The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
A 10+ Year Old Picture
OK, this is easy!
Oh, all right, I suppose I should honor the actual spirit of this Challenge. Ye Gods! Like I said earlier in this series, I don’t have any of my own photos around. Luckily, though, The Wife and I have been married nearly 13 years, so here’s The Wife on our wedding day, flanked by her mother and grandmother, who are both sadly now gone:
Day Nineteen: Something That Made You Smile Today
Well, I suppose I can use this as an excuse for some random linkage!
The 5 worst deaths ever written for great characters ( disagree about Captain Kirk, actually — how else should he go out, but in a fistfight on some Godforsaken planet somewhere?)
And a whole lot of other stuff too. Cheerio!
Favorite Board Game
Hmmmm. We haven’t played many board games of late here at Casa Jaquandor; this is something that needs rectified. We still have never played the RISK or Settlers of Catan games that I bought almost a year ago; we gotta dust those off. RISK is lots of fun.
You know what, though? My favorite board game of the “Parker Bros” or “Milton Bradley” variety is probably Sorry. I used to play Sorry all the time with my grandmother when I was a kid and she was in town to visit, and The Daughter and I have often had a great time playing it.
Sorry, for those who haven’t played it, is a “Move your piece from Point A to Point B before your opponent does” type of game. What’s different is that you don’t have one piece but four, so you have to manage your resources a bit. Gameplay is determined not by dice but by drawing from a deck of cards; each card tells you what to do. The name of the game comes from its “revenge” factor: since the object is to move your pieces from your “Start” space all the way around the board to your “Home” space, it stinks when something happens to send one of your pieces all the way back to Start. This happens when one of your opponent’s pieces lands on the same space as yours, or when your opponent draws the dreaded “SORRY!” card from the deck.
It’s a surprisingly strategic game; you have to make decisions as you go — do you take advantage of an opportunity to knock one of your opponent’s pieces back to Start, possibly buying time or just getting even for when they did it to you, or do you advance your own toward Home? The game’s system of play is also loaded with little quirks — you can only move a piece out of Start on a draw of 1 or 2; if you get a 2 you get to draw again; all cards marked 4 make you move backward 4, so if you’re lucky enough to start a piece from Start on a 2 and then draw a Backward-4 on your bonus draw, your piece basically circumvents the entire navigation of the board except for eight measly spaces. A 7 card is unique in that you’re allowed to split the move between two pieces. There are no 6s or 9s. A 10 card either lets you move 10, or backward 1. An 11 either lets you move 11 spaces, or switch places with one of your player’s pieces. And a 12 is a whopper of a card that allows you to chew up large amounts of the path around the board.
What I always found really cool about Sorry was that whenever I played The Daughter, the game was always close. There were games when she would literally have two pieces all the way around the board and Home before I even had two pieces out of Start, and yet by the end, when the game came to an end, with the winner placing all four pieces into the “Home” space, the loser would have three pieces Home and one very close. I never once played a Sorry blow-out.
So that’s Sorry. Time was when The Daughter and I played a lot more board games than we do now; we should probably revisit those days. Before Sorry we had Chutes and Ladders, and before that, of course, there was Candyland, which was maddening in the fact that once the deck is shuffled and gameplay begins, there is literally zero factor of chance in the game; the course of the game is already determined by the order of the cards and all you’re doing is unmasking them, one by one, until you learn who wins. (Unless, of course, the initial shuffle results in a scenario whereby the entire deck is drawn before someone has won. Then you shuffle again. But as far as chance goes in Candyland, that’s it.)
Let’s see, what other board games do I like? Othello is fun. So is Tri-ominoes. Monopoly is literally only fun if you have lots of people playing it, and even then, I’ve never once played a game of it to completion; every Monopoly game I’ve ever played ended when a critical mass of people said, “You know, I think I’d rather go dust the fireplace now.” As a family we used to play Trivial Pursuit a lot. I’m not sure if it counts as a board game, but my father and I used to have a good time playing Mastermind.
Ultimately, though, my real favorite board game is good old chess. Too bad I’m not very good at it.
