Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

We got an awesome new toy today — Dave went to the gaming auction and picked up this 1985 Tag Team Pinball machine for a few hundred dollars (bringing back memories of when we all lived just a few blocks from here in the 90s and had two machines in the kitchen that got a ton of use). They forgot to give him the front panel key though, so we’re actually having to put real quarters into it for now… I wonder how much money will be in it by the time the key arrives? I’m guessing a lot, since everyone seems to be enjoying it. Nefarious got a phone call from one of her school friends and mentioned it to her, so her friend is now quite excited (“coooool!!”) to come and play after school in a couple days.

Yes, we were so excited to get playing that we didn’t even take the time to put the legs on before starting to pump quarters into it.

In our continuing quest to improve the games we play, we’ve also added a new play style to Gin Rummy, which we play while eating a surprising quantity of mandarins. When you play your cards, they can be laid in a grid, with the suits being the columns and the runs being the rows (or the other way around). For a run/set to count, it of course has to have three cards minimum, as in standard Rummy, but this way means that you can have cards be counted more than once for scoring (as in Quirkle, which is the game that gave me the idea). So for example, in the photo below, I have a 6-6-6 set, a 5-5-5 set, and a 5-6-7 of hearts run, and a 4-5-6 of diamonds run, as well as a set of Jacks and a 2-3-4 of clubs run, and thus for the purposes of scoring the five of diamonds, the five of hearts, the six of diamonds, and the six of hearts are all counted twice. Especially once you start taking into account adding onto your opponent’s played cards, it makes the strategy and gameplay a little more advanced.

Tomorrow Nefarious is going to a friend’s mini-golf birthday party — we got them a “make your own glow in the dark slime” kids chemistry set, which I hope will be a hit — and as the chauffeur I’m looking forward to the free time. Because the place is a little out of the way, my plan is to bring along my Kindle and find somewhere to read, as I’ve downloaded a couple of books that feel so far like they’re going to be great reads. I’m really happy I got a Kindle, and all things considered, I prefer reading on the Kindle to paper books, which is really quite a remarkable statement for a bibliophile like me.

Other than that, I stayed up too late last night watching almost all the episodes of Embarrassing Illnesses, which on one hand is the same can’t-look-away trainwreck as the bazillion abscess and zit-popping videos on Youtube, but on the other hand is really valuable, really helpful information documenting the awkward experiences that we all have but are all afraid to talk about. There were some very brave people in the videos and I hope they know what an important service they’re providing.