Check and mate! Finally something worth blogging about!

My oldest son was accepted into his school's chess club yesterday!



So what's the big deal? Normally they don't allow first graders into the chess club. That's one smart cookie, and I'm one proud daddy!

I found this book of chess for kids at Half-Priced Books for some ridiculously low price, and it is a good one for a chess beginner or semi-beginner. It describes each of the pieces, has some basic strategy and one or two opening gambits.

Anything else about chess? Sure! One of the tattoos I've been preapproved for is a Knight's Tour, which is having a knight move according to the rules of chess and landing on every square exactly once.



Sort of like this, but I would have to use my rippling muscles to make it move.

I would love to find some sort of chess applet that I can put in the sidebar of my blog for ongoing games, but so far I've found some graphics that I can manually update only. Oh, the humanity! If anyone has found something else let me know!

Darth Vader Harmonica Bayou

Really, I never knew he was so talented!



Thanks Louis!

Desktop Tower Defense

I've been playing a lot of Desktop Tower Defense. It's a simple game, but very addictive. Your goal is trying to shoot all the "creeps" that are trying to get from one side of the screen to the other, and you do this by placing guns in what amounts to a maze-like configuration.



You are given all the time you want for the initial configuration, but once the game starts it doesn't stop! You spend most of your time frantically upgrading guns or placing new ones of different types. Some creeps are immune to certain guns.

It's fast and I'm addicted to it - check it out! It has gotten into a few game journalists' and reviewers' Game Of The Year lists as well.

We were dreaming of a White Christmas!

I'm back!

We went to Copper Mountain, Colorado, for Christmas. The first leg was to Lubbock to spend the night with my brother and his family, and then we drove to Aurora, CO, to stay with some friends. Here is the view from their front yard.



We stayed in a condo, spent too much money and didn't ski enough. Here's another pano from the condo porch:



This is outside the condo, and you can see the dumpster.



We stayed in Silverthorn. Behind me is Lake Dillon, and we would drive over the dam to get from Silverthorn to Dillon.



These are icicles. Relax - it's just frozen water.



The morning we left it was 12 degrees below zero. That's not the wind chill! Including wind chill I think it was about 20 to 25 below zero.



We're on the road back!



We drove from Silverthorn to Denver where we stayed a few days with some friends of ours. Thanks Karen! Thanks Michelle!



We left Denver and decided to drive straight through the night just to have more time at home and not have to worry about finding a motel, carting in all the valuables, sleeping late, food, etc. It was 20+ caffeine-bombed hours.

I think this is Mt. Capulin that we passed on the way through New Mexico.