All mixed up

This weekend was a real mixed-bag of activity. Saturday at noon, we headed over to the Old Town House for the Soup and Cider celebration put on by the North Yarmouth Historical Society. We lunched on a variety of soups and breads and washed it down with some freshly-pressed cider. The kids were too little to crank the press, but they had fun tossing apples into the hopper.

We brought separate cars, because Angela and big sister needed to be at the 2pm performance of "Can-Can Parisien" at Maine State Ballet. They went and bought their Nutcracker tickets immediately aferward and then went out for Indian food. I thought that was a bold choice, and apparently the kid did, too. She ate some, but was having a hard time with the spices even though she had a mild dish. I really enjoyed the left-overs on Sunday morning, though.

While they were having their fancy afternoon, the little one and I went to Wal-Mart and then home. I snoozed in the armchair while she played and watched TV. I had been late the night before playing World of Warcraft with some guys from work and I had another late night ahead of me.

That evening, I headed in to Portland to meet up some old high school classmates. It was our quarterly alumni get-together, and I've been really good about doing them the last year or so. We went to the billiards room at Old Port Tavern, which ended up being a great venue. No huge crowd and no loud music, so conversation was easy. The turn-out wasn't huge, but we had a couple faces show up that I hadn't seen in 17 and 4 years (other than on Facebook!). It's crazy that you can actually know more about someone after a few hours of adult conversation than you knew after 12 years of being children in school. One by one, people are figuring that out but we've still got a lot of bitter classmates to educate.

Sunday morning, I took the first-grader to a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese for a classmate. I had never been there before, so was nervous, but it ended up being pretty fun. She certainly enjoyed herself. I just don't think it's a great place to have a party, though. The kids spend most of the time running around playing the games by themselves and not interacting with one another. Even when they all sat together to eat, they watched the TV monitors more than they talked. We won 300+ tickets, but you need 10 times that to get the Polly Pocket toy that she wanted, so I convinced her to hold on to her tickets rather than wasting them on the cheap stuff that you get for 300 points. She understood that saving her credits would pay off in the long run.

After we left the party, we ran in to the mall and then came the highlight of the whole weekend - nay, the whole MONTH: Rock Band 2 came out that day for the PS3 and I bought my copy. I sped home and popped it in, but only had a few minutes to play before we had to leave for my brother-in-law's birthday party. I brought my disc over there and we played a little bit, too. Then he got his own copy for his birthday.

After putting the kids to bed, I spent the rest of the night playing and unlocked a few new tunes. The new Tour mode is far superior to the old way and between the new tracks, the old tracks and the downloads... you could, if you spent enough money, have a library of something like 400 songs to choose from. The only problem I'm having is with the calibration of our LCD tv. The sound and video aren't perfectly sync'ed up and it makes it very hard to play. I do ok with songs that I know well, but there are some really obscure tunes that I was struggling with on expert guitar. I'll keep playing with the settings until I get it right.

Comments

[March]

I need to get RB2..i just need to do it.