Chickens, Blue and Turtles, Too!

I came home from work today after a very hectic week of prepping for inventory and going through a painting facelift of my store, culminating in a twelve-hour inventory blitz today. It has made for a couple of long, hectic weeks.

Tonight, after getting home and eating dinner, even though I felt very sore, burnt out and exhausted, I decided to spend a little time with the kids. We started in the play room, playing my son's version of Blues Clues. Instead of paw prints, we have hand prints cut out of construction paper. And instead of using three prints for "clues" we use five. We take turns hiding the "clues" and finding them, then guessing what the "clues" had in common. We actually had lots of fun playing it tonight in the play room with my daughter joining us (usually it's just me and my son). Eventually, my daughter tore the thumb off one of the hand prints, and while I was out of the room getting some tape to fix it, my son came up with another game to play.

He found my wife's old (and I mean, she had it when she was a kid) Atari 2600 game system, with a library of more than thirty games. "Let's play this," he said.

So I made the minor adjustments necessary to hook it up on the TV, and we went through probably half of the games we have:

• Missile Command
• Berzerk
• Tapper
• Pitfall
• Freeway

Just to name a few. Of course, I think we both enjoyed playing Freeway the most. It's amazing how much fun you can have with such an outdated, basic system as the Atari 2600. Of course, several of the games required turning the system on and off several times just to get it to work. We made a little game of it. My son, then my daughter, then I would all blow into the cartridge (it seemed to work when I was a kid), then I'd insert the cartridge into the game, give it a couple of taps, and then play with the power switch until the game was live. Before I knew it, my daughter was bringing stacks of games over to us and blowing into them. It was really quite a bit of fun.

And we topped the evening off with an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Comcast OnDemand.

This particular episode was titled "Still Nobody," and featured a shrouded caped hero who called himself Nobody. I'm no big fan of the Turtles (my son loves them), but this was probably one of the best episodes I've ever seen. I told my son when it was over, "Maybe they should make a cartoon of the Nobody guy."

It was a nice, relaxing, enjoyable evening with my kids. And I had looked forward so much to just coming home from work and relaxing. Oh the fun I would have missed out on.

Joe