Onward I go

Onward I go...somedays I could write all day long. For one of my writing lessons, I wrote for four hours straight - over 8 pages. And it was just this stream of consciousness writing - where you just write whatever you want and it doesn't even have to make sense. Actually, a lot of my writing seems that way. Just like in the first story in this blog. I started out writing about one thing and suddenly, I was in the middle of a stream fishing with my dad.

Words are like that in my head - just everywhere, but nowhere in particular. In school, I was a good speller but lousy at vocabulary. Actually, things haven't changed much. I still have trouble with comprehension. I suppose that's why I studied elementary education - so I could leave the dictionary and thesaurus at home. I do enjoy playing scrabble though. Both of my parents played well - they knew many more words than I did. But it was also an opportunity to learn them. I about memorized many of the two letter words and the words that started with a q, not a qu. My mom loved doing crossword puzzles and so she knew many words, some foreign - or should I say, many were foreign to me. And now when I play against my son who has his PhD and I rarely beat him. But when I do - everyone hears about it.

I love to play board games or card games with friends and family. When I was growing up, we had storage benches in our family room - and sometimes you had to dig all the way to the bottom to find all of the monopoly pieces or the dice for parcheesi. When my kids were younger, every Thursday night was family night for one year. We would mix it up and watch movies together, but mostly we played board games with them. Now I have several shelves full of games, but they're gathering dust because it's only me in the house. So I like to encourage game nights at church. I'm like the game lady, because I walk in carrying two shoulder bags full  - dominoes, Jenga, backgammon, yahtzee, rack-o, phase 10 and more. You just have to know how to have fun. And most games do require at least two players, I could get away with playing Jenga all by myself, but what would be the fun in that when it falls over. I do have several solitaire games I can play, but usually I opt to play a game called Words with Friends on the computer. It's similar to scrabble, except that no one can challenge you because you can't put down a misspelled word. It can be addicting like the game Candy Crush. The first time I started playing that I was like, why is everyone playing this all the time. And then I reached some challenging levels. Challenging so much that I was even dishing out 99 cents to buy more lives so I could keep playing. After spending $5, I realized how addicted I had become and stopped playing it. I have returned to the game once in awhile, but never so much that I couldn't stop without paying.

The other game I enjoy playing on my kindle is Spider Solitaire. You can choose to play with 1, 2, 3 or 4 suits. Playing with 4 suits is the most challenging one. I have played and won a few,  but lost probably close to 100. I love the 3 suit game. You can undo all the way back to the start or you can just replay the game. Some games I replay 3 or 4 times until I beat it. You can remember where some of the cards are - that's helpful. I have to be careful not to play into the night. This has become one of the things I do before I go to bed - play all the games with Words with Friends and then one or two games of spider solitaire. Unfortunately, I'm not playing any tonight, because my kindle decided to die on me. It's over three years old, so probably on its last leg anyway. But I have many books and a couple CD's worth of songs on it - and hope I can i-cloud it over to a new kindle. I really need to get that soon - as I will be babysitting for one of our pastors for five days at the end of this month (April 2015), and so I need to use it for reading purposes. I must mention one other game on it is called 2048. It's a numbers game. You just slide the numbers down and across and they add together and the goal is to get a tile with 2048 on it. I've gotten a 1024 and a 512 and lower - but have not beat the game yet. My daughter Sarah introduced this to me. She's my math person. She majored in math in college and then got a master's degree in statistics. And she prefers to use a calculator when adding. Funny. Anyway, so there you have it - the games I love.

I am also known by my life group as the movie lady - I have a collection of mostly faith-based movies and I love to share them with others. I alphabetized them on my shelf and printed out the list for my friends to borrow. Currently, the most popular ones are the Downton Abbey Collection - seasons 1-5. I also have several of the Duck Dynasty DVD's. I have trouble saying no to solicitors and the one group - Feature Films for the Family - always get me to buy their dvd's. Now they are good and decent movies for anyone to watch. It's just that they're $15 each - and now they come in a cardboard folder. Though they say, the more you buy, the less expensive it becomes. And they love to set you up on a monthly payment plan so really, you don't realize how much you're actually paying. Well, I do love to support faith based movies - I just need to slow down and not do this every year. Eventually, I'll have to invest in another shelf - and then, where would I put it.

Well, onward I go only got me inside my condo. Nowhere special - not even out and about. Hopefully the next time - we can do just that. But like I stated earlier - you never know where my words are going to take you. So I'm going to stop for now.