"Escape From The T. Rex!"

Mr Bunches invented a game! It's called "Escape From The T. Rex." He designed it, and I drew it to his specifications.  Here are the game pieces:

Each player is a jungle explorer, and has to make their way along the treacherous path from Start to Finish:

You roll a die to move, but Mr Bunches decides how many steps to take in between the marked spaces.  This is intentional: Mr Bunches hates to lose (he is always the red explorer) so by not marking spaces on all the boards, he can decide (as he did tonight, for example) that if you roll a six and are pretty close behind him you move 6 tiny little spaces so you stay behind him.

There is, of course, a T. Rex:

Scientifically accurate

But the T. Rex only comes into play if you land on that space, in the middle of the board, labeled "Eaten By The T. Rex!"

If THAT happens, your piece is replaced with one of the pieces indicating that his head has been bitten off:

and you are either out of the game, or returned to start, or -- in one strange quirk tonight -- turned into an angel and then by magic your head is back.  (That happened to my piece, I think because I looked sad at being out of the game.)

If a person makes it all the way to Finish, then you have escaped the T. Rex and also beaten it so that it turns into a fossil:

Pretty sure that's EXACTLY how fossils are made. 

It is a VERY exciting game that combines the best of science, board games, and the thrill of Escaping From A T. Rex!

The Boys etc etc August!

Miniature golfing:

Swimming at the "Dolphin Pool" (So named for its dolphin-water fountain)

At Zipline Park. 

On our way to the Dolphins' Cove waterpark for Mr Bunches' early birthday present. No pictures from the waterpark, for non-waterproof-camera-related reasons. 

Babysitting Mr F's and Mr Bunches' nephew (my grandson) and taking him to the nature trail...

Mr F & Grandson at the splash park:

Swinging on the last weekend of summer...

Bonus Summer Day: Actually September 1, but I took the day off and we went bowling: 

Mr F has a "Green Machine," a Big Wheel for older kids, but it had already been delivered to the school by the weekend of September 2 (he uses it for phy-ed), so he was relegated to old school Big Wheels when playing outside: 

The boys are tenty-one, part two: pics from July

Sweetie and I agreed summer seemed less full of activities this year -- me busier with a new job and having fewer days off helped that. But we packed a lot in.

Stewart Lake, 

This is our nature walk to the natural springs and then the big hill we call "the mountain." We got to the springs, but this impending thunderstorm called off the hike up the mountain:

Free day at the Milwaukee Public Museum: Mr Bunches in the butterfly room

Us in the European village. 

Mr F in front of the Native Americans hunting buffalo display. Clearly excited by it!

We only stayed about 1 hour at the museum. It was supercrowded and Mr Bunches was made nervous by the dinosaur display where the dinosaurs seem VERY real and there are thunder noises in the background.

Swimming, then swinging at the beach down the street from us.

This was when we went to go wading up the river, right at the start. Mr F slipped and cut his ankle, and while it wasn't bad I didn't want it to get infected so we cut the trip short. Then weather kept us from ever finishing the trip, one of three traditional summer activities we had to skip that we'd done every year up to this one. 

The Vilas Zoo in Madison. Free, so we go all the time. 

Sad story alert! This is a splash park where Oldest Daughter brought her son (my grandson) and I took the boys. While Mr F and the grandson had a great time, Mr Bunches kept coming over and telling us that there were "troublemakers" squirting him (as shown below). We both thought he was just having fun and saying they were troublemakers because of the squirting, which, you know, splash park. We learned after we left that it had really bothered him, that he wanted to play with the horse squirters but was trying to get the kids to stop squirting him, and that in fact he wanted our help. I felt guilty for days.

I took him back to the splash park a month later, and he was worried about the troublemakers being there again. So I stuck by him and when a kid tried to squirt him, I explained to the kid that he did not want to be squirted, and Mr Bunches finally had a good time there.

This is what happens when you swim several days in a row...

Mr F finished off July lounging in our lower level, where my home office used to be but now it's becoming a playroom again.

The Boys are Tenty-One

The boys turned 11 yesterday, but I ran out of time to post photos of them. In lieu of the yearly roundup of past pictures of them, I'm going to post a bunch of stuff we did this summer. Today is from June:



Graduation from fourth grade. As 5th graders, they now go to a new building with fifth through eighth graders.

Clearly impressed by his achievements.

Trip to the beach with their nephew. It was the windiest day I've ever seen, but Bucket Helmet (Patent Pending) was an unrelated fashion choice.

