Brady’s Blog

mrs. cracker and i just got in from a day at silver dollar city..

not just any day..

oh no..

saturday..

during young christians weekend..

total zoo..

thousands upon thousands of teenagers hopped up on funnel cake and cotton candy..

good times..

i almost made it through the whole day without riding a roller coaster but not quite..

i was forced to ride thunderation, which i was assured was just about the wimpiest of the wimpy little baby sissy girly kiddie rides..

i grunted and moaned and screamed through the whole thing..

that combination of fear and stomach-swirling motion is just too much for me..

but i survived..

and after 4 hours of driving today and 10 hours of chasing kids i’m a bit tired..

and it’s final four saturday..

so..

i have about 6 hours of tivo’d basketball to go through..

might just have to watch the last 5 minutes of each game and call it good..

ok..

last 2 minutes..

so..

let’s see..

it’s friday night at 11:30..

i just woke up from about a 5 hour little nappy..

didn’t get much sleep last night..

my sister and i drove to tulsa last night to pick up our folks at the airport there..

the flight got delayed on our way over there so we had a little time to kill..

in oklahoma..

in the middle of the night..

so..

that means either gambling or denny’s..

we did both..

i had never been to a real live oklahoma casino..

i have to say the one we went to was almost like a real casino..

only smokier..

and even more depressing..

when i see someone pop down $1200 at a table in vegas i think “wow, that person either has money to burn or is going to look back on this vacation with some serious regret”..

when i see the same thing at a casino in oklahoma i think “trailer foreclosure”..

as for us, we played about 4 hands of $5 blackjack..

well.. i did..

my sister wanted nothing to do with it..

she was about as fish out of water in an indian casino as a fish.. um.. out of.. yeah.. water..

anyway, i tipped the dealer a buck and still left up a whole two dollars..

and on to denny’s..

not much to say here..

standard denny’s experience..

sat between a homeless guy and two meth chicks, listened to the party crowd screaming obscenities in their attempt to produce a good “we got kicked out of denny’s” story, and enjoyed some fine french toast and bacon..

and hash browns..

and sausage..

and eggs..

and coffee..

mmm..

denny’s..

yum..

i’m taking another late night road trip to tulsa tonight..

my folks had some flight schedule problems coming in from arizona so they’re flying in there late tonight and i’m driving them back here to northwest arkansas..

whenever i hear the word tulsa, i think of a girl i used to know..

her nickname was tulsa..

no, oddly enough, she wasn’t from there..

our family has always played games..

cards - spades, hearts, tripoli, rummy, etc..

boggle..

clue..

yahtzee..

just whatever..

but i had just about forgotten about this one..

it was called mastermind..

and it was just about the most frustrating thing in the world..

i don’t know if this game is still available for purchase, but if it is and you’re thinking of buying it, just do yourself a favor..

take the money you were going to spend on that game, convert it to coins, melt them down, cast it into the shape of a sharp spike, and hammer that spike into your forehead..

believe me, you’ll be better off..

you’ll look really cool and your head will hurt less..

basically, this was a codebreaker game..

you stick these little pegs in a board, trying to guess the color code your opponent has set for you, adjusting your choices according to the responses to your tries..

kind of like battleship only without the whole random guessing thing..

you have to figure out what’s going on..

you have to think..

kind of like playing yahtzee against the germans in ww2..

(nazi yahtzee?)

i think i finally got the hang of it after a while but i just remember when my mom would drag that game out thinking “oh great.. homework..”

it was so hard..

high level of difficulty..

not what i look for in a game..

also why i stayed away from chutes and ladders..

one christmas someone in our family got a taffy machine as a gift..

i don’t remember what it looked like or how it worked or what the taffy tasted like, but i do remember everything being extremely sticky for a year or so..

we were at my aunt karen’s house that christmas - i remember spreading everything out on the twister mat to try to keep it off the floor and furniture..

what a mess..

that twister game was a stroke of genius though, wasn’t it?

here’s a 20 dollar piece of plastic with some circles painted on it..

now go sprain your ankle..

why does every piece of dumb forwarded email i receive start with the phrase “i don’t normally forward these dumb emails..” ?

really makes you wonder about the emails that aren’t being forwarded..

these kids today have it way too easy..

what with their central heat and air..

when we were kids, our grandma’s house had a furnace in the floor..

as in, that’s how the place was heated..

something in the floor was hot.. or on fire or whatever..

and hot air came up through a metal grate and warmed the house..

either that, or there was a really deep hole there..

anyone else remember seeing one of these?

probably not many of us that lived to tell about it..

but you can identify us all easily enough..

we have a distinct waffle pattern branded onto the bottom of our feet..

and at grandma’s house, the furnace was right in the middle of a doorway..

so if you wanted to go from the living room to the bedroom, you had to either jump the grate or do the hot coal dance..

oh.. and radiators..

all the schools had radiators..

here’s another brilliant way of warming people..

let’s pipe scalding hot water all over the building and use metal pipes to radiate the heat out to the kids..

surely they won’t ever touch them, will they?

nah..

of course..

they did serve a purpose..

we watched 300 today..

it was pretty good..

nothing special really..

lots of guys getting whacked apart by various weapons, etc..

good enough..

of course, once again, everyone in ancient wherever-ville has to have a british accent of one kind or another..

because everyone knows if you’re from more than 50 years ago, you’re from london or cambridge or liverpool..

unless you’re really really angry..

then your from scotland..

stewart can pronounce the word accidentally..

our other two children cannot..

and, believe it or not, there are some situations from time to time around our house where that word comes in handy..

with davis, we usually get something like this..

“i actually dent broke that”..

or

“i actually didn’t (subliminal persuasion technique) tear that up”..

claire usually sounds more like this..

“i accident to breaked dat thing”..

always followed by “i sorry mommy”..

she’s at that age (under 40) where a girl thinks saying she’s sorry and flashing a smile fixes everything..

if only she were wrong..

about 13 years ago i had a job selling cell phones..

i worked for alltel mobile when they first started selling inside of wal-mart stores..

it was your typical sales gig..

quotas and contests and pressure from above to make numbers..

i had a couple of really good tricks that i always used if i was behind and needed a sure sale..

first, i’d take my trusty motorola 8000..

you remember the one..

often called brick phones..

anyway, i’d take my 8000 and throw it across the floor of wal-mart in front of some unsuspecting future alltel customer, making sure to smack it into something hard enough for the battery to come flying off..

then i’d pick it back up, put the battery back on it, and make a call..

“that thing still works?” they’d ask..

and i knew i had them..

the other thing i would do was hang around the pay phone outside of wal-mart and wait for someone to start to use it..

and i’d say “here, just use my phone”..

and the person would be like “what’s that? a cell phone? cool?”..

and i’d drag them inside and harvest them like so many sheep..

man..

what a job that was..

and my kids will read this and wonder..

“what’s a pay phone?”