Cooties: The Other White Meat

Playing "Cooties" with my almost-three-year-old is a fast-paced, highly non-linear experience.

The rules and game objectives appear to be slightly less effable than those of Numberwang or Calvinball, but a shocking number of Hot Wheels crashes is usually involved. Often, there are loud, violent insect battles that appear to be initiated when two Cooties happen to be within arm's reach.

"Turns" are mainly time-based, using the other players' attention spans as a metric. That is, you can do whatever you want for as long as the other players are content to sit and watch you. Your turn is over when someone interferes with what you are doing. The youngest player can veto this rule at any time without cogent explanation.

Well thought out and calmly presented objections to these vetoes are considered and summarily dismissed.

Since the die and many of the appendages are currently MIA and other props can be incorporated into the game at a moment's notice the "winner" (the person sitting there last after the boy wanders off for the final time) often ends up with a creature that doesn't look as much like the image on the Cooties box as it looks like its from a game that might be called "Civil War Triage Unit on the Island of Doctor Moreau".

Candyland lacks the surrealistic strategy and half-hour cleanup time required of my son's avant-garde take on the Cooties game and is therefore, in his opinion, one of the most boring things someone can do with their time.

Frankly, I agree.

Four Chalkboards

Over the past couple of days I built four chalkboards. Well, I built three new ones and refurbished one from a garage sale.

My wife said it would be nice for our 2.9 year old to have a chalkboard out in his playhouse. I said "Thy will be done" and got to work.

I didn't just want to buy a chalkboard because typically they are not all-weather and probably would fall apart after a few months due to heat, humidity, rain, insects, etc. I had some rescued cedar from the initial playhouse build and its later refurbishment which I thought would be good for the frame. I also had a largish, warped sheet of cedar plyboard that I kept from the original playhouse packaging (I guess they used it to stiffen a cardboard shipping box) that I could use as a writing surface. Sweet.

I went to Lowes and got a quart of black Valspar Chalkboard paint (203261). I had never used it before so I decided to make a couple of practice chalkboards first to see how things went before making one for the playhouse.

After cutting the plyboard to size I used a leftover piece from the old playhouse climbing wall to make the frames, remembering to incorporate a ledge on the bottom big enough for chalk and an eraser. The thick ledge would also help force out any residual warpage once it was glued and screwed down.

I lightly sanded the dirt and some of the old stain off the frame pieces to clean them and give them an "aged" look. After sealing them with a clear satin sealant it was time to paint the plyboard.

The chalkboard paint is thick and goes on easily with a chip brush (chip brush = cheap, throwaway, bottom-shelf brush). I suppose I could have used a roller, but I didn't want to waste one of my disposable paint pans. I did not treat the plyboard with primer first because the surface was actually pretty smooth which jived nicely with my natural laziness.

After letting everything dry overnight my son helped me apply glue to the frame pieces and ledge and clamp them in place. After a few hours we drilled some pilot holes and secured the rails with screws. BTW, he really enjoys being in charge of the drill/cordless screwdriver.

Here's what they look like mounted to my storage cabinet in my garage. They write nicely and seem to erase well with a dry rag. I have not washed them or been too rough with them yet but the chalkboard paint looks like it would work out ok for the playset.

After more of the same work as above I had the 18" x 18" chalkboard you see here on the left. I used leftover Red Oak stain and a clear outdoor sealant to color and waterproof it. I went with thicker frame pieces to make it a little less prone to warpage because it would probably be mounted differently than the garage boards - I'm not sure where yet, but probably not flat against a wall like I was able to do with the indoor versions.

Since I had the can of paint out I figured I would resurface the garage sale chalkboard my wife brought home one day. The size is great for the playroom but the surface is way too slick to write on with chalk. Nothing for it but to redo it.

The can says that a smooth surface makes the best chalkboard but that's probably not 100% true. You need a little bit of roughness for the paint to adhere well to the surface if you don't plan on priming it first. I learned this after I tried to remove the painter's tape and some of the chalkboard paint peeled up with it.

I will touch up those areas and let it dry for another 24 hours before putting it though its paces. I suspect I will need to sand it off, roughen up the surface, then reapply the paint, though. Meh, easy enough to do - live and learn.

Including the cost of the chip brushes, paint, and garage sale board I spent $18 or so on this project and burned only three hours. Not bad. I have used about one-eighth of the can, so, assuming the shelf life of this stuff is fairly long and the garage boards hold up ok I will be making a lot of chalkboards for the house and maybe some as gifts around Christmastime.

Merlot and Motrin

On Monday I made the mistake of not stretching for the thirty minutes that is recommended to someone of my age before engaging in anything as strenuous as reaching for a two-ounce hand tool.

