smokerblog

A New Backyard Underhand Tossing Game

Everyone is familiar with horseshoes and bocce. There was also the backyard health-hazard of the 80's known as Jarts. But this past weekend I had the opportunity, not once, but twice, to play a new underhand-tossing-things-in-the-backyard-type game called Ladder Golf.

That, at least, is the version of the game as patented by Ladder Golf LLC. There is also a version being sold under the name of BoloToss, or, if you are the do-it-yourself type, you can easily create your own home-made version of the game.

This is what my buddy Mike did, and I can report that the game is great fun. Concentration and consistency are key, and the twirling golf ball "bolos" impart just a hint of danger vital to any backyard tossing game (although not nearly as extreme as the craziness of Jarts).

Most importantly, however, you can throw the bolo with one hand, while holding a beer in the other.

One Woman's Many Coiffures

I should make a similar hairstyle retrospective for Kari. Mine would be pretty boring except for the 80's mullet.

(via hillary)

One Man's Coiffure

There's this guy I've seen every night on my way home from work^* for the past week or two. He's always either wandering about in his yard, standing on the sidewalk watching traffic, or tending to the few hostas and lilies that surround his home. His well-tanned features seem to be those of a well-preserved 70-yr-old or a prematurely aging 50-yr-old, I can't tell.

He's somewhat short and squat in the way that some people might describe as having come from sturdy, European peasant stock, which he does seem to have a Italian or Greek or, what, a Gascon air about him or something. Plus, he seems to share the immigrant's habit of always wearing wool or polyester trousers with a tight-fitting polo shirt or, when the weather is particularly hot, just his v-neck t-shirt, as if jeans or shorts would kill him.

But the feature that stands out, heck, from a first-impression standpoint it practically defines him: his hair. And it's not really the hair itself, which is always formed into a perfect helmet of a pompadour. It's the color of his hair.

It's black.

As in, really black. Blacker than black. Jet. Coal. Pitch. These modifiers barely scratch the surface of the blackness that exists in this man's hair. There is no shimmer, no sheen, no highlights or lowlights, only no lights. Light just falls into this hair and does not escape. I'm even questioning at this point whether this guy is coloring his hair. I doubt that science has progressed to a point where we can produce a color (or rather, the total and utter absence of color) like this in the lab. A black this black can only exist as some sort of freak of nature.

Not that I think this guy is a freak or anything. It's just his hair.

Out of the INS

Our adoption application has been approved by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which basically means that Ben is now allowed to come into this country. Now our application is being "exemplified," which is just a fancy legal term for having a bunch of stamps and seals of authentication put on it. After that, the application goes to China so that they can tell us that we are allowed to travel there and take Ben back home with us.

In a typical adoption, the Chinese government would also at that time begin searching through their lists of available children in some arcane process whereby they would match us up with a suitable infant. Purportedly, one of the criteria is physical appearance, kind of mind-boggling to me, but who am I to question a process that seems to result in so many happy families?

We skipped that step, though, so hopefully (we hope, we hope!) that the approval process goes just a little bit quicker.