Ride the Train
I’m back from over a week with no square dancing and no calling; I think that’s a record for me since I started dancing back in 1990. Instead, I spent the week playing a lot of games of a domino variation called Mexican Train. A quick perusal of the web indicates that this is a fairly fluid game with many different versions:
Our family has its own idiosyncratic version, which seems to change every time I go home (and sometimes even changes during the course of a single visit). An interesting thing about searching for Mexican Train on the web was that I ran across some diary pages…the kinds of things that people are probably putting up for friends and family and don’t really expect other people to look at…but then someone searches on terms that happen to occur on the page and there they are: looking at someone’s life. Quite a few people mention playing Mexican Train at some point. My going-on-100-year-old grandmother enjoys it, as did a Japanese exchange student who spoke very little English.
I also spent time trying to teach my mom how to use her new iMac. It’s interesting to see how much I take for granted in computer use and how hard it really is. For example, she might be typing in a form and accidentally hit some key that totally changes the context she’s in…and she didn’t even know she made a mistake. All of a sudden, everything has changed, but it seemed to change “magically” rather than through some action on her part. Compounding the problem is her crumby internet connection, which I think is mostly caused by bad phone lines, but seems to be compounded by some flakey modems at her ISP. So, although I set it all up, she can’t just click the “Send and Receive” button to automatically dial in, get her email, and disconnect…over half the time, the modem doesn’t connect on the first or even second attempt.
Counting down…only three more days until I get a DSL connection. In the meantime, my regular phone line is down for no reason that I can tell. Oh well…repairs will supposedly happen tomorrow.