I Have Much To Say

Yes, yes I do. Once again, I took a weblog vacation this year over the holidays, and once again I have a lot of ground to cover.

Christmas Wrapup

To continue the "My Kids Are Broken" theme, on Christmas morning they woke up and stayed in bed until we came and got them! I mean, thanks for the extra sleep and all, but this is ridiculous.

I realize this information is too late to help you this year but if you are expecting toys next Christmas morning - or perhaps an ensuing birthday - I would recommend you have some tools on hand:

Of these, the cutters are the most important. Every toy your kid wants comes secured to the packaging by a minimum of five metal twisties. Believe me, you'll be tired of untwisting them by the third one.

Building Toys

Santa brought Cameron a set of K'Nex for Christmas. After spending a couple sessions building things with the kit I declare them inferior to Lego.

It could be that I am just biased due to a lifetime of Lego work, but the K'Nex stuff just isn't intuitive to build with. The "snowflake and stick" construction of K'Nex toys makes it difficult to visualize your end product. I think Cam will have trouble "free building" with them the way he does his Lego.

On to other Lego news. One of our neighbors got Cam a Lego police car for Christmas:

(Please hold your ranting about the specialization of current Lego sets for another time. Thank you.)

He put it together (all by himself, says his proud father) and was playing with it out front one night. I came home and ran it over pulling into the garage. Many tears ensue. Cameron does share some blame for leaving his toys in the driveway but I still felt pretty bad - he'd had the thing for a couple hours. I figured I'd be picking fragments out of my tires.

Not so. Only one brick was damaged, a 1x4 plate, which got bent and a little torn up on the underside. (I took some pictures but it's hard to see the damage.) The model came apart but aside from that one piece it all went right back together.

When Mike heard this story he observed that "we should build the space shuttle out of that stuff." Indeed.

Cards

Once again, I hosted a New Year's Eve Eve Poker Game this year. It was a good news - bad news kind of night. The bad news was that five guys cancelled on the afternoon of the game. (I will be merciful and not name names. You know who you are.) The good news was that in spite of that we still had nine players, and everybody seemed to have fun.

We didn't have a big final hand like last year but there were other distractions.

Last summer I was a guest at a club that has a poker room. The walls of the room were covered in cards - every straight flush that had ever been played in that room was on display, with name and date attached. I thought that was a pretty cool idea and decided to do the same thing, should such a hand ever show up in one of my games. It didn't seem likely, as I had never seen a real straight flush - that is, one with no wild card assistance - in the course of play.

Well, there's a first time for everything. I took Rich's cards after this hand and retired that deck. Soon they will hang on the wall in the one room I am allowed to decorate with impunity.

The garage.