I tweaked my back. Hard. The pain was enough to immediately drive me to my knees and onto the garage floor near the screwdriver I was trying to pick up.

I figured I had a fifty-fifty shot of making it into the house and a zero-one-hundred shot of wanting to spend the next several hours as an unmoving, mewling ball on the concrete outside until the wife finally came home. I fought through the pain enough and drug myself onto the sofa at a speed that probably made Continental Drift seem zippy in comparison.

After gently depositing myself on the sofa next to the cordless, the cell phone, and the Xbox controller I stared at the ceiling and wondered if the next four decades of my life were going to be filled with surprises like this. All I wanted to do was take advantage of a little down time (since I was home with a bug of some sort but had gotten well enough to move around) to pick up a little in the garage, and it’s not like I am out of shape – I exercise often, both cardio and weight training.

Obviously, I won’t be going to the gym for a while, which is a bummer. What is more of a bummer is that I can’t lift my son into his carseat. Luckily he is big enough to scramble up there himself but buckling or unbuckling the straps is still a hassle. Aside from that, the other heavy or physically stressful stuff is avoidable.

On the upside I learned that a recent Xbox update incorporates the Kinect’s voice commands into the streaming Netflix app. For those of you who think that last sentence was just so much gibberish that just means I can yell at my TV and have it fast forward or pause or play movies or what have you, which is nice. And about time, really. It’s 2011, after all.

I used my newfound powers of “verbal TV control” and “couch-ification” to watch a bunch of “Archer” episodes (hilarious) and I even caught “Firefly” (meh, promising) for the first time. 600mg of Motrin and 375mL of Flip Flop Merlot got me through the first night.

It’s been a few days and my back is a lot better – still not 100% but I can tell I am on the mend. I didn’t need any time off from work (I pretty much just sit in a chair all day) so as soon as the Sears AC guys finish replacing a dying motor in the unit downstairs I will head back in and complain about my back to anyone who I haven’t told yet.

And work, I suppose.

Weekend Redemption

Nine forty-five at night is a little late for me to start writing a post – I usually jam out these notes to Future Me on my phone at lunch, see. Since I wanted to put something out there I thank you ahead of time for your patience for not only dealing with the SnowUrchin-trademarked bad grammar and spelling, but for the eyeball-jarring non-sequiturs and derailment of trains of thought that ma…

As I whined at you in a previous post, last weekend was brutal so the wife and I played hooky from work on Friday. It was a pleasant 80 degrees, the humidity was low, and the skies were clear. There was nothing for it but to drop the boy off at daycare and go to Busch Gardens, the most beautiful amusement park in the United States.

Don’t look at me like that.

Short version: There were virtually no lines, we rode an unexpectedly large number of happy-scary rides, had awesome food at the Oktoberfest pavilion, and I won a “Minion” doll by throwing wiffle balls into an array of PVC pipes.

Long Version: There is no long version and there won’t be until the technology develops that allows us to efficiently transfer joy over the Internet.

I, of course, gave the Minion to the almost-three-year-old when we picked him up. He said “Thank you for the Minion, daddy! Where did you get him?” We were prepared for that question. Not wanting to tell him that mommy and daddy were at an amusement park all day – one he visited for the first time three weeks ago – I said “I don’t remember, buddy.” He was quiet for about 30 seconds and then said “Yes… yes you do remember… you got it at… at… Busch Gardens!”

“Oh, you have got to be freaking kidding me,” I thought as the wife and I stared at each other in amazed silence. It’s not like we played that game the last time we were there – we just walked past a place that had them. So either 1) Something happened as we passed one of the Minion-offering games that caught his eye and caused him to remember that the dolls were there and where “there” was, 2) he has some sort of iconic memory that allowed him to pull up the seemingly random fact that “Minion dolls exist at Busch Gardens” or 3) he is pretty much the lamest X-Man ever, possessing the power to know the place-origin of all stuffed animals.

What else… Man, it’s getting late and I still have art to do and an American Dad to watch…

My wife recommended a book to me – Regarding Ducks and Universes by Neve Maslakovic. I have no idea how she found it, but the fact that she even thought I would like this proves (yet again) that she is my soul-mate. It is very smart, funny (where appropriate), and overall a ripping page-turner. The authoress fully immerses the reader in a world that shares a slightly different alternate history with another that is connected by routinely navigated and strictly regulated portals. Intrigue ensues. I am hugely looking forward to Mrs. Maslakovic’s second book.

Oh, yeah. Been renovating the garage. More on that later.

Gotta go. G’night.

Book Review: 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America

I saw Albert Brooks promoting his book on The Daily Show a while back and I was pretty amped.

I think he is a good actor and a brilliant screenwriter – Defending Your Life is one of my favorite movies and I thought he voiced Marlin (Nemo’s father from Finding Nemo) and Hank Scorpio (a Bond-esque villain in the Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice) brilliantly. Heck, I even liked him in The Muse.

Furthermore, I like (well, used to like) the genre of “Dystopic Visions of the Not-So-Distant Future”. 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, The Stand… you name it. I guess I just had a fascination with what some people saw as a dire warning of tomorrow if we continue to strut merrily down the self-destructive path they perceived humanity to be on.

You would think I would have loved this book, right?

Picture a world where 75% or more of the people in it are actually Albert Brooks. They could be men or women, old or young, they could be living in the lap of luxury or a newly destitute victim of a 9.1 earthquake that levels a major U.S. city – they all have at least one snappy (or sardonic) one-liner to say per “scene”. Fun in small doses, never-ending-knock-knock-joke irritating in a novel. This behavior is certainly unrealistic for the President of the United States (albeit one as dorky, weak-willed, and thoroughly un-electable as the one in this story) who is supposedly overseeing a country on the verge of total financial collapse while dealing with the largest earthquake in human history.

Speaking of badly-described natural disasters, without giving too much away, the quake causes a big mess and displaces a lot of people. Traffic is disrupted because some lanes are shut down. Lots of buildings have cracks in them and might be unsafe. Some planes needed to be re-routed. Also, at least two people died as a direct result. A darned inconvenience.

Apparently, in this world of tomorrow, there are not many technological advances beyond what we have right now... or, in fact, had twenty years ago, and what is there is all very haphazardly applied. There are self-piloting airplanes (fine) and cars (yawn), but not boats (huh?). The book is rife with distracting examples like this.

There is no real plot. Every page seems to hint at a promise of something… anything… about to happen but it never pans out. People are always almost up to something, but they never actually do anything. The reader is forced to wait around until 95% of the way through the book until the “something” he has been waiting for occurs, and it is literally nothing. I would say “the reader is left wondering what happens next” but that is not true – I could not care less and you probably wouldn’t either.

The whole thing has an oily sheen of what they call in the movie business “industry humor” and reads like someone was thinking “this would make a great black comedy film someday”. I guess it would, but it is going to need to be punched up quite a bit to elevate it to “comedy” status on par with something like Doctor Strangelove. If it is billed as a serious movie then a lot more work will need to be done to somehow hack and hew all of the “witty” dialog out of it without turning the scenes into just two or three people staring at each other in awkward silence for minutes at a time while events dramatically fail to unfold around them.

The story is a great idea, poorly executed. I agree with many of the two-star reviews at Amazon. Read a few before you read this book.

Happy Belated Memorial Day

(Editor's Note: Thanks, Gene, for the hard drive data transfer hardware... it looks like the drive was Merlot-proof, even if I am not.)

The United States is divided into two groups (isn't it always?). One half celebrates Memorial Day weekend with parades and cookouts and maybe even a trip to the beach. The other group sees the long weekend as a chance to trade the usual day-to-day grind for 72 hours of straight up “toil” and jealously curses the ground upon which the first group walks. Primarily because we just got through mowing, aerating, and fertilizing it, and there they go tromping all over it with their horseshoes and their coolers full of sweet, sweet beer...

Oh. Did I say “we”? Hell, yeah, I did.

I got the yard mowed, the deck and both porches stripped and bleached, the hedges trimmed, and the shed stained and sealed. The mailbox post was reconditioned, as was the boy's sandbox. I put down fertilizer in some places, and Triazicide and non-specific plant killer where peaceful coexistence with the indigenous lifeforms was no longer an option. All in 95 degree heat. This might just be the sunstroke talking but qhulif pancake brushnog loffin kooj-a-riffic snorkalooz.

As Homer Simpson would say “My feet hurt. All this fresh air is making my hair move, and I don't know how much longer I can complain.”

Fine. It wasn't all weapons-grade suck.

I finished reading the Albert Brooks novel 2030 (more on that later), cooked out twice, played around with the Lego Digital Designer (free, cool), and went to the gym. I found out where the turtle in my yard lives (near the porch), where the rabbits in my yard are coming from (the woods behind my house near the tree stump), and learned that the Eyed Click Beetle prefers to fly directly into the side of a grill rather than around it. Heck, I even played in the sprinkler you see above for half an hour today, which is something that was frowned upon by my more conservative neighbors before I became a father.

It was a good weekend. So, even though I am literally falling asleep at the keyboard here the grumpy old man routine doesn't quite cut it...

What was that? Yeah, buddy, you can have your Frisbee back when you pry it out of my dehydrated, too-tired-to-resist fingers... heeeey... give that back...