Especially since you did it with H&RBlock, shouldn't they have some kind of guarantee or help??

I would have thought.... I mean, they did help -- the guy figured out what I had missed, but still. I don't know.

We have dongles for the soooper special customized captioning software we use at work. They are tiny and each of them costs $10,000.

I think my boss just likes the word "dongle".

Speaking of being twelve, I was reading some Flylady emails about setting aside some private alone time for yourself. One of the suggestions was to take along your vibrating timer.

Hrm. Their guarantee on their website is pretty crappy--if it's an arithmetic error (!?!) they'll pay the penalties and interest.

Megan, was it you that mentioned Pit? I loved that, but we had to stop playing because my grandmother and great aunt were so cutthroat. Risk was also banned in our house because my mother couldn't take how vicious we all got.

Someone else mentioned it before me, but, yeah. It's a great get-people-into-gaming-mode game. Plus, it's easy to learn and quick to play.

Mine has a bell, which is awesome, but I'd rather have our old version with the original commodities (flax, etc.), for one thing, the point values had better distribution.

Hrm. Their guarantee on their website is pretty crappy--if it's an arithmetic error (!?!) they'll pay the penalties and interest.

Yeah, I guess it's technically my fault, and I don't have to pay any penalty (just my real taxes that were hiding from me). Whatever. I'm getting over it.

We definitely had the flax. It's the only reason I knew what that was as an eight year old. What's the bell for?

Speaking of being twelve, I was reading some Flylady emails about setting aside some private alone time for yourself. One of the suggestions was to take along your vibrating timer.

Heh. I read that email but didn't go there. I have that timer... I don't think it would be very effective.

We played Uno with my grandparents, Parcheesi and Sorry! at home, Monopoly very rarely. I think we played Milles Bornes in French class? Not sure. Scrabble always a classic.

And now that I've caught up, it's time to start getting ready for bed.

Some other games comments. You can play Guillotine online, along with a bunch of other games, at GameTableOnline: [link] You can play either against other people or AI opponents. One subtle advantage of online play: it gives you an answer on ambiguous rules. I play RoboRally there, and found it very helpful in working out how one card, Fire Control, was supposed to be played.

Another quite simple card game that I've been playing recently is Reiner Knizia's "Money". You have a deck with a number of different currencies, nine cards of varying value in each currency. At the end of the game, everyone scores points for the cards they've collected. You want to collect sets (three of a kind - same value and currency) and you're best off specialising in a currency rather than spreading out your cards among lots of different currrency (the scoring rewards hitting 100 value in a given currency, and then 200 value after that). It's an auction game - each round you turn over some cards from the deck into two lots, and players bid on them. If you miss out on one of the lots, you can instead take one of the other players' bids.

Anyway, it's a simple game, quite easy to learn, but allows for some tricky decisions and you need to account for what your opponents are doing. I don't own a copy; it's available as an app for the iPhone.

Also, if I never have to hear my boss at the theatre talking about his "dongle" again, it will be to soon.

It's like when my friend refers to random objects as a "hoo-hah". I'm like "um, that refers to lady parts, not the stapler"

Never let them meet!

I realize part of my stress about this is a) not really being in a position to control the dates and times much (if she put me on a dawn flight....blearg) and b) cat anxiety.

I so get this. My parents have me coming down at the end of the month for a family thing and it's so completely awesome they they made my reservations and paid for the flight but I am trying to get over my residual stress over the flight being so early that I have to get Kittenish to the kitty jail the day before and all of that. Plus, yeah, it's stressful boarding older cats with health issues.

I so get it.