Weekend Reading

This weekend, we started a new book--more like a really long poem--Beowulf. It's super exciting as Beowulf takes on Grendel and Grendel's Mom. I like the Dungeons & Dragons like mixture of ultra-violence followed by praise of God. Beowulf is a tough fighter. We're reading the Seamuus Heaney translation. Very cool!

Pirates v Army Men

Here is a slide show of the battle between the pirates and the army men. I'll add to it as the story evolves.

Ahoy there!

 

This morning, there's danger on the high seas of our living room. Little People pirates have come into the port of the army men. The army men have many, many ships docked in port. Unfortunately, their ships are made from dominos and Kapla blocks, so they're not very sturdy.

From 2009 09 05

The Little People, on the other hand, have a stout bark that is much larger than the ships of the army men. Who will prevail? Will numbers plus high powered weapons manage to overcome the pirates led by Captain Mommy?

From 2009 09 05

Making matters worse for the army men, the Captain of "Ship Hotel USA" has no head for battle. (View the picture in large size to see the visual pun.)

From 2009 09 05

Another Adventure

 

Daddy's latest kick is "adventures" on the weekend. Mostly these consist of going to various outdoor places and walking around to see pretty things. Naturally, I'm against all this since life is so much simpler if we just stay in the house and play Wii or watch Road Runner episodes. Nonetheless, he persuaded Mommy to go on an adventure today, so I had no choice but to come along.

Today's adventure was to Lafayette Reservoir--a big lake in Lafayette. There's a nice trail around the edge and, more importantly, paddle boats for going out into the lake. Initially, the adventure looked terrible. I was going to ride my scooter along the path, but the rules are that scooters are only allowed Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then, when we got out of the car, it was windy, really windy, so windy that I was cold enough to need my fleece jacket.

From 2009 09 05

But things got better after that. I saw a lot of cool stuff and really liked the paddle boats. Somehow, these adventures turn out a lot better than I think they will.

Road Runner

We're back to watching my favorite cartoon of all time--Road Runner. I find myself asking why about lots of things happening in this cartoon. Daddy offers a stock reply,

Cartoons are filled with nonsense. There is no why.

Must be true. But I cannot help asking a fundamental question---given how hard it is for the coyote to catch this particular road runner, why doesn't he go after a different one?

In other news, we saw a coyote roaming the streets of Alamo a couple of nights ago driving back from the club. It didn't look much like the cartoon coyote. Wonder if it was after road runners?

Stuff I'm Doing

Thought you might like a snapshot of what I'm currently doing:

Books: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Videos: Thomas the Tank Engine
Wii: Super Mario Galazy
Toys: Hot Wheels orange track, army men, Thomas the Tank Engine (press the cab series)
Games: Chess, Uno, Sorry
Outdoors: Swimming

I'll be offering weekly updates so you can track my changing tastes.

King of the Galaxy

From Drop Box

I'm back to trying to tame Super Mario Galaxy. I've made it pretty far, but it's getting very tough. Fortunately, Mom and I are a good team. It would be nice to win this game.

Under the stars

Lately, we're doing something new and fun after dinner--going to the club. For the last several days, we hit the hot tub and the lap pool for a little swimming action under the stars. I love how the sky looks at night. There are also a bunch of trees at the club decorated with lights. They look very pretty. Evenings are great.

Weekend update

Composition: King x Knight, originally uploaded by John-Morgan.

Another busy weekend of playing. I really try to jam stuff into every available minute on weekends once school has started. The highlight of the weekend was a Sunday filled with chess. We played a standard game. Then a "coach" game, where Daddy coached me on what to look for in moving. Then we played some variants. In one version, we each had only one of the major pieces (i.e. 1 knight, bishop, rook) instead of the usual two. The other variant I came up with was a pawns game. Here, the board consisted only of the king and the 8 pawns. This second variant was quite interesting.

We did some other stuff too. Went to the club for some swimming during the day and then, even better, swimming and hot tubbing at night. The hot tub is only available to me at night since the club has a rule that you have to be >13 to be in the tub. This rule is not enforced after the life guards go home. Also did some kickboarding. In fact, I'm making progress on actually having some swimming skills.

All in all, a great weekend.

Reading

I've discovered that there are some very good books out there. Who would have guessed. Daddy introduced me to Captain Underpants--what great literature. I thought for sure that nothing could compare to these stories.

