Friday 12-5-25 254 Craft Mall, Christmas Shopping & Dancing to Ett

 

It's Friday let's dance

 

We had wintery looking day. It was overcast and chilly with the morning temperature of 37 degrees and the high of 53. There was a little breeze, which made it chilly.

We did something a little different today. We drove to Waco, which was 41 miles one way. Larry read the other day that 254 Craft Mall was having a grand opening. 254 Craft Mall is where crafters and artists around the Waco area rent a little booth inside the building and sell their wares. 

The store opened at 10:00 am and we were there about 10:15 am. We were surprised there were a lot of cars in the parking lot. It was in a huge building with booths all over the place. There were rows and rows of different booths. It was very well organized and clean. We were greeted by two friendly women. There was a lot of Christmas nick-knacks. We didn't buy anything but we had a nice time. It took us a half hour to walk through the store.

 

Visiting 254 Craft Mall

 

One of the booths of nick-knacks

 

Hanging signs

 

One of the tee shirts for Christmas

On the way home we stopped to do some Christmas shopping. The first stop was the UPS Store to check the mail. Next was Walmart to buy Christmas cards and other items. The last stop was Dollar Tree. 

While we were in Walmart we bought a rotisserie chicken. When we got home I heated up some of the