Full frontal momming at the Game Stop

Yesterday I went to Game Stop to sell back a fiver of games with John & the kids.  When I walk in, both Helpful Nice Game Store Clerks give me a heads up as always and they take a gander at what I’m selling back.  Much mooning and gushing over titles ensues.  I tell them up front I want the cash back on the EB Advantage card, and hand it over to them.

 ”Whoa dude, this Magna Carta looks aaaahsome…”

“Oh no, don’t even think about it,” I tell HNGSC #1.  “Its a total piece of shite.  Then, I probably had that mindset because I’d just come off playing God of War 2.  Anything plays like Pretty Pretty Princess after that.”

“Well yeah its God of War, that’ll happen.  But in this, the girls are hot…” he says peering at the box up close.

“That’s not a girl, that’s the hero right there,” I say. HNGSC #2 confirms.

“No way!  Dude!  A dude?”  The two clerks go back & forth over the character.  Then they start making over the rest of the games, waxing nostalgic on their fav titles in similar genres.

“I loooved Steambot Chroniles, oh and Tales of Symphonia. . . yeah and FFX. . . “

I change the subject to in-game battle timing and storyline development.  We natter on about that for a bit.  I pick up my EB Advantage card & leave off to arbitrate controller arguments among the kids over at the Viva Pinata demo.  Then John & I talk about buying him a GBA because he’s interested in getting into gaming on the ground level and wants something handheld.

Eventually, we gather up the younguns & head out, run a bunch of errands over the next two hours.  After the hardware store in a separate section of town, John spots an EB Games store, we decided to stop in.  I find a copy of Escape from Monkey Island for my PS2, and also Nintendo’s Mario Karts which we’ve been looking for a while.  I toss in another Game Cube controller as well.  Go to pay for assorted items & well, as has happened twice before, HNGSCs at Game Stop forgot to put the cashback on my card.

I twist into a conniption over this, but buy the games because they’re so hard to find.  Next stop, drive back to the Game Stop and have a chat with HNGSCs.

As soon as I walk into the store, both clerks hang their heads and start shuffling around behind the counter.

I start off with the silent Motherly Stare That Compels Confession (combined with hands on hips in that maternally, “your behavior is unacceptable” way). Then I sigh and say, “Now I know you boys are good boys, but Dudes, you have got to stop shafting me on the cashback. I don’t wanna grief you two, but am I gonna have to talk to the boss?”

Much bowing & scraping ensues. HNGSC #1: “DUDE, what were you thinking, she’s in here all the time with her kids!”

HNGSC #2: “I KNOW, Dude….It was his fault, ma’am. I told him he forgot to put the cash on the card because he was drooling over the games and then we went to get lunch….”

They spend the next five minutes finger pointing & explaining.  Due to the motherly disdain I must be exuding, all the teenage boys in the store retreat to the back shelves and bury themselves in the discount bins.  Their discomfort is palpable.

I give them the benefit of the doubt and hand them my card.  “Let’s not forget this again next time, all right?”

They credit my cashback & I just couldn’t resist. I leaned over to clerks and say, “Thank you, boys. Oh, and you have some ketchup on your shirt.”

In a family way

My cousin Aric is an artist.  To my knowledge, he’s not professionally trained, but his gift is one my family’s enjoyed seeing on the walls of my grandparents’ house for decades.  On the recent trip to the wedding in NC we stopped in Chapmanville to visit my Aunt Linda.  Along the top of the window sills in the florida room of my grandparents’ house, my aunt had placed his paintings, maybe fifteen or so of them.  Landscapes, emotive portraits, a few conceptual pieces, some representational work.   

I’ve always liked Aric’s work, how he’s self-taught (which I think keeps you honest and close to the soul of your art), and wish I had some of his work for my own.  Especially the gothic, dark and pensive work — that’s just my style and tastes, like his Mothman art. 

I didn’t grow up “with” him (my branch of the family moved around a lot), but I grew up always thinking of Aric as the good-natured, easy-going and quicksmile cousin, sweet, blonde and tall as a kid, just as sweet, soft-spoken and easy-going as a young man.  I don’t think I ever saw him angry or speak a harsh word to anyone. Years ago when our grandmother died, I offered him a ride with me to the cemetary as we drove to the interment.  We spoke of nothing much in particular, mostly about metal music and some bits about art. In that brief ride together, I had the best conversation with him — still remember it to this day.  In an unspoken way, I’ve felt a kinship with him that’s not on par with other cousins whom I don’t see often, something more than a sympathetic, artistic camraderie. 

Problem is, we’ve not often touched base with each other, and therefore I haven’t really given him the support and encouragement I’ve wished I could over the years. 

Recently having discovered DeviantArt, I realized it’d be a great venue for his work and through our aunt I passed on the link.  Months later, we’re finally emailing each other, and I find out he already knew about DA and was just getting around to putting his work there.

So in props to my cuz, check out his work & let him know what you think, and please respect the copyright.

Up From the Black by Aric S

I’m a Lumberjack & I’m OK!

Boy Wonder’s antics in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing has us at our wits’ end.  Every one of the villagers in our town of Grover (named by Twinkie 1) is so angry, so vehemently irked at us that I think it won’t be long until we’re all run out on a rail. 

We love that game for many reasons, mostly because four players can play the game non-simultaneously.  Each of the kids set up their own character & house, and I’m the fourth in our band of merry players.  Thank goodness the nonlinear gameplay allows kids of various ages to wander about engaging in whatever goofy activity they enjoy without serious effects on the other players.  Serious effects no, but aggravating effects seem to emanate from the realm of Boy Wonder’s gaming.

First, the kid (as is kidly) has no real agenda, goal or purpose in the game.  He collects seashells at the shore, shakes all the trees and leaves the fruit on the ground, and digs countless holes for the hell of it.  Most of all, he loves to welcome himself into the other players’ homes and fiddle with their gyroids, furniture, instruments and electronics.  His house is the least improved because he just won’t get a job and pay off his mortgage.  Ok, he’s five years old, I’m not particularly worried about this.  Yet.  Plus, its a game for the luvapete.

Save for one thing, I’m happy to let him go his garrulous way in our town.  Whenever Storekeeper Tom Nook stocks an axe at the Nookway, Boy Wonder snatches it up and proceeds to hack down all the trees in our town, including the money trees, leaving stumps hither and yon and generally pissing off ALL the villagers.  He of all of us learned that an axe will break if you use it X amount of times, and that a new one is procured easily at the Nookway.

First time this happened, I was able to catch him in the act and shut down that lumberjacking habit on the spot.  Made him put the axe in his gyroid and forbade him to buy another axe, while balancing this with all the other cool stuff he could do in Grover.

He rebounded by planting every fruit he could find: orange, apple, pear and even the saplings from Nookway, any fruit he could get his hands on until the place looked like Sherwood Forest.  Yes, the Force is strong in this one.

I curtailed that behavior too, redirecting him to fishing or running errands but neither seem to hold the gratification of wanton deforestation to him.

So I thought the chopping habits had subsided until the Twinkies at dinner tell me that during the gameplay that day all the villagers walked around in a funk, yelling nasty things at them the entire time they played.  Awful junk like, “You stink!  I hate you!  I never want to see you again! You’re ugly and I don’t understand why I was every your friend!”  Then Twinkie 2 says, “Yeah, Dora screamed at me and asked if I was the one who had been cutting down all the trees. . . .”

An arid moment descends on us as slowly, I cranked my head around to look at Boy Wonder with the Motherly Stare That Compels Confession.  He drops his fork and immediately wails, “SORRREEEEY!!!! I am SORRY I CUT DOWN THE TREES! I wanted to cut down the trees and I will NEVER DO IT AGAIN, I promise!”  The kid cries in an anime version of himself, tears squirting out of his eyes like a garden sprinkler and pouring down his face. 

I dispose an Animal Crossing time-out for the lumberjacking, and remand him to the custody of only one game, Mario Super Baseball, for the next week.  Until by chance I heard his father working with him in the pitching tutorial, teaching him how to play “chin music” on Princess Peach the other day — you know, where you purposefully pitch to hit the batter.  Oh fer cryin’ out loud.

The Burden of “Genius”

To this day, John keeps an ace up his sleeve: my secret and erstwhile spurious burden of genius.  No matter what anybody says (and this is for you , Mom), the true secret of this “genius” happens to be a voluminous knowledge of a lot (and I mean a lot) of things, some of which have no earthly useful purpose than to crinkle up my grey matter rather prettily.  Big difference between “well-read” and “brainiac.”

John draws this ace and lets fly at the best of times.  Like when I give some insipidly specific, detailed answer to a question he never really wanted the answer to:  “Well, you know that because you’re a geeeeenius, aren’t you?”

At one time during our prenuptual days my mother (you know how mothers are) confided in him that in Kindergarten the school psychologist tested me and referred me to some university or psychoevaluative center.  She professed that the formal report quoted some IQ figure like 148, 146, something like that.  And its been a long, slow decline every since (cue rimshot). 

Every time she’s told me this story I dismiss it and openly scoff.  Yeah, freakin’ genius, that’s me.  Regardless of this unwelcomed and doubtful information, she’s stuck to her guns all these years that I’m a genius, and forthwith told my prospective husband.  Being a New Englander and a consummate sarcastic character, John socked this tidbit of info away for the proper moment to toss it right into the middle of any conversation we would have like a lit cherry bomb.  He did, and does, often.  Why?  Because he knows it pisses me off, and also because its a last resort when he can’t win an argument/discussion/disagreement/whatever.  See how smart I am?  I can’t even come up with another word but “whatever.”

Case in point, the first real situation we experienced where he deftly used this info happend while watching an episode of PBS’ Antiques Roadshow.  Ok, he watched it, I read the paper and listened to it while reading (my usual habit).  If I could listen to an iPod with one earbud while doing these other two things, I would as well.  I like to keep all the synapses firing, baby.

I heard the appraiser ask the man about this black statue and they both fiddled around with some goofy speculations about how it could be the Maltese Falcon.  I looked up briefly and snorted like an elephant with an appropriately elephant-sized gollop of snot in its snout — then went back to the paper.  Puhleeze.

“What?” asks John.

“That’s not the Maltese Falcon for gobsake, its Horus the Egyptian God of the Sun who’s often depicted with the head of a falcon,” I said in a tired, didactic tone.  “His godhead dates back to before the dynastic eras of ancient Egypt, where he’s the son of Osiris the King of life, death and all that crap and Isis the Queen. Its supposed that his name is derived from the Coptic word for “hawk.”  His symbol is that kholed eye you see used all over out of context.  Since he is the god of the sun, and through one of those weird Egypto-mythos twists he only comes into existence as the son of Osiris *after* Osiris is killed by his father and cut into chunks — the fertile, dangly bits of him get tossed into the Nile where they are retrieved by his devoted wife Iris and whoopee, gets she with child the Gadda the Sun. Pretty funky, huh?” I rattle the Metro section as I turn the page, not even looking at the tv.

Deep pause of perhaps fifteen seconds while the statue owner goes on about the Maltese Falcon.

The appraiser laughed congenially and said something to the effect of, “Well, its not the Maltese Falcon but dates quite a bit earlier than that.  Its actually a beautifully carved statue of Horus, the Egyptian God of the Sun….”

Another deep pause.  I stifle a self-posessed humph and a grin behind the paper.

“You know, there are only three people in the world that know that statue is Horus the Sun God,” said John. ”The guy who dug it out of the ground, the guy appraising the statue and you.”