Early in the summer, Mr F didn't want to go in the water when we went swimming. So we compromised...

Dad teaches hygiene, Mr Bunches fights back using The Power Of Notes (Patent Pending)

"Cops & Bobbers": free fishing poles for the kids at the park where Sweetie and I had our wedding reception years ago. Mr Bunches caught TWO fish.

Of course without DNA testing we can't say whether
that's a different fish or just the same, really really
gullible, fish.

Most Sundays I go into work for a few hours in the morning. The boys come with me, and then we go do something fun. Here's Mr Bunches playing with the Dollar Store Robots by my fish tank. Oh, yeah, we got goldfish for the office. Mr Bunches named them: the boy is "Sam Alex," and the girl is "Rose Alice."

I am the only lawyer in my office with a working catapult and an easy chair. BOTH ARE NECESSARY.

"Krafty Kids" at the library. Mr F was making an ocean necklace.

On weekend nights, Mr F's nightly ride is the "Capital Route," which takes us down by the Capitol, through the UW campus, and home along the lakeshore. One night, we got this scene:

"Tall Park." Guess why we call it that?

Swinging at the park around the corner from our house.

"Little Park On The Mountain." I don't know why he was posing this way...

But it reminded me of something...

It began with just wanting to find one book

A while back I started trying to find a copy of the book Master Of The Five Magics, a book I read long ago and wanted to re-read again as part of my 100-Book-Year to see if it held up the way I thought it might.

Only the book wasn't available (at the time) as an e-book, and they didn't even have a paper copy of it at the library.  So I decided I would try to find it at a used bookstore, because why not? I mean sure I could have gone on Amazon and ordered it and had it in 5-8 days, but that didn't appeal to me.

So with that I began occasionally stopping at the used bookstores in town and seeing if they had a copy. They didn't, but they had many other paperback books I'd read once before.  I no longer had hardly any of my books; I'd sold many of them to the bookstore years ago when ebooks first became a thing.

But as I walked around the store trying to find a copy of the book Master Of The Five Magics I decided that I liked the way paper books looked, and I began missing my old collection of paperback scifi and fantasy books (and some other favorites), so I decided that if I had a chance I'd pick up some of my other old favorites, too, and re-stock my collection; not necessarily to read but because I liked them, liked having them around and the way they looked. They were nostalgic and interesting and fun.

With that, I sort of gradually slid into just plain book collecting, and that's where I realized I was the day I was in a used bookstore and came across some old E E Smith scifi books that they were selling for just a buck each. E E Smith is one of the early scifi writers (I once read most of his Lensmen series after hearing it might have been an inspiration for Green Lantern, my favorite superhero).  So I bought the books. I'm not particularly a fan of Smith, but they were old and collectible books, and I liked them, so I bought 'em.

That was the tipping point, so now I'm more or less committed to building up a library of books I loved and/or find interesting, particularly focusing on scifi/fantasy paperbacks, with a side of paperback movie novelizations, which I have always loved. As a kid I often liked reading movie novelizations for movies I'd seen, and generally preferred them over the movie.

That's all the intro to this post, in which I proudly display the three latest books I picked up, during a stop at the library yesterday to return books.  They are:

The first two I got mainly because they were movie novelizations; someday when I own a bookstore/toy rental company/book museum there'll be a whole wing devoted to those.  The last one is a book I first saw when the boys and I were spending the day at the Madison library (the big one). We were hanging out on the level where they let you eat snacks, because libraries are cool now, and while the boys were eating I was looking at the display books where the librarians group together books in themes like "Back To School" or "Beans!!!" or something. I'm not sure the grouping that had Willis' book in it, but I was drawn by the cover and the description

 Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.

I put it on my list of books to eventually read, but the problem was that there isn't an electronic version of the book at the library, which means that I can't get it through the library as an ebook, and the volume of books I read is such that I never want to buy them if I don't have to. (I'm still reading about 100 books per year, so it'd be like $500 or more on books per year to read this.) Then I saw it at the library and decided I'd spend all of 50 cents -- the cost for used books at our library sales -- and picked it up.

So there you go. I'm a book collector, having come full circle from when I eschewed ever reading a paper book again.

PS I found Master Of The Five Magics about a year into the search, at a bookstore near the home of my elderly uncle, because I now go to bookstores in cities where I have business, too. I re-read it, and it was still a solid book. A bit more basic than I remembered but not a bad read.