A Childhood Picture
Errrr…I don’t have any of my own. Honestly. All of my childhood photos are at my parents’ house, up to and including my high school yearbooks. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that in my family I’m legendary for taking horrible photos when I was a kid, and then later on, when I figured out how to not take horrible photos, I still thought I looked like a doofus.
So, here’s the best I can do. This is the apparent demolition of the Westgate Theater in Beaverton, Oregon. What’s special about this theater? Why, that’s where I first saw Star Wars, at the tender age of 5. I also saw The Empire Strikes Back there. Alas, we had already lived in Western New York for two years when Return of the Jedi came out.
Current Grades
Ummmm…yeah. This one does not compute. I’m long past things like “grades”. Isn’t it funny, though, how unimportant grades can seem once you’re far enough removed from school? That awful grade I got one period in Ninth Grade English sure doesn’t seem nearly as important now as the teacher tried to make it seem back then. (And besides, I am still convinced is because she lost a paper I handed in, and in any event, she didn’t even mention that she “hadn’t received my paper” until well after the final grade for that period was submitted — that’s when that particular teacher earned her spot on my Eternal Teacher Shit List.)
If I’d had better grades, would I have a “better” life right now? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe with better grades I get into a “better” college, or maybe I get to go to grad school on a fellowship (I was accepted to a number of grad schools, but none offered assistance, and I was not terribly interested in accruing massive amounts of debt for a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I decided not to walk through that door). But then, maybe I don’t meet The Future Wife. Maybe I don’t decide that I like writing a lot. Maybe I don’t learn to work with my hands when I’m in my 30s and have never worked with my hands before. Maybe I have a job where I’m working 60 hours a week and thus don’t learn to cook. Maybe I don’t read Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, Christopher Moore; maybe I don’t rediscover Shakespeare and Tennyson.
With better grades, maybe I’m just another person who saw college as “job training” and who demonstrated contempt and disinterest for anything I didn’t think I’d need to know about “in real life”. And anyway, it’s not like I was a crap student, either; I was in the top 15 in my graduating class in high school and graduated college cum laude. I just didn’t buy into enough of the BS to push harder, and I can’t say that I regret any of that.
Favorite Purchase Ever Made
Welllll…heck, I don’t know.
The laptop on which I’m writing this? It’s been two and a half years, and it’s still going strong. The first pair of overalls, which I bought the summer after high school? They’ve long-since gone to Goodwill. The first car I bought? I loved that car, until it threw a rod on the 90 right by the Big Blue Watertower. (That’s an actual Buffalo-Niagara landmark, believe it or not — the junction of I-90 and I-290, the major thruway into the northern suburbs, is the location for this enormous, bright blue water tower.) The Wife’s engagement ring? That’s gotta be right up there. Any of The Wife’s porcelain dolls? Hmmmm, that reminds me, I haven’t bought one of those for her in a very long time.
And I sure do love all of my books.
And my tools, although most of those were purchased with money provided by The Store.
And this blog, which I bought with time.
I’ve got a lot of stuff!
Where Your Family Is From
Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Oh, we need a more specific answer, I suppose. Here we go!
More specific than that? OK then….
Well, since I don’t know what specific streets my parents lived on as children, here’s the best I can do.
Yup, we come from Pittsburgh. The Steel City. Iron City. Boo-yeah!
Recent Picture of Yourself
Well, OK. Here are some goofy photos I took of myself during a writing session. This is what writing looks like. Kind of.
Here I’m trying to decide if a certain character should meet a spectacularly grisly demise in a skateboard accident, or become King of Westphalia:
Here I’m trying to decide which synonym for “exsanguinate” I want to use in a particular sentence:
Here I’ve just realized that my two main characters, who have been flirting with one another for several stories, are in fact brother and sister! Who knew!!!
Here I’m starting to question the wisdom of setting my tale of star-crossed lovers who must overcome the societal bonds of class to be with each other forever on a cruise ship that is doomed to sink on its maiden voyage.
And here I’ve finally seized upon Inspiration and am following her directions to the production of amazing prose:
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
Clearly, I need to start interviewing for a better muse. This one is basically an office temp with a bad attitude.
So there you have it: recent pictures of me! Hooray!
