Category: play

bass beat

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

While we were in Dayton, we stayed at a bed and breakfast in the Oregon District. The bed and breakfast was in a restored mansion on a side street just off Fifth Street, the road through the district where the tourists could find bars and restaurants to visit. The suite we rented was not in the mansion but behind it in a street-level addition that was almost certainly built at least a hundred years after the mansion. It had a private entrance, a very cozy sitting room, a warm bedroom, and a kitchenette. It was perfect for us.

We arrived in Dayton on Wednesday evening and departed Saturday morning. After driving eight hours on Wednesday we were just a little bleary-eyed and foggy-headed, so a short walk around the district was about all we had the energy or the focus for. We stayed in Wednesday night, mostly reading to get our minds off the road, turned in late and slept well. And except for the garbage trucks that rampaged through the neighborhood at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, our sleep wasn’t interrupted much by anything.

We slept in until almost nine on Thursday. When we finally did get up, My Darling B made coffee but I couldn’t bring myself to drink it. Not her fault. She did the best she could with the Mr. Coffee machine and the big plastic jug of Folger’s coffee. Luckily I knew where to find a coffee shop just two blocks from the inn, so after a brief walk I fetched back an Americano and a latte and we sipped those as we nibbled on our breakfast.

We had lunch at a Thai restaurant, conveniently located just across the street, before getting dressed to go to the service in the evening. After the service we went back to the inn, warmed up the rest of our lunch (the portions were enormous!) and had dinner in our suite. My Darling B picked up a bottle of wine earlier, which we opened for dinner and enjoyed through the evening. We went to bed after staying up late reading, and slept well, waking to the arrival of the garbage trucks once again.

I got out of bed at about eight on Friday, tiptoed out of the bedroom to dress myself in the sitting room, and let myself out as quietly as possible to seek freshly-brewed coffee. After collecting two large black coffee’s to-go, I returned to the suite to bestow hot beverages unto My Darling B, who had just roused herself from slumber. We had about an hour to sit and enjoy our coffee while nibbling on breakfast, then washed and dressed and went to the service at the cemetery. There was a luncheon after and then a few tasks to take care of, so we didn’t return to the suite until maybe five o’clock. We got sandwiches at a restaurant across the street before settling in for the night. B read while I watched The Shawshank Redemption. We turned in at maybe ten-thirty or eleven o’clock.

And did not get a wink of sleep. Well, maybe a wink. Maybe even a wink and a half. On Friday night there’s a dance club on Fifth Street in the Oregon District where they play music on a sound system so powerful they could shatter granite and melt steel, if they so chose to. On this particular Friday night, they chose only to keep us and the rest of the neighborhood awake until at least two-thirty in the morning. (My Darling B says three, and I don’t doubt her, but the last time I looked at the clock while the dance music was still going thumpa-thumpa it was two-thirty.) I didn’t sleep much after that because I spent every waking minute up until then thinking about how tired I was going to be driving back to Wisconsin the next day, so I wasn’t exactly in a frame of mind that would let me go to sleep when the music finally stopped.

Nevertheless, I stubbornly stayed in bed until about seven-thirty, which I was about the time I got the very appealing idea to go get some delicious coffee. Got there about fifteen minutes too soon; they didn’t open until eight. I made a big loop around several blocks of the district, arriving back at the coffee shop about five minutes before they opened, so I huddled in the doorway until they raised the blinds and unlocked the door. I guzzled down every drop of that twelve-ounce cup and, before we hit the road, went back for more. I won’t go so far as to say the caffeine boost made the drive survivable, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

home again

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Home again, home again. Left Dayton yesterday morning at 9:00 am (eastern time) and got back to our little red house at about 5:30 pm (central time). Hit a minor hitch when I missed a turn and had to drive through Gary, Indiana, but it didn’t set us back much and we didn’t miss any more turns than just that one.

improbable

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

We were watching the first episode of “The Last of Us” when my mom texted me. She was housebound because she’d been hit by the same deep freeze that was keeping all us inside, but for her it was worse: she lives in Arkansas where the road maintenance crews don’t go out to salt or sand the roads, so she was stuck at the end of her cul-de-sac, unable to go anywhere. We stayed in just because we didn’t like getting cold.

So she told me about the books she was reading and I told her about the zombie show we were watching. “The funny thing about zombie movies,” I texted her, “is that you have to pretend that everybody in the movie has never seen a zombie movie.”

“I have never seen a zombie movie,” she texted back, “and I hope I never do.”

