Monday, October 6, 2014

Dealing with Fame

My picture was published in the local paper. Hold your applause. No, please. Sit. Thank you. Thank you! Luckily I wasn't the person wearing the Oculus at the time, but not only do you have a clear shot of my hairline and beard, you can see my personal computer's desktop in the background. None of the work-machines were beefy enough for us to be comfortable demoing the headsets, so I volunteered my own machine. One of the fringe benefits of being a gamer is that my tolerance for outdated hardware has a much lower threshold than normal humans.
It's a little hard to tell with the program windows that are up, but I'm rocking a Minecraft 1.8 screenshot as my background. I've probably mentioned this before, but Minecraft is fantastic.

Yesterday I decided to allow myself to be taken to a pumpkin patch thing. It was insane. Okay, so there's this place called Vala's or something like that. They will most likely have a website. I knew a little bit about it, but the actual scale of this place is hard to grasp. We went pretty early in the day, and there were hundreds of cars already in the lot with helpful police officers guiding us into place in a field. When we left that afternoon there were thousands of cars filling every field in sight. Not too shabby considering the entrance fee is fifteen bucks a head. The attractions inside were... I've deleted a few attempts at describing them. A lot of it seems like a disorganized jumble of concepts. We went through a Pirate themed maze and our first time through ended up finding the 'treasure,' literally two steps inside of one of the five starting doors. Later we found out that the maze has multiple areas once could enter, and some of them would guide you through with trivia questions, but it was never consistent. Some turns were marked, others were bare. Much like the corn-maze. It seemed that intrepid humans had seen fit to trample unofficial passageways, interspersed with what seemed like the planned paths, so our trip through, while enjoyable, was spent wondering if we had just cheated. It's a corn-maze. Cut into a field of corn. I can't really criticize, but it did seem a little slapdash. The park is interspersed with lots of low-budget animatronics, voiced by tinny loudspeakers. Quaint and charming in one light. The stuff of nightmares in another. So for a 'spooky' Halloween/Fall attraction: Mission Accomplished?

Regardless, a good time was had. The family pedal carts, and bean-bag horse-shoes, and kettle-corn, and camel, and pig-races, and being surrounded by kids and families having a great time made it all worthwhile. Well done Vala's!

A kind coworker gifted me a big shopping bag full of apples a few days ago. They are giant, delicious, and a half-dozen of them have been cored, sliced, and baked into a pan full of Apple Crisp. I followed an online recipe with minor alterations and it was a shocking realization about just how much sugar goes into that stuff. Delicious stuff! I also did the math, I will run out of sugar long before I run out of apples!

More soon!




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