My Daughter The Writer

My daughter, four years old, is a writer. In fact, she has been, at least recently anyway, much more prolific a writer than I am. Let me explain.

My daughter can’t write on her own, at least not yet. She does know how to write all of her letters and does know a few words such as “The End” which she likes to end all of her stories with. For the rest, she’ll ask my wife and I and we’ll tell her letter by letter.

So there she’ll sit at her little “Penn State” table, pencil in the left hand and paper in front. Then the craft begins. Our dialogue is as such:

Her: How do you spell “scary”
Me: S
Her: What’s the next letter after s?
Me: c

…and so on. I’m usually half listening, to be honest, as I’m usually cooking, tidying up from a meal, or playing *ahem* Donkey Kong Junior while she is writing. The fun part is when she’s finished with a story. Her little stories are pretty good.

The one that got me this weekend was a story about witches. She had an entire story about these witches, which also included Halloween, spooky, and pumpkins, I think. The interesting part was a second sheet of paper she had, which contained only the following:

The Scary Parts

She later explained to me that she had written a scary story, and the story included scary parts, but she didn’t write them down because they were too scary. In their place was the placeholder sheet, which I just mentioned. Too funny.

So yeah, my girl is a writer. I just hope she remembers me when she’s famous. I also hope she someday lets me know what was included in the scary parts, just not before bedtime. Because that would be too scary.

Much Happening

We had a busy, but great, weekend.

Saturday we visited the local “Haunted Granary” during the day. This is the second year they had a kid’s day at the old Granary, and my daughter and son had a pretty good time there, I think. They were able to go walk through the granary and have their faces painted, without any of the scary stuff that goes on during the real event at night. I was okay with not doing the night time “Haunted Granary”, although I miss the witches’ funny banter at the end. They used to always make fun of my earrings, which is fun.

Sunday we attended a party at my daughter’s “best friend”‘s house, and the kids and adults had a great time. My daughter even did her first “bobbing for apples” and got an apple on her first try, although with a controversial move of grabbing the apple by the stem. The rules committee allowed it, though, and she won a witches hat. She wore that hat the rest of the day.

During dinner, she was already planning our “family costumes” for next year. Apparently we are going to be ghosts. Each of us gets to pick out a fabric for our costume from JoAnn Fabrics (guess where we went shopping on Saturday). She was nice enough to tell her brother that he can even pick out his own fabric, but he can’t change his mind after we get home. Too much.

My evenings were spent enjoying playing my Donkey Kong Junior. I’m steadily getting better at it, but let’s just say I’m not challenging any records yet. I’m still having a lot of fun playing this 28 year old game, though, and still slightly shocked I have a real arcade game.

Me and the Boy

I realize I haven’t posted a pic here in a while, so here you go. This one is of me and the boy, who is now 1.5 years old! This picture was taken at a fruit farm we visited this weekend. They were having their annual fall festival to sell off their pumpkins and such. We scored a really nice one for $6.

Yeah, I know, he looks nothing like me. Lol.

Question of the Day

This one comes from a conversation my wife and I were having in the car yesterday, and is of the utmost importance that I answer it. It’s a matter of national security I think.

On to the question. Imagine you are speaking to your spouse in the car in front of your kids. They are young and you really don’t want them to know what you are talking about (because they’ll start talking about it, or worse yet, make you make a pit stop). Which of these two is more appropriate (instead of well, poop) : #2 or BM? I went with BM and was told #2 was better. I would have to disagree.

So answer my poll below and explain you answer in the comments. You might be surprised by this topic, but you wouldn’t if you knew me in real life.

Moleskine Pac Man

I have mentioned here in the past my obsession with Moleskine notebooks (and also how I have trouble writing in them for fear of sullying them). Well, they have announced a couple special edition versions of their notebooks that I’m pretty much required by law to purchase.

The first is the Pac-Man collection, for which you can see the little video above. Pretty sweet, huh?

Second, and even better, is the Peanuts collection. I’ve already requested one of these for a Christmas gift.

Will I have the courage to write in it? That I’m not sure.

Papercraft Goodness

‘Tatooine’ by Jeremy Messersmith
Animated/Directed by Eric Power

This was just too beautiful not to share, even if you’ve seen it already. Even if you aren’t a Star Wars fan. A very touching song indeed. Who would’ve thought such a song could’ve been made about the twin suns of Tatooine.

Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That

You may have noticed that I pinned my little Halloween short story Frank to the top of the blog. Most of you have probably read it, but I figured I’d post it there for the newbies. It’s probably my most successful story, as I’ve received e-mails in the past from teacher’s who have read my story in their classes, and have taught using the story. So very cool.

This weekend was a blur. We knew that going in, so I guess that helped. Saturday morning T-Mike (now 19 months) woke me up at 5:40. This was okay because I had to be up anyhow  to be at my hockey game by 6:15 AM. Of course I drove to my game only to find out we didn’t have a game scheduled this week. This would’ve bothered me from five years ago very much, but since I would’ve been awake anyhow I shrugged it off.

At 10:45 we took the daughter to soccer. After that we drove to my sister-in-law’s house near Philly for a day trip. It was great to visit, but I was beat when we made it back home at 10:45 Saturday night. I didn’t even get to play any Donkey Kong Jr.

Sunday we drove an hour in the opposite direction to have lunch with family, to see my aunt and uncle who were up visiting from South Carolina, and to celebrate birthdays (my baby sister’s 30th and my grandfather’s 93rd, amongst others). It was great seeing everybody, but again I was tired.

On the way home we stopped at Lowes, trying our luck with two tired kids who had been great all weekend. It was a fail, although we did manage to buy an entry door for the back of our house, something we’ve needed for eight years. Eventually we made it home, made dinner, and got the kids to bed.

So yeah, I could use a weekend to recover from my weekend. Luckily, we’re having another one (a weekend) in five days, right?

Blowing on NES Cartridges

Photo courtesy of Boule De Feu.com

Thought of the day:

This is for those of you that came of age when the Nintendo Entertainment System was THE gaming system.

Do you all remember how the cartridges would stop working and the screen freeze? Remember how we all fixed the problem? That’s right, we’d blow on the cartridge and it would magically work again.

My question is this. How did all of us, spread out throughout the country, know that the way to get a game to work was to blow on it? There was no publicly available Internet back then. I doubt Nintendo Power printed anything about it. How did we do it? It’s like when in history that the same inventions  crop up at almost the same time, among different cultures spread out far physically from each other that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.

Any ideas? This one might very well keep me up all night.

Kermit and Such

You may have seen this or you may not. I’m posting it here, just in case you haven’t. It’s an out of work/homeless guy, two Kermit puppets, and “Under Pressure” by Queen. It is awesome.

People are hurting out there, for sure. So many are out of jobs, and we aren’t creating jobs fast enough. Not much to say about that except that I wish multi-national “American” corporations such as Nike would start manufacturing things in the USA again. Picture your town with a brand new Nike shoe factory. Think that would help things a bit?

We had a guest pastor at church yesterday. He gives the sermon a few times a year. I wish he was our regular pastor, because his approach just hits me the right way from an emotional and intellectual point of view. He told us that for every three dollars our church spends on helping others, we spend seven on infrastructure/operating costs of the church. It was his hope that someday it would be 1/1 or even 7/3 in the other direction. I totally agree, although I’m sure that ruffled a few feathers in the pews.

On a totally unrelated note, I came across a book today called Zombie Felties. I must acquire this book. It is awesome.