Ancient Games

Two years ago, I wrote a blog about the game Scorched Earth. It was a game that I played in computer class in high school. It had occurred to me two years ago during a conversation about old games that I might be able to find that particular game somewhere on the internet. I didn't remember the name of the game, but after typing a description in the Google search box I did find the game. The game was available for free download as it turns out that the game is freeware. Anyway, I downloaded my game, played it, wrote a blog about it, quickly became bored with it, and filed it away in a folder deep within my windows folder archives.

That brings us to today. Or yesterday, actually, when I had a magical notion. It's sort of like a magical potion except that a magical notion is better because it comes first alphabetically. It dawned on me that there was a lot of games on that particular website, not just Scorched Earth. So, last night I ran the same search and WALAH! (is that how you spell that ridiculous sound?) There were plenty of ancient computer games just waiting for me to try,

You should definitely check out the site and try some free games. Because these games are DOS based games, you can even load them on to your flash drive and play them right off of it. I let Jacob play them and he loves them. It just shows that kids don't need fancy graphics to enjoy a game. And the ones I got are violence-free, unlike pretty much everything on the market these days.

For a link to the website click here. My favorite game so far is Rally Sport. I made it into a self-extracting file and uploaded it to my myhotlinks.com folder. You can download this file from there by clicking here. It's a really cool racing game that is reminiscent of RC Pro Am on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, but it's way better. The graphics are sort of lame, but the gameplay is surprisingly fluid. Definitely worth the download! It's only half a megabyte for the whole thing, so don't think there is a problem if it is done downloading after two seconds. After you let it self extract to a folder somewhere, double click the file that is named "Rally" and it will open the game. It doesn't tell you the controls so I'll list them below. Happy gaming!

A = Accelerate
Z = Brake / Reverse
< = Steer Left
> = Steer Right
Esc = Return to Menu / Exit Game if already at menu

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Peppermint Shortage

This week was the first week in which I decided to ride my bike to work. I couldn't ride Monday because it rained all day and today has promised to have the same watery problem. I was, however, able to ride Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The benefits of these rides are already beginning to show and I'm excited about that. Where previously there was somewhat of a tan line separating my gleaming white ankles and feet from my just off-white legs, there is now no visible difference and I'm proud to say that I have graduated to "signs of life" pigment from the knees down. I don't know if I've lost any weight or gained any muscle definition because I don't keep track of those things, but I'm hopeful that I'll also eventually notice some improvement in those categories as well.

I hope that I don't sound like a health nut or worse: a fat guy. But, I apparently like to talk about myself, so just deal with it. This should come as no surprise to you anyway if you've ever read any of my blogs before. I'm really off the intended subject, though. Which, I've yet to even touch on. I told you the biking thing just to explain that I stopped at PriceCutter on the way home from work yesterday to pick up some dishwashing detergent. We tried some "eco-friendly", good for the environment dishwashing detergent and it's terrible. It leaves a milky-white powdery substance on everything. I hope that it is equally as good for humans to consume than it is for the environment, because I failed to get it all off a glass and used the glass anyway. I'll probably turn into the swamp thing or something. Or do you have to live near a swamp for that to happen? Maybe just the Thing, then.

Anyway, again off-subject, while standing in line with my Electrosol liquid (which is awesome, by the way, but probably kills flowers in the swamp that it winds up in) I noticed that Peppermint flavored Eclipse brand gum was more expensive than its other flavors. I wondered how this came to be. I even asked the checkout girl if it could possibly be a mistake. She took the time to scan it and one of the other flavors to do a price check, but indeed the computer showed the same price difference. I might have discussed the matter with her further if I had not connected eyes with some customers behind me who were apparently very busy and important people who did not have the time to bear witness to a 15-second price check experiment. I took my Electrosol and my 10 cent cheaper spearmint flavored Eclipse brand gum and pedalled home.

