Thursday, October 26, 2006

A Day Off

I took a couple days off.

Well, more like a day and a half. Monday was a holiday, the feast day following the month of Ramadan. In fact, the calendar said it would be Tuesday and that's what DA scheduled. But knowing the way these things go in Senegal, with sightings of the moon and inter-community differences of opinion, DA scheduled Monday as a parent-teacher conference ½ day. That meant Jonathan stayed home and Jane went in for the morning.

In any case, Monday afternoon we got the house ready for guests. In the evening we had a group of DA staff over for pizza and video mystery. They came in a carload: the Dixons (Jonathan’s French teacher) with little Joshua, Jane’s friend Ginny (a fellow English teacher and kindred spirit), Lois (a math teacher and another friend of many years) and Becky (elementary). Gretchen happened to come by just before they got here so she joined in for a while, too. Jane had dough and sauce ready and the others brought the toppings. We each took responsibility for building half of a pizza. I don’t know why, but that was extraordinarily good pizza.

Then we pulled out this game we got recently. It is a video-based game from the 80s. The VCR tape has a series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries on it. You watch a bit and then take turns checking out secret clues from a clue book and then watch a bit more. It’s a race to solve the mystery. It’s a bit like Clue or like a two-minute mystery. Anyway, we had fun doing it and laughing at the movie’s tongue-in-cheek attitude and all. Very nice.

I'd photo the box, but Ginny liked the game so much she took it home with her to try the solataire rules!

Tuesday, I continued the theme. I did nothing constructive all day. I read an entire mystery novel and I played on the PS2. The novel was an old favorite that I’ve read many times, the first Miss Seeton novel. I highly recommend it as hilarious, witty and smart. They got someone else to continue the series eventually and that didn’t work. But the original three or four by Heron Carvic were absolutely marvelous. I also played Myst III on the PS2. That’s a kind of puzzle solving computer game. I won’t try to explain, but at first take Jonathan thought the pace was so slow that he would die. It has no car racing or shooting or finger-thumb exercises! He left me alone for a while. Eventually, though, he got caught by one of the puzzles and he helped me figure out several of them.

No NCAA or NFL or “Law and Order”, Dad, but still, a nice day off!


// posted by Tad @ 11:31 AM
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