Hitting the links

The Boy becomes obsessed with random things from time to time. First it was presidents, then maps, then Super Monkey Ball, then Paper Mario, then crossword puzzles, then Zelda. Now he’s set his sights firmly on golf.

I don’t know why golf has caught his fancy. I don’t play golf. We don’t live next to a golf course or anything. He liked playing Wii golf a couple of weeks ago, but he didn’t become obsessed with it until the middle of last week. I guess sometimes it just takes a while for the gears to click into place in that little one-track mind of his.

For the past week or so, he’s spent every waking moment after coming home from school finding and playing free online golf games. I didn’t realize there were so many golf games online, but The Boy has located and played just about every one in existence. And he’s made me play most of them as well.

Fortunately, his obsession has not extended to watching golf on television. That’s good for me, because watching golf on television is quite possibly the most boring thing a human can do. I’d rather watch paint dry. Or clean my driveway with a toothbrush. Anything but watching golf on the tube.

After watching him waste all day Saturday clicking his way around virtual greens, The Wife and I figured it would probably be good to tear him away from the computer screen, so I agreed to take him to the local miniature golf place on Sunday for a round of actual three-dimensional golf. We didn’t even pretend that any other activity or enticement would get him to leave his online golf-a-thon.

He was pretty excited about the outing and made sure that I didn’t get lost in the parking lot once we arrived. I didn’t realize that our local mini golf place was one of those glow-in-the-dark establishments, so staring at my shoes became even more exciting than usual. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a plywood recreation of the Old West covered in nauseating neon hues.

The Boy did a pretty good job with his putter but still came in at 20 over par. I did slightly better and finished at three over, but when we reviewed the scorecard, The Boy decided that he was the winner. That’s the joy of being a father.

After conquering eighteen holes of the psychedelic Old West, we hit the air hockey table and the skee ball lanes before returning back home. And within an hour, The Boy was back in front of the monitor playing more online golf games. I think we may need to stage some sort of intervention.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

What the hell?
From the back of our mini golf scorecard: a new way to spell miniature.
Random quote from The Boy: “My brain doesn’t think at all. It just wants to hurt my toes.”
I got to spend nearly all of today at home with The Girl. She gave me just enough time to get to work and check my e-mail before she puked all over the place and I had to go pick her up. She seems to be doing fine now, although she was very sleepy all day long.
The Girl has discovered the fun of playing with refrigerator magnets.
The Girl thinks she can play Mario Tennis better than The Wife can.
We have a large number of freaky geckos that live in our backyard and occasionally make it inside. I managed to rescue one from the clutches of The Cat (who’s really a very poor excuse for a hunter), but not before it had lost its tail.