Tuesday, July 26, 2005

It began three weeks ago.

We started off with 4 days in Maryland visiting my wife's father and step-mother. From there it was off to Florida to spend 8 days with my parents and my sister. After a brief 4 days at home doing laundry and preparing, my mother-in-law arrived with her longtime beau for a 6 day visit. Those 6 days included multiple visits from my sister-in-law as well as hosting the entire clan for my daughter's birthday one afternoon.

(Begin disclaimer)

Now, our families are pretty damn easy to get along with. My wife's family made for both good hosts and good guests. Meanwhile my family did a dandy job of being travel companions. That being said...

(End disclaimer)

Oh, sweet Jesus, it's good to have the house to ourselves. Finally, I can relax and let the natural scowl return to my face. At long last the only sounds in the house are the blaring of the children's TV programs or the sobbing of my daughter frustrated by her piano practice. Ahhhhhh, pinch me.

On an unrelated note, we spent a little time this afternoon playing with one of my daughter's birthday gifts, a Dance Dance Revolution game for our XBox.

Are you familiar with this game? It's an arcade-style game where you compete by dancing. A song plays while arrows quickly fly across the screen indicating where your feet should have been.

This is a travesty. Video games used to be the sort of activity in which even clods like me could feel competent. I know everyone is up in arms about the part of Grand Theft Auto where you can see cartoon characters having sex, but at least in that game you don't actually have to be good at sex to win.

Meanwhile, my daughter enjoys playing Dance Dance Revolution with me. She takes responsibility for half the mat and I'd do the other. This is pretty much the definition of physical comedy. You've got an adorable six year-old girl violently stomping around one side of the mat while her computer programmer father clumsily and effeminately flails around on the other side. My wife, who can actually dance, was in stitches watching this.

Thankfully, the rest of our extended family wasn't around to see this. I can scowl in peace.

3 comments:

tinyhands said...

Remember what I said about recording this so you could laugh at your daughter later? Right, this is the part where we laugh at you.

Mike said...

Louie, you misspelled "with".

Kat said...

That's a lot of time to spend with family - I don't care how much you like them. Word on the DDR - my little brother loves this game and I just sit and watch in amazement.