Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Yahtzee: Still relevant after 50 years

Our new favorite game is Yahtzee, which we acquired from my Grandma. It's a great game to teach math skills, as well as strategic thinking.

After wondering what the word Yahtzee means, I looked it up on
Wikipedia. It came out in 1956, based on a dice game a couple used to play on their Yacht. The date on our game is 1959.

And it definitely looks like something from the 1950s: This is the picture of the original Yahtzee game on Wikipedia:
We have the original score pads, dice and box. And for those of you who played endless rounds of it at 1319 John Street while eating chocolate chip cookies that were stored in a Pringles can in the freezer, you know exactly whose game I'm referring to. This game, plus Uno, Mastermind and Scrabble, always remind me of Winfield summers.

An interesting addition I have is a sheet of *typed* rules. Yes, typed...like on a manual typewriter.

Only a marketing person would be interested in the development of the game's tagline. The original tagline was "The game that makes you think while having fun." Between 1956 and 1961 the tag line was changed to "The fun game that makes thinking fun."

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Some like it hot

"Some like it hot, so let's turn up the heat 'til we fry"~ Some Like It Hot, Robert Palmer, 1985

"Man, it's a hot one. Like seven inches from the midday sun." ~Smooth, Santana, 1999

There's an excessive heat warning until 7 pm Friday. Today is Sunday.

Week two of 100+ weather. Last week had two days where the actual temperature did not reach 100+, and one of those days was 99.


The pool water is warm, and we found out very quickly that it's highly possible you could easily fry and egg on the cement: one of my tweets was mentioned in The Wichita Eagle.

I'm a hot weather girl, but this is a little much, even for me.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Little Birdie

A little birdie friend came to visit us for two days.
It arrived by slamming into our front door. The next morning he sat outside our kitchen window and watched me eat breakfast.
Birds were circling and chirping above and every once in a while, a bird would fly down and whiz right by him. He acted bored...like he didn't even notice. The birds were not happy.
Turns out it's a red tail hawk. And according to some Twitter followers and Facebook friends, we should bring in small animals. No one thought small children counted, but we didn't take any chances and stayed inside.