So I guess it is possible, then, that in a zombie apocalypse there might be one or two people who didn’t realize what was going on. I stand corrected.

lyric

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

aw, shit.

It’s “come on, eileen tah loo rye yay,” not “come on, eileen tah roo lah ray.” I’ve been singing it wrong all these years. So embarrassing.

fractured

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

We got beat yesterday evening during our weekly game of Spirit Island, and by “we” I mean My Darling B and I. Tim did just fine defending his territory and he did what he could to help us protect ours. Winning the game is a group effort! So when B and I went down, we took Tim with us. Yay, team!

It’s a game of anti-colonization. Invaders explore the island, building towns and cities and blighting the land. Natives defend the island with the help of spirits, each of which have unique powers. My favorite spirits are Ocean’s Hungry Grasp and River Surges In Sunlight. Ocean is good at drowning invaders but can only get them if they’re near the coast. River is good at flooding the lands, which washes the invaders down to the shore where Ocean can get at them. That’s a pretty good example of how the game relies on teamwork.

I was playing Fractured Days Split The Sky, a spirit I had played only once before. It’s a spirit with very complex powers that frankly intimidated me so much I didn’t dream of playing it for the longest time, but I could tell from watching Tim play Fractured that it was a spirit with a lot of potential for helping out other spirits, so I wanted to learn how it worked.

I played Fractured Days last week and again last night and both times I felt like I was groping around in the dark with no chance of finding the light switch that turned on the big light bulb over my head, so I asked Tim for any hints he could give me that might help me learn how to make this spirit work. He pointed out that one of Fractured’s power cards, Blur The Arc Of Days, could be very useful for destroying invaders. He’d tried to point this out to me during the game but I was slow to pick up on it because to me, the power card seemed to be no more than a way to spawn and move the Dahan, which are the island natives we as spirits are supposed to be protecting.

The card also lets Fractured Days force invaders to ravage the lands. I didn’t see how that was helpful. Ravaging invaders can blight the island until the spirits gain the ability to defend against blight. Out of habit, I had trained myself to prevent the invaders from ravaging. Tim pointed out that after I acquired power to defend the land, I could destroy invaders by spawning Dahan, forcing the invaders to ravage, and protecting the Dahan from the ravage with my acquired defense, which allows the Dahan to fight back against the invaders, destroying them. Such a simple strategy that it completely evaded me. Now I wonder what other seemingly useless powers I’ve been overlooking.

egg noodles

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

My Darling B sent me out to get egg noodles. I don’t know what egg noodles are.

“They’re wide and flat and curly,” she explained.

“They’re flat and curly?”

“Yes. They’re flat. But they’re curly.”

I couldn’t even imagine what that looked like.

“How wide are they? An inch wide? Three-quarters of an inch?”

“They’re about that wide,” she answered, holding her fingers about a half-inch apart.

“Okay. And how long are they? An inch long? Six inches?”

“They’re about as long as spaghetti noodles, but you can’t see them.”

“I can’t see them?”

“They’re in a bag.”

“They’re in a bag I can’t see through?”

“Well, you can, but you can’t.”

A bag that’s transparent but it’s not, something else I couldn’t imagine.

Eventually I had to fall back on this: “When I leave, I’m going straight to the store and I’m going to send some photos of noodles to your phone, so watch your phone for incoming texts with photos from me.”

And that’s how I bought egg noodles. I found three or four bags of flat noodles that were curly in different ways, snapped photos of them, and sent the photos to B, who responded with a message telling me which one to buy. Thank goodness for modern technology.

your honor

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

We’re binge-watching the Showtime thriller crime series “Your Honor” and if you haven’t seen it yet stop reading right now because I’m going to spoil it in a big way.

The show stars Bryan Cranston as Michael Desiato, a judge in New Orleans, and Hunter Doohan as Adam, his son. Adam crashes his car into Benjamin Wadsworth playing the part of Rocco Baxter, the son of a crime boss. Don’t get too attached to him, he dies a grisly death in the first episode. When Adam tells Michael what happened, Michael takes Adam downtown with the intention of turning him over to the police, but when Michael learns that his son has killed the son of the crime boss, he slinks out of the precinct unnoticed and the craziness begins.

I was sort of into this show for the first five or six episodes. The first two episodes were about how Michael covered up the crime, how Adam suffered a full-blown crisis of conscience, and the next few episodes were about how the cover-up began to fall apart, but the last episode we watched last night was totally looney toons. To say they lost me is an understatement. In the final scenes, I was rooting for the bad guys, although to be absolutely fair by the end of the episode it was clear that Michael is just as awful as the mob boss he’s hiding from, and Adam is an apple that hasn’t fallen all that far from the tree.

