Mild Amusement

Ever since I was a kid, I've liked playing with Legos .  I probably spent countless hours of my youth building, tearing apart, and re-building all sorts of cars, airplanes, and spaceships (none of this pansy house-building for me).  I still have a bucket of them sitting in my room, and every time I break them out, I get a little nostalgic.  Besides, it's just plain fun for my inner tinkerer/geek. Technically, these are children's toys.  You don't want babies near them, because they might swallow the pieces; children of about three years old, though, can usually handle the whole concept.  And coincidentally, there just so happen to be kids of that age floating around my house at times.  Most of the time, I just help them build stuff that they're working on.  Sometimes they still have trouble with snapping together pieces, so I help with that.  Other times, they don't understand how gravity works, so I help to provide structural support to their c...

On New Year's day, my (female) work friend & I went to go visit another (male) mutual friend of ours. The tentative plan involved the three of us going to the shooting range, but we figured we'd at least grab something to eat. I've never fired a gun before in my life, so this plan both worried & excited me. Heck, I don't even really like first-person shooter games , so I'm only vaguely aware of things like weapon calibers. Still, I was game. The friend we were visiting had done his homework by the time we got there, so he had found a shooting range that was open. The tentative plan was going to happen. So, he & his buddy started assembling the guns they wanted to bring to the range. The first thing I noticed was that they were all universally black, with no silver or wood color anywhere. That surprised me a bit, but I suppose that's the difference between real life and video games. Anyhow, they let me handle one of the guns before we lef...