Houseguests No More, Wii-Related Injuries, and Mr. Monocle's Malicious Money Mongering Machine

Birthdays are over, kids have finished their performances, extended families have left for home, life is good.

It was a hectic week for Stacy and I. Having her family in town was fun, but stressful. Sleeping on the constantly-deflating air mattress in the cold basement wasn't pleasant, but I can handle something like that for three nights. We got in a few good games of Wii Sports Tennis, enough to show me how out of shape I am. Did you know there is a medical condition that has been nick-named Wii Elbow? Yeah, apparently it strikes those that play a lot of high impact Wii games and adolescent boys. Not sure where the correlation is between those two groups.

We celebrated Scarlett's second birthday with some friends at Chuck E Cheese the week before last. She had so much of a blast that we thought we'd take her back along with her uncle, Ryan, and his son, Mason, since both of their birthdays are pretty close to the same time. We have a house of mouse near us, but since we don't enjoy skee ball games with one ball or driving games that run in circles, we opted to go to the one about 45 minutes north.

It's a good thing we don't live near a casino, because the light chase machines at those places taunt me until I dominate them with my superior light-stopping skillz, coaxing out the sweet stream of tickets like a soothing cascade of spring water to a desert nomad. I can usually master the infernal machines with a relatively low investment of tokens, but this particular location has one branded with a certain top-hat-wearing, monocled, mustached debonair that brings a little extra Atlantic City charm with him. Instead of a single token with a single progressive jackpot of tickets, he has three levels of payout with which to taunt me.

"Just one quarter?" he seems to say, "You know that will only get you 50 tickets if you win and three measly ones if you get close. C'mon, it's not worth it unless you drop in three. Just think, 200 tickets, imagine what you can buy with that!"

(For the record, that'll get you one bag of cotton candy and a couple of party favors, seriously.)

Mr. Monocle is devious. I won the jackpot on our first visit with a relatively small investment. He knows how to draw me in. I cashed in an undisclosed amount of money (I ain't tellin'!) and approached my nemesis, confident in my superiority, safe in the knowledge that I had mastered it before and it would do my bidding. Why, with as many tokens as I had, I could afford to hit the three-token bonus and then the two-token jackpot!

Oh, it's an evil little thing, that machine. It sucked the tokens out of my little cup like a kid gulping down water during a midnight potty break. The most insidious part of its little token-stealing plot is the payout for missing the jackpot by one light: 12 tickets. That piles up pretty quick. I look down at my feet and see the big stack of tickets and figure that even though I haven't hit the jackpot yet, I'm doing pretty good.

Then I look down and see the bottom of my cup through the few remaining tokens. I look up at the machine with dawning realization. Do you know what that fella with the monocle was doing?

He was smiling.

Oho! You're an evil, squat, ticket taunting devil, light chasing machine! I ripped out my tickets from its stingy innards and walked away with what little dignity I had left. I parceled out the remaining tokens to my kids and nephews and sent my tickets through the counter.

With the stack I had accumulated that night and the ones we had left over from the week before, I had enough to get five jeweled bracelets for all of the girls there, two sticky spiders for the two older boys, and a weird floppy-spiked little pair of eyes for the helluvit.

Who's smiling now, Mr. Monocle?