While Adam was unraveling emotionally after killing Rocco, he attended a memorial for Rocco where he met Fia, Rocco’s sister. The next day, Adam “accidentally” ran into Fia in a coffee shop. He’s been stalking her on social media so it doesn’t feel all that accidental. She sat down with him and they began to chat. Adam told Fia his mother had been murdered. Fia told Adam her brother had been murdered. They bonded over their mutually shared anguish and left the cafe to spend the day together. They had good chemistry and looked adorable with each other. It was a really sweet date, or would have been if Adam hadn’t had to keep dodging the fact that he was the monster who ran over Fia’s brother and left him to die.

Later that night as Michael makes a sandwich, he tells Adam the heartwarming story of how me met Adam’s mother. Sorry, not heartwarming. I meant to say psychopathic. These two are psychopaths. Adam killed Rocco. He was spectacularly broken up about it until he started dating Rocco’s sister after e-stalking her. Now his heart is healed and he’s in love. Or something similarly warped. Meanwhile his dad, Michael, has done such a half-assed job of covering up Adam’s involvement in the murder that Rocco’s mob boss of a father is killing off everyone he thinks is responsible. And Michael knows it. But he’s in the kitchen telling his son stories of romance and eternal love. Totally psycho.

So when Rocco’s father, the mob boss, thought he had it figured out that Michael killed Rocco (and Michael let him think that) I wasn’t all that worried that Michael was going to get a bullet in the brain. I knew that wasn’t going to happen, of course, because there were four more episodes to go and the series has been renewed for a second season, so they weren’t going to kill off the star of the show. But I was kind of hoping they would anyway. And a little disappointed that they didn’t. Oh well.

In the two episodes we watched tonight, Adam is still dating Fia and they still look kind of cute together, but still in a really creepy way because Fia keeps mentioning her dead brother and Adam keeps tap-dancing around it by mentioning his dead mother. How does he think this is going to end? Happily ever after? Best-case scenario (for him) she never finds out until he’s telling his own “how I met your mother” story to their kids and it slips out that he ran her brother down in the street. Oopsie.

All that said, Bryan Cranston has gotten pretty good at playing a psychopathic monster. If you liked him in “Breaking Bad” you’ll like him in this. Same character, really.

best television theme song

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Jonny Quest was my all-time favorite Saturday morning cartoon show, and why wouldn’t it be? Jonny was the son of Doctor Benton Quest, a man so smart that the CIA had him under twenty-four hour surveillance every day of the year to protect the secrets in his brain. He went to every corner of the earth to do science and, naturally enough, Jonny went with him and got into all sorts of adventures.

A show like that needed a great big television theme song, and Jonny Quest’s theme song was the best theme song in the history of television theme songs! It opened with a flourish of trumpets, followed by war drums that beat the beat of an excited heart for four measures before a bevy of trombones began to hammer out the base line of the song. There’s hardly been a theme song like it since then. Okay, maybe Hawaii Five-O came close, but it’ll always be in the number two slot.

life skills

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Random recollection: My mom told me she wanted to teach me and my brother some basic housekeeping skills: cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing. Dad wouldn’t allow it, apparently because it was women’s work.

Fast-forward a couple years: I was living on my own in an apartment in England. I had to call my mother to ask how to bake a potato. I did actually try to bake it myself before I called her. I don’t recall what I did wrong, but it was not at any time during my kitchen experiment what I would have considered edible, and back then I was okay with a lot of canned foods that I would not eat now except as a last resort following a global catastrophe.

I suppose eventually it would have occurred to me to visit the library to check out a cook book, but honestly I had no clue at all and could conceivably have starved during the lag between trying to learn through trial and error, and twigging to the idea that I should put my hands on at least a few examples of one of the most well-documented human activities of all time.

Maybe some day I’ll tell you how long it took me to warm to the idea that I should, from time to time, vacuum the floors of the rooms I lived in. Maybe. Maybe not.

Casablanca

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Tonight’s after-dinner entertainment was “Casablanca,” the corniest of cornball movies and yet still so wonderfully enjoyable. The first time I saw it on the big screen was while I was in college; the audience cheered after every well-worn quote. We didn’t cheer tonight but we did recite our favorite quotes along with the actors as they recited them, and sang long every time “La Marseillaise” was played, which was pretty much from the beginning to the end of the movie. So much fun.