Thirty Day Challenge: Day Thirty

Whomever You Find Most Attractive In This World



Well, this was a fun thing to do. If I see another interesting Thirty Day Challenge, I may well do it!

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-nine

Somewhere You Want To Visit

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-eight

A Drawing

Oh, man. See, thing is, I'm not very good at drawing. At all. In fact, I'm terrible at it. Awful. I dreaded when my grade school art classes did a project that involved drawing, because I was simply dreadful at it. Graphic representation has never been a skill of mine in any way, and the only drawing I ever do now is when I sketch out something really quick at work just to visualize a project.

So, here's something The Daughter did for one of her art classes.



They're apples, btw. It's a kinda abstract.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-seven

A Picture Of Where You’re From

I'm a wee bit baffled by this one, I have to admit. I already posted about where my family is from, earlier in the meme-thing, but now it's asking where I am from. And I'm from the same place as my family, no?

Or is it talking about where I'm from right now? Geez, I dunno.

So here's the Buffalo-Niagara region, as photographed from Chestnut Ridge, a park in the hills a few miles south of Casa Jaquandor:



I truly love this area and want to be here when the place blossoms again. And it will. Oh yes.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-six

A Picture From One Of The Greatest Days Of Your Life

The only photo from my wedding that I have on the computer is the one I already used earlier in this very Challenge, so that's out. And I don't have any photos from The Daughter's birth, and I couldn't choose between her birth or Little Quinn's, either, so that's out. Truth is, I'm more likely to take photos on the normal days than on the "obviously great" ones. Why this is, I have no idea, but that's the way I tend to operate. I hate to whiff on this so spectacularly, but there it is.

But since I gotta have something, here's May 25, 1977.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-five

One of your most prized possessions



My wedding ring.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-four

Something embarrassing in your room

As a rule I'm not terribly embarrassed by things I have around, but in the spirit of things, here I'm joined by a couple of friends: Share Bear and Jar Jar.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-three

Favorite Music Video

As usual, I can't begin to select just one, so:

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-two

Picture of You on This Day

OK, by the nature of this one, I'll update this post later on accordingly. Check back.

UPDATE: OK, here's one.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty-one

Favorite Movie Quote

Boy, is this ever a loaded one for me. I couldn't begin to name a single favorite movie quote, so here are a bunch. See if you can name the films:

"A rational transaction! One life for millions!"

"Hey, no sweat. I play video games better than anybody."

"At least you're still in one piece! Look what happened to me!"

"So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

"Red wine, with fish. Well, that should have told me something."

"Your problem is sex and nervousness."

"You're the Mayor of Shark City, and these people think you want the beaches open!"

"I stick my neck out for nobody."

"Why, I make more money, than...than...than Calvin Coolidge! Put together!"

"I'm gonna blow this place up and be home in time for cornflakes."

"A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day."

"Ahh, Lupin. Out for a stroll in the moonlight?"

"Ohhh, I'll take that action. You're out some smokes, Son!"

"Huh. What were the odds that trap door would lead out here?"

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twenty

A 10+ Year Old Picture

OK, this is easy!



Oh, all right, I suppose I should honor the actual spirit of this Challenge. Ye Gods! Like I said earlier in this series, I don't have any of my own photos around. Luckily, though, The Wife and I have been married nearly 13 years, so here's The Wife on our wedding day, flanked by her mother and grandmother, who are both sadly now gone:

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Nineteen

Day Nineteen: Something That Made You Smile Today

Well, I suppose I can use this as an excuse for some random linkage!


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

The 5 worst deaths ever written for great characters ( disagree about Captain Kirk, actually -- how else should he go out, but in a fistfight on some Godforsaken planet somewhere?)









And a whole lot of other stuff too. Cheerio!

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Eighteen

Favorite Board Game

Hmmmm. We haven't played many board games of late here at Casa Jaquandor; this is something that needs rectified. We still have never played the RISK or Settlers of Catan games that I bought almost a year ago; we gotta dust those off. RISK is lots of fun.

You know what, though? My favorite board game of the "Parker Bros" or "Milton Bradley" variety is probably Sorry. I used to play Sorry all the time with my grandmother when I was a kid and she was in town to visit, and The Daughter and I have often had a great time playing it.

Sorry, for those who haven't played it, is a "Move your piece from Point A to Point B before your opponent does" type of game. What's different is that you don't have one piece but four, so you have to manage your resources a bit. Gameplay is determined not by dice but by drawing from a deck of cards; each card tells you what to do. The name of the game comes from its "revenge" factor: since the object is to move your pieces from your "Start" space all the way around the board to your "Home" space, it stinks when something happens to send one of your pieces all the way back to Start. This happens when one of your opponent's pieces lands on the same space as yours, or when your opponent draws the dreaded "SORRY!" card from the deck.

It's a surprisingly strategic game; you have to make decisions as you go -- do you take advantage of an opportunity to knock one of your opponent's pieces back to Start, possibly buying time or just getting even for when they did it to you, or do you advance your own toward Home? The game's system of play is also loaded with little quirks -- you can only move a piece out of Start on a draw of 1 or 2; if you get a 2 you get to draw again; all cards marked 4 make you move backward 4, so if you're lucky enough to start a piece from Start on a 2 and then draw a Backward-4 on your bonus draw, your piece basically circumvents the entire navigation of the board except for eight measly spaces. A 7 card is unique in that you're allowed to split the move between two pieces. There are no 6s or 9s. A 10 card either lets you move 10, or backward 1. An 11 either lets you move 11 spaces, or switch places with one of your player's pieces. And a 12 is a whopper of a card that allows you to chew up large amounts of the path around the board.

