Potato Heaven

Since this blog has the word potatoes in the title, it's appropriate to report on my recent experience with nearly potato heaven.

We took our youngest son Jon to a casino for his recent birthday, a casino my wife and I had only been to three times before in the previous year, but one Jon had not yet experienced. Taking a break from our non-productive (and low-expenditure) gambling, we decided to have lunch in the buffet; after all, my wife had a free buffet, and we had discounts for the other two meals, so the cost was not bad.

But the food was even better. While the giant meatball I had was a bit dry, the almond chicken was great, as was most of the other food. And, for me, most of the other food consisted of potatoes.

Mashed potatoes. Twice-baked potatoes. Au-gratin potatoes. Red-skin potatoes. Hash browns. Mind you, most of my portions were sampler size, although I did go back for more mashed potatoes, and joked with my wife about covering them from the chocolate fountain at the dessert table. (For the record, I DIDN'T do that.....I'm not THAT weird.) I also passed on the mashed sweet potatoes, mainly because I don't like sweet potatoes and I'm not sure if mashed sweet potatoes officially counts as potatoes. (Like I said, I'm not THAT weird.)

After gambling later in the day, we stopped for a burger, and I forced myself to have a few french fries, now striving for my personal best potato day. Before the day was up I forced myself to have about three potato chips, just to up the ante.

The day could have been a little better had I had a better video poker experience as I had during my first two visits to this particular casino (first time I drew four deuces, and the second time I drew a non-wild card Royal Flush....neither making me rich, since I usually only play nickle video poker). But, hey, simple pleasures are the best, and what is a simpler, better pleasure than mashed potatoes....or seven kinds of potatoes in one day?!!?!?

We all shoot, we all score

I'm not a huge video game person. Oh, I certainly like my video poker, as well as Reversi and Tetris, but I'm not into Halo and violent games, and I've only played on a Wi a couple of times.

But here's some more about Tetris. I've played it off and on for a number of years, and now I play an online version a couple times a week. I've tried different levels, and never quite get too far, usually only about 10,000 points or so. I've nudged up to 17,000 or 18,000 a few times, but could not get past 20,000.

Until a couple weeks ago. I find it best to not look at my score as I play, as it just depresses me and takes my attention away from those rapidly falling myriad shapes. So when that game finally ended and I saw that I was about 23,000 points, I was very surprised, as I never thought I would get there.

Aren't we all like that? Assuming we will never get somewhere, so what's the point of trying? It's like making new year's resolutions. We expect to eventually fail, to not keep up on our exercise programs, or we fall short of being able to document our well-intentioned efforts to be a better person, or to pray more, so we don't even try. What's better than a built-in excuse to anticipate and justify our future failure?

I remember Anthony Robbins commenting how people overestimate what they can get done in a short period of time, but underestimate what they can accoplish over a longer period of time.

Just like me and Tetris.

And maybe just like you and ???