For sale: baby shoes, never used.

I love doing weird little exercises to pass the time sometimes. I’ve been so busy over the past month (hence the sudden blog gap) that I haven’t had time for anything. But now I have plenty of time. I’m trying to keep my brain working because I’m one of the many people who lose half their brain cells over the summer if they don’t keep them stimulated, and since college summers are almost five months long, I’d be completely screwed if I didn’t do this. So, after reading this amazing blog here, I learned all about blackout writing. It’s kind of like madlibs, I guess. Briefly, for those that don’t know, it’s taking a black pen/pencil/marker to a newspaper or magazine (anything with text that you’re prepared to ruin) and blacking out everything except certain words. The exercise is finding a story in the words you leave unmarked. This is my first attempt.

Childhood nostalgia

This was one of the easy levels in Rat Poker.

I love everything that takes you straight back to childhood. No matter how bad your memory is of certain things, one great film, book, game, picture or even smell just takes you straight back to a time when such a thing was so new. I had one of those days where I’m staring to look for things that will give me those feelings. In my house, we have this really old monster of a PC, a Windows 98. It sits dormant in my brother’s old room and it has the most amazing games on it that remind me of when I was young enough for that to be the ‘latest model’. They were Microsoft “Play the Puzzle” Collection and as far as I know, they came with the computer. A collection of about ten games that were infuriatingly addictive – so simple and yet deceptively difficult. Rat Poker was probably my favourite. Simply line the rats up in a certain colour pattern and send them on their way, but if it got to full, you’d here that dreadful alarm that sounds like a wooden spoon banging on a pot.