Tag: activities

LGBTQ+ Club Scavenger Hunt

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

So my club of weird, wonderful little queer kids decided they wanted to do a scavenger hunt. We put the list of items together today. They have a week:

  1. A pop-it
  2. Any object with a rainbow theme
  3. A piece of handmade jewelry
  4. An actual real world paper map not printed by a printer
  5. A map of a fantasy world
  6. Something with fire (nothing illegal please)
  7. An unbroken egg
  8. One Croc
  9. One chancla (bonus points if it’s the same color as the Croc)
  10. A hat with a bird on it
  11. An action figure
  12. A unicorn (three-dimensional, not a picture)
  13. A school hallway pass, signed by a teacher, with “APPLESAUCE” written as the student’s name.  I must be able to read the teacher’s name and you can not explain why you need this.
  14. A [name of our school] article of clothing.  Your ID does not count.
  15. The wrapper for a Jolly Rancher
  16. An unsharpened pencil of at least two colors.
  17. A receipt from CVS, Walgreen’s or 7-11.
  18. A recipe for baklava.
  19. A toilet paper tube.  No toilet paper may be attached.
  20. An unused but unwrapped Band-Aid.
  21. A button with two holes in it.
  22. A bobby pin
  23. A safety pin
  24. A clothespin
  25. A piece of paper with a clear fingerprint on it.
  26. A Nevada quarter
  27. A piece of paper foreign currency
  28. The name of one of Mr. Siler’s favorite books.  This will be ten books and to keep things fair Mr. Siler will share a list of the books with another teacher.
  29. A phone video of you dancing and singing the alphabet.
  30. A milk sticker.  The milk does not have to be dairy based.
  31. A paper wall calendar from 2023.
  32. A container for a large fries from McDonald’s.  
  33. A piece of turquoise.
  34. A pink Lego.  You may not steal Mr. Siler’s Legos.
  35. A yellow Zip Tie.
  36. A tie clip.
  37. A cassette tape.
  38. A DVD.
  39. A piece of hair from a teacher.  The hair must be in an envelope and the teacher must sign it.  You cannot explain why you need the hair.  You may lie.
  40. A piece of soap in any color other than white.
  41. A picture of two stuffed animals in a place stuffed animals are typically not found.  They must look like they are upset with each other.
  42. A Halloween wig.  It cannot be a wig a normal person would wear on a normal day.
  43. A picture of your parents/guardians/responsible adults when they were young.
  44. A positive affirmation from [either of the social workers].  This can be written on paper or emailed.
  45. A toy car.  
  46. A picture of yourself in preschool (3-5 years old)
  47. A horoscope clipped from a newspaper or printed from the internet
  48. A Marvel comic book.
  49. The Secret Item from [the principal].  I have not decided what this is yet so give me some time.
  50. A video of any teacher rapping.  You cannot tell them why you need the video.
  51. BONUS: Any item so strange that no one else recognizes it.

I will report back on how this goes. They were super excited about putting the list together; we’ll see how many of them actually bring a bagful of stuff next week.

On the Michigan Renaissance Festival

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

… okay, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with the Ren Faire, but … holy cow, y’all, Duolingo gets me all the sudden. I really want to use this as a cover pic somewhere, but it’s completely the wrong aspect ratio for everything and that’s very disappointing.

So the Ren Faire (Ren, autocorrect, you bastard, not red! Ren!!!) was an absolute blast even though I almost died, and the only question is whether we’re going to make this an annual event or something we do every couple of years. We are definitely going to pick a weekend where the weather is better, and if I had any influence over the organizers I would be screaming at them that they need to make this a September-October event and not an August-September event.

After making a huge deal about my outfit here and elsewhere for several days, I ended up going with the kilt, hose, sporran, and … that’s it. Why? I spent four seconds outside in that shirt and discovered that it didn’t breathe at all and if I wore it I was going to die. I ended up just throwing on a regular cotton t-shirt, and … it was fine. One way Ren Faires are different from cons is that nobody’s really making a big deal about taking pictures of each other, or at least they aren’t at this one, possibly because there were thirty thousand fucking people there. I posted this picture already, but look at all the nerds:

Everyone in this picture looks comfortably dressed and there are only a couple of people right up near the camera who are clearly in garb (and I’m not sure the woman in the grey dress, dead center, counts) but there were people walking around this thing in full suits of metal armor. People dressed like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, wearing armor and fur clothing designed for winter. Ren Faire people are a different fucking breed, y’all. These motherfuckers are warriors. They are also crazy, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see a single person passed out from heat exhaustion all day. I couldn’t handle a shirt and there were people walking around in plate armor.

