Five Fun Things For Friday — Father’s Day Edition

Ah, you did­n’t think I had been doing noth­ing all this time, right? Of course not. Here’s a few things that have been occu­py­ing my free time:

1. Chas­ing the Baby — She final­ly fig­ured out crawl­ing a cou­ple of weeks ago. Peo­ple had told me that one day she’d just get it and then she’d be crawl­ing every­where and get­ting into every­thing. Some­how I had assumed that this would be a phase spread out of a week or two, at least. No, it lit­er­al­ly hap­pened that fast. One evening Angela sat her down, and she just sud­den­ly crawled over to my gui­tar and start­ed try­ing to pull it over onto her. She’s been into every­thing can reach since that moment.
2. “The Wire — Sea­son Three” — This show is just as good as every­one says it is. It’s a won­der­ful bal­ance of per­son­al sto­ries and com­men­tary on mod­ern life. Heavy, of course, but not with­out a sense of humor. How­ev­er, you can­not watch this around your 10 month old daugh­ter. As a mat­ter of fact, the swear­ing and vio­lence is even a bit too high for Angela. Therefore…
3. Wii Fit - Though we have a cou­ple of oth­er Wii games that we play a lot, as well (Mario Kart Wii and Dr. Mario), Wii Fit is real­ly a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. Though it uses a lot of game-like con­ven­tions, it actu­al­ly is tak­ing a gam­ing con­sole and chang­ing how you can use it. When (and it’s not as often as I need, any­more) I go run­ning, I can put that on my train­ing cal­en­dar. Regard­less of what exer­cise I do or do not do, the game mon­i­tors and tracks my weight loss progress. The exer­cis­es it offers are real and the feed­back is tru­ly help­ful to improve bal­ance, flex­i­bil­i­ty, and strength. Now, if we only had a big­ger liv­ing room to do those push-up/­side planks in!
4. “Star Trek — Enter­prise” — Despite the net­work’s many hor­ri­ble choic­es for pro­gram­ming (Wrestling? Seri­ous­ly? WTF, Sci­Fi!? At least your stu­pid B movies and real­i­ty shows have some­thing to do with your chan­nel’s orig­i­nal line-up.), they do man­age to get some great syn­di­cat­ed series. Enter­prise was my favorite ST since Next Gen­er­a­tion, by far. I watched the first cou­ple of sea­sons but unfor­tu­nate­ly fell out of it (it was pre-TiVo for us). Now I can catch up. Too bad these weren’t in HD, though.
5. Dun­geons & Drag­ons — 4th Edi­tion — Yeah, I know. The fan­ta­sy kick con­tin­ues. It’s kind of hard to explain. A part of me feels like I nev­er real­ly got to play D&D with a seri­ous group as a kid. When I tried, the rules were cum­ber­some and we nev­er got through any­thing. Now, I’ve found some folks who live around here, are my age and have sim­i­lar inter­ests, and who kind­ly let me come join a game. It’s been an absolute blast. I’ll expand on some of this in the near future, but if you’ve ever thought about play­ing a table-top RPG (and prob­a­bly even if you haven’t), the new edi­tion of D&D is real­ly a fan­tas­tic game.