“Well, your mother did tell me you were a geeeeeenius.”  Said in just the appropriate tone to twist my knickers.

He’s also parried with this info when I told him that the Chinese dynasty is pronounced like “d’ahng” instead of Tang like the breakfast drink the astronauts drank.  And when I find myself with certain words stuck in my head all day (molybednium and pachycephalosaurus come to mind).  Also when I told the kids about the Golden Ratio, why a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable, how the human eye inverts an image which is re-verted by the human brain during visual perception, and why a Klein bottle is so much cooler than a mobius strip.

None of this makes me a genius, just a well-qualified smart ass.

still fuzzy, with a little jetlag

After laborious issues with LiveJournal, I imported the XML of my LJ to WordPress and am starting fresh.  The XML uploaded fine but with apostrophe substitution which I’m manually rectifying individually within the posts.  Until I get it all compliant with the doc spec, bear with me.

In an instant…

>>>(originally written the evening of 7/15)<<<

I’m feeling otherwordly tonight.  That kind of feeling like you’re not quite in the moment, as if you’ve turned your head but your brain stayed focused in the other direction, wobbly inside and adrenaline burned-out.  I don’t know if I’m more shocked at what happened, or that normalcy drifted back around us so swiftly afterwards.   

Five hours ago I wrangled my three kids (the Twinkies, aged 7.5 and Boy Wonder aged 5.5), my sister’s two aged 6.5 and 3, and my brother’s daughter aged 8.5 through an impromptu kid-together of popsicles, swinging, barbies, sandbox and hotwheels.  The ice cream truck jangled a couple blocks away and the kids all screamed for ice cream, which I’m happy to treat for since its an affordable $1.25 for chocolate, vanilla or swirl cone.  Five hours ago, ice cream was a melty, generous indulgence, an inexpensive, nostalgic experience for my kids, nieces and nephew.    

Three crossed the street with John to help carry the cones, my Twinkies and their one-year older cousin. A car was parked in front of our house on our one-way street, the ice cream truck was across the street, leaving the middle of the road open to the traffic but the view was totally blocked between the two vehicles. I went to walk behind the car parked on our side of the street, to cross the road and to help my husband & the girls carry ice cream. They crossed, looking both ways before they did, as they always do. I hear voices behind me and notice my sister’s three-year old son and my five-year old son are following me out of the yard, so I usher them back in the yard & shut the gate. When I turned around, I think I experienced what its like to have your heart totally stop dead.

Twinkie 1 was screaming her sister’s name over and over and over, holding her hands against the sides of her head, looking into the road. Because of the blocked car, I couldn’t see anything, and then I remember my husband screaming his fool head off at a car in the middle of the road that had stopped. A man got out holding his head with a look of pure horror and without knowing what had happened, I KNEW what had happened. I knew it with that sick, supernatural feeling you get when your brain makes the connection but your heart does not quite yet figure it out.

Everything heated up — my brain, my body, every muscle in my being and every heartbeat that slugged through my heart — and I remember running around the car to see my daughter (Twinkie 2) lying on the road, screaming bloody
murder. Screaming is good, that weirdly logical motherly part of me said, if she’s screaming, she’s not dead. John was nearly volcanic with rage and going at this guy so vehemently I thought he was going to take him apart with his bare hands. The driver was literally falling to his knees on the road, shaking and saying in Spanish — “oh my God, the child, is she dead? oh the baby, the angel…God in heaven, save the baby…”

I remember running to her, grabbing her up and screaming over her screaming, “are you hurt?” Stupid stupid stupid question to a kid who just got hit by a car. I think she was upset because she felt John was yelling at her — “you jackass what the hell were you thinking are you a total idiot?” he bellowed.

I scooped her up, ran inside, called my sister downstairs, made an icepack for her leg, grabbed my wallet, called the urgent care center, decided to go to the emergency room, gathered her up, broke about 6 driving laws on the way to the hospital (turned left onto a main street with a red light, ran another three blaring my horn). Made the ER in less than 10 minutes, holding her hand, telling her “its ok, I’m with you & you’re gonna be all right.”

