Category: Journal

Last week, I was talking to one of my classmates who has a tendency to arrive a minute or two after the class officially starts. I complained that he has an extra cushion to show up since his last name starts with an S, whereas mine starts with B. (When your last name is Bakken, you’re always gonna be near the top of the list for roll call.) I decided it was time for a little equality, so I bet him a nickel that the professor would take attendance in reverse for the next class. Not only did he accept my bet, he said he’d give me a whole five pennies instead of a nickel. How could I turn that down? Continue reading “How to double your money on a bet”

I visited my older brother Brent earlier today and Gemma, his daughter, introduced me to Wii Sports for the first time. Also for the first time, I was destroyed playing sports against someone who’s about 1/4 my age.

For those of you who don’t know, the Wii operates by using some funky motion sensors that allow it to detect when you move your hands, thus swinging a racket or a bat or throwing the controller through the TV screen. I’m sure the game interprets that last one pretty badly, but it’s hard to tell when there’s no screen anymore.

So during the course of our gaming, I was swinging myself around, getting all hot and sweaty and nasty, and I had very few positive results to show for it. Some of my not-so-shining moments included winning points in tennis because Gemma helped me win—she’d hit the ball when it was out of bounds because she wanted to play to deuce—I managed to get one hit out of the infield playing baseball and I discovered I’m very adept at rolling gutter balls when I’m bowling. The worst, though… I need to work on my boxing skills.

Or perhaps I just need to work on my Wii technique. Brent explained that not only do the sensors detect motion, they detect the way you’re pointing the controllers. Thus, when you’re pointing your hands forward instead of holding them upright, the punch will land lower on the target, which would explain my difficulties with one of the training exercises. The Nintendo trainer has a pad on each hand and holds them up one at a time for you to punch. Each time you hit a pad, you get a point. Each time you hit the trainer, you get minus one point.

Because I was having trouble with the controllers… I think a real trainer would have been a little pissed off. During the course of a minute, I managed to hit the pads 14 times, but I also punched him in the gut 24 times. That’s when I started to wonder if I might have been better off just throwing the controller at the TV screen—at least I would have only missed the pads once.

My journey home from work takes me up Interstate 35, which not-so-fortunately was under construction today. Going to work wasn’t much trouble, but coming back north… it was sloooooooow. Why? Because there was a section where the right lane was closed, leaving one open for everyone to squeeze through.

Naturally, there are the really annoying people who think they’re in a hurry or something, so while most good drivers merge into the left lane with plenty of space remaining, they blaze a trail up the empty lane and cut in at the last possible moment, perhaps even a little late, resulting in the harsh demise of an orange traffic cone or two. I hate that. I really do. They can’t be courteous drivers like the rest of us. Nope, they need to get ahead of you. Now. And it’s a two lane road, so what can you do?

Not much, unless you’re my hero of the day: a large semi who was tailing me at 80 mph. It was a little uncomfortable to have such a huge mass of steel driving so close behind me at that speed, but it’s not like I could pump the brakes to get him to back off—that’s a recipe for pancakes. Shawn-flavored pancakes. Once we got closer to that stretch of construction, though, everyone slowed down, so we were creeping along as the occasional annoying person buzzed past us.

After the first couple passed by, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw that the semi was drifting to the right. A lot. It kept drifting and drifting and drifting until it was straddling both lanes. And then it stayed there. Just moving along at the speed of sludge oozing downhill as cars… well, I’m not sure what they were doing behind the truck, but they sure as hell weren’t getting around it.

No more cars speeding by and slowing everyone down when they cut in at the last possible moment. Nope, just a bunch of us driving in the left lane followed by a very wide semi and what was probably a gigantic clusterfuck of cars and trucks right behind it. It felt like vindication without guilt because no one did anything wrong. Well, that whole “driving in both lanes” thing probably wasn’t “legal”, but I’d bet today’s paycheck that if a cop saw what was going on, he’d laugh so hard that he’d spray his half-chewed donut all over the windshield.

So to my hero of the day, thank you for making my drive home a much more enjoyable experience. As my way of saying thanks, I’d love to cook a meal for you sometime. Maybe pancakes. Any kind but Shawn-flavored.