Weekend Gaming from the parent's house

The first part of my four day trip was shabbat at my parent's in Beit Shemesh, on the road to Tel Aviv.

My father is mostly recovered from all of the travails he went through having chemotherapy and an ileostamy. Thank God. I also saw some friends, including the Elkins, the family that I stayed with in Dallas when I went to the BGG.con last November.

Really, games are everywhere, if you look for them. Driving to Beit Shemesh, we heard more on the subject of video game "addiction" on BBC. When we watched a little TV at my parent's before shabbat (we don't own a TV), we saw a Growing Pains episode where Ben tries to get others in his family to play video games with him and finally tries to break out a board game. And visiting my friends at lunch I saw that they had a Monopoly styled picture frame ("We go together like Boardwalk and Park Place").

In the evening, I dropped by Abbagav for a little visit.

I the afternoon, I went to the house of the organizer of the Beit Shemesh Scrabble Club, Joe Weisblatt. They were still eating lunch, so I taught his kids and some friends how to play Oh Hell while they finished (they were playing Casino, and I couldn't allow that to continue). I played Scrabble and lost by 100 points, while two other Scrabble games were also going on.

All the while, I was being pestered to play Oh Hell again, which I did once more after the Scrabble game, before leaving.

Now I am trying to finalize plans for the next few days. So far I've got Safari in Ramat Gan (mostly because Tal loves zebras) tomorrow followed by dinner ?, beach and window shopping Monday followed by Chinese restaurant, and the Educational Center for Games on Tuesday morning. For the latter, it will be interesting to see what's up and say hi to Helena who runs the center.

Oh yes, I want to check out Freak, if I can. Sunday or Monday.

Missiles have now hit as far as Hadera, so they may be hitting Tel Aviv by the time we get there ...

Yehuda