I did a simple Google search on Peppermint to see what I would come up with and I did have some interesting findings. Okay, they're not very interesting, but I have to at least say things like that to keep you people reading. I found two sites that claim there are nationwide peppermint shortages. One site briefly mentions China's shortage of the product while the other is a gossip site for all things Starbucks and it makes mention of a shortage of Peppermint in their stores as well as their lack of ability to get it from their supplier. These two little known facts don't prove anything, I admit. But I needed something that sounds like proof. A wise man once said, "As long as you make a case, weak as it may be, you are bound to convince somebody." Okay, I just made that up, but someone wise could've said it. It's possible, and you can't argue with that.

So, whether the possibility of a Peppermint shortage concerns you or not, I think that I'll be growing my own Peppermint and selling it in dime bags. For every bag I sell, I can afford to buy one more pack of Peppermint flavored Eclipse gum and sneer at the other cheaper flavors that poor people are forced to buy.

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Hot Rod Golf

What do you get when you mix golf with a car show? You get a ridiculous looking golf cart as shown here. This sums up what we did this past weekend. Jodi got me a set of golf clubs for my birthday this year. I really like them and it's nice to finally have a set that is my size. The few times that I've gone golfing, I've either borrowed clubs from the guy I went with or I've used the set I bought a few years ago for $3 at a garage sale. They're good clubs if you're 5'3", so they should work just fine for Jodi. We got a babysitter Saturday and headed for the greens. We played the par 3 course by Payne Stewart and had a blast. We didn't keep score, but I was proud to say that I did get a couple bogeys and almost got a par. That's pretty good for me. It was also fun being out there amongst some real golfers. Some guys were out there in their golf shoes and their fancy bags, while Jodi and I both sported our bare feet.

Sunday, we took Jodi's parents to the Hot Rod Magazine Power Tour. My mom gave us an invitation that also got all of us some free BBQ. The show was huge. There was no way to get around and see everything. Just when you thought you had seen it all some left and more came rolling in. It was a revolving door of muscle cars and antique beauties. My favorite was a 1960 Ford F100. It's the first 57 through 60 model I've ever seen at a car show. I wound up talking to the guy for quite a while. He and his son swapped the frame out for a 1974 Ford truck frame. I told him my plans for my frame swap and he said that it was a good idea. He told me all the things he ran into along the way, but had said that it wasn't as difficult as they had thought it would be. I'll do a few things differently than what they did, but I love the turn out. Mine will stay a little more original. For example, I'll leave the gas cap on the cab even though it won't connect to a tank anymore. I'll also keep my big mirrors. They were original and while they prove bulky and less stylish these days, I like them.

Another cool thing I saw was a hardtop convertible. Jodi's dad had told me about them, but it wasn't until yesterday that I finally saw one. Ford only made them for 2 years and they didn't last, but what a collector's item. Because of their hinges getting bent and rusting up, the usage of the convertible option was rarely used and the cars themselves got scrapped when they wore out. So, they are a very rare breed. It's a complete waste of space, but it makes for a great car show spectacle.

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Intelligent Design

I want to expand on a previous blog entry that I wrote back in March. The subject is about the theory of Intelligent Design. I had a revelation of evidence to support this theory when I was 18 years old. Just so you know a little bit about me then, I was not yet saved, but I had been raised in church. Because of this solid foundation, deep down I believed in the existence of God. However, I had never come to see the power of God or His reality. From what I knew of God, He was a powerless god that once did powerful things, but only did them then and not now. Now, He merely was a spectator watching our lives unfold and a sorter of the good and the bad when we kicked the bucket.

This revelation came to me one night about two o'clock in the morning. I had just been brought home from the hospital by my roommate. Earlier that evening, I had lost control of my car while delivering a pizza and was broadsided by a Ford Bronco that couldn't avoid me as I slid sideways into his lane. It was quite an ordeal and for the second time on that mile stretch of highway in Ozark, Missouri I couldn't remember the ambulance ride into Springfield. I briefly told this story without much detail last year in a previous blog titled Head Injury.

