Super egg hunt yesterday! When she arrived, the hunter waited calmly while the adults greeted and chattered. Even though she could see some of the brightly colored ovoids, she just smiled and waited patiently. Once she started, at first she methodically put them, unopened, in her basket. Her plan was to collect them all and then concentrate on opening them, but curiosity got to her after a while and she started opening them as she found them. It was so much fun to see how delighted she was by glittery hair clips and egg-shaped erasers, among other things! One thing I especially like is finding all sorts of little things other than candy - although candy is definitely part of it too, being *the* tradition, after all. Shoe clip-on flowers, a tiny purple bendable magnet-man, a stack-of-crayons, stickers, pipe cleaners. . . . I saw one or two too-perfect-for-Easter things that were irresistible and too big to fit into eggs - the small boxed set of fourteen miniature Peter Rabbit books being a case in point - so this year I added a scavenger-hunt element to a few of the eggs and put written notes with directions about where to look in a few eggs. It was so much fun to watch her read a hand-printed note and then go off to follow the directions. Next year there'll be a one-year-old, too, which will add an interesting twist to the excitement.

I heard about a neat way for when children are older and maybe don't get much of a kick out of magnets and bouncy balls. The Easter Bunny hides five or ten eggs per child and the eggs have candy and/or money in them. The children scurry around to find the eggs and the person who gets the most eggs has the satisfaction of finding the most eggs, and then the money and candy are distributed equally among the kids. Inventive, don't you think.

Happy spring and Easter to all!

Labels: anniversaries, children, games

There are many time wasters available online, many of them excuses for driving yourself utterly mad. Facebook has Twirl, Scramble, Tetris (a pretty good version, actually) and several word and/or letter games, among others. But now there's this, thanks (or not) to normblog. The record is around 19 seconds, amazingly. When I first posted this, I'd managed just shy of 5 but I'm determined to get higher eventually. (Update - I'm up to 9.36 12.984 seconds!)

Labels: games, madness

Seems that Facebook is the up-and-coming internet and social "it" thing. You can interact or just throw yourself out there all by yourself. Perfect for the modern world, eh?

Recently, many people I know put up their own pages and even more are talking about it. Some like it for professional contact and some for social interaction. After hearing an astonishing variety of people talking about it, I've concluded that it's taking over blogging as the keyboard thing to do. One highly placed tech friend was even asked to put up a Facebook page by his manager, with the idea that the company would thereby have a Facebook presence, something the manager considered important. It seems many people get ideas about companies by evaluating Facebook groups. Fascinating. I'd worry somewhat, though, because posting is so easy and feels so personal that you risk having put something up that you won't want out there, way in the future. Old things have a way of coming back to blow people's chances for public respect out of the water especially in this global village that's getting more global and more village-y. I mean, imagine today you post a wild and crazy photo or write something wild and crazy on your wall and twenty years from now you run for a seat on your town council and someone says wait you said . . . . It's hard to be restrained and careful when something is so relaxed and easygoing. On the other hand, maybe the world is changing enough that it won't matter.

My own problem is silly. I like to play Twirl and Pathwords - word games - but it's baffling to figure out what are "acceptable" words. One of my friends and I have been comparing words Twirl takes and/or doesn't take. At first we thought it was the same as the Outlook dictionary but it's stranger than that. It accepts typical crossword words like nee ("formerly known as"), for example, but rejects equally typical ones like oder (a person who writes odes). It takes sic ("as written") but doesn't take turbo (not even necessary to define it). It takes nth (as in to the nth degree) and meg (nickname for margaret? for megabyte?) and ump (nickname for umpire?) but rejects parer (a paring knife) and grump (hardly obscure). It takes some proper nouns but not others: bali but not rome. I could go on and on. On the other what-it-takes side, Pathwords allows millions of combos that don't seem like words at all although I suppose they must just be very obscure. And Pathwords doesn't let you do anything from the keyboard which cuts down on speed something fierce. Also, letters are all the same point value so you don't' get more points for cleverly grabbing "lox" rather than for "lot" or "quiz" instead of "suit".

Too much time on my hands, you say? Nah.

Labels: facebook, games