The Four Seasons of Snow

I am sitting in my car in a plaza parking lot in Gladstone, MO. I’ve been here for three hours, and I have enough material to write a book. It seems that the human zoo has decided that it is “Entertain Fred” day. And it has indeed been good entertainment. Here is a store-by-store rundown.

Hobby Store – I’m not just hanging out in a parking lot in order to practice being a social deviant. I brought a young man in my neighborhood to a hobby store so that he can play Yu-Gi-Oh. That is his hobby, and he is very good at it. You most likely have no clue what Yu-Gi-Oh is, and if you do, you might have a dim view of it. Yu-Gi-Oh is a card game of a fictional land. There are literally thousands of different cards,(over 15,000 I believe) and players collect certain families (decks) of those cards and then duel each other. Here is a website that discusses the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu-Gi-Oh!_Trading_Card_Game . Every Saturday we go to hobby stores so that he can enter tournaments. While he plays the tournaments, I sit in my car and teach online. I teach four or five classes a year online. It helps me stay grounded with my profession, it represents a little extra money, and I just generally enjoy it. So with my computer, my wireless broadband card, and an extra battery, I can get most of my weekly work done. On this particular day, it is 72 degrees, a slight breeze, and the secadas are not as deafening as most days. So, it is a nice day to be outside in Kansas (actually, Missouri) Back to Store #1 – The Hobby Store -

When we started this hobby store visitation habit many months ago, this kid would get his hide tanned, as he just didn’t have the necessary cards to be competitive. But the entire way to the hobby store – 1 hour – and the entire way home – 1 hour –  this young man talks and talks and talks about the cards he needs and how he would structure them to be better in his duels. He is REALLY into this. Sometimes I have no idea what he is talking about. It is an entirely different language, but I try my best, and sometimes I tease him and sometimes I laugh, but most times I just shake my head up and down in an approving and seemingly understanding manner. But over the last six months, he has accumulated some good cards, and today he was 6-1. He didn’t make the finals, but he came really close. Here is an excerpt (with a little help from Wikipedia, see link above) of the language that I have to assimilate every Saturday.

“My Dark Synchro Monster isn’t quite strong enough. He is a monster that can be summoned by deducting the level of a Dark Tuner-type monster from a non-tuner monster. This has a negative level. But, my Accel Synchro Monster can be summoned using two Synchro Monsters, one of which is also a Tuner type, to perform a Synchro Summon. I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I think I might need the Blackwing Elphin contributor.”

How would you like to listen to that for four hours?  Some people associate these Magic card games as being devil worshipping. I had heard bad things about such games, like Magic, Dungeons and Dragons, etc. But I have to tell you, I’ve hung out in that hobby store many, many Saturday afternoons, and I have never seen any one of those kids summon the devil or cast spells on each other. I can’t understand a single word they are saying, but there are no gateways to Hell, at least that I can detect,  or anyone’s neck spinning around 360 degrees. In fact, these are smart, well-adjusted kids. They are really INTO their game, but no more than other kids who are really INTO soccer or trouble. These kids can do math in their heads way beyond what I can do, because they have to keep track of shifting point totals, and most of them do it exactly in that manner – in their heads. I am proud of and impressed with this young man whom I now spend a great percentage of my Saturday’s with. We have a plan to get him better cards that involves yard work and doing well in school, etc. And it is going just fine. So, as I sit in my car, there are 15 boys playing Yu-Gi-Oh in the hobby store. If someone accidently walked in that store and didn’t know what Yu-Gi-Oh was, they would flee screaming and thinking the Apocalypse was in full swing.

Slim-4-Life Store: This is particularly entertaining, and not because I’m making fun of overweight people. You know my current battle, which by the way, I’m down 17 pounds. So, in and out of the diet store they come. And most of them are quite typical… women perhaps 30 lbs overweight, men perhaps 50 lbs. They go in and stay for about 20 minutes, and then they come back out. I don’t know what happens in those twenty minutes. Perhaps it is a weekly weigh-in. Maybe there’s a Weight Priest in there, and Saturdays are Confession Day. Who knows. But whatever it is, it takes 20 minutes. On this day, for whatever reason, I’m particularly observant, or perhaps just bored with my teaching. And I notice, in particular, three different scenarios. First, up pulls a portly fellow on a Harley. He takes off his helmet, reaches into his saddle bag, and pulls out an Extra-Biggie McDonalds #3 Angus Mega-burger with fries and a Coke. He consumes them in about 2 minutes. He then crinkles up the bag, gets off the Harley, and heads into the store. Now, maybe it’s just me, but that seems counterproductive.  Maybe he was trying to gain MORE weight before he went in…..

Second, I see a very robust woman go into the store. Twenty minutes later, she emerges, and then she sits in her car, just across from mine, and pulls out – you guessed it – a Mega-Angus Massive-Carbalofat meal from McDonalds. There is a distinct pattern here that I am learning to spot through my own research and recent dieting experience.  The pattern involves huge quantities of calories, carbs, and saturated fats.   The carbs kill our body’s ability to handle sugar, and so we become obese and diabetic. And saturated fats plug our arteries. Both drain our energy so that we desire to exercise less, not more.  High calorie intake is fine if one has high calorie burning. And I am convinced that, despite the psychological assurance we get as children from Ronald McDonald, that McDonald’s and such restaurants are the fuel for our demise as a healthy society. They are not the cause, they are the fuel. The cause is our inability to abstain.

Finally, there is the skinny family. Dad, mom, and a teenage girl couldn’t weight 300 lbs in total. Why they are in that diet store completely eludes me. Twenty minutes, and here they come. If they lose any more weight, we’ll have to call the ambulance and take them TO McDonald’s.

Time to go summon my Dark Syncro Monster and  do some yard work.