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Here are some more mini-reviews of books, thanks to summer vacation. I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Having read a couple of Terry Pratchett stories before this, I figured I should start with the first Discworld book before getting into any more Discworld stories.

I did enjoy the writing – puns and clever phrases abound. But this is not a book for the middle-grade fiction demographic, as there are some parts of the story that are more adult in nature. Do with that what you will.

Next up: The Boy Who Knew Everything by Victoria Forester

This is the second book in The Girl Who Could Fly series. And it was written knowing there would be a third book to round out the trilogy, so do not plan on reading this book as a standalone book. If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one.

Next up: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

I read the book first in case we ended up going to see the movie. We have not seen the movie. By some accounts the movie is better, because it cuts some of the rough parts out of the book. Rough as in content that young children should not be exposed to, not as in poorly written. The book was a fairly quick read, not heavy, and varying chapter lengths helped move it along.

It was one of those stories where you knew what was going to happen, but you still wanted to read to find out how.

Next up: Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

I was not looking for this book. I went to another library because they had a particular book on their shelves and it was quicker to make a trip there than put a hold on it and wait for the inter-library loan system to process it, and this library had a section of Newbery Award winners that caught my eye so I started perusing the titles.

I didn’t want a hefty tome, and this one was not. And it sounded vaguely familiar, so I checked it out. I found out later it was a Jim Carrey movie, and maybe that’s why it sounded familiar.

I’m used to middle-grade fiction, and this was probably two steps below that on the reading level scale. I don’t know what the reading level scale is, but if it’s two steps down from middle grade then it is two steps up from “See Spot Run”.

I have no plans to watch the movie to see what they did with it. But I can see why they cast Jim Carrey as the lead.

Last up: The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern William Goldman

In keeping with the theme of books and movies, I decided after all the years to finally read The Princess Bride, as it was a book first and movie later.

The only problem with this one, regarding the book/movie duality, is that the guy who wrote the book was also a screenwriter, so the book and movie are basically the same. Including even the side narration between a grandfather and grandson.

The book was fine to read, but when I was done all that happened was that I can now say I read the book. There was no greater sense of accomplishment. There were a few things in the book that were interesting, such as getting the story of Inigo’s father, and also the story of Inigo’s romance.

But in general, the end feeling was that of “never meet your heroes”.

That’s it for this review. More book reviews coming up later this year.

On a recent trip to the UP here in Michigan, we stopped by Whitefish Point. Whitefish Point itself is rather secluded, but it has enough to see that it is a popular place. We toured the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum (which includes the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald) and an old lighthouse. And then we wandered to the beach, which is mostly sand but has a lot of small rocks too.

The most interesting part about this beach is the line of black sand near the shoreline.

The thing you need to know about Whitefish Point is that it is part of the “graveyard of the Great Lakes” in that it is one of the more treacherous areas and has a large number of shipwrecks. It also happens that many of the shipwrecks are freighters, carrying a variety of things but a common load was iron ore.

Knowing that sand in Michigan isn’t naturally black, and knowing that iron ore is, I told my son (because he was the only one with a magnet) to drag his magnet along the black sand and see what happens.

Sure enough, the black sand stuck to his magnet. Notably, the Edmund Fitzgerald was carrying iron ore on her last voyage, so some of what’s on that beach could be from that cargo.

This is a guide for how to play the game Trumpet. It is out of print and no longer available from most places, so there’s no good link to give you. But if you do see the board game Trumpet at a thrift store or garage sale, now you’ll know what you’re getting.

1. How do I win?
By being the first token around the board to the finish line.

2. How do I move my token?
You get to move forward one square for each trick that you win.

3. How do I win a trick?
The standard way, by playing the highest-ranking card of the suit that was lead, or by playing a card of the trump suit if you can’t follow suit.

4. How do you know what suit is trump?
That’s a big part of playing this game, you can change the trump suit. The game starts with no suit as trump. If when you move your piece it lands on a trump square then you get to pick the trump suit, and it stays that way until someone else lands on a trump square (or you make it to the next trump square). But it is not just one trump suit – there are 6 suits and when you choose the new trump you add the suit marker to the list. The list ends up with all 6 suits, so there is not just one trump suit but rather a trump order, so that all the suits have a ranking, and the game ends up being more about which suits you have than the rank of the cards.

5. How does it work when the suit list is full and you land on a trump square?
In that case, you get to swap two suits, so the suit order never stays the same throughout the game, and even changes during a hand.

It is a fun game and it moves quickly. It might favor luck a little more than other trick-taking games, but not to an annoying degree.