The ER staff immobilized her, and contemplated a neck brace. She was still wailing, but more scared now than hurting. They did a full thorough check, cleaned her up, bandaged the heavier scrapes & kept her for two hours on observation.

Her biggest worry in the ER was that her twin sister was as seriously traumatized (I know she had/has to be). She asked the ER doc if she could call her sister and let her know she was ok. After they talked she didn’t cry any more. Its a twin thing, I know. Secondly, she asked about the driver from the accident. I told her that I’d called John & he said the driver turned out to be a neighbor from the next street over.  He (the neighbor) was beside himself with grief and worry. John said the driver had been over to the house twice that hour alone to ask if we’d heard anything about how Twinkie 2 was. Twinkie 2 somberly said, “when I get home, I want to go tell him I’m ok, and thanks for stopping and not running over me.” I just about choked on my tears.

Within an hour she had cracked a smile and told me her arm was sore. I kept her occupied & entertained (who knew of the “Rock, Paper, Scissors” version that included “Pistol, Fire, Gluestick?”) but she didn’t get sleepy, have any headaches, blow pupils, discover some new hurt or otherwise prove that she’d suffered anything but a hard jolt from the car. The driver must have been going less than 20 miles an hour (thank God, again). On our one-way street that in itself is a miracle, as the current popular speed is nearly 45 miles per hour since we are only two blocks going into the main street.

In three hours, they released us & I was able to bring her home. She got to say goodbye to her cousin leaving town. She had some ice cream and asked to play Nintendo. I tried to talk to her Twinkie 1 who didn’t want to talk about it, telling me she had put it in the “shadowy part of her brain where she didn’t have to see it.” I did find out from her that she remembers seeing the car hit her sister, and her sister flying about ten feet through the air.  She was the only one who saw the accident in its entirety.  Last night was rough, both girls were up twice with nightmares, Twinkie 1 with empathetic leg cramps in the same leg her sister was hit in (again, a twin thing), and once again with a bloody nose near morning.

After the vigilant night I made them breakfast, poured my first cup of coffee and sat down to read my email. My kids sat in the living room watching Spongebob. *That* was the minute that my motherly composure finally ran out. You know what I mean? That adrenaline-fueled master of emergency management system that mothers draw from when things fall apart? I just started sobbing, all three kids came over to hug on me.

Then, all the illogical things you think come pouring over you — Twinkie 1 told me that her sister had turned back when she saw me coming to help with the ice cream. If I’d stayed in the yard, she’d have never gotten hit. What if the driver had been going faster? What if he hadn’t stopped? What if it had been worse? What if I had come home from the hospital without her? What if I had to make plans for a memorial instead of plans for what we’ll all four have for lunch? As a mom, you can’t help but think of those awful, heart-rending possibilities when you realize just how fortunate the outcome of something so unpredictable has been.  We’re all fine now, things settle back into their routine.  All I can do is contemplate the wealth of life we all have, and be grateful, be very grateful for having it.

Keep feeling (necrotic) fascination

Bodies: The Exhibition opened in here Columbus, June 27 and runs to October 28. I’m looking forward to going, by myself of course.  John doesn’t have the interest in it and the kids are too young IMO.  It’ll be like my visit to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia; I’ll leave the weaker souls & stomachs to go get some Philly-style water ice while I forge ahead on my own.

