We rented a car on Friday and went to an indoor amusement center called The Funplex in East Something-or-Other, NJ, about an hour away. It had mini-rides, arcade games, go-karts, foam ball shooting, and most important, MagiQuest (cue chorus of angels).
We stayed overnight at a hotel in nearby Something-or-Other...Parsippany? Whippany? Colonoscopy? I don't know; do real people actually live in these places or do they only exist for the 24 hours we are there, like Fantasy Island?
Jen even got 2 hours at Target while the boys and I swam at the hotel pool.
At $120 for Funplex admission for 4, and $100 for the hotel room via Priceline, it was less than half the cost of an overnight trip to Great Wolf Lodge, which I still love and miss but whose $500-a-night cost we simply can't justify in 2009.
Story of a teenager whose sole obsession in life is to meet The Archies in person. Dreams are shattered when he comes to realize that they are a fictional band.
I took a training course at work on managing people. I learned that when you have negative feedback to give an employee, you should not "sandwich" it between positive feedback--as in, "Your presentation went well, but you shouldn't have set the conference room on fire, but most people were only slightly injured, so it turned out okay."
The employee will only hear the positive.
This is apparently called a "But Sandwich," which the instructor illustrated on a flip chart. It looked like a hamburger. The buns had "+" signs, and the beef had a "-" sign.
I liked the concept so much that after the class I asked the instructor if I could keep the sheet of paper.
I took it home and gave it to Samuel and Ethan. They also liked the concept of But Sandwiches.
Tonight as the boys and I were attempting to take photos of Kahlua appearing to smoke a cigarette, we discovered that dogs are physically incapable of taking individual bites of a french fry. They think that if they don't eat the whole thing in one bite, that you won't give them a second bite.
This was based on a sample of only one dog, but we repeated the experiment with multiple french fries, and each time we got the same result.
The findings were eerily consistent with the time at the park when we tried to feed her one bite of a hot dog. She got the hot dog and wouldn't let it go until she had the whole thing in her mouth.
