Random Thoughts # 40 (The Family Visit)

--I attended my very first 3rd-grade girls soccer game on Saturday. Not too surprisingly, I found it to be rather boring action-wise, but incredibly entertaining as far as an overall sporting experience goes. My favorite thing about the day was to watch the overly-involved soccer Dads yelling completely generic instructions. "Kick it," "Hustle Up," and "Come On, ____" seem to be very popular. Someone should do a study on the efficacy of this practice.

--In my ongoing effort to be thrown into federal prison due to copyright infringement, I spent a great deal of time this weekend attempting to find and download XBox and PS2 games to give to my nephews. After spending hours locating, downloading, extracting, decrypting and burning said games, I learned that one needs a special modification to the console to make it work. After reading up on this and finding out that it involved soldering wires to the game's internal chip, I decided just to go buy them a few at The Game Stop. But you've got to admit, that's just no fun at all.

--I am amazed at the amount of time that is spent discussing sports in my sister's household. I suspect that out of every 1,000 words spoken in their house, 900 of them are talking about something related to sports. The other 100 are spent telling the children to stop being annoying.

--On the way down to Oklahoma, I stopped at a gas station to wash the bugs off on my windshield (it was awful--it looks like I had driven through a locust storm. As I lifted up the windshield wiper on the passenger side, the squeegee got caught in the wiper blade and I accidentally knocked the blade off. This wouldn't have been so bad had I not let go of the metal part of the wiper trying to catch it. It would've been ever better had the sharp metal point on the metal part not slapped the glass at 100 miles an hour, putting a giant, spidering crack in my windshield. Darn the luck.

--When I visit family, I am the tech guy. During this visit, I set up two wireless routers (one for my sister, the other for her husband's sister in-law who lives down the street), configured profiles for the kids, enabled home networking, set up file/print sharing, fixed a setting on my sister's digital camera and trained several children on the effective use of Windows. I'm surprised no one asked me to set the time on the VCR.

--I'm used to my house being relatively quiet most of the time. I'm also used to it being unoccupied by anything with less than four legs. My sister's house, on the other hand, is a constant stream of sound related to running, crying, yelling, football games, video games, cartoons, arguing, door slamming, dish breaking, blaming, balloon-popping, complaining, question-asking, basketball bouncing and, of course, whining.

--I'm really sorry for not posting over the weekend. I spent so much time on my sister's computer doing set up/repair and maintenance that I just didn't have the energy to even open my laptop. I did take some pics and made a short video, so that'll be posted shortly. Maybe. If you're nice.

--It's not such a bad drive from Oklahoma to Kansas when you've got someone at home waiting for you. I kinda like that. :)