Brandon Notices

In the word game Quiddler, players are dealt a hand of cards, each with a letter or two, and the goal is to rearrange the cards so that they form words. On Saturday, I was playing the game with some relatives: Carla, Shelly, and Russell. In one round, Shelly played the word "ad." Russell challenged her play of the word, pointing out in the game instructions that abbreviations are not allowed, and that "ad" is an abbreviation of "advertisement."

We turned to the electronic Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (our family's agreed-upon dictionary—we use it for Boggle and other word games) and found it in there, of course. Russell, however, referred us to the entry in a large print dictionary for "ad," and pointed out that next to the word was an indication that the word is an abbreviation. He then referred us back to the point in the Quiddler rules that abbreviations are not allowed.

I understood his point, but my argument for allowing the word ran along the lines that while being short for "advertisement," "ad" has become a word itself through common usage. It seems that we all discussed this for no less than ten minutes, and Russell didn't seem to care that the word was present in the Scrabble dictionary because it's an abbreviation either way. It got to the point that Shelly withdrew the word herself and asked to just take the 7-point penalty. (The word wasn't even worth very many points!)

My dad, cousins, and I sucked at the crossword puzzle we attempted on Saturday.

Speakers' platforms: ROSTUM
Right-triangle ratios: TIEEM
Cacklers: CHKN
Unfreeze: DTHAW

Our biggest mistake was doing it in pen, but I don't even know what we were thinking on some of these. We kinda gave up after a while, though, and were goofing off before we quit entirely. Keep in mind that this was the Saturday puzzle, the hardest of the week.

I'm up in Bellingham, helping my aunts set up for the 2008 Red, White, and Blue Fourth of July Celebration Blast (that's what we've named our party this Friday). After it got dark and started getting stormy, we quit setting up tents and went inside to play Word Yahtzee, a game I found at Value Village a few years ago.

My aunts love to play word games like Scrabble and Upwords, so they each have a little electronic Scrabble dictionary which is also good for "cheating", so they couldn't resist pulling them out at the beginning of the game. We had to play Word Yahtzee in turns, and after a while, when it wasn't my turn, it got a little boring, so I picked up one of the electronic dictionaries and asked it to tell me all of the words of any length—in other words, to provide me with a list of every word. I went through "aa" (rough, cindery lava), "aal" (an East Indian shrub), "aalii" (a tropical tree), "aardvark", and "aardwolf". Then I came across "aarrghh"!

Understand that I was playing with the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary: apparently an authoritative dictionary of words that are acceptable for use while playing Scrabble. Who decided that "aarrghh" is an acceptable word? It's not in the online dictionaries of Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, or Oxford. Why does the Scrabble dictionary say that "aarrghh" is okay, but "whah" and "teehee" are not?

Last night was Bingo Night at the high school. I didn't win anything last night, and I haven't won anything the last two times I went, so I don't know why I like going to Bingo Night. I went with my cousin, Kevin, and my mom. My sister was also there, but she went to sit with her friends.

Mom and Kevin each bought two bingo books ($6 each), but I bought only one, because I figured I wouldn't win anything anyway. Mom and Kevin also each bought 12 raffle tickets, which cost them each $10, but none of us won the bingo games or the raffles or anything.

A bingo book contained 15 pages (one per game), each with 3 game boards. We played standard games like "5-in-a-row bingo" and "four corners", but we also played weird games like "fill any 6 numbers", "fill a rectangle of 6", and "get a small diamond around the free space". It added a lot of variety, but the bingo caller had to keep reminding everyone of what game we were playing as she was calling numbers, and it got annoying halfway through the night.

The front of the room was set up with a bingo number mixing machine and a TV displaying the hole that the bingo balls come out of. So we could see the ball as it exited the machine, but the bingo caller said that it didn't count until she picked up the ball, lit the number on the big board, and read it aloud. Regardless, there was half of the time some moron who would call bingo, only to sluggishly remember the rules and acknowledge that it didn't count yet. Then the bingo caller would call the next number, and the winner would call bingo again, less enthusiastically this time. It was really very anticlimactic, especially when this happened on the final blackout game. It's a bit of a dull way to end the game.

