Saturday 

30 December 2017

— just a dusting of snow

Good Morning All,

Thanks to those of you who wished me God Bedring (Danish for Good bettering). I’m happy to say that although I’m yet getting serious attacks of the shivers, I got in a good night of unscampering sleep and—best of all—got off this morning a couple of self-respecting farts without alimentary incident. (My guess is that you, too, know that feeling, not so much T.S. Eliot’s line about daring to eat a peach, but to judge your liquidity level and take a chance on … well, you get the idea.)

Yesterday evening, Holly baked potatoes to go with falafels and bernaise sauce with tomatoes and thousand island dressing on the side. For me, it was more than usually delicious since I’d eaten exactly nothing since the previous day’s breakfast.

After that, we played Candyland (see the snaps below), which we had last played in May of 1986, a mere thirty-one years ago. We … what’s that you say? Do we still have the game? Even after our move last January?

Well, of course, we still have the game! It lives in the wooden toy box in the far corner of the dining room.

It’s for children ages 4 to 8, but back in the ‘80s the kids let me play with them if I could behave myself and not scatter the pieces when I lost.

Basically, the object of the game is to proceed along a path to be the first to get to King Kandy’s palace. One does so by drawing cards with colored squares on them. If you draw a green card, for example, you advance to the next green square on the path. If you draw a card with two green squares, you move up two green squares.

At the beginning of the game, if you first card is orange, you get to take the Rainbow Trail shortcut. (See pic.)

But there are also picture cards, for example, the snow flake card you can see in Holly’s snap. That allows you to jump all the way forward to having completed three-fourths of the path. (Or if you are nearly to the end, you must go back some.) The Candy Cane card will get you halfway. A sugar plum will knock you back nearly to the beginning.

I hope you can see that this educational game is fairly representative of reality as we know it. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. There is no strategy that works. You can be sailing along without a care in the world, way ahead of those slow coaches behind you, and then draw the dreaded sugar plum, and you are back in the mire again.

It also teaches children the value of hope. Hope that you'll get the snow flake. Or—and in some ways better—hope that one of your opponents will get the sugar plum. One of the best parts of the game is being able to say with a long face, “Oh, Johs, what a pity! You were only two moves away, and you had to get the peanut brittle.” (We did not say this to Holly, by the way, as she was only six.)

The other snap shows one of the many scores we kept on the inside cover of the box. I’m not sure exactly how to read those numbers, but it would seem that Holly scored 33 points during a match conducted on 11 January 1985. 

We played three games last night. Holly won the first. Johs won the second. I got a little sour and was tempted to flip the board up into the air, but they suggested one more game, and I must say I won it quite handily.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly Candyland shots: