The "Game" of LIFE

One of this year's hot Christmas gifts was "The Game of LIFE Twists & Turns". I don't remember playing the original game much as a child, but we've sure played this one a lot in the last 5 days.

For anyone not familiar with the game, players earn LIFE Points and dollars (which are converted to LIFE Points at the end of the game) by experiencing careers, lotteries, job promotions, marriage, kids, cars, houses, vacations, education, and, of course, catching lucky breaks by leveraging your grandmother's cookie recipe for big bucks. The game is divided into quadrants of play called Learn It, Earn It, Live It, and Love It. This new LIFE game even takes VISA! Just what I was hoping to teach my kids at the ages of 4, 6, and 9! At the beginning of the game you determine how many years (turns) you will play, and then once you're done, the one with the most LIFE Points wins.

The first time I played, I severely lost to both Caleb (6) and Seth (9). Seth refused to buy a house or car or take any risk whatsoever. Caleb took the maximum risk at all turns and it paid off every time for him. Having never played the game before, nor having experienced much of "real" life, Caleb won that first game. I made the mistake of getting an education before going off to work. I also steered clear of marriage and kids, trying instead to maximize my earnings in the 10 years we had decided to play. I lost subsequent games with a similar strategy. That $500,000 island I had to buy really sunk me in one game.

Upon reading the detailed rules mid-week, I formulated a new strategy for winning. It turns out that getting married earns a lot of LIFE Points that continue to accumulate year after year. So do kids, but they cost 10% to 40% of your salary each year. (It seems as though marriage does not cost anything.) I also discovered you could forgo moving the number of spaces spun, and instead opt to jump to the starting point of any of the 4 quadrants of the game. The downside is that you don't get to draw a LIFE Card, and therefore don't get to experience any of the fun (or disappointment) of entering numbers into the little computer the game supplies that keeps track of your dollars and LIFE Points.

So I finally won a game with this strategy: I picked a career that earned a decent amount of money after 3-4 promotions without requiring a degree. I started in Love It, and got married first. I got 3000 LIFE Points and 1500 each year thereafter. Then I jumped to Earn It (lost a turn because I jumped instead of taking the spin amount). Got promoted, increased salary. Then jumped back to Earn It again and lost a turn. Got promoted again, increased salary, etc. Continued cycling through Earn It until the years nearly ran out. Towards the end of the remaining years, I had earned all the promotions and salary I could get without a degree, so I jumped to Live It and took a big vacation. By then, I could afford it, and I earned 5000 LIFE Points at the end of the vacation (my last turn). I won big time when I played with this strategy. My opponents tried the same Earn It strategy once they saw what I was doing, but they forgot to get married, and instead just earned a lot of money. My poor virtual "LIFE Wife"... We got married early, never had kids, I worked all the time, lived a boring life, and didn't take a vacation until I retired!

So being that I'm into metaphors, this game has really caused me to reflect on my own life and career. I don't want to win in real life the way I won in the game, but it almost seems inevitable. I've got the wife and kids and do abundantly enjoy many real life aspects of being a husband and father. But my career... While I don't currently "work all the time" pursuing one promotion after another, there is a great deal of melancholy in the way I am in this real life Earn It quadrant. I guess the 40's are the "earning years" and that's where I am. I don't play the lottery (which in the game you have at least a 50% chance of winning!). And I don't do business ventures - maybe I should. I don't have any living grandmothers with cookie recipes.

I am thankful for my job, and I am qualified to do what I do, and I can do it relatively well, and am relatively successful at it, and I've enjoyed it a lot more lately. But it's not my life's passion. It's not what I want to do when I don't have to do it. I don't know how many spins I have left in real life, but it seems like it is going by as fast as it does in the game. I don't want to look back as a 65 year old retiree and not have lived life to the fullest, and fully enjoyed the work I do.

Funny Things My Kids Do

Last night about 45 minutes after the kids had gone to bed (around 11:30pm), I was sitting in the bed typing on the computer. I heard the cat (CoCo) under the bed... quietly making a sound... YACK YACK YACK... complete with some slight wheezing... sounded just like a hairball coming up. This was our new cat's first hairball, and I was trying to recall the cat medicine you give them to help with hairballs. So I jumped down and began to look under the bed. I wanted to see this. I looked under my side and didn't see her. Then I looked under the foot of the bed and didn't see her, but I could see some movement underneath Lori's side of the bed. I called to CoCo, hoping to coax her out, "Are you OK?" Caleb replied in a soft voice, "Yea. I'm OK." Apparently, he can be light on his feet when he wants, but can't hide that little cough he's had recently.