Something else that kinda spoiled the evening was that some old bald guy sitting in the back of the room kept winning. He won at least three raffles and a bingo game. It seems unfair, but he had like 10 bingo cards and probably 100 tickets or something. But still, Mr. Greedy Bald Monster took the prizes and wasn't sharing the wealth. Oh well. I wasn't going in thinking I would win anything anyway.

So we altogether lost $50 during the night. It was a very dismal night, except that they were selling popcorn, so I ate two bags of popcorn while I was there. So it wasn't a total loss.

In my Light and Color class, we learned about the rods and cones in the eyes. The cones are good for seeing colors, but they don't work well in the dark. The cones work much better in dark environments, but they can't distinguish colors. I decided it would be fun to test this.

Last night, my cousins Kevin and Daniel came over to participate. My mom and sister also wanted to participate. After it was dark outside (and there wasn't much moonlight because we just had a new moon), we turned off the lights. We had to wait a short while for the rods in our eyes to warm up, and Mom and Stephanie fell asleep before we got to the actual experiment. The original plan was to play a game of checkers, which I assumed would be difficult because we would be unable to tell the red and black checkers apart, but it so dark that I couldn't even tell the checkers apart from the checkerboard. So we settled with my backup plan: Uno.

The lighting was just right so that we could make out the numbers on the cards without too much trouble, but the difficulty lay in a frustrating inability to easily tell the cards' colors apart. Yellow appeared to be the lightest-colored card, but I couldn't be very confident what color any of the other cards might have been.

The picture is a comparison of a simulation of what the cards look like in night vision and normal vision.

Of the 49 cards we set down before Daniel won, about a third of them were illegal moves, many of which were played one after the other. Here is a table of the illegal plays.

Card on top of discard pile	Card played on discard pile
Green 2	Blue Reverse
Blue 7	Green 3
Green 3	Red 1
Red 1	Blue Skip
Green 6	Blue Skip
Blue Skip	Green 9
Green 9	Blue 1
Blue 7	Green Skip
Green Skip	Blue 5
Blue 3	Yellow 6
Yellow 6	Green 9
Red Draw 2	Green 1
Blue 0	Green 6
Green 6	Blue 2
Blue 2	Green Skip
Green Skip	Blue Draw 2
Blue Draw 2	Red 5

A simpler experiment to try in the future might be to just sort the cards by color into piles, rather than incorporate the experiment into a game, but the point was to have fun. Other activities we did not attempt included putting together a puzzle, solving a Rubik's Cube, and eating different-colored jelly beans.

I want nobody to forget: Drew Carey begins hosting The Price is Right on Monday.

I was outside yesterday afternoon and saw Jesse and Dylan (two of the little neighbor kids). Jesse was playing with Dylan's little electronic casino toy. He was playing blackjack.

"Oh, you know how to play blackjack?" I asked.

"Yep," he said.

I watched as he was dealt a 2 and a 3. "Hit or stand?" the game's electronic voice asked.

"Stand," Jesse declared aloud as he pressed the button.

Little kids are funny. I wanted to teach him at least what I knew of blackjack (I'm no expert, but I know better than to stand on a 5), but I had stuff to do.

Tonight, I went to my high school's Bingo Night with my family and cousin Kevin (but Stephanie went to sit with her own friends). I was mildly surprised to see Brandon Johnson there; he sat next to me. We also had the pleasure of sitting next to Khader too. I went to Bingo Night two years ago. It's lots of fun. I wanted to go last year but it was the night before my SATs. This year was very much the same. They had pizza—I had pepperoni—and some popcorn.

I was upset by something, though. They didn't have a blackout round! How angering. It was so tense the last time I was there—very exciting. But not this year. There were several groups of high school kids there who kept making shreiking noises at the wrong times, and the bingo caller kept pausing to say, "Do we have a bingo?" It was a bit annoying. I wasn't incredibly mad that I won nothing—it's fun to play bingo. But still, I was upset by the poor sportsmanship of many of the bingo players, booing players who had shouted "Bingo!" Come on, guys, be good sports!

Oh, we won some stuff this year! I personally didn't win anything, Khader won the very first game (regular 5-in-a-row bingo) and got some peppermint patties. Mom won a raffle and got some "relaxation" stuff (mostly cookies and some kind of pillow footwear). And Kevin won the "I"-or-"G"-row game and won a gift certificate to Sparta's Pizza.

