Sorry folks, but this one is too good not to share.
Category Archives: fun
The Merry Ferry
This morning I read this article in the Burlington Free Press that informs me this:
A Lake Champlain Transportation ferry struck pilings at the Grand Isle dock Friday night, sending four people to the hospital with minor injuries.
Apparently it hit the pilings so it would “avoid crashing into the dock.” The pilings, of course, are there to keep the ferry from hitting the dock. This ferry, however, must have been going too fast. Not only did four people get injured, but one car was damaged and “the pilings were knocked over.”
Whoa there, Captain, hit the breaks. I found this to be a strangely curious and, I admit, amusing, local story. But then I saw this ad in Seven Days, our local weekly:
Breaking Through Indeed
This was far more amusing that the story itself. Who knew they meant it literally?
Share this:
Cool Video
Sometimes when I am hanging at home, checking out what is to be checked out on the internets, I come across something that just needs to be shared. This video is one of those things. Plus the music is worth hearing.
Share this:
iPod
My wife’s birthday is tomorrow. She just got a new iPod Touch. I won’t be seeing her for a while.
She’ll be here, of course, but she will be way occupied with her new toy. There are lots of features on this thing and she has lots to learn. Will she use all the features? Doubt it. But she will have fun with some of them.
I have to admit I am a little envious. She’ll use it for music and she’ll use it get online. I could use the calendar and the email option and the photo option and…
I have been thinking of getting a new PDA in any case. Mine was a gift from a friend who didn’t use it. It is handy but I could use more functionality to really make it work like a charm.
I will test this baby out when I get a chance to get my hands on it. Maybe that will be my new work tool and toy wrapped into one.
It may be some time before I get my hands on it, however. The testing will have to wait.
Share this:
Back in the Saddle
So today I hurried back to the grind of working a job after a couple weeks of holiday vacation. It was, as they say in the taciturn parts of this state, not a bad thing to be off for so long. While it wasn’t bad to get started again, I hopped into the saddle with some trepidation.
I don’t mean trepidation as in “It’s been so long I am a little scared I won’t know what to do or where to go.” I mean it more in the “Dang it is awfully nice not to have to work for someone else or really to have to work at all and boy wouldn’t it be great if I could keep all this material greatness and quit the day job?” sense. That is the kind of trepidation I mean.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to fit one long, uncommonly uttered word into just a few sentences of something more than one person will read at least three times. Check that off my list. If we can jump to the meta-cognition level here, when except over the holidays, when I can sleep in until 7:30 (7:30!) for three days straight, would I ever have the idea encompassed in the previous sentence? See what I mean? Not working means thinking deep thoughts, thoughts that can only come when one truly relaxes.
Alas, I was back to the work thing today. I did watch it snow from the warm side of the window. That was, and I’m not afraid of being called effeminate or even (heavens!) a pansy if I use the word, lovely. Then I drove home on the icy and slippery asphalt, hands clenched on the wheel, sweating in the down jacket I both didn’t need and forgot to take off in my haste to get to the post office, slowly.
The saddle in which I returned my physical self was metaphorical, of course. I’m no wrangler. I’m no jockey. I can’t even really call myself a desk jockey anymore, although I did spend way too much time sitting today. My saddle was a chair in this case. At the end of the day I rode off into the screen saver sunset, bouncing along peacefully on the pneumatic riser of the padded office seat. It was a lovely way to end the day. And a lovely way to start the week.
Share this:
KENKEN
I have been pretty much way into crossword puzzles the past few months. Late this summer I purchased a book of 300 crossword puzzles and scribbled away every day. I just completed them all, and that includes going back to the few I skipped and completing those. I have a few more shorter books of them but I just got introduced to KENKEN.
This was a holiday gift from my wife, who was aware of my puzzle fanaticism and who thought I might enjoy the new challenge. I have. I have been somewhat into Sudoku, a craze that most people are aware of by now. KENKEN is similar to Sudoku (a 9×9 grid with some of the boxes filled with numbers, the goal being to fill in all the boxes without repeating a number in any horizontal row, vertical row or smaller 3×3 grid). The difference here is that some math is involved.
The book I have starts with easy puzzles. The grids are 3×3. I blasted through them but they gave me a sense of how to solve the puzzles. The book ends with 5×5 puzzles. These are still relatively easy and I am afraid I will have to advance to more difficult ones. Here is a fairly easy example (from www.Kenken.com):
Easier KENKEN Puzzle
And here is a more difficult example (from Wikipedia):
A Tougher One
As you can see, the first one has simple addition and subtraction, while the second one also contains multiplication and division. I am ready to leap fully into those.
So far I have done well but I am still working on the easier puzzles. I will need to go out and get a more advanced book. I am hooked. Sudoku is fine. I have had some fun with that. But I never got jazzed on it the way I am with these. I will not give up on crossword puzzles. I still have lots of those in the house to work on. I will, however, be busy with KENKEN for a while.
Mercury on the Move 