What I didn't write about at the time was what happened on the way home from the hospital. When the nurses finally unstrapped me from the wooden stretcher that I was hog-tied to, glass went everywhere. I had been covered in broken glass in my car and much of it hitched a ride with me to the hospital. I brushed it all off and didn't give it any thought until the car ride home. I had something in my eye and was rubbing it trying to get it out, when it occurred to me that it might be glass and I therefore shouldn't be rubbing it. I quit immediately and resisted the urge to touch my eye the remainder of the trip despite an overwhelming desire to attempt its removal. When I got home, I went straight to the bathroom and pinched my lower eyelid and pulled down and away from my eye. I could see something in there but couldn't get my other fingers on it. I looked around the bathroom and found the perfect tool. A nail. As I pulled down my eyelid, I used the nail to slide the object towards the corner of my eye. It worked perfectly. I retrieved the object and found immediate comfort for my eye. I found that the object wasn't an object at all. It was merely a collection of sleep (people call this stuff a variety of names including eye goo and eye boogers, but I call it sleep and TheFreeDictionary.com confirmed my proper use of the word). However, upon closer inspection, as I rolled it between my fingers, the sleep peeled away and revealed a 1/4 inch long sliver of glass.

Here comes my revelation. I was amazed at how complex the human body is and how it even had a defense mechanism in place for glass getting in the eye. It would've been very easy for that sliver to cut right into my eyeball, but instead my body surrounded it with a protective coating to thwart the chance of that happening. I realized that the human body is so amazingly complex, leaps and bounds beyond any other species, that there is just no possible way that we were an accident of nature. Our creation had to have been given great thought beyond our comprehension. Our very existence is evidence of a higher intelligence.

Let's take that a step further and look at our planet. Scientists even agree that the probability of Earth forming so perfectly placed in our solar system to contain life is beyond calculation. There are no other known planets that can sustain life. Science has found what appears to be evidence of water having existed on one of Jupiter's moons, but that's as close as it gets. And that even remains debatable, after all, where did the water go? Could the moon have lost its atmosphere? How?

I have a hard time making since of any theory that makes life out to be accidental. I'm not accidental. You're not accidental. We were made with purpose. Let the numbers speak for themselves. God was and is a mathematician. His design is meticulously put together and science reveals this all the time, but largely fails to credit Him with it.

Furthermore, upon searching "Intelligent Design" on Photobucket.com for an appropriate picture to go along with this blog, I was surprised to see that 100% of the results were very hateful slandering at Intelligent Design. I searched further and found tons of articles, blogs, and rantings spewing a blind hatred for the Intelligent Design theory. It's not hard to see the obvious cause for this blind hatred. People get offended. But, it's more than that. They display a need to convince others of their beliefs or lack there of. They crave it like blood thirsty maniacs who have no class, no decency, and no manners. They refuse to debate without the use of slander, name-calling, and making absolute statements based off of common belief or common understanding of evolution without any actual evidence. Do the research. I've seen hard evidence of the existence of God and the historical evidence that supports the events found written in the Bible. But, I really need to look no further than my own bathroom mirror to see the evidence of intelligent design. The existence of every living thing is a miracle in itself.

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Game Winner! And her chosen topic.

We had a winner, yesterday! Congratulations to Jodi Felton for being the first and only person to comment on yesterday's Celeb Guessing Game and get all the celebrities' names correct. After a little confusion about how the game works she managed to pull herself together and take home the gold. And as the rules clearly state, she gets to pick the topic for my next blog and since I'm blogging right now I guess I should get on the subject she chose, "Why I Love My Wife".

In no particular order:

Because we share similar goals - I want to fix up our house. So does she. I like to entertain people. so does she. I wanted a family. So did she. (past tense on that is only because we have one now where before we were married we didn't, not because we no longer want a family). Etc.

Because we share similar interests - I like old style architecture and antiques. So does she. I like music. So does she. I like getting really cool photos. So does she. I like to relax by watching movies. So does she. Etc.

Because we share similar senses of humor - Our sense of humor, or sixth sense, if you will, is the most important of all the senses. What good is it to see life and find it dull? What good is it to hear life, but miss the amusement of it? Some people have a sense of humor that is too under-developed in order to keep up with a group and have fun. Jodi and I laugh a lot when we're together and I imagine that we'll live to be a hundred because of it.