There, now go play Trumpet.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Kermit the Frog asked “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?” but that is a bad question because there aren’t so many songs about rainbows. Let me ask you, other than “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, what are some songs about rainbows? It is a very short list.
• Some people try to conclude a argument with “Let’s agree to disagree.” But if the other party doesn’t agree, does that nullify the statement? Sometimes I will disagree to disagree, and then the other person doesn’t have a choice.
• I discovered one of the signs your child is getting older is when they start declining the offer to ride in the wheelbarrow. If I was doing yardwork, the kids would always like a ride in the wheelbarrow. Somewhere in the middle school years they don’t take me up on the offer any more.
• Can things be a cold mess? The way I have seen phrases tossed about, the progression goes from “It’s a mess” to “It’s a hot mess”. Where does a cold mess fit in that scale? I’m thinking it means things are less of a mess than how they started. I.e. hot mess = worse mess and cold mess = lesser mess.
• Dear companies trying to be friendly: if your birthday wish to a customer includes the words “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” then I think it is neither heartfelt nor meaningful to the person.

Squirrels cause a variety of problems, some worse than others. The following is not one of the worse ones; in fact it was rather amusing. And not just amusing once things had settled, but it was amusing while it was happening.

We have a shed in our yard where we store things like the wheelbarrow and snow shovels and garden hoses (in the offseason). One of the things stored in the shed is stuff for grilling – charcoal and lighter fluid.

Last fall, when I was putting the stuff away, I must not have rolled the bag of charcoal up. Or maybe it unrolled itself during the winter. Either way, when I went to get the charcoal for the first grilling of the season, the bag was open.

Another thing to note is that the squirrels like our shed. It’s a nice sheltered place.

Anyway, I took the bag over to the grill and dumped some charcoal into the grill, and I saw this:

The squirrels had decided that the bag was a good spot to store walnuts. I picked the walnuts out of the grill, tossed them off to the side of the lawn, lit the grill, and went on.

While we were waiting for the coals to settle down, we noticed a squirrel going to the bag of charcoal. Over the next several minutes, he went to the bag, grabbed a walnut out of it, took it somewhere, and repeated until the bag had no more walnuts. Saved me some work later. But I suppose he caused me some work earlier, so squirrels are still overall a nuisance.

Do you remember those kids’ activity or puzzle books, with word searches and logic puzzles and spot-the-differences and find-the-hidden-objects and such? One of the staple items in that type of book is the trace-the-line puzzle. Usually it would be of a matching sort of thing (help the animal follow its rope to its favorite food) or of a avoid-the-dead-ends sort (which rope will let the explorer pull himself out of the pit?).

Little did I know back then that those puzzles were training kids for adulthood. The books tried to make it fun. If they wanted to make it more real and less fun, it would be something along the lines of “which extension cord should you unplug so you can move the fan to another room? If you choose the wrong one, you have to reset the clocks on two devices.”

The other thing the books don’t train you for is that you can’t just follow the rope/cord/line back to its source and then you’re done. You have to physically move the various cords to extract the one you need, and the other two cords do not easily let go of the one you want.

I propose the kids activity books should include a life lesson on the rope-tangle page, something like “Remember, if the explorer had used a rope organizer, he would not have the problem of needing to untangle them.”

This is the third of a three-part series. You can also read about the first part of our trip to Florida here.

Day 7:
This day was Universal Studios Epic Universe (USEU) day. We had been seeing ads for it, and it looked fun. And we had some friends who went, and they liked it. And we don’t take our kids to theme parks (unless you count one trip to Cedar Point), so at least they can have had the experience.

We took the shuttle from the hotel to the park, and had no problems with that. The park was crowded, but the line to get in moved along well enough.

Thanks to the Universal Studios app, we could see the wait times for all the rides on our phone, so we headed first to the one that looked decent enough to ride and had a short-ish wait time. It was in the Isle of Berk.

Most of my experience with amusement parks has been Cedar Point. I like Cedar Point, but one thing that USEU did better than Cedar Point is that they have a lot of shade for people waiting in line and they also have drinking fountains along the way. Maybe in the Florida heat that’s more of a necessity than Ohio.

The different worlds were well done, with the right props and settings, people who stayed in character as they were walking off their post back to the break room, and different music in each area that set the mood. The music really was a nice touch, it was always there, not blaring, and even if you weren’t paying attention to it, it sub-consciously had an effect.

And there were plenty of props – some animate, some inanimate – to keep your attention, like this sheep in the Isle of Berk.

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