I brought my bingo cards home and counted them. Counting the free spaces and wild spaces that could have helped me win bingos, I marked 250 squares. I mismarked one square—I marked 61 when I thought she had said 51.

My sister went to music camp today, and my mom went with her, so they aren't here. Before they left, Mom gave me a coupon for Chevy's, and told me that Dad and I could go to Chevy's for dinner. "Okay, probably." Then, a few hours later, my cousin Kevin IM'd me and said that he wanted to treat Dad and me to dinner, coincidentally at Chevy's. I told him he could use our coupon, and so we went to Chevy's tonight.

Now, this wasn't any ordinary coupon. This was a Mexican Poker coupon. The idea was that the coupon came with two tiny pictures of cards. We could take these cards to Chevy's, and compare them with three other cards posted there to make up our poker hand. Our hand determined the type of discount we would get.

The cards we had were the six of diamonds and the ace of hearts. Kevin pointed out to me before we left that we already automatically had the Ace High, so we knew we couldn't lose. Then we arrived at Chevy's and eagerly ran to the poster to see what the other three cards of the hand were. And one of the other cards was an ace! This means that everybody won at least the Ace High. But we had a Pair. That was worth $5 off!

I ordered a steak quesadilla, but they brought so many chips with so much salsa before my quesadilla arrived that I got full mostly on delicious chips and couldn't finish my quesadilla. Then, after the meal, the waiter seemed disappointed that we didn't want dessert. If they didn't fill us on chips, maybe we'd order dessert.

I guess the moral of the story is this: You can't eat both chips and dessert.

Well, Bingo Night at school was much more fun than I thought it was going to be. I met Tiffany there, and my mom and Tiffany's mom stayed and played Bingo too. We got there at about 6:20. The cards, which came in a set of 15 games, cost $5. Each game had three bingo cards. That's three chances per game. However, once one person wins a game, that's it. Onto the next card. This game's over. We also could buy stampers (they only had pink) to mark the bingo cards. Those were 50¢. I only needed one.

This place was official. A real light-up board with the numbers—you know what I'm talking about. There were also TV monitors at the front that displayed what number popped out of the ball thing. It was neat.

We played 10 games at first, each with special rules, like picture frame, for example, or hardway (getting a bingo without using the free space. I didn't win any of those. However, Tiffany's mom did! She told Tiffany to choose a prize from the table, and Tiffany asked me to go with her. Many of the prizes available were gift certificates to restaurants, and there were also a few Christmas decoration things. Tiffany ended up choosing a $20 off gift certificate for Anthony's seafood restaurant. Good deal.

Between the second and third games, I went to the concessions stand to buy some pizza. Mmmm. The poster said "Four kinds of pizza!" so I asked what they had. They said, "All we have is cheese, and green pepper and onion." Now, they probably thought I would have said cheese, but no! I chose "green pepper and onion", and they gave me a look that said, "you can't be serious, get the heck out of here." It was quite good. It also had mushrooms (good thing). I'll eat any pizza that doesn't have anchovies. And pineapple. What business does pineapple have on a pizza? But I digress...

After those first 10 games, and a short break, there was a special game with a special card that cost 50¢ per card. I didn't want to play that. I think I thought the prize wasn't fun enough or something. So while I wasn't playing, and everyone else was, there were some children behind me roughhousing. Apparently, a boy had this one girl's shoe, and she was trying to get it back. I said, "Why do you want her shoe?" And then the boy told me it wasn't a her—it was his brother. Whoops. The long hair threw me off. I was upset at them because they had already won a big bag of Twix candies, my favorite candy next to Kit Kats.

After the special game, we played five more games with varying rules like before. Of course, I lost all those games, too. It was funny. When somebody yelled "Bingo!", everyone (not me, or anyone else I was with) would boo or just plain be poor sports. Gone are the carefree Bingo games.

After that, they were going to have another special game. "The BIG Blackout". Ooooh hoo hoo! I bought two cards, each at 50¢. They announced the prize we were playing for, a year supply of Starbucks or something, and Mom bought four cards because she really wanted to win it. She gave me one of her cards. It was hard keeping track of 9 bingo cards at once.

I never won. Mom didn't win either. What a letdown. You could tell the air was tense with excitement. Someone yelled "Bingo!" and everyone, even me, moaned. Then she said okay, we'll continue this game for a second prize. She pulled a number, and someone immediately said "Bingo!" Everyone moaned, except this time, they were just plain upset. That was it. Game over, dudes.

Aww... too bad. After this, while the woman was reading some raffle ticket numbers (we didn't win any raffles, either), the boy who was at the table behind us was talking to me. "What grade are you?" "11! What grade are you?" "1. Guess how old I am." I guessed 7. "No, 6." "Oh. Well, I was close, wasn't I?" "Nope." "Oh." Then I was walking to the trash can to throw away the plate my pizza was on, and as I was returning to Mom at the table, the boy gave me one of his Twixs. "Oh, thank you," I said. So, YES! I got a Twix.

We left. Mom was disappointed that she won nothing. I've yet to eat the Twix, but maybe in a minute. Probably right after I type this weblog. Or maybe I'll give it to Mom.

Everyone in the cul-de-sac spontaneously decided to have a cul-de-sac party. I learned at 11 a.m., and decided to plan some games. Stephanie, Jesse, Alyssa, and I filled up maybe over a hundred water balloons. The games went well... We played two games. The first was a game where you put the water balloon on a plungerhead, and race to the finish while trying not to drop the balloon. The second was a tossing relay. We could have played a third game had the neighbor kids not wasted all the balloons throwing them at each other.

Karen left this morning. We never left to see Anchorman this week. However, Stephanie, Karen, and I played a lot of Life. You know, The Game of Life? We found a new pink car at the local Value Village, on Wednesday, that goes with the game. Stephanie and I were happy because our Life game doesn't have a pink car. Now Stephanie I think will always use the pink car. It's funny because both Mom and Karen want the red car. Kevin never cares what color he uses, so he usually gets whatever's left over.

Yesterday, Kevin came over, and he, Mom, Dad, Stephanie, Karen, and I went to the Tasters Wok (I don't like Asian food, so I wasn't happy), but there were too many cars in the parking lot, so we sat, in two cars in the parking lot, trying to decide where to go next. We decided on Ivars. Yum. I got fish and chips, and for dessert, I got some kind of chocolate pie. It was pretty good.

Then, Stephanie wanted to go ice skating with her friends. Stephanie and Kevin convinced me to go with them, so I got in the Jeep with them. However, we had to stop home anyway, and Karen decided to go with us. But she didn't want to skate. Neither did Mom. I can't blame them—I didn't skate either. Karen and I played dots. When Aunt Carla and her daughter Shelly arrived, Karen, Carla, and I played Upwords. I did quite well, getting more points than Karen, but fewer than Carla. But they're both pretty good, so I wasn't expecting to win or anything.

A show I've started watching that is pretty funny is on CBC, the Canadian channel. It comes on at 5:30, and is called Just For Laughs: Gags. It's a hidden camera show, but it's much better for several reasons. I like that there's no talking to distract from the show. For example, on Candid Camera, the host is always talking, and it takes away from the funniness. The gags on this show are more visually oriented, and they run much quicker. They manage to fit about 12 of these gags into a half-hour show, which is much better than Candid Camera's six in one hour.

We went to Chuck E. Cheese's! Mom, Stephanie, Kevin, and I went at about 7:00. It was really fun. All games only require one token. Stephanie brought her own Chuck E. Cheese brand token dispenser, and about 15 tokens, plus all four of us got 25 more tokens with the pizza. Before the pizza was ready, Kevin and I played Skee Ball while Mom and Stephanie ate their salads. Generally, Kevin's better at Skee Ball than me, but I'm not bad. During our first game of Skee Ball, our movements mirrored each other (really, he's left handed), especially when we threw it too hard and it bounced back simultaneously. I did pretty well at Speed Skee Ball, a game I made up where you have to play Skee Ball really fast. Skee Ball always gives you four tickets (except for the broken one on the right). I think my high score for Skee Ball was 210,000 pts. Stephanie won with a high score of 320,000 pts.

This reminds me of a humorous anecdote that happened at Chuck E. Cheese about a year or so ago. Mom, Stephanie, and I went (same place) and played Skee Ball. Suddenly, the machine started spewing out 400 tickets! It's fun when they're all connected. We redeemed them for a Firefighter Chuck E.

