OmegaMom

Okay, I have a few posts in mind, but right now I just want to pass on something that Pretzel passed on to me.  It’s in the spirit of earworms:  Once you pass it on, hopefully it’s not stuck in your own mind anymore, eh?

Boomshine!  A bubble-bursting chain reaction game.

Go forth and waste time.  I just want you to know that I made it to 336 points.  Woot!

(Posts in mind:  OmegaDotter builds a house…A review of a kid’s sex ed book…fear and loathing on world equivalents of Wall Street…cold weather…)

OmegaDotter was sick, then OmegaDad got sick.  Now it’s my turn.

My head feels fuzzy and I can’t think.  I hate it when I can’t think.  Gah!

OmegaUnk pointed out in the comments to my previous post that Hasbro is getting huffy about Scrabulous.  As the article I link to says, why on earth don’t they just buy Scrabulous, and keep it running?  Though I suppose they’d get all snarky about paid subscriptions and stuff like that.  Maybe they could do ads, and make it pay that way?

After all, it’s the rare family that’s going to use Scrabulous to play Scrabble™; it would require a computer for each person, or an insane amount of people switching seats and swearing up and down and left and right that they’re not cheating by looking at the other person’s tiles while the other person is playing.  In other words:  people will still buy Scrabble™ for playing at home or with friends, so they’re still going to be getting their money for the game anyway.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

More later, dudes.

OmegaDad is not what you would call the most macho of men.  He is, in fact, a sweetheart, kind, thoughtful, generous, intelligent, and totally, totally funny at times.  He sniffs at football.  Sneers at racing.  Used to hunt, but claims it was only for the socializing, the male-bonding bit.  He seems to find most male posturing something to look at askance, mock gently, and imitate wildly (for that totally, totally funny part). 

Definitely not your typical Oklahoma redneck dude.

But lately…lately the man has gotten me worried.

He’s found a pursuit–a sport, if you will–that has him posturing and gesturing and uttering manly-man crows of victory and macho snarls of aggression.

It’s a totally new side to him.  It leaves me gawping in amazement.  And amusement.

I’ll be wandering downstairs after getting the dotter off to sleep and enter the office only to hear him yell, gleefully, "HAH! I’ve got you now!"

What, you may wonder, is the pursuit in our office that has roused the prehistoric male in my quiet husband?

Scrabble.

Online Scrabble.

Specifically, Scrabulous.

Now, I have sung the praises of Scrabulous previously, have my own account, and do, occasionally, dip in.  But OmegaDad has become obsessed.  He has become quite snooty about who he will play; he will only play folks whose history shows that they’ve been around for a while, people who have a rating similar to his, he challenges people to "put up or shut up", he has the arcane two-letter combos practically memorized, he prides himself on getting bingoes (seven-letter words that use up all the tiles) at least once per game…

There’s an arcane formula that Scrabulous uses; all beginners start off with 1800 points, and usually drop precipitously from there to bounce around about 1200.  A good player will have a higher score coupled with a long history, because if you win enough games, you gain points.  A really good player will have a long history with 1800 points or more.

OmegaDad has become one of those players.  In the process, he’s become a spectator sport for me, because it’s just so fun watching him bounce about, letting out shouts and groans and snarky comments like, "Well, buddy, are ya gonna open it up for us, or am I gonna have to do it?!"

So if you’re at Scrabulous and want to check him out, look for wannallamanow.  If you play him, realize that you are just feeding a sad, sick addiction–my amusement at this oh-so-macho side of him which is devoted to…a word game!

This weekend, I purchased Uno for the dotter and me to play.

We’ve been non-game-players for quite a while, with a few forays into Go Fish and Candyland.  But I thought it was time to introduce the dotter to a slightly more complicated game, and figured she had reached the point where we would actually spend time playing the game, rather than me stripping it of the finer points so that she comprehended how to play it.

I was right.  We spent an hour playing Uno this evening, she and I, while OmegaDad cooked a delicious dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and carrot and celery sticks with peanut butter.  Yum.

Anyway, the dotter thought it was great fun.  But I had reached a point where I wanted a break.  She kept pleading for “just one more game!” and I did my stock model firm “No.”  No yelling, no storming, no frustration, just plain, “No.”

And when she realized that (as is my norm when I use that “No”) I actually meant it, she said:

“Oooooh, dammit!”

My eyes bugged out.  OmegaDad’s eyes bugged out.

OmegaDotter put a shocked hand up to her mouth, with bugged eyes of her own, then hid her head in my shoulder.  Giggling.  But, yes, she realized it’s a “bad word”.