When I germinated a fascination with the weird (I think it was pre-school or Kindergarten), I couldn’t imagine my interests would span most of the -ologies:  physiology, anthropology, pathology, entomology, archaeology, paleontology, epidemiology.  Over the years they ranged from nose-in-book edification about the gory excizing of hearts at Teotihuacan to details of Cotton Mather’s persecution of New England housewives, the devastation wreaked by outbreaks of influenza and the black plague, the incredulous efficacy of Dr. H.H. Holmes during the Chicago World’s Fair, how Joan of Arc’s heart did not burn and how ebola morphed into the deadliest infectious disease in known history.…

So back then, there were no Goths, Geeks or Nerds, only creeps and freaks, friends. You were either Category A: disturbed (which you were expected to grow out of by adulthood) or Category B: disturbing (which you were expected to be remanded to the state institution for juvenile psychotics).  I’m surely the only first grader who with my cousin Craig (and a funeral procession of my younger sister and brother) buried goldfish alive in baby food jars in my grandparents’ woods, returning at intervals to excavate and observe various decomposition stages of our piscean subjects. Rest assured, I didn’t grow up strangling kitties or setting fires but later learned more empirical, acceptable methodologies for m scientific interest.  Thank Jeebus, eh?

I tried to keep my weird fascinations undercover through junior high until the librarian at St. Andrew’s found out that I was the only student who repeatedly checked out the same books on witch trials, feral children, freaks of nature and accounts of human aberrant behavior.  The nuns must’ve had a field day with that.  Next semester someone mysteriously pulled all those books from the shelves and instituted ”Girls’ Program.” In one of the first “program, Sister Frances volunteered me to be the 7th grade makeover candidate for the visiting Mary Kay represenative.  As if a mere cosmetic makeover would exorcize the true freak in my soul.

Aside:  Doesn’t it seem ironic that the exhibit runs in Columbus and Branson as well as Prague, Lisbon, NY and D.C.?  Just struck me as unusual, but I’m not a native Ohioan.  If I were it might not seem ironic at all.

John sez

John sez yesterday he walked out of class [Business Accounting at graduate school] and a woman with a box of giveaways comes up to him and says, “would you like a free highlighter pen with a compartment in the chamber for Post-It-Notes?”

He deadpans, “you had me at free.”

At the risk of erroneously promoting him as the funniest guy in the ‘verse I had to post this.  Heh heh.  He gave me the highligher cause he knows I love that kind of junk, and because free is a damn good price.

Afterthought:  Where the hell am I gonna use a highlighter?  I write everything online.

Oracle Schmoracle

Glomps to  gleckia in her LiveJournal ’twas this little easter eggy meme!  Its the results of my Greek Mythology Personality Test.  On the toughest question, I coulda gone with Plato having a good point AND being an ass, either way is good with me.  Actually, I find the results pretty accurate, by my accountin’.  But then again, I knew that I knew I was gonna say that. Could be why I’m such an intolerable smart ass.

Your Score: The Oracle

0% Extroversion, 80% Intuition, 44% Emotiveness, 80% Perceptiveness

Heuristic, detached, and analytical to a fualt, you are most like The Oracle. You are able to tackle any subject with a fine toothed comb, and you possess an ability to pinpoint nuances and shades of meaning that other people do not have and cannot understand. Accomplishment and realization of ideas are, for you, secondary to the rigorous exploration of ideas and questions — you are, first and foremost, a theorist. You hate authority, convention, tradition, and under no circumstances do you accept a leadership role (although, you will gladly advise leadership when they’re going astray, whether they want you to or not). Abstraction and generalities are your interests, details and particulars are usually inconsequential and uninteresting. You excel at language, mathematics and philosophy.

You are typically easy-going and non-confrontational until someone violates one of the very few principles that you deem sacred, at which point you can fly into a rage. Although you possess a much greater understanding of process and systems than the people around you, you are always conscious of the possibility that you’ve missed something or made a mistake. You don’t tend to become attached to particular theories, and will immediately discard mistaken notions once they’re revealed to be incorrect (but you don’t tolerate iconoclasts who try to discredit validated theories through the use of fallacies and bad data). Despite being outwardly humble, you probably think of yourself as being smarter than most other people. That’s because you are. In fact, in your dealings with people your understanding of their motives is so expansive that you know what they’re going to say before they say it, and in world affairs, you usually know what is going to take place before it actually does. This ability would make you unbeatable in debates if only you were a little less pensive about your own conclusions, and a little more outgoing.

