them to the boys at Christmas.

Well, it was a good idea, but the costume area after Halloween is a huge MESS! Parts of costumes are tossed here and there. If you find something you like, you have to search at the bottom of the display for the matching mask/hat/whatever. Not easy! There were some Star Wars costumes that I wanted to get, but couldn't find all of the pieces. Same with Transformers.

But in the end, I walked away with 2 Human Torch costumes, 1 Mr. Incredible costume, 1 Spiderman costume, 1 policeman costume (with muscles!), and 3 NASCAR costumes for about $35. I also got myself a costume for $5 in case I ever need to be Pontius Pilate in Sunday School.

Christmas Shopping Part I

2008-10-30T16:45:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know. It's still October. Why would I want to talk about Christmas shopping? Well, I just saw a very cool looking toy that I think I might get for LilKat2. Remember 'Lite Brite'? Everyone liked Lite Brite, right? Well, imagine that you have a Lite Brite that doesn't light up (ok, I know that makes it worse, but stay with me...), but still has patterns that you can copy to make interesting things. Now instead of lights, imagine that it has colored screws. And instead of just putting them into the board, you screw them in with a toy drill. What you end up with is something that looks like this:

Think it'll work for LilKat2? Well, he loves tools, he's creative, he loves making 'patterns'. I can seriously imagine him sitting and working on a picture for an hour straight with this. The only downside I can see is LilKat1 wanting to play with it while LilKat2's using it. Oh, that and it costs $40! I think we might have to get it for him though. Seems like a perfect fit.

I'm Done!

2008-10-25T22:44:00.001-07:00

Oh boy, what a week...

Here's all the stuff I did:

1) Ran 3 Soccer practices

2) Coached 2 Soccer games

3) Attended 2 End of Season Soccer parties

4) Created 2 Soccer Team movies (along with copies for all of the parents)

5) Created 1 flower arrangement for my friend K's family (huge assist from Mrs. BigKat here)

6) Attended 1 pumpkin carving event at LilKat1's school

7) Created 1 Sunday School PowerPoint lesson with associated take home pages

All while sick!

I just printed the last page of my Sunday School stuff.

I'm done! Woo hoo!

Oyster Race

2008-10-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

Ever heard of the Oyster Race? A friend of mine just ran one last weekend. It sounds like a ton of fun! You team up with some friends and do an 'Amazing Race' style event where you get clues that take you all around a big city. There's running, biking, skating, and other things, so it sounds like a pretty good workout. But there are also other challenges, like finding certain flowers in the Rose Garden and taking a picture of them, or sitting in every single seat in a particular row at a sports stadium. I am definitely going to do this next year. It just sounds too fun.

Here's a video of what it's like...

October 22

2008-10-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

Remembering my friend K on her birthday. She would've been celebrating her 10th birthday today. Instead, she's celebrating eternal life with Jesus.

I went to the cemetary today, same as I do every year on this day. It's been 3 years in a row now that God has decided to make October 22 a beautiful sunny day, right in the middle of fall.

I miss K. But it's wonderful knowing that I'll get to see her again someday.