The weekend update with Brit Hume

Filling in for Brit this week will be Neil Patrick Harris.

Filling in for Neil Patrick Harris will be our regular guy, Rick Carey.

Several funny/cool/weird things happened this weekend so I'll try to do a quick recap.

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If you run the right decompression scheme on that you'll get the following report:

Friday night we hired a babysitter and went over to some friend's house to have dinner and play some games. Actually A game. Specifically Mississippi Queen. It's a pretty cool riverboat racing game where you gotta stop and pick up a couple of river rats southern belles. There's some good strategy involved and it's pretty easy to play.

When we got back to the house we found out that Dee fussed almost the entire time we were gone. Terri felt bad for the sitter. Dee had done that several times for ME when Terri had to go off somewhere and I had to babysit.

Saturday we spent a lot of the day unpacking boxes that we'd had in "storage" (storage being defined as stacked in the hallway).

A lot of the stuff is going up on eBay (after all it's been in the boxes unmissed for about a year!)

Sunday were were supposed to go to Grapevine for the DFW Ethical Fellowship's Talk Like a Pirate Game Day. According to Terri, we were supposed to be there at 11am and then by noon we'd be heading somewhere to get some lunch and then back home. Normally Terri and Dee go to these things by themselves and I stay home and get work done. But I figured I'd tag a long this time. I figured that we'd be done with lunch by 1pm and we could stop at Fry's and a couple of other places on the way home and I could be home by 3pm with plenty of time to get some more work done around the house.

It didn't work out that way.

Around 11am we're noticing that we're the only ones at the fellowship. So I called Shelly and she tells me that the Game Day starts at 3pm. So we met up with John and Shelly (minus Maggie who was with Grandparents) and hung out, shopped and ate lunch until 3pm rolled around. Then we went back to the fellowship and played games for a couple of hours before heading back home. Got home about 7pm the rest of the day being completely shot.

We played a really cool game at the Game Day, though. Pirates of the Spanish Main is a really cool miniature battle game where the ships are pieced together from parts printed on credit card stock. It's a very neat idea. There's a few oddities about the game mechanics, though. Like if you sink a ship, you and the player that owns the ship split the booty from the ship rather than it simply being lost to the bottom of the sea. To win, you've got to get over 50% of the treasure in the game... this is sometimes hard to do if there's an even number of gold in the game. The gold is distributed to the islands randomly at the start of the game, so if you get lucky and the islands closest to you have more than 50% of the gold and you've got some fast ships, you can get there, get the gold and race back to your home island and win without a shot ever being fired.

I definitely have some ideas for house rules that I'd add to the game, but I'll save that until later when I might have a chance to test those ideas.

More stuff that bugs me

Whenever I have the opportunity, at the grocery store, convenience stores and the like, I use my debit card to pay for my purchases. It's very easy if they have the little device there where you can swipe your own card and enter the pin without having to hand over the card to the cashier. However, most of the cashiers seem to think that they have to walk you through the operation of the device.

I know how to use the bloody thing! I've been using them for several years now!

I don't know if they do this automatically because there's still a bunch of clueless people out there that need help with this, if they're doing it out of habit, if the store management says they have to or if I just look like a complete moron that can't operate a simple piece of electronics.

In any case, you people are really freakin' annoying! CUT IT OUT!

It kind of reminds me of when I used to deliver pizzas in college. After giving them their pizza and collecting the payment, I'd say, "enjoy your pizza" and 99 times out of 100 they'd respond, "you too!"

It was pretty funny the first time it happened. I realized that they'd been expecting me to say, "have a nice day" or something similar and the conditioned response is of course, "you too." After that it became a game. I made sure to say, "enjoy your pizza" to everyone I delivered to and sure enough most of them responded with "you too."

