Hi Will,

I have to tell you the saga of the video game here this last week.

My son Will has been mowing yards and babysitting this summer and
finally saved up enough to buy “Enter The Matrix.” He’s been playing
“Age of Empires” and “Jedi Outcast” all summer and it’s his money that he
worked for, right. We have a Pentium III processor and 128 megs of RAM
and I wrote it down for him so he could compare with the system specs
on the box. He came out of the store happy as a lark. We go home, install
it and it doesn’t go. So I go on about three tech support sites to see
what the problem is. We have Direct X 9, we have an Intel video card
that I downloaded an update for, I reinstalled the game and no go.

So I call my geek friend the next day and he tells me these games all
come with patches that I can find on the game’s tech support site. So I
go home from work and download the patch and now it just goes back to
the desktop. I reboot and reinstall the game (which comes with 3
installation discs) and it still goes back to the desktop.

So I talk to another geek friend of mine who spends whole weekends
playing video games–which is why he’s 34 and isn’t married–and he
asks what kind of video card we have. “Oh that’s just what comes with the
machine, it won’t run the newer games. Go buy a video card.” So I go
out to Best Buy and talk to a little short geeky kid who looks like
he’s 15 and doesn’t need to shave and he assures me that the $79.99
video card will work but that I likely need 256 megs of RAM–that’s
like another $50.

By this time that game is going to run or I am going
to hurt the computer so I buy it and go home. I get the RAM in–that’s
easy. But there is no AGP slot in my computer so I think, well maybe
they hid it under the fan. 15 minutes later, nope. And I can’t find all
the screws to put the fan back in. So I put the video card back in the
package to take back, muttering about 15 year old geeks, and boot the
computer. It crashes half way thru the boot. By this time I am
sweating because now I not only have a game that won’t go, I have a
machine that won’t boot.

So I take the kids to Subway, muttering all the way. They are
strangely silent. I realize while I am eating my sub that the only
thing that’s different is the new RAM so I take the box apart again
and take it out. The machine boots fine. Toss the RAM back in the bag
and put it by the door.

I go to Best Buy the next night after work and go right to tech
support. This guy is at least pushing 30. He tells me I need a 100
mhz DIMM RAM chip for $20 more, and the PCI video card is also $20
more. And he assures me it will run the game. By now it’s get the game
going or commit seppuku to preserve my honor so I take the stuff,
after coughing up another 40 dollars after muttering about how much
money I had before I had kids and why the hell did I ever let him buy
that stupid game anyway…..

Took the stuff home, snapped it in, runs like a charm. Yee Haa!!!

Willie, however, decides he’s staying at a friend’s house overnite and when
he calls me I nearly scream into the phone “LISTEN, BUSTER..You WILL come
home, you WILL play this game, you WILL enjoy it. Do I make myself clear,
BOY????” He rides his bike the five miles home in a rain storm.

I find a “Best Mommy in the Whole Wide World” Award that he’s created in
Publisher on the kitchen table the next night when I get home from work.

How’s things by you?

Deb

My little girl is just over a year and a half old.
I came down for dinner tonight and spotted her playing with two video
cassettes. She’d pulled a few inches of tape out of each, and had one
dangling from each arm. I can only assume that they were supposed to be
purses. A third cassette was lying on the floor, discarded after the
tape broke (for the record, it was “The Empire Strikes Back”).

Both of her brothers ruined their share of video cassettes…but unlike
their sister, I don’t believe they were driven by the need to accessorize.

I was just out with my three-year-old, and
one of the songs we listened to in the car was “What Shall We Do With The
Drunken Sailor” as sung by Leonard Warren, an opera singer of the 1950’s
(he died young, poor fellow). Later, while we were walking through a
store I heard James singing to himself: “Yo, Ho, and Umpy Noises, Yo,
Ho, and Umpy Noises, Yo, Ho, and Umpy Noises, Early in the Morning.”

Jane just made some Christmas cupcakes,
because, as she told David, “It’s Jesus’ birthday.”

“How many years old is he?” asked David.

“About two thousand.”

His eyes got wide: “Do we have that many candles?”

A few moments later he added, “How do we send a cupcake to Heaven?”

Jane’s still wondering what to tell him.

We are raising very polite children, apparently. Yesterday David
and James were playing with David’s Star Wars Lego toys, and in between
such comments as “We are evil!” (said in a low, gutteral voice),
“I put the girl in the dungeon with the ogre.” and “Where is the girl?”
“The girl is in the box.” were occasional statements like, “Thank you,
Darth Vader,” and “That was very nice of you, Darth Vader,” (invariably
said in a polite, sincere tone).

I suppose that if my two boys are feeding imaginary girls to imaginary
ogres while pretending to be Darth Vader, I can at least be glad that
they are polite while they do it.

A couple of
days ago, Jane showed me a list of words that David is supposed to learn
to recognize. And it occurred to me, “Gosh…I could probably make Dave
a flashcard program.” The current release of the Tcl programming language
includes all of the bells and whistles that I needed. So yesterday
morning I sat down, and in a couple of hours I had a simple program that
displays a word in really big type. When Dave presses the “???” button,
a recording of my voice says the word, then spells it letter by letter,
then says it again. When he presses the “Go!” button, another word
appears. When he presses the “Stop!” button, the program ends.