Good 'Ole Country Comfort in My Bones

As I look at the archive for my month old blog, the tally is telling... September: 10 posts... October: 1 lone post. I guess the blogging honeymoon is over already. Since the Hilton Head beach trip, it's as if there's nothing to write about. But that's not really the case. This month has been pretty eventful.

After the beach, we went to the NC State Fair. We went through 9 books of tickets, which we bought in advance to save almost 50%. The Fair has about 6 fun houses, and every one of them has the same layout, and same slide at the end. That was where most of the tickets were spent. The other popular ride, and ticket consumer, was The Crazy Mouse, which is basically a combination Tilt-a-Whirl and roller coaster. Imagine spinning in a circle while riding a roller coaster. Once was enough for me. The kids rode again, with complete strangers.

Then we went with my parents and my family to Aunt Beverly's mountain home outside of Stuart, VA, for a Saturday afternoon visit. This was our first trip there since Lori and I have been married. The kids had a ball. They enjoyed getting BB-gun-shooting lessons from Bev and then shooting tin cans and a personalized bulls eye. After lunch, they got to check out Bev's tarantula, and look for insects in the yard to feed the tarantula.

As a kid, when I used to go to my sister's in the summertime - for what seemed like months at a time - there was no gun shooting (well maybe some) or insect searching (any insects found were unwelcomed). This was back before computers, the Internet, and GameBoys were invented. What on earth did we do?

What I remember is not necessarily entertaining or fun-packed, but good nonetheless. I remember honing my stamp collecting skills by going to the only post office in town to see if there were any new releases. I remember doing nothing in particular during the day, but riding back home after sundown in Bev's yellow Jeep CJ-7 with the top removed. Though it was summertime and miserably hot during the day, it was cold in the evening, especially as you left the bright lights and big city heat of Stuart - with its one traffic light - and headed to the real back roads and cool dark sky of Patrick County. We would have the heat on, and would listen to the 8-track tape of Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection, which, to this day, is still my favorite Elton John record. It was worth being cold.

Back at Bev's house, there was little to watch on TV, as this was pre-cable and pre-satellite, and her mountain antenna reception wasn't that great. We would play Bach records and play with the crazy Siamese cat Moo Moo to the rhythm of the music. We would play guitar some, as Beverly would self-teach herself to play lead to some song, and I would strum along the chords. Not sure if that was the "camp song" - or not - that our parents have fondly reminisced about ever since. We both wished we could play like John Denver.

Sometimes we would venture up onto the Blue Ridge Parkway or beyond. We visited the home of our ancestors in Grayson County and would go look at old tombstones, searching for our great-great-grand-something or another. We took pictures of things, and developed and printed in Bev's home darkroom.

There was no home cooking of vegetables, beef roast, or pork chops... but really good tacos, spaghetti, hot dogs, and Hamburger Helper. During the stay, we would easily eat a whole pack of 100 cookies - half chocolate and half vanilla. It was all good.

I would never trade the times at the NC State Fair with my family, braving the crowd, tolerating the noise, and riding The Crazy Mouse. But as I have grown older, and gotten busier, I often crave the quiet and simple and seemingly humdrum days that I experienced as a child, spending my summers with my big sister in the mountains of Virginia, doing nothing in particular. Those were great memories, without a lot of technological entertainment. It's a rare time these days when there is solitude, with time to think, and quietness, with time to listen.

Our Trip to Hilton Head, SC

This morning marks the end of our "summer" vacation to the beach, this time to Hilton Head - three nights and four days in what was predicted by esteemed meteorologists as 4 days of "severe thunderstorms, lightning, 80% chance of rain, up to 1/4" of rain." What we got was occasional white puffy clouds, frequent blue sky, mild temperatures (80s), and the usual dose of beach humidity. We may have turned the wipers on for 30 seconds one day, but that was it! That's the unpredictability of beach weather.

