home again

We had a nice visit up outside Seattle. The town feels like The Truman Show: most of it was built in the past 5-10 years. The streets full of identical 1900-sqft houses sit on 3,000-sqft lots, putting some perspective on our California "postage-stamp" 5,000-sqft lots.

You really notice the northern latitude there, with long days, even so close to the spring equinox. The long winter nights drive away a lot of people, including my uncle's wife. (Not to worry, my uncle went with her.)

It was a pretty good weekend. Anna's mother kept the crazy reasonably under control while we were there: not a sustainable thing for her over the long term, but I think we all appreciated the effort. Time with Grandma usually translates into J navigating life with greater difficulty, but again, it could have been worse.

I read the blog of Marco Arment, who created Instapaper, a marvelous tool made more unbelievably awesome by the iPad/iPhone app. He reviewed a quirky iPad game called Super Stickman Golf, and I figured for 99 cents it couldn't be that bad, and...wow. It's compelling. We all know the video game mechanic of shooting projectiles at an angle, with a certain amount of force, from the original 2D artillery games, to the far more sophisticated and artful Angry Birds. The graphics are simple, the music is annoying (and optional), but the gameplay is just cool. There's a few dozen courses, quirky golf ball options (I unlocked the Sticky Ball, which sticks to anything, thus allowing shots on vertical walls or overhangs), and a really pleasant interface. I'm not obsessed, but I do enjoy having something lightweight to do with my brain, and it's more engaging for me than most games.

J, on the other hand, is willing to do homework just to watch me play it. We've had a couple of snuggling periods where he just lies on me and gets very excited about whatever's going on. Sometimes when I say "Doh!", he'll be all reassuring and say "No, that's okay, you can just hit it up on the ledge!", which is charmingly unnecessary and very sweet.

I also walked in from work and got a smiling child charging at me to give me a hug. So that was pretty awesome, too. It's been a parental sort of weekend, in a good way.

Finally, I am proud and somewhat startled to discover that I have, in fact, scuffed the finish on my tungsten carbide ring. My best guess is that it's from diving into the sand playing beach volleyball at the company picnic a couple weeks ago. I guess it's an argument for continuing with the tungsten: imagine what I'd do to gold.