And most of that two hours was spent recording the words and the
individual letters; the programming was simple. There’s a reason I
like Tcl.

Some time ago we started giving Dave a
small weekly allowance. We don’t actually give him the cash; instead, he
accrues a certain amount each week in the Bank of Dad. That means that
when David asks how much money he has, I check the record in my PDA and
see how many weeks it’s been since I last paid anything into his account.
Then I add the resulting amount to his balance and tell him how much he’s
got.

Now, for quite some time David has been agitating for a Bionicle. (It’s
a kind of Lego toy.) For quite some time we’ve been telling him that
if he saves his allowance he can buy that kind of thing for himself; in
the meantime Christmas is coming.

This afternoon he said, “Dad, when it’s my birthday I want you to take
my seven dollars and buy me a Green Bionicle.” I said, “Dave, you’re
a little confused. If I buy you a Green Bionicle for your birthday,
I’ll be spending my money, not yours. And if you have seven dollars
(or whatever a Green Bionicle costs), then you don’t have to wait until
your birthday.”

So naturally he said, “Dad, can we go to Toys’R’Us today?”

I checked, and indeed his account in the Bank of Dad was well over
seven dollars, and so there I was, stuck, the victim of my own
teaching. And so we did. It wasn’t what I had planned to do with
my early Sunday evening, but on the whole I think it worked out rather
well.

And so did the Green Bionicle. Dave put it together all by himself,
following the instructions, and it’s really rather cute.

My five-year-old has been playing AYSO soccer this
season, as I believe I’ve mentioned before. It’s been something of a
trial for me, as the games are scheduled on Saturday, and usually
Saturday morning.

Now, Saturday morning is my chief project time. I can get a lot done on
personal projects in the evenings, but Saturday is the only time when I
can tackle larger things–when I have several hours together and have the
gumption to focus on something difficult for that length of time. Having
a soccer game take (effectively) a two-hour bite out of that time has
brought my productivity to a screeching halt.

Today, however, the soccer game isn’t scheduled until 1:30 this
afternoon, so I have the morning to myself. Well, mostly to myself; Dave
is sitting on the other side of my desk playing with Legos and
occasionally making staccato “Twang, Twang” noises (I think he’s shooting
something–best not to ask). It’s looking like a good morning.

We’ve got three cupboards in our “play room”. This is where the TV
is; it’s also the one room we could easily close off with a gate to
keep the little ones inside. It’s like a big playpen. The cupboards
are all “locked” with those white plastic two-piece babyproofing locks:
the kind that you snug down around the knobs on a pair of double
cupboard doors so they can’t be opened?

The middle cupboard has toys and games in it, most dating from when
I was a kid. Even David is still too little for most of them, so
the cupboard stays locked all of the time.

I was reading my e-mail after dinner when Jane called up to my study,
“Will, Dave, can you come down? I need some help.” We duly came down,
and found Jane sitting in the play room. James and Anne had gotten
into the middle cupboard, and there was my childhood scattered all over the
floor. There were crayons, coloring books, barnyard animals, two sets of
dominoes, a couple of games, some puzzle pieces, and a number of decks of
cards: one Peanuts-themed Old Maid deck, two normal decks, both dirty,
one oversized deck, and a Flinch deck. That’s only a fraction of what’s in
that cupboard (for which God be praised), but it was still enough to cover
about ten or twelve square feet of carpeting.

I gather that Flinch is a card game intended for
people who class regular playing cards with short skirts, dancing, and
alcohol. I’ve never played Flinch, and while I believe my mom played
Flinch when she was a little girl I don’t believe the set we have has
ever been used, except that I used to take the cards out and fiddle with
them when I was little. They are in remarkably good shape, all things
considered.

Oh, and there was a little box filled with little stars–the kind
elementary school teachers used to award. That got dumped out, too.
It took us a good half-an-hour to get everything squared away enough
to vacuum, by which time it was time to get the kids to bed.

James has solemnly promised not to let Anne into the cupboard again.
We’ll see.

UPDATE: I just sat down to do something else, scratched my knee,
and found six more of those little stars stuck there. I expect we’ll be
finding them floating about for days.

Sunday is Nap Day around our house. Sleep in, have a
leisurely breakfast, go off to church, have a simple lunch and then it’s
nap time. We don’t plan it that way; it’s just that Sunday is a day of
rest and come Sunday afternoon we feel like resting. Jane and I feel
like resting, I mean; the kids often require some encouragement. That’s
become my definition of adulthood: that age when naps suddenly start to
sound like a good idea.

Today was exceptional only in that David went off to a birthday party for
his new kindergarten friend Max. Max just turned six; and apparently
when you’re six it’s no longer cool for your friends’ parents to hang
around for the party. So there was one less child needing encouragement,
and as Anne (the littlest) had fallen asleep right after church I took
James off on an errand. He fell asleep in the car, and after I sent him
up for a nap it was my turn. I had a blissful time until David came home
and wanted to show me the prizes he’d won at the party (a couple of small
Lego toys, including what looks like a Martian driving a swamp boat;
heaven only knows where he’d find a swamp to drive it in). Ah, well. I
knew the job was dangerous when I took it.