The Michigan festival is particularly cool because it is a permanent installment. I’m not sure how many of these things are fly-by-night operations and how many have permanent buildings like this, but we were there for about five hours and I’m certain we didn’t see everything. There was a mermaid apparently? No idea where she was. We watched a magician and a few jugglers and I kinda wanted the boy to try his hand at throwing spears at things but he declined, and the horses for the joust were probably the largest I’ve ever seen (did we watch the joust? We did not. Too many damn people too close together and no shade.) and the shops were amazing if perhaps crazily overpriced in certain ways and other than the nearly dying and the half-mile walk on a mud path through overgrown foliage from the parking lot, we all had a hell of a lot of fun.

And, oh, Christ, did I spend a lot of money, to the point where I’m not even going to tell you what this fuckawesome quarterstaff and this fuckamazing war hammer cost:

Let me put it this way: I first had my eye on something they were calling a Dwarven Axe, until I discovered they wanted two thousand five hundred dollars for it.

I did not spend two thousand five hundred dollars. I spent a larger fraction of that than I probably should have, though.

The staff is 6′ tall and the war hammer is 36″ or so and … I dunno, maybe twelve-fifteen pounds? Which is a lot more than it might sound, especially if, when you buy it, they wrap it up in cardboard and bubble wrap, making it hard to carry, and you are a mile from your car, and you don’t know that you’re going to buy a quarterstaff at a different booth in a few minutes. That fucking thing will cave in skulls. It’s a murder weapon. It’s functional art! And I had to carry both of them back to the car in million-degree heat and the next time I go back I’m buying daggers!

(I have my next several weapon purchases planned out.)

Go ahead, ask me what I’m gonna do with those. No fucking idea. But I’m really hoping someone breaks into my house soon.

So yeah. We had a great time, I nearly died, and I don’t know that I’m going to make a big deal about dressing up for the next one, or at least not dressing up for this one again, just because I didn’t feel like it made a difference in the way, say, a carefully-constructed cosplay might. If you show up at C2E2 in a full suit of armor people are going to be asking you for pictures all day. I saw some amazing costumes, easily the equal of anything I’ve seen at a con (or close, at least) and … they were just kinda being ignored by everyone. Like, I wasn’t expecting my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination to attract that kind of attention, but I also wasn’t expecting the best costumes to be attracting the same amount of attention as my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination, either. If I do dress up for another Ren Faire, it’s going to be something more … wizardy, I think. Although I do need to find an excuse to wear the kilt somewhere else. I have been resisting being a Kilt Guy for a while now, and I gotta admit, the things are damn comfortable. I’m thinking of showing up in mine for Picture Day this year just to see what happens.

Any other Midwesterners want to recommend any other nearby festivals?

BLOGGING!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting3 Comments

3-in-1-Bounce-House-Bounce-House-with-Slide-and-Obstacles.jpgToday was– this is kind of hard to believe, but it’s true– one of my first moments where one of my friends was in town and we had to come up with activities to Entertain our Kids while they were here, because we’re all adults with kids now.  She has a six-year-old who I haven’t seen in forever and a three-year-old who I met for the first time today, and luckily the three of them appear to have gelled together perfectly well.

An excellent suggestion for this sort of scenario: take the kids to the local House of Bounce, especially since it’s Friday afternoon and we are going to be the only ones there.  Having a big room with four giant inflatables in it is really awesome; the kids can run about to their hearts’ content and exhaust themselves, which means that we get to spend the rest of the afternoon… uh, staring into devices and such.  Like grown-ups.

For those of you who have read my books:  who the hell knows when the next Benevolence Archives book is going to get done.  It’s been languishing for, literally, months.  I know what else I have to write, I just haven’t done it, because <insert excuse here.>

But the cover is done.  It’s been done for a while.

Anybody wanna see it?

In which I go outdoors on purpose

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

The Internet was down, meaning there was no TV either (we get everything through Hulu or Netflix), so we decided to go outside and somehow ended up at the 4-H fair.  A few random observations that really ought to have pictures with them but somehow don’t:

  • There was a giraffe.  At the petting zoo.  There should always always always be giraffes. Everywhere.  Especially at petting zoos.
  • After a while, though, watching the giraffe became less fun than watching the people walking by who were consistently surprised by the giraffe.  I heard “Is that a giraffe?” probably ten times from people who knew damn well what a giraffe looks like but couldn’t process the fact that there was one right the hell in front of them.
  • There were tigers doing tricks, but they were really not in the mood for them and so it was kind of sad and slightly embarrassing.  As far as I know, no one was eaten, though.
  • The boy really really really likes merry-go-rounds.  I like merry-go-rounds less than I thought I would; turns out that when you’re standing next to your toddler they make you crazily dizzy.
  • Saw no less than 12 students.  Luckily, only four of the twelve saw me, and all four seemed happy to do so.  Considering that the last time I saw one of them I was hollering for our resource officer to put him in handcuffs that percentage is probably a good thing.
  • I bought no food, which means that the gyro I had for lunch is the grossest thing I ate today, which is probably as it should be.
  • I had no idea that rabbits could even get that big, holy shit.
  • Pissed-off pigs are scary.  Pissed-off goats are hilarious.

All in all whee fun would pay $8 again.