For me, there is nothing like the beach, and seeing and hearing the ocean. It just keeps on going. I see the beautiful homes here, many along the beach, and just imagine what it might be like to live there. Not necessarily in the home - but on the beach. To be able to sleep on a screened-in porch and hear the real ocean, not the fake ocean as played by my sound conditioner back home. I can dream... and if that day never comes, we still have vacations. Our first night here at the Marriott was a nice view of the entrance road and parking lot. After some confusion and gnashing of teeth, we moved to a beach side room for the last 2 nights.

The most distinctive thing about this beach trip was the environment. Hilton Head is more low key than Myrtle Beach. There are no big lighted signs pointing to the Dixie Stampede just ahead. There are dark unlit roads weaving through quiet neighborhoods in gated communities leading to a marina where a restaurant and its T-shirt store are located. The have putt-putt here, but no NASCAR Speedway Fun Park. They have pools, but no splashing sliding bucket-dumping water park. Lori and I compared this place to Bald Head Island, but with cars and a competitive free-market economy. (Note: Bald Head Island, SC has golf carts for transportation and few restaurants and stores, which seem to be run and/or tightly controlled by the government of BHI - as it probably has to be - otherwise, you would need cars, and that would spoil the point of BHI - which is to RELAX. But I digress.)

We brought 2 bikes here from home and rented 3 from the local bike rental store. Then we became cruel parents and forced our children to ride bikes around the community and on the beach. I really hated putting them through that as it was very traumatic to have to participate in recreation not involving the pool, beach, Cartoon Network, Nikelodeon, Play Station, Nintendo DS or Gameboy. I expect that when we get home, they will fondly talk about riding bikes on the beach, in and out of the edge of the surf, and will look forward to that on future beach trips. I know I will.

Caleb & Seth enjoyed the ocean probably more than anything. They would stand in the water up to their belly, and get smashed by waves, over and over again. I think they would do it for hours if we would let them. But that is a very stressful activity for a parent - maintaining focus on the 2 little bodies playing in the water. So we did that for about an hour each day, and I'm sure that is what they loved the most about this whole trip. Luke's thing was playing in the indoor pool and hot tub. That's a lot easier to manage. And we all watched The Lord of The Rings movies at nights (we had never seen them), as Luke and Caleb fell asleep... and then the rest of us... and the room became quiet. And the ocean kept doing its thing outside.

Happy 10th Anniversary to Us!!

Ten years ago today, Lori and I tied the knot after an amazing 6 month relationship and 6 week engagement. My best friend from high school, who was a legal pastor I believe, married us at the NC State University Arboretum in the presence of our parents and my favorite aunt and uncle. It was a cheap wedding, but has been a richly rewarding marriage.

It seemed like a risk to get married so suddenly, but we both felt God made us for one another. The time has amazingly flown by. If we did not have a 9 year old son (who just turned 9 last week!), I'm not sure I would believe this! She has also given me 2 other boys as pictured to the right (and a cat, the only other girl in the house).

We didn't have a honeymoon right away. I spent 2 of the first 3 weeks of our marriage on a business trip in Ireland. It was tough being apart so soon after getting hitched. We finally took our honeymoon trip in December to Australia. Seth was actually "Made in Australia." The other two came as great surprises along the way, and we stopped after Luke.

The balance is almost fair now... the 3 boys and me combined are almost as much a man as she is a woman. She is lovely, and sexy, and witty, and inventive, and caring, and creative, and nurturing, among other things. And she can cook, which proves she is also teachable (thanks, moms!). She has a smile and charm that wins everyone over, especially me. She has patience to love me unconditionally, and I am thankful she appreciates me and encourages me. She is giving and sacrificing to others, volunteering at a local women's shelter, to bring a smile to someone else's face. Every time our kids cry "Momeeeeeeeee!" I am especially thankful for her, and that they know her soft comforting hugs and love, just as I do.

I think the secret to our marriage is that we allow one another space to be ourselves. We don't so much try to change one another, as we have grown to appreciate the unique qualities and attributes God made in us, and that any individual problem or issue is not a deal-breaker.

I credit Lori with bringing me back to God. We talked about our faith when we were dating, though mine was questionable at the time. Later, we joined a church, and she encouraged me in Bible study, sharing of my journey with Christ with others, and giving. We have had many special times praying together and living through our faith challenges.

In hindsight, we probably have an improbable relationship. But by God's grace we have made it this far, and I love her more each and every day. This has been, by far, the best 10 years of my life.