carcassonne

Garrett and I just got into a new game. We played it with some friends last weekend, and this past weekend some other friends bought it for us as a wedding present! It's called Carcassonne, and like Settlers, it's a winner of the German game award.

It's initially got the basic idea of dominos--you pick up an overturned square and have to fit it adjacent to other tiles already on the boards. Then you add little men to roads, cities, farms, and monestaries to rack up points.
And the board that forms is very cute. The dragon is from an extension we don't have. We have an extension that uses pigs. But we haven't figured out how to play it yet, because of course our directions are in Czech. We're not quite that fluent yet...

lunchbox

When I was little, we had two tin lunchboxes in the basement that I could use to take to school. My big sisters were old enough to take their lunches in brown paper bags, but I was supposed to have a lunch box. They were tin, and I was the only student in my class who still used an old tin lunchbox. After recess, all the other kids would throw their lunchboxes down the parking lot and kick them all the way to the door where we lined up. But if I threw mine, it would pop open and make an awful racket.

Of the two lunchboxes we had, one was girly: strawberry short cake or something like that. The other was themed from this movie, and to me it was icky. It looked boy-ish and harsh, and I decided I hated it. I had no idea what the image was from, and only just now, finding this image-link on google, did I learn. It's funny because a few years later I became infatuated with the West, and would have loved it, if I had ever realized what it was.

Those lunch boxes would probably sell for $40 in some artsy store today. Too bad I banged it up on the concrete at Washington Elementary.

crocheting, etc.

I've taken up a few new hobbies. Perhaps I should add blogging to the list again. Actually, "the inspiration" comes just because I happen to have more time on my hands for a few weeks. We've returned from summer travels, and are back at work, but the school building closes at 3pm, and of course there's no grading or planning to take home, so the evenings have been long.

Last week on Tuesday, I was already bored at 5pm and didn't relish a long evening of nothing-ness. So Garrett and I looked up Indian recipes and headed out with a list. We found a little Indian spice store just 5 blocks from our house that we had heard of, and got most of what we needed. We made chicken makhana, and it tasted quite good. We were rather impressed with ourselves!
We also made up chipatis from Mark's How to Cook Everything book. They came out fairly well, despite the mis-purchase of what we hoped would be whole wheat flour.

A few weeks ago I pulled out some yarn and crochet hooks from a give-away pile, and decided I would learn. I've perused several "how to" videos on youtube and tried numerous times to simply make a regular pattern, as you would start a scarf. I consistently got stuck on starting the second row, and it always looked hideous. This afternoon I took it up again, and this time followed her videos on making the "granny square." She gives the best detailed instructions out there for someone who is just beginning, and I completed my first project!

I suppose it is a hot pad for our dinning room table. I'm just going to stop there and let it be that: the next one will be better, I trust.