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I’m a big quitter at heart. In middle school I signed up for track and made it through about a week before I timidly knocked on my mom’s bedroom door one morning and told her I wasn’t going to go anymore. My reason? Um, I had to get up early and there seemed to be running involved. (I wasn’t the brightest child.)

This weekend I came across one of those inspirational plaques in a store (we all know I’m a fan of those) and Snarky Girl reared her ugly head again. The original looked something like this (I can’t change the ‘you are wrong’ underlines):

My version? More like this:

Luckily, I saw a kid tonight who is not a quitter! He had turned his bike into a one-man snowplow. He had a snow shovel wedged onto the handlebar of his bike and was stuck in a drift, but he just kept peddling. You go, kid.

I have good news or bad news, depending on what you have going on for the weekend.

There’s a new edition of Bejeweled out. You can either play it online like me (unlimited time, but fewer cool features) or download it for free (like Lloyd) and play for an hour with advanced features like instant replay. We have wasted our Friday evening on this. Yay!

If you haven’t played, it’s a game from PopCap where you have to connect three matching jewels to make them disappear. It’s sort of like a sparkly Tetris in reverse.

The new version has three new styles of the game, plus a few more moves that I don’t quite grasp. The only one I could reliably get was the flaming jewel, which sounds like a cocktail. Apparently PopCap also was able to snare Satan to do the voice-overs. It’s a little disconcerting having a demon bossing us around all night – “Go!” – or alternately praising us in a low, rumbling-from-the-depths-of-Hades baritone – “Excellent” “Good” – and telling us when to move on – “Level Complete”. (You really have to say it like a Dark One to get the whole picture.)

By the way – I’m terrible at it, but I love it anyway!

(Warning, it will take a while to find the free versions. As Lloyd says, “They give you thirty chances to buy it before they let you play it free online.”)

Here, let me open my soul to you so you can mock it.

I was not a hard-core science fiction geek as a teen/pre-teen, but I could hold my own. I was a Star Trek and Star Wars fan, and since we didn’t have cable – the BBC (on PBS) provided me with Doctor Who and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. HHGttG got me started on reading Douglas Adam’s series, the very best part is in the third book, when Arthur Dent discovers how to fly.

In a nutshell, you fall down but get distracted and forget to hit the ground.

I loved that!! I believe that’s when the flying dreams started, because I simply loved the idea of being able to fly. Usually the dreams started as running, with longer and longer bouncing strides, until I was eventually airborne.

Warning: Soul-mocking moment ahead:

So, I was in our backyard on the swing set(I was a lonely pre-teen), and I was looking at the crooked trunk of a small tree. “This is it,” I told myself. The universe had collapsed into this one crystal-clear moment and I knew that if I ran at that tree and jumped off the trunk, I would be flying! This was it – good-bye, gravity.

I ran.

I jumped.

I fell.

I looked around in embarrassment.

(I still believed.)

Happy Birthday, Jesus! Have a great day, everyone!

Let’s take a survey! You can answer with ‘when I was a kid’ or ‘now as an adult’ answers – I don’t judge. (You can copy-and-paste if you like.)

1. Do you open presents Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or other?
2. Do you do stockings?
3. White lights or colored lights?
4. Real or fake tree?
5. Tree topper?

1. Do you open presents Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or other? As a kid, it was always Christmas Eve. Now – whenever I want! You can’t tell me what to do!
2. Do you do stockings? We have some, but I don’t always hang them up. We had them when I was a kid, and one year my Mom wanted us to open one stocking gift a day for each of the 12 days of Christmas. That lasted for 12 minutes. Sorry, Mom.
3. White lights or colored lights? White lights, non-twinkling.
4. Real or fake tree? Fake tree. It’s just so much easier.
5. Tree topper? It’s a little star this year.