And indeed nothing does. But Roald Dahl comes close. We first read James and the Giant Peach. While I had some misgicings, it was nice to see the peach crush Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge. Then we went Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This took all Dad's voice talents. In the story there are 4 kinds of English people, plus Germans, Southerners, New Yorkers, and a bunch of other regions. Daddy seemed to like the challenge. Now we're reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Roald Dahl is pretty cool.

Weekend before school

I'm not looking forward to school. I'm really not. But this weekend was fun. Daddy apparently didn't look forward to school either so he thought we should have maximum fun for the last weekend before the start of the school year.

Saturday was an amazing day. We went on an adventure where we climbed a big mountain. Then we hit some golf balls. At night, we played Wii baseball. Then, to top it all off, we had a backyard campout.

Sunday was equally cool. After church, we went kite flying. I set a new record with the height of my kite. It was so high I ran completely out of string. More baseball and then a campout with Mom.

Pretty Leaves

Here are some pretty leaves I found in the driveway. I like how they're yellow and green--my favorite colors.

Captain Underpants

From underpants

As you know, I generally don't like to read. While I can do it, I'd rather not. Mostly because nothing interesting has ever been written. Fortunately, I finally ran across a series of books worth reading---The Adventures of Captain Underpants.


These are the first books that are so exciting, so insightful, so amazing, that I'm happy to pick them up and read them myself.

From underpants

Pretty weird, huh?

Striped Shirts Stink

This morning before church, Mom and I had our usual fight about what I should wear. She wanted me to wear a striped golf shirt. I did not. Here's a short photo essay about my feelings.

Sleepover

 

Summer is great. Play dates, sleepovers, fun! Tonight, my friend Chris is sleeping over. Of course, not much sleep is occurring, but I'm still having a great time. I introduced Chris to my two favorite things at the moment--Super Mario Galaxy and Dungeons and Dragons. Our D&D friend, Cynwyd, unfortunately died by being squashed under a rock trap. But we managed to defeat some Morlocks thanks to the sleep spell of Chris's character, Jones. He's a wizard. My character is a priest named Lightning. I had some close calls with the Morlocks but have so far been unharmed.

My Least Interesting Photo

wine2, originally uploaded by John-Morgan.

My Daddy has uploaded many, many photos to Flickr over the years. Some were better than others, but the one above is, according to Flickr, the least interesting photo he's uploaded. It's more uninteresting than this photo:



which is a sign for bubonic plague in Lake Tahoe.

It's vastly less interesting than this photo:



A houseplant.

Weird.

Backyard Campout

I'm looking forward to this weekend's excitement---a backyard campout. Only here's the twist, it's not in my backyard; it's in the Cubmaster's backyard. A bunch of my friends will be there too. Should be fun!

D&D...

Can be pretty scary. Last night our party ran into a wererat. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I knew something was up when he grew a tale. We defeated him and his rat friends. Tonight challenge was ghosts. Mom picked up some haunted goblets and ghosts attacked us as we headed for the exit. Apparently, they don't like their goblets disturbed. Ghosts are really scary.

Yahoo is Mean

My website, which has been hosted at Geocities since I was born, is now to be deleted by my Daddy's friends at Yahoo. Here's the announcement:

GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009.
On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

If you'd like to move your site, or save the images and other files you've posted online, please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to AT&T Yahoo! Web Hosting. See details in the help center or upgrade to Web Hosting now for only $4.99 a month.

Now you would think that they would at least make it easy for you to pull your content off their server and send it somewhere else for hosting. Sadly, they don't. Here's their solution:

The simplest way to download your published pages and images is to visit your GeoCities web site:

Right-click on any page and choose Save Page As... from the menu that appears. (If you're using a Mac, hold down the Ctrl key and click the page.)
Choose a location on your computer to save your files.
Click OK or Save to save the code and images associated with your page to your computer.
Repeat these steps on each page of your site.

But this is completely obnoxious since, during the save you end up saving the AD CONTENT displayed on the page as well. So if you want to move your site, you then have to strip out all the windowing and ad hosting code Yahoo inserted.

This is really not a nice way to treat longtime users. Yahoo is mean.

Courses

I like to design courses for people to compete on. Last evening, I designed a series of ring toss courses for Daddy and I to compete doing. A lot of my courses had the goal posts located in the garden and at other tricky spots in the yard. It's great fun when someone manages to put a ring on one of the goals in my course. I also like to see how the difficulty changes as I move things around the course.