As a child, I got a bunch of these peg board games from my grandparents. They came as a set, but I guess they didn’t come with a way to store them, because I’ve always kept them in a cardboard King Edwards Imperial Tobacco box that my grandfather gave me. (Fitting them all into one box became a game itself.)
They’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet for a while, and I dug them out this weekend while looking for some class paperwork. (My filing system is a game of another sort.)
It seemed like a good time to not stare at a screen, so I pulled the games out and tried to figure out how they all worked. Most of them were a mystery to me, as a kid. Not that they’re overly complex, but I guess they were just beyond my patience at the time. There’s one game I knew well, because I’d been to a Cracker Barrel. I played a few rounds of that, trying to remember the pattern I devised to win. (I’d devised a pattern, which is a thing I would do, of course, but it’s been decades.)
All of which is to say, I’m telling myself it takes real talent to do this.
The good news is the other games now make sense. I need to play around with them a bit more to see which is the most entertaining.
Anyway, 144 more papers to read and grade. Two finals are due on Thursday. The rest come in next Monday. Suddenly peg board games seem like fun, don’t they?
In September of 2024 I devised a 25-mile time trial. It is a big circle with nine turns. Critically, eight of them are right turns. It involves going down the hill and back up past the haunted house, into town, by the park, through the sheep pastures, and then taking that left turn. Then you go a mile, turn onto a busy state highway, go 2.3 more miles and turn right, to get back into the countryside. Then you eventually get to the downhill that is always in the headwind, which makes the downhill feel like an uphill. You go by the crazy house and then into the woods, until the road ends. You turn right again onto another highway, one which you can absolutely fly on for four miles, before turning into another small town.
You go through three towns on this route. You pass many more warehouses. And I need to rename this. It’s not really a time trial if you’re just getting slower on the thing.
I am getting slower on the thing. Twice I’ve done it so far this year, and these are the slowest times in the series.
Much of that is about me, of course. But I can blame the weather, too. Today I had headwinds from three different directions!
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
If you’d like to go there, ask around for directions to Tulan Strand.