Famous people like you: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John McWhorter, Ramanujan, Marie Curie, Kurt Godel
Stay clear of: Apollo, Icarus, Hermes, Aphrodite
Seek out: Atlas, Prometheus, Daedalus

Link: The Greek Mythology Personality Test written by Aleph_Nine on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Selective reading and Hiding Wallace

John home from work yesterday sees my LJ open and says, “I’ve never read it from the source — do you mind?.”  He sits down & starts to read but he’s scrolling and skimming — I shoulda known he isn’t interested in all the gaming commentary.  I peep over his shoulder and he notices me scrutinizing what he’s scanning.  “Most of this shit is way over my head, you know, the parts where you ‘grabbank a grobilious and reach level gradius’  I just look for the parts about me.  And the kids too, of course.”  He particularly appreciated the Sammy Davis Jesus line.  

Making John laugh remains my pervasive driving ambition in life.  With his sense of humor so keen, if I make him laugh I know I’ve germinated the penultimate essence of humor, even if its just momentary.  Its rare but sometimes I say or write something so hilarious or unintentional he’ll actually laugh out loud.  That’s a savory triumph right there.  Most of the time when I think I’ve had a particularly humorous moment, he’ll console me with “I’m laughing on the inside.”

Over his other shoulder, our little 3″ bendy-figurine of Nick Park’s Wallace hangs behind a framed needlework my mother made in the 70’s when my father was in seminary at the University of the South (the Mount St. Michel of the Southern United States).  Only his fisty hands and knobby-nosed face show.  Ah HAH!  The game’s afoot — with John engaged in my LJ, I snatch Wallace and pocket him on my way to make dinner.  For your vicarious pleasure:  beef shank pot roast with rosemary and roasted vegetables, frenched green beans, and for dessert, fresh cherries.Wallace, you intrepid traveller back in my possession once more!  For the past fourteen years give or take a year, our Wallace Action Figure has been more places than Anthony Bourdain or Rick Steves.  Our little game started when several Wallace & Gromit  figurines & toys came home from KFC (?) after we were married, purchased for me by John (sweethearts floating up from my head in anime fashion as I recall this romantic gesture).  Yeah, its a grown-up, married peoples game, but one that only twisty minds like us appreciate.  

Hiding Wallace, who knows when it began or how?  Wallace gets hidden, Wallace gets found.  Times there’s been he’s gone unfound for weeks at a time.  He’s a bendy toy, so can fit in any myriad of places.  The finder never mentions when or where Wallace was found, only re-hides him without interruption and goes about his or her merry way.  The original hider only knows Wallace’s been found when he or she looks in the original hiding place…..that’s the green light that you have to start looking for Wallace again.

Over the years he’s been in the toilet reserve tank, the egg carton, buried in the sugar box, literally sandwiched between slices of bread in the bag, and tucked into diaper wipe boxes.  He’s peered out from potted plants, pantry shelves, and the pr0n collection.  He’s had his feet frozen in ice cube trays, been submerged in the water cooler bottle, suffocated in rice bags and crammed inside the gas cap cover of the car.  He’s been in thousands of places, mundane and suprising alike. Most other couples kiss each other every morning or say, “Have a good day, honey!”  We hide the Wallace.

Our kids only last year realized we play Hide the Wallace, but they can’t quite get the rules.  If they see me hide Wallace, the next time we’re sitting at dinner they’ll announce, “I know that Wallace is in the cover of your calculator, but I’m not supposed to tell you!”  D’OH.  Also, they think that since they are “in” on the game they should be able to hide him too.  We’ve had to lay down the law on the hiding of the Wallace as something only grownups do.  God knows what we’d do if he got lost.  Our marriage would probably fall to pieces.