That lead me to another little social experiment. I'd noticed that if you ask someone what time it is right after they've looked at their watch, they'll look at it again before answering you. Again, I think it's a conditioned response. When someone asks you what time it is, the instant reaction is to look at your watch (or a clock if you don't wear a watch). So the game became to ask "what time is it" immediately after I see someone look at their watch. I've NEVER seen anyone not look at their watch again.

When I ask them why they looked at their watch the second time, in many cases people said that they didn't even realize they'd looked at it in the first place. That suggests that the first look might have been just a habitual thing and they weren't actually wanting to know what time it was, so the time never actually registered on a conscious level.

Most of the time, however, people simply had no idea why they'd looked at their watch again other than habit. On a few rare cases, I'd get someone try to rationalize the action by saying that they wanted to show me that they looked at their watch before answering so that I could believe them or that they wanted to provide the exact answer and needed to check to see if the minute had changed since they had looked two seconds ago. The first answer might hold some merit as a desire to speak from authority, but I think the second answer is complete BS unless you're dealing with Monk.

Grapefest and stuff

Saturday I spent all day over in Dallas with one of the producers of Deadly Bachelor Party Bachelor Party Massacre. I'm editing the behind-the-scenes video and there were some changes he wanted. Basically he wanted to see more of himself in the footage. So I spent several hours over in Dallas working on that with him. But we finally got it finished. Now I just have to go back in and layer in the background music and it'll be finished.

Sunday we went to the Humanist Fellowship pot luck. I usually don't go to those things because it seems a bit like church to me, but Terri and Dee have been going and they seem to enjoy it. I went yesterday because it was just a potluck dinner and then we were gonna go to Grapefest.

The potluck was ok, but it was pretty true to it's name. We had chili, chicken and dumplings, stuffed mushrooms and a rice pilaf. But I guess that's about what you can expect when there's only 6 adults there (four of them being comprised of two couples). Anyway, it was fun and we played some games. Then we went to Grapefest.

Grapefest is a lot like the Main Street Arts festival in Fort Worth. The main difference between the two is that Grapfest doesn't have nearly the crowds. That makes it a lot more preferable to me. However, I'm typically bored with these places after an hour or so. So I spend the rest of the time just wandering around waiting to leave.

But it was fun, they had some good music and I bought a map. So I came away happy.

We got home around 6:30 and ordered a pizza. Pizza Hut does something that really bugs me. I order the pizza on the internet using my credit card. The billing address on the card matches the address they are delivering to, so there shouldn't be any problems, right? Most of the time, however, the delivery drivers want to see the card and make a rubbing of it on the receipt. This is just stupid. They claim that they can't process it without the rubbing. I understand (thanks to a friend of mine) that that's probably technically the case, but they DON'T DO IT EVERY TIME! In fact, on several occasions, I've ordered a pizza for the baby sitter and then left (with my card) but they still deliver the pizza ok. I could understand that if I was having it delivered to someplace other than the address that the card is billed to, but even then, they don't check my ID against the card or even check the card numbers against what's on the receipt. I could hand them any card and they'd rub it and it'd probably go through without a single problem because who's gonna check all of those receipts?

I must be insane

Weird little things bug me.

Like the security guard that shouts "good morning" at me every single morning as I'm driving through the gate farthest from him, while rolling up my window and blaring the stereo. I specifically turn the stereo up and do not make eye-contact with him. I don't know why but it bugs me that this guy seems to think that one of his primary responsibilities is to try to be the first person to say good morning to you as you enter the parking garage. Nutter! (him or me take your pick) I don't need him to say good morning to me or any other thing either. I don't know him, he don't know me. Can't he just sit in his little box and do his job without trying to foist his pleasantries on me?

Here's another one.

The trailer park queen that works at the local convenience store that keeps calling me sugar, honey and the like. I'm sure she does it to everybody and is not actually hitting on me or anything. However, if our positions were reversed and I called all the girls that came in similar names I'd probably receive complaints for being chauvinistic or something.

But, like I said, since nobody else seems to be bothered by such trivial matters I must be insane.