It’s the first time she’s used a “bad word” with full intent, in the right context, and with feeling.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or proud.

The OmegaFamily has a nightly routine.  We eat dinner (usually late, sigh), then, between the end of dinner and the beginning of the bedtime ritual, is OmegaDotter’s “eleven minutes”.  This is her time to play with daddy all by herself.

(”Eleven minutes” can be anywhere from an actual 11 minutes to an hour, depending on the night.  As for why it’s 11 minutes and not, say, 10 or 15–well, OmegaDad has an interesting quirk.  When he uses the microwave he refuses to use any number divisible by five or any of the standard time divisions.  Thus, you find him firing up the nuker for 31 seconds rather than 30, or 6 minutes and 2 seconds.  OmegaMom rolls her eyes at this.)

Sometimes the “eleven minutes” is spent playing with horsies, sometimes watching a video, sometimes hide-and-seek, sometimes a big Bad Guy roaring, “WHERE IS SHE?!?!” as she giggles and flees, or sits on his shoulders giggling as he whirls around “looking” for her.

Last night, for whatever reason, they decided they needed a tunnel.  OmegaDad was stumped for a minute or two, then had a light-bulb moment.  They marched out to the garage, and returned with OmegaDad carrying a bunch of flattened Home Depot boxes.

I deduced that the boxes were being made into a tunnel, and heard much hilarity for a few minutes (”My butt is stuck!” quoth OmegaDad), then the dotter dashed in, grabbed my arm, and started pulling me back into the living room, saying, “You have to see this!”

The boxes marched across the living room, flaps overlapping and taped here and there.  OmegaDotter vanished into one end, boxes bumped and jumped, and she emerged from the other end. 

Then she demanded I do it.

Erm.

I gave the boxes the hairy eyeball.  They didn’t look really large enough for me to do what the dotter was doing–scamper through on arms and legs.  And I feared I would end up saying, as the dad had said, “My butt is stuck!”

But I gamely squirmed in one end and proceeded to do a Marine-style crawl through the boxes, pulling myself by the elbows and wiggling my lower body as I progressed.

(Hallelujah, ladies and gents!  I have discovered the be-all and end-all to tummy exercises!  I’m sure if you did this ten or twenty times every night, within a few weeks you’d either have a hellacious bad back or else a svelt new figure…)

And then OmegaDad and I watched as the dotter chased the Wooly cat through the tunnel, and he, in turn, chased her.

And then it was time for bathroom and toothbrushing and bed.

The dotter, having had a quick bout with the cold, handed it off to me.  Thus, I spent the weekend id a haze ob bizery.  OmegaDad, having lured the Geography Gals to our house for a Sunday evening birthday dinner, spent the weekend alternately patting me on the head, thrusting various cold nostrums my way, cleaning house in a frenzy, and dealing with the dotter.  By the time the GGs showed up, Banana Split Birthday Cake (a decadent, cholesterol-laden delight from, I am sure, the ’50s or ’60s) in hand, I was at least alert enough to socialize and eat some of the cake.

In the meantime, OmegaGranny had evilly emailed me a link to The ESP Game, which randomly partners you with someone else (never seen, heard, or named), randomly tosses up a bunch of thumbnail pics, and asks you to label them.  So, while I was dealig wid de code ad de stuffiness, I whiled away away a few hours mindlessly typing in descriptors of pictures.  It’s something to do with Carnegie Mellon University and labeling unlabeled pics on the web, supposedly…Anyway, I soon found that even though I could neither see, hear, nor talk to my partners, I got some definite likes and dislikes very quickly.  Some partners were worthless.  Some–wow!  It was like we would zing*pow*zap get the same descriptors over and over again.

What can I say?  I found it addictive.  Bad, bad OmegaGranny!

In the news, we had a Texas legislator whipping up some ill-thought-out plan to pay women $500 to decide to adopt their children out rather than have abortions.  He did, at least, make sure to include verbiage that would keep anyone who did so from being charged for selling babies…No word on fathers, of course.  No procedure for getting the kiddo into foster care, or finding agencies, or anything like that.  Not a word about prenatal care.  Nothing about coercion.  Just *bam*, sign this paperwork (available only at abortion clinics, by the way) within one month after the birth of the kiddo, and voila, 500 smackeroos.  I can’t collect the words to properly describe how idiotic I think this is.  I hope this is the kind of throw-away legislation that never makes it out of committee, like the legislation that some of our own state legis-critters have produced.

No great thoughts here, alas.  I’b sdill drying do ged by doze do clear up.