Tanks

Day 267

Kristy left this evening to go to a fireside with some of the Young Woman in our church group leaving Logan and I home by ourselves.

Normally we eat treats and play Mario Kart but tonight we played Tanks with his marbles. My dad taught me this game and actually taught Logan how to play too. All you need for Tanks is a bunch of marbles and one larger marble (like a Boulder). We couldn't find a larger marble so we used a golf ball.  You take a bunch of marbles and set them up in groups of four.

A view from my side of the battlefield looking at Logan's.

You set up your army of tanks on one side of the room and your opponent sets his up on the other side. You use three for the legs and a marble on top for the head. You can set up as many tanks as you want. We usually do between seven and ten. Then you secretly choose a captain without letting your opponent know.

My Captain. He's special because of his head.

An helicopter view of my team. And yes, I was making helicopter sounds.

Then the battle begins! You take turns rolling the larger marble at your opponent's tanks until there is one team standing. If you kill the Captain, you get a bonus roll. If you accidently knock down your own guy during gameplay, he is dead. If he falls down because you didn't set him up good enough, he is dead. You can knock more than one down at a time. If a tank falls because it was hit by a tank's "body parts" he is dead. And of course, you can make up any other rules you want.

Here is Logan taking a shot. You can barely see the golf ball at the lower left.

Logan is a little over-dramatic. I just killed his last-standing tank. Knocked the head clean off!

Victory!

It is quite a simple game but one that I could play for hours. Logan is quickly picking up the game though and will soon challenge his old man.

The Video Date

Day 254

I had a lot of fun dating in high school. I rarely dated the same person and my friend Damond and I would always try to plan creative dates.

For this date I was super excited. Damond was dating a fun girl named Brenea and I was going on my first date with this cute blond named Valerie. Interesting side note, both Damond and I were dating older women. Well, they were only a year older than us but we thought we were living dangerously.

We didn't have much planned for this evening. We were planning on making some treats and then playing DumbDamondGames(tm). For those that don't know, DDG was just a series of silly nonsense games. Usually these games would somehow get us closer to our dates physically. It was all part of the master plan!

Instead Damond and I had a flash of brilliance. Let's make a music video! We dug out an old video camera and we found an even older tape player. This tape player had reels it was so old.

And we found the perfect song to do. "One Bad Apple" by the Osmond Brothers. We also found some old clothes to dress up in and we found what we wanted to use as musical instruments. I guess I should have noticed it then but I dressed up to be a bass player. I used a yard stick and wore a baseball hat with a scarf tucked in so it looked like I had long hair. I don't remember what the girls wore but I do remember that Damond had a helmet on and used a wood gold club. He would sing the lead and the rest of us would sing backup. We only mouthed the words of course. Damond one time swung his "mike stand" (golf club) and about smacked me in the groin. We would do the whole song and then we would watch them after and make plans for new videos. We laughed and laughed when we saw that Damond almost permanently neutered me but what really made us laugh was you could audibly hear me go "Whoa". We made three different videos and had a real hoot doing them.

After the date was over and we took the girls home Damond and I would stay up into the wee hours of the morning watching our videos and we would talk about what we thought of our dates. We had so much fun on this date that after our LDS Missions we did it again with a different set of girls. I even reprised my role as the long-haired bass player. It was still a lot of fun to do but unfortunately it just wasn't as magical as it was that first time.

I wish I had a copy of that tape. Sadly, Damond's dad taped over it all. If I would have known he was going to do that, I would have bought him some new tapes!