Welfareloser's Blog

one of the fun parts of playing munchkin is that it has tons of expansion packs. you can get as streamlined or as silly as you want, by adding or removing the portals to different dungeons, the ability to ride steeds, the new races like orcs and gnomes, the new classes like bards and rangers.

obviously, around here, the sillier, the better. we use all of the expansions at the same time: the pink and glittery fairy dust cards! the munchkinomicon cards! the “mighty mask of the munchkin!“

so in a recent game, Spazmonkey wound up being an orc bard.

SM: wait, what’s a bard do?
me: travelling storytellers. they sing. and tell people the news.
SM: can orcs sing?
me: they probably sound pretty terrible.
PRM: they probably sound like willie nelson.

it changes every few weeks. this what it currently looks like – at least, when drenched in sweat after a long night of extremely athletic fencing with PulledAPeter, who got a pimpy new SLR camera before heading to college in Manhattan in a few weeks.

EvilGremlin: 6th grade. still playing the bass. continuing in the twice-a-week gifted program, plus getting bussed to 8th grade pre-algebra an hour early every day.
DramaQueen: 3rd grade. new braces. starting in the gifted program. still can’t find his ass with both hands.
SpazMonkey: 3rd grade – different classroom than his twin for the first time. writes books and snickers mercilessly while his brothers do their extra homework.
MonkeyBeef: one last year of preschool. he did it all for the booty.

a few random pictures of things we did during our last month of non-traveling summer vacation…

we finally went to the iowa city children’s museum. i haven’t ever taken the kids there, i think mostly because i’m so goddamned offended that it’s at the mall. yeah, because i want to drag my kid past the build-a-bear workshop and the popcorn factory to drop $7 per head on a shitty little pseudo-educational experience. as i expected, it was pretty rinky-dink, and geared mostly toward kids 6 and under. but it was worth one visit, entirely because of the aerodynamics room – the twits spent the entire visit designing ever-more-elaborate paper airplanes and stomp-rockets, and helping littler kids with their designs and construction. MonkeyBeef stomped a few rockets, and then came up with increasingly unsafe ways to go down the three-story slide.

there were a couple of trips to chuck e cheese, of course, where, in spite of the fact that the twits spent 2 hours and 90% of their tokens on a shoot-the-aliens video game that gave no tickets, we STILL managed a massive haul of prize loot with thousands of tickets, because they discovered how to beat one of the new games. this time, it was a massive version of the “operation” board game, where you use a joystick to line up a crane, then hit a button to drop it, and hopefully pick up the body part you were aiming for without hitting the sides of the hole it was in. they played it a couple of times, and then said, “hey… there are two axes of movement you can control here, neither of which you can see well from the joystick. but if you happen to have two brothers who can each line up their respective lines of sight with each of of the axes, and give you a thumbs up on when to hit the button… we’ll make millions!” the technician had to refill the ticket dispenser in the game. twice. so, i’m sure that game, like all the other games they have figured out how to rape for thousands of tickets at a time, will mysteriously disappear before our next visit! either that, or they’ll get red-flagged like card-counters at a casino, and escorted out by security.

then there was the undergraduate research fair, where polished poster presentations of truly impressive scientific and medical research from every department were presented. also, free cookies. the older boys got to go pepper some other poor bastards with science questions for a few hours… and MonkeyBeef enjoyed the “cookie party.” so much so that, every time we drive past the student union now, he asks if he can go back to the cookie party.

and finally, as PRM begins his final year of post-post-post-graduate training, it’s job interview time. so the kids got to experience the wonders of “some other motherfucker is paying for this” travel, complete with presidential suites at hotels with river views and gourmet room service.

this one is from sioux city, which is the current frontrunner due to excellent schools and an excellent fencing club in town (compare PRM’s other interview this month, the marshfield clinic site in wisconsin which offers me the almost-dealbreaking choices of a 90 minute drive to the Minnesota Sword Club, or the cringe-worthy amateur fencing scene at the University of Wisconsin campus in town.)

the kids made me shit. the three older kids made me potholders (MonkeyBeef got as far as picking up one of the cloth loops, putting it on the loom, and then demanding angry birds to shoot with his improvised slingshot.) and the three younger boys made me strawberry-scented soaps shaped like cupcakes (EvilGremlin got as far as the same room as the soap-making and threatened to barf from the smell.)

awwwwwww. i’m feeling the love. and smelling it!

i had a hammock. it was kinda shitty, and definitely not UV-resistant. it died. i was sad. i got a new hammock. i was happy. for about 5 minutes. then MonkeyBeef kicked me out and invited his brothers in. turns out, it’s not my fucking hammock.

which is okay. because it doesn’t look that comfortable.