What I always found really cool about Sorry was that whenever I played The Daughter, the game was always close. There were games when she would literally have two pieces all the way around the board and Home before I even had two pieces out of Start, and yet by the end, when the game came to an end, with the winner placing all four pieces into the "Home" space, the loser would have three pieces Home and one very close. I never once played a Sorry blow-out.

So that's Sorry. Time was when The Daughter and I played a lot more board games than we do now; we should probably revisit those days. Before Sorry we had Chutes and Ladders, and before that, of course, there was Candyland, which was maddening in the fact that once the deck is shuffled and gameplay begins, there is literally zero factor of chance in the game; the course of the game is already determined by the order of the cards and all you're doing is unmasking them, one by one, until you learn who wins. (Unless, of course, the initial shuffle results in a scenario whereby the entire deck is drawn before someone has won. Then you shuffle again. But as far as chance goes in Candyland, that's it.)

Let's see, what other board games do I like? Othello is fun. So is Tri-ominoes. Monopoly is literally only fun if you have lots of people playing it, and even then, I've never once played a game of it to completion; every Monopoly game I've ever played ended when a critical mass of people said, "You know, I think I'd rather go dust the fireplace now." As a family we used to play Trivial Pursuit a lot. I'm not sure if it counts as a board game, but my father and I used to have a good time playing Mastermind.

Ultimately, though, my real favorite board game is good old chess. Too bad I'm not very good at it.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Seventeen

Westgate Theater, originally uploaded by figan.

A Childhood Picture

Errrr...I don't have any of my own. Honestly. All of my childhood photos are at my parents' house, up to and including my high school yearbooks. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that in my family I'm legendary for taking horrible photos when I was a kid, and then later on, when I figured out how to not take horrible photos, I still thought I looked like a doofus.

So, here's the best I can do. This is the apparent demolition of the Westgate Theater in Beaverton, Oregon. What's special about this theater? Why, that's where I first saw Star Wars, at the tender age of 5. I also saw The Empire Strikes Back there. Alas, we had already lived in Western New York for two years when Return of the Jedi came out.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Sixteen

Future Tattoos

I suppose I could change my mind, but as of right now, I have zero interest in getting "inked". No piercings, either. Boring one today, I guess!

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Fifteen

Current Grades

Ummmm...yeah. This one does not compute. I'm long past things like "grades". Isn't it funny, though, how unimportant grades can seem once you're far enough removed from school? That awful grade I got one period in Ninth Grade English sure doesn't seem nearly as important now as the teacher tried to make it seem back then. (And besides, I am still convinced is because she lost a paper I handed in, and in any event, she didn't even mention that she "hadn't received my paper" until well after the final grade for that period was submitted -- that's when that particular teacher earned her spot on my Eternal Teacher Shit List.)

If I'd had better grades, would I have a "better" life right now? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe with better grades I get into a "better" college, or maybe I get to go to grad school on a fellowship (I was accepted to a number of grad schools, but none offered assistance, and I was not terribly interested in accruing massive amounts of debt for a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I decided not to walk through that door). But then, maybe I don't meet The Future Wife. Maybe I don't decide that I like writing a lot. Maybe I don't learn to work with my hands when I'm in my 30s and have never worked with my hands before. Maybe I have a job where I'm working 60 hours a week and thus don't learn to cook. Maybe I don't read Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, Christopher Moore; maybe I don't rediscover Shakespeare and Tennyson.

With better grades, maybe I'm just another person who saw college as "job training" and who demonstrated contempt and disinterest for anything I didn't think I'd need to know about "in real life". And anyway, it's not like I was a crap student, either; I was in the top 15 in my graduating class in high school and graduated college cum laude. I just didn't buy into enough of the BS to push harder, and I can't say that I regret any of that.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Fourteen

Favorite Purchase Ever Made

Welllll...heck, I don't know.

The laptop on which I'm writing this? It's been two and a half years, and it's still going strong. The first pair of overalls, which I bought the summer after high school? They've long-since gone to Goodwill. The first car I bought? I loved that car, until it threw a rod on the 90 right by the Big Blue Watertower. (That's an actual Buffalo-Niagara landmark, believe it or not -- the junction of I-90 and I-290, the major thruway into the northern suburbs, is the location for this enormous, bright blue water tower.) The Wife's engagement ring? That's gotta be right up there. Any of The Wife's porcelain dolls? Hmmmm, that reminds me, I haven't bought one of those for her in a very long time.

And I sure do love all of my books.

And my tools, although most of those were purchased with money provided by The Store.

And this blog, which I bought with time.

I've got a lot of stuff!

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Thirteen

Favorite Memory

Any of these.

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Twelve

Where Your Family Is From

Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it?



Oh, we need a more specific answer, I suppose. Here we go!



More specific than that? OK then....



Well, since I don't know what specific streets my parents lived on as children, here's the best I can do.



Yup, we come from Pittsburgh. The Steel City. Iron City. Boo-yeah!

Thirty Day Challenge: Day Eleven

Recent Picture of Yourself

Well, OK. Here are some goofy photos I took of myself during a writing session. This is what writing looks like. Kind of.

Here I'm trying to decide if a certain character should meet a spectacularly grisly demise in a skateboard accident, or become King of Westphalia:



Here I'm trying to decide which synonym for "exsanguinate" I want to use in a particular sentence:



Here I've just realized that my two main characters, who have been flirting with one another for several stories, are in fact brother and sister! Who knew!!!



Here I'm starting to question the wisdom of setting my tale of star-crossed lovers who must overcome the societal bonds of class to be with each other forever on a cruise ship that is doomed to sink on its maiden voyage.



And here I've finally seized upon Inspiration and am following her directions to the production of amazing prose:



ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY

Clearly, I need to start interviewing for a better muse. This one is basically an office temp with a bad attitude.

So there you have it: recent pictures of me! Hooray!