The truth is that a reason for love can not be explained in words. All these things I've mentioned aren't why I love her. They're things that I like about her and they definitely have helped us to become the good friends that we are, but they aren't reasons for love. I'd love her if she didn't share my interests. I'd love her if we had different goals.

I could list some really romantic things. I love the way she walks and talks in the morning when she first wakes up: like a five-year-old that just got disappointed by some bad news. Or, how when she laughs really hard she accidentally snorts just a bit. But, these aren't reasons to love her either. I'd love her if she didn't do these things. The fact that I love these things is the result of me loving her, not the cause.

So, Jodi, I hope you enjoyed your chosen blog topic. The reasons I love my wife, are undetermined. They remain a mystery just as Love itself is mysterious. Anything that I could list would simply be debatable whether it is a cause for love or an effect of it.

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29 Celeb Guessing Game

Here is a short list of some celebrities who have turned or will turn 29 this year. These celebrities seem young to me and so by grouping myself in with them I feel a little younger myself. You should try this and see what celebrities are your age. It'll make you feel better about your age. Unless, of course, after searching your birth year your list is only 3 or 4 names long and they all starred on Golden Girls. Or worse, On Golden Pond. Come to think of it. Stay away from anything Golden.

Yesterday, I did promise a game. And I never let people down. Phh, ha ha. Yeah right. Well, I won't let you down this time. The first person to guess the names of all these celebrities and do so in a comment on this blog post will receive their name mentioned in an upcoming blog post, will have the honor of choosing my next blog topic, and depending on their proximity to me may even receive a cheesy gift from me even though it's my birthday. Good luck.

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30 Goals to Achieve

Tomorrow I turn 29. I haven't given it much thought up to this point and I'm a little ashamed to admit that I'm starting to think quite a bit about now. Although, all it took was a simple Google search to quiet my rising concerns over the issue. I stopped clicking on the Google results after running across five other blogs that shared a common theme. They all were describing the things in which the authors thought that they should have had worked out by this age. Apparently these five people had a set of goals for their lives and they didn't really know that they had them until this 29th birthday came about. So, they spoke of their determination to get these goals achieved in the next year.

I, on the other hand, am rather content where I am in life and what I have accomplished. There is only one goal that I know that I had made in my early twenties that I don't see happening by the time I reach the big 3-Oh. I had wanted to be in a house for five years by that time so that I could have enough equity built up in it to sell it and buy a few acres. I then wanted to use the property value to acquire a construction loan. I would then build a house on a one acre plot of this property and live in it for a minimum of two years. This way, when I sold it, in my thirties, I would avoid Capital Gains tax and be able to build another house on another one of the acres and repeat this process a couple or three times. It's a great way to make good money as long as you leave yourself with enough capital to pay for two mortgages until the house sells.

Well, I didn't get approved for a home loan for many years because of a poor credit history. Jodi and I had to work at it to get our credit good enough for approval. Because of this stumbling block on our path, my plan had to change. But, I'm happy to announce that the plan is no less profitable. I thought that I'd have to live in a house for 5 years before I got enough equity to do anything like this, but that's not true. Jodi and I have proven our shared love for home remodeling and have managed to stay dedicated to it in every way including financially. It's so easy to get that tax refund and go out and buy some new toy. But, we've started new projects every time we got a large sum of money and even some times when we didn't. The result is an ever-improving house that scarcely resembles the one in which we bought about 16 months ago.

I'm thinking now that the appraised value of our house will be much higher than what we had originally estimated. And because we're doing all these home improvements with available cash rather than taking out a loan or racking up a credit card debt, we stand to come out much prettier. This all means more equity which can be used to acquire another house to do it again or some land to do the previous plan or whatever we decide.

Every other goal for 30 is already achieved, so I can concentrate on and enjoy my life rather than feel the pressure of a set of goals left unfulfilled. Stay tuned tomorrow for my actual birthday as there will be a fun little game for you all to play. The winner will receive an honorable mention in an upcoming blog as well as a possible cheesy gift that has yet to be determined. Even though it's my birthday.

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