games

Final Friday

Friday 09 January 2026

Tonight was the Girl's final evening at home. She heads back tomorrow for her second semester of college. (Is it only her second semester? How is that possible? It seems she's been studying forever, and we've only just begun this adventure in independence and eye-watering expenses.)

"What do you want for dinner that final night," K and I asked her. She thought for a while and replied, "Fettuccine alfredo."

"With shrimp?" It's her favorite, and I would have been surprised if she said no, but "No" was indeed her response. "With chicken, I think."

But how to spend our last evening together? We long ago realized that we are only a small part of our daughter's circle, and that meant we'd only have a little time with her this evening. "I want to go visit M one last time," she explained. M, her closest friend from high school, studies at Fordham; they only see each other when they both happen to be home. So a family movie was out, and besides, there's not much socializing with a movie. Additionally, since the Boy has regional band auditions tomorrow, he would be more than reluctant to spend so much time away from his trombone on the evening before such a significant audition. In the end, we played cards.

Game Night

Friday 08 November 2024

We only have so much time together as a family of four. L will graduate in a few short months, and then her time in our house will be limited to summers. I expect that soon enough, she won't be staying with us the entire summer. She'll be twenty, twenty-one years old. She'll have her own life. She'll have her own priorities. She'll have a job that she'll want to continue working over the summer. Or she'll have some internship or other. So these evenings are rare.

Some things have, of course, changed, but for poor K, nothing has changed. She always has the absolute worst luck in board games. When we play Monopoly, we call her (and she calls herself) the Slum Lord because she can never manage to get anything other than the very cheapest of properties, and the three of us end up bankrupting her in fairly short order. Tonight's game of Sorry was no exception. But one other thing stayed the same: we all laughed heartily about it.

Laughing as a family -- few things are more precious.

Friday Insanity

Friday 26 July 2024

I've had the matchingtracksuits.com domain registered through the same company for as long as the website has existed, which is around 19 years or so. I've had the actual website hosted at a few different providers, but for the last few years, I've used Host Gator because their cloud VPS hosting is a good value for all I do online. I also have my school site hosted here (ourenglishclass.net) as well as a Moodle installation for class content (no URL provided because only students have access). I decided it's about time to move the domains to the same company that provides the hosting (it made sense to keep everything consolidated), so a week ago, I began the process of changing domain registrars for two of the three domains we have (kingary.net being the third). It finally went through today, and much to my surprise, it broke the two websites. Completely. And totally.

So I spent most of the day going through using phpMyAdmin to move all the necessary records from one MySQL database to another. One of the tables has 519,000 rows. Another table has a more modest 49,736. But the catch is this: I had to do massive search-and-replace operations on every table to make sure it would continue working when moved everything to the new database that now runs this site.

The upshot is this: while the site might not look all that different than it did 24 hours ago, what's going on under the hood is completely different. It still uses WordPress, to be sure, but it's a totally different installation in a totally different directory with a totally different database.

That was the day portion of Friday.

The evening was so much better. We took K out for her birthday dinner: she chose pho, which we all love. When we came back home, we played a family game, something we've never played before: a Polish game called Pytaki.It's likely made with younger children in mind, but the premise is as simple as can be: there's a bag of questions from which you choose a random question and then talk about it. They're questions that show you how well you know the other people (one for K was, "What is the best way to make the person on your right happy?" she answered immediately: "Cigar and whiskey.") or give you a chance to share a little about yourself ("What's your favorite movie.") Some where about family history, like "How did your parents meet?" A lovely game that we played for an hour and led to a lot of much-needed laughs.

Sequence

Tuesday 23 July 2024

"Let's play a family board game tonight!" the Boy declared. The Girl was at track practice, and the three of us were going to head out for a mountain biking adventure before it began raining. But the Boy still wanted to do something together.

He wanted Monopoly (as always); we agreed to play Sequence.

It's a game we've played a lot over the years, and somewhere, I have a picture (and a post) of us playing it with Nana and Papa.

Perhaps this will be a game we play together when the kids come back home for a visit...

Orlando 2024 Day 2

Wednesday 26 June 2024

Yesterday there was a team from Texas who, I believe, lost all their games in straight sets. L has been there: she’s been on teams that leave a tournament day without a single win. The Texas team was up 11-8 at one point, but our girls rallied and beat them.

Today, it was more of the same: straight-set victories for the first two games, including a brutal second game with sets that were 25-10 and 25-11. “It’s good to be on this side of that score,” I said to another parent, “but we’ve been on the other side, and I know how that hurts.” It does a real number on your self-confidence, and soon, the bad mistakes (like the ones they were making: hitting serves out and sloppy serve reception) pile on each other. They reach a point that essentially, the team is just as much beating themselves as being beaten. Again, we’ve been there, too.

The final game was a bit of a different story. In the first set, the girls were quickly down 2-7, but the pulled it together and ended up taking the set 25-19. The second set started out much the same, but once again, they were able to pull back and then take the set 25-21

Today was Pink Out day, when all teams wear pink uniforms and I guess thinking at least in passing about the fact that women (and a few men) die of breast cancer every year. “Believe there is hope for a cure,” one shirt reads. It has a certain religious ring to it, but it’s antithetical to the whole enterprise of looking for a cure. While it is science and not faith, belief, or hope that will cure cancer, I understand the implied optimism in the shirt, certainly a critical element for anyone fighting cancer. One of the players I noticed yesterday is clearly just after chemo. A strong female outside hitter without a single hair anywhere on hear head, she stood out in more ways than one. Perhaps the pink encourages her. Hopefully.

As for today's pictures, I focused on the setters, which I don't think I've ever done. In a lot of ways, their the brains of the whole team: they read the defense, make quick adjustments, and then decide which hitter to set based on perceived weaknesses in the opponents' defense. Their sort of like the steering wheel of the team, or the neck. "Brain" seems to take something away from the other players.

In truth, all the players are completely critical. If you don't have good defensive specialists, you won't get a good pass to your setter. If you don't get a good pass to your setter, or if your setter is not on her game, you won't get your hitters in good position to attack. If the hitters are attacking, you won't be scoring (except from opponents' errors and blocking, and the occasional well-placed lob to the empty back corner from the setter or a DS).