Scrabble

This week I've become fairly addicted to an iPhone game called Words With Friends.  It's basically Scrabble, played like chess-by-mail via the interweb.  I can challenge friends anywhere to a game, then my phone lets me know when they've made a move.  I can take as long as I want to make my move, and so on.  My LDF was playing it with her sister all the time, and I finally grew curious.  I had no idea how hooked I would get.  I've always enjoyed Scrabble, but never been a fanatic.  But this game really gets me.  I have to exercise considerable willpower not to play when I need to be doing other things.  As an addiction, though, it seems pretty innocuous.  It was a free download, and if anything it's challenging the verbal portion of my brain, increasing my vocabularity.  If you have free time, I highly encourage you to look into Words With Friends.  It's available for Android as well as iPhone, and also on the computer, I believe.  My user name is GingerDana, and I'm ready to play you!

Little Kids (Hunting Easter Eggs)

More from the Easter chronicles with the LDF-family.  Here's an overly hasty scribble depicting cute little kids on an Easter egg hunt.  We saw this one little girl who was almost lost in her voluminously fluffy pink dress, sitting in the grass, not quite sure what all the fuss was about.  A slightly older girl approached her, holding out an egg and communicating via the special means that babies have to talk to each other.  Finally she flopped down on the grass almost atop the pink dress girl and everyone happily snapped photos.  I love the way little kids will just do their own thing, regardless of what the grown-ups are encouraging.  "Go!  Get those eggs!  You can do it!  Go fast!" shout the parents, and the kids amiably toddle along, enjoying the cool grass between their toes, observing insects in flight and the angle of the sunlight through the trees.  They may find Easter eggs and they may not, and they couldn't care a whit either way, except that the world is a big, bright, beautiful place full of endless wonder, and they're happy to be in it.  I'm with the kids.

Road Food

This weekend my LDF and I hit the road to visit her family for Easter weekend.  It wasn't too long a trip as these things go, but by the time we were traveling, we realized we would need a snack to see us through lunchtime.  We stopped and got biscuits at a drive-through.  For some reason there was a noisome odor lingering near the biscuit place, but I think it was mere coincidence because the biscuits were delicious.  We could tell they were going to be good when we saw the grease stains on the brown paper bag.  The best road food is the kind of stuff that you would never eat on a daily basis, but it's perfect for traveling.  Maybe it's an ancestral urge in our cells to stock up fat reserves for the journey ahead.  Maybe traveling makes us long somewhere deep down for home and stability, and eating comfort food is a way to achieve that.  Maybe going to foreign surroundings pulls us away from a sense of our mortality, and the feeling of our arteries clogging is a reassuring reminder.  Maybe the heavy food is ballast that literally helps ground us during the uncertainty of physical transition.

Or maybe it's just downright tasty.

Tornadoes

On Saturday I was very sleepy, but that's not what stands out about the day; what stands out is tornadoes.  For lunch, my lady-duck-friend and I went to a Mexican restaurant.  On the way in, we dodged raindrops from an afternoon downpour, but thought nothing more of it.  Just a little while later, when we'd gotten back to my place, my dad called telling us to turn on the news.  Only then did we see the tornado-ridden storm speeding eastward through North Carolina.  The storm passed by where we were without much incident, but meteorologists started talking about a tornado headed straight through the area where my LDF's apartment is.  Her dog was at home as the twister approached, but we didn't have enough time to get there before it hit, so we sat on the couch, watching and waiting and keeping our fingers crossed.  As soon as the storm had moved farther east my LDF jumped in the car and drove home, where she found to both of our great relief that her apartment was still standing and her wonder dog was none the worse for wear.  With that weight off my mind, I promptly lay down for a nap.

Windy Days

On Saturday, I went to the N.C. State University arboretum with my lady-duck-friend and my parents, which was the first time they had all met.  An exceptionally strong wind buffeted us as we tried to read the markers in front of noteworthy plants.  At one point I was surprised by a gust so strong that it almost moved me backward.  I found I really enjoyed the wind, though.  It was refreshing and cleansing, so long as my sunglasses kept specks and leaves (and the odd flying squirrel) out of my eyes.  The walk was entirely pleasant.  And the occasion, of a sort which can be stressful for all parties, felt quite calm and congenial, as I hoped it would.