Emmett and I played tennis today for the first time. I used to play regularly (every Sunday for three years with Emmett's godfather), and he's beeen going to tennis camp for three years now. He's very good for an almost 9 y.o. I sometimes forget to factor that in because athletically he's more like what I was at about 10 or 11.
We came home and I told him it was electronic silence until 6pm, and he complained bitterly that without TV or computer he'd be bored into a catatonic state. But I held firm, and he's been happily playing with Legos for an hour now. Of course, they're all elaborate killing machines, but still.
Hee. And then they tell you which to do. I wish my profs told me which material I only needed to scan.
The Institute study material for my Life Insurance unit was supposed to be formatted to do this. In addition to the normal formatting, the bedrock vital stuff was in bold, and the less important material in a smaller font. At least, that was the theory. In practice, they'd lost the formatting for most of the notes.
I wish my profs told me which material I only needed to scan.
Wait. Isn't that all of it, until it comes time to write a paper? Am I doing grad school wrong?!?
But I held firm, and he's been happily playing with Legos for an hour now. Of course, they're all elaborate killing machines, but still.
Things I built with legos as a child.
- Elaborate killing machines
- Fleets of spaceships that were at war
- Ships or spaceships that had befallen some catastrophe, involving sinking, fire and/or explosions.
- A machine where you put marbles in the top and they came out of a random door at the bottom - made with several "randomizer" ramps to make it impossible to "cheat" and get a non-random door.
- A tower that went from the floor to the ceiling.
Things I built with legos as a child.
No Legos when I was a kid, but if you substitute wood blocks for the legos, tommyrot and I are as one.
My brother and I also made phasers out of TinkerToys so we could play Star Trek. My sister's cardboard house served as the brig. I figured out how my TinkerToy phaser could be made to shoot dowels, etc. with a rubber band, but I was dismayed that there was no way to stabilize the dowel in flight, like an arrow.
We had a lot of Lincoln Logs, plastic dinasours and plastic soldiers from serveral historic periods-civil war, roman, WWWII, etc. My older sisters and I would make forts for the soldiers and huge dinasour armies that were set to attack them. We often spent so much time setting them up, that we never had time to actually have the battle.
My older sisters also invented the cannibal factory game, where you drew Rube Goldbergian "factories" for processing body parts for cannibal products that they could buy in their cannibal grocery stores.
Then there was this elaborate performance art game we used to play with kids from another large family. It was "The Haunted House Hotel"
and most of us were the staff, who turned into monsters at night. My oldest sister was always the hapless victim who checked in, but never checked out. This all predated "Hotel California" by at least a decade.
We had cap pistols. Do they still make caps?