Then the pizza was ready. The real reason I went. We had half pepperoni and half combo. While we ate, Chuck E. Cheese appeared on stage! He sang Help I Need Somebody Help Not Just Anybody for the first song, and for the second song, the duck/chicken/bird sang a love song to Chuck. It was a bit awkward as an audience (actually, we were the only ones eating there).

After pizza, we all went to play Skee Ball, except the machine on the right wasn't working. And since there were only four Skee Ball machines, we couldn't play four-player. Oh well. There were other fun games there that we played too. The Super Speedway game was fun. Ordinarily, the game gave out four tickets, but if you were good enough, and broke "the all-time record", you won ten tickets instead. I did this twice! I was surprised to learn about that jackpot. Kevin couldn't beat the jackpot, so at least that compensated for my stinky Skee Ball playing (don't get me wrong here, I love Skee Ball).

However, not all games are fun. Hitter's Rally (I wrote the names of these games on a napkin so I wouldn't forget them) was the game from hell. You had to press a button to make the machine pitch the ball, then flip a lever to swing the bat. The annoying thing was that half the time, the machine would pitch the ball too far for the lever to reach. It was really annoying, like I've said. And when I could actually hit the ball, it ended up going far to the left, and I could barely catch the ball with part of the lever. If I could keep doing that, I could hit the ball well, but then the lever would stop working and I would lose! ARRGH! I only got two stinkin' tickets from that game.

There's also a ride of sorts that costs one token. You get to sit in (or stand behind, in my case) a car with Chuck E. as a passenger! And it takes a picture! Whee-hah! We took some funny pictures. Altogether, it wasn't the best thing there, and it gives you no tickets, but it gives you a memorable picture!

Behind the Chuck E. Ride was my favorite game there: Buzzy Buzzy Bee. It's a box-shaped machine with a fan in the bottom that blows bee-painted ping pong balls into the air, and you have to use a net-like stick to catch the bees in mid-flight and pour them into a "honey container" to score points. It takes some practice, but after a while, it's pretty easy, and it's not hard to score three bees at a time. Sometimes the ping pong balls fly right into the honey pot without any assistance. I guess I liked it even more because it has a Double Dare-esque feeling to it. It even has a 30-second time limit (okay, it's 35, but it has the same feeling)! I love this game, and I love it even more because it gives you five tickets, each time you play! My high score for this game was a remarkable 21 pts!

With 30 minutes left before the place closed, we had to redeem our tickets. They have these really cool machines (they had them last time too) that you feed your tickets into. It counts them as you insert them, and when you're done, you can press a button and it prints you a receipt. By the end, I had 182 tickets. Altogether, we all had 541 tickets! There really were no prizes I was particularly interested in except for two plastic lizards. That cost me only 30 ticket points. Everyone else added together their ticket points to get a kickball that has a picture of Chuck E. on it. And Mom got a pretty little foldable flower thing that she has in her car.

Well, that was my two hours of fun at Chuck E. Cheese. I hope you enjoyed reading about it.

We got to Bellingham easily yesterday evening. I was amazed to see a 15-foot snowman in their field. Wow!

We played Yahtzee! Jeannie won. Then, it was the new year. We went outside and exploded fireworks. Then, since there was snow, we thought it would be funny to explode snowmen. We dug holes in the snowmen and dropped lit fireworks inside. The most the fireworks did was light up the snow. But no, they didn't collapse. The fireworks did, however, leave icky black goop stuff on the snow. Ewwww... Daniel ended up tackling the snowmen to knock them over.

The Schwerdtfegers gave me Simpsons Jeopardy! yesterday for my Christmas present! It's fun. It comes with little clickers you use to buzz in. We were up till 3 A.M. playing that game.

It's a heat wave! It's about 90 degrees!! I know that many people are used to such temperature, but here in Washington, it usually never gets any hotter than 60 degrees. At least I have a big supply of water balloons. It's not very fun to play badminton with water balloons, but it's very fun to play baseball with water balloons. All you have to do is hit the water balloon with a bat, then run around the bases. The outfielders have to get the popped balloon shards and tag the runner with the bits of balloon.