In which there are puzzles and rain

M received Ubongo from us for her birthday. It's like a competitive tetris/tangrams game. You each get 12 tetris type shapes and a puzzle board. A die is rolled that lets you know which three (or four) pieces you will use to assemble the shape depicted on the board. You then have a very brief window of time in which to assemble the puzzle. If you manage it, you can collect two gems from the score track. At the end (9 rounds, different board for each round) the person with the most gems of a single color is the winner. (You can move across the columns of the score track depending on how quickly you finish the puzzle thus helping you to get gems of the color you want). It's fast and also pretty fun. Some of the puzzles are fiendishly difficult. And others not so. It's also pretty easy to adjust the difficulty so that everyone has a chance. Make the grown ups solve the 4 piece puzzles while the kids do the 3 piece offerings. Remove the timer for younger players (an option I think I'll try with G next time) and so on. There are several versions of Ubongo as well in case you need more puzzles.

Other than that M had a lovely birthday and managed to mostly avoid the rain we've had on and off for several days. There was a traditional pool party and some mu shu pork and a whopper pie. An we were glad for an opportunity to spend the day together. Happy birthday M!

Lovely wife has managed to get the kids geared up for school (next week! woo hoo!). Other than that things have been almost quiet at casa del 'd'. I've even manged to not read a ton of books. I'm going to give Last Apprentice a bit of a break so that I don't wear myself out on the series. I suspect I'll get book four in the next couple of weeks though. I have instead opted to collect all 120 stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2 which of course just opens the next 120. I think I will also take a break from that prior to hunting for them. I think I liked the first Mario Galaxy a touch more. Mostly because it forced you to progress through the "story" (such as it was) before going back for all the extra stuff. The second one let you do the extra stuff almost from the get go. And the completist in me wouldn't let me go ahead before I had it all. So aspects of it were more work than fun. It's not entirely the game's fault, but I liked that aspect of the initial game better. The second one certainly has some pretty amazing levels and fun game play, just like the first.

Quick thoughts

I finished reading Fat Vampire by Adam Rex. Doug is 15 and overweight and now undead. Forever 15 and overweight and trying to sort out this whole undead thing. The initial parts of this book are hilarious. The rest moderately so. Lovely wife liked about the first 2/3s. I enjoyed it pretty much up until the end. The end is a little odd, it's true. But there was some decent humor. I suspect the biggest problem is the fact that the book kind of wanders. It is a coming of age tale of sorts, so I suppose that's somewhat understandable, but not really to the extent found in the book. I'd say it's worth reading for humor, but not necessarily the story. Although it's not bad. (Although the Google? Really?)

G and I have started playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and it's quite good. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one. It's a touch more challenging, but there's a lot of fun to be had. If you haven't played the first one, I think I'd recommend starting with it. There are a couple things the new one does better (especially related to having a 2nd player) but you'll probably find the learning curve a little less steep.

And that's really all I feel like going on about right now. I will mention very briefly in passing that Cypher and Red Rock West were both pretty interesting little movies. One's a sci-fi espionage flick and the other is a noir-ish mistaken identity flick.