Last weekend, my daughter K was invited to a birthday party for the daughter of some old friends from college, Jeanne and Mike. The party was held at a skate and amusement complex in RI.
I am trying to find out if in-line skates would be a viable exercise activity for me. I don't have a history of being really athletic, so I wanted to test my abilities before spending a load of cash on my own pair of skates. This was the perfect opportunity. So instead of staying home and watching M, I tagged along with Maggie and K.
At noon the rain was coming down in buckets and we picked up H and B, two girls that a friend of ours had asked us to take to the party. Off we went to the Ocean State, with the ocean seemingly falling from the sky around us!
Some Form Of Skating
Skipping a lot of details, the kids had a lot of fun. I learned that I can in-line skate, and will probably invest in my own skates. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon on the parquet skate floor dragging the girls behind me, once they learned they could pretty much both get a free ride from dad. It's good exercise to skate with an artificially enhanced weight load. I would hold M's hand and then K would grab on and we had the beginnings of a human chain slowly touring the rink. On straightaways I'd get us going dangerously fast and then pull on M's arm when we hit the turn to whip K into a sort of slingshot effect and she would squeal loudly.
What's In A Game?
This amusement complex also hosted video games and those funny games of chance that give out tickets which can be redeemed later for prizes. When the kids weren't skating, they were playing the games.
If you're familiar with skee-ball and these other games that give out tokens, you'll know that you usually get, at most, about 10 tickets from these games. Usually they spit out a lot fewer than 10 if you didn't do too well.
There was one game called "Tower of Power" which wasn't much of a game at all. You watch a moving line and you try to hit it when it is positioned over the "bonus" if you miss, you hit one of the numbers from 1 to 10 and you get the number of tickets indicated. But if you hit the Bonus you would be showered with untold riches in tickets. This drew my attention, and the attention of a lot of the kids.
I saw a girl hit for ten tickets and watched it slowly spit them at about a ticket per second. I think that's part of the drama of winning. I bought a dollar in tokens for myself.
Broken
"Tower of Power" had stations to accept players on 3 sides. Kids were only playing on one of the sides.
K put a coin in one of the unused stations and the machine did nothing. Disappointed, she wandered off to another game. I checked the coin return and noted that there were two tokens there, so I gave them both to her. I returned to the machine and tested out that slot. Every time I put a coin in, it fell through to the coin return. I couldn't get it to work.
I looked to the other unused station and a 9 year old kid was just walking away. He noticed me looking at it and came back.
"Don't put a coin in there -- it doesn't work. I just lost my coin in there." he said to me. I thanked him and looked at the slot.
Indeed, the slot was jammed. I took out my Swiss Army Knife and used the saw to fish out a couple of the coins, but there were a ton still lodged in there. I kept working. I think I fished 3 or more dollars in tokens out of that slot. The slot still didn't work, but I was up a bunch of tokens. As I got up from my crouch, a kid in a white shirt was running through and bumped into me, then ran off. There was a lot of chaotic action at the arcade.
I spotted the kid who had warned me and wandered over to him.
"Hey there." I said. "Thanks for warning me about that slot. Here's the coin you lost." I then gave him half of the coins I fished from the slot. Then I scooted off before he could say anything back to me.
Weird
I looked for a cheap videogame to play. I like to spend my tokens one at a time. There were some cheap stand-up games, but two girls and what looked like their 6-year-old brother were at them. The brother was pestering one of the girls for more tokens.
I sat down at a nearby snowmobile racing game because it was one of the cheapest games in the place. One token. I started to play. After a minute or so, I sensed that there was a woman behind me and her son. They were really close behind me, for some reason. The 6-year-old kid who had been pestering his sister for tokens (I'll call him "Pesto Changeo") was also suddenly next to me. Now I had an audience of three people.
"What are you doing?" asked Pesto Change-o.
"I'm playing this game."
There was a long pause as I tried to extend my time on the game by picking up bonuses. The woman, her son and Pesto all looked on. I wondered if they were all together.
"Hey!" I said. Pesto was trying to climb into my lap. "Um. Please don't do that." I tried to keep him off my lap. Meanwhile, my game ended. That happens when you're trying to snowboard and keep a kid off your lap.
I thought the kid wanted the machine so I got up. The woman behind me put her son in the machine and he started playing. Pesto Change-o wandered off. I looked around. Where were this kid's parents?
Score!
The kids who were playing with "Tower of Power" were called off by their birthday party because it was time for them to eat pizza. I decided to plop in a token.
On the first try, I hit the bonus and the machine started counting down from 200 as it spit out 200 tickets. I stood there for over two minutes with kids staring at the tickets pouring out of the machine. They were amazed, but I felt like an idiot. Here's this 30-year-old with over 200 in tickets. I waited it out and played that game and a few other games, ending up with about 400 tickets total.
Sorry
I went out to skate some more. I skated with the kids some, and then let them go off and try actually skating on their own. Once I was alone, the white-shirted kid skated up to me and said "Sorry about bumping into you before!" Now there's a polite kid. I hope he didn't think I was angry at him. I had more than 100 lbs on him and barely notice when a kid bumps into me in an arcade.
Weird, Part Deux
As I was trying to round up my daughters to leave, I found Pesto Change-o interfering with some other kid's father who was playing Cruisin' USA. Unfortunately, he spotted me and for some reason thought he had to come over and talk to me.
"Do you have any money?" he asked.
"Do you have any money?" I asked back.
- pause -
"Do you have any money?" he asked again.
"Do you have any money?" I asked back.
"Do you have any money?"
"Do you have any money?"
"Do you have any money?"
"Do you have any money?"
At this point he got bored and wandered off.
Everybody Wins
When we left the party, all the kids took their tickets to the place where you redeem them for prizes. I probably could have gotten some sweet stuffed animals for my tickets, but instead I decided to give 100 each of my winnings to K, M, H and B.
Before I had given them the bonus tickets, H did a very nice thing for K. She bought one of those friendship necklaces that you separate into halves. You keep one and give the other half to your friend. Those are some good kids.
When we left, the torrential rain had stopped. It turned out to be a weird, but fun day.
I think I had an encounter with Pesto Change-o. I'd say he was a somewhat challenged kid who was dumped by his parents. I notice that parents of challenged kids either meet the challenge or dump them everywhere they can every chance they get.
I was talking to Bonnie when he leaned over the back of the bench she was sitting on and started taking things off our table. I shooed him away, but he came back again after a few minutes and tried to take our schedule of events. It was like, dude, that's not going to do you any good. I don't think there was much info going in. Poor kid.
