When I was little, there was a milkman. I never saw him - he made his rounds much too early in the morning for me to ever see him. There was an active dairy not that far from us - Yoder dairy - and every week, my parents had delivered two quarts of milk (or was it three?), a dozen eggs, and a pound of butter.
Well, that's the order I remember, at any rate. They adjusted it from time to time. My mom had two special recipes that she brought out when we'd used fewer eggs than expected during a week. One of them was angelfood cake, which is made with egg whites, and is still one of my favorite desserts. The other was a cornmeal muffin that called for egg yolks and was probably terribly bad for us. Especially with butter smeared all over them.
I can still remember turning the milk carton away from me on the table because the Y on the carton had two flourishes that I thought looked like eyes staring at me. The idea of my milk watching me eat breakfast disturbed me.
I don't know if my parents cancelled that service because it became too hard to predict how much of any individual product we were going to use in a week, or if the service stopped because the dairy closed. I know the dairy closed - there's now a mall where the cows used to graze, and a restaurant in the old barn. I like shopping at that mall, but I've never eaten at the restaurant. Maybe I should try it sometime.
I bought a new computer game last night while we were out shopping for my dad's birthday present. It's called Pandora's Box, and it was designed by the guy who wrote Tetris. Since I spent my first year and a half of college absolutely addicted to Tetris, I thought I'd pick it up.
It's pretty neat. Astonishingly good, for a Microsoft program. (I shouldn't say that. Microsoft writes pretty good programs, they just can't build an operating system to save their lives.) It's essentially ten different kinds of puzzles. I won't try to describe them, because it would take too long, but they're pretty good.
The puzzles are wrapped up in a storyline: When Pandora's Box was opened, seven trickster gods escaped, each taking pieces of the box with them and scattering the pieces all over the world. If you follow the storyline in the game (You don't have to - you can just do puzzles if you prefer) then you have to go from city to city (it tells you where to go) and find the pieces. Each city has ten puzzles attached to it, and when each puzzles is complete, you wind up with some piece of art from that culture - photos, statues, paintings. It's neat. One random puzzle in each city hides the piece you're looking for. Between each city, the game tells you part of a legend about that particular god. For each god, you have to find four pieces of the box, then the god himself, and then you have to do a challenge with that god (which I haven't got to, yet, so I don't know what that's like.)
Anyway, the puzzles are simple enough not to be too frustrating, but addictive. The game itself is visually stunning, and pretty well put together. I like it.
I get to leave the office very early today. Because of MarsCon and the Brandts coming to visit, Matt and I are trying to leave work as early as we can, though Matt's leaving early depends on what he finds out about his review. But I got to work just a hair after 7 this morning, and I have an extra half-hour on the timesheet I can use, and so if I work through lunch, I'll get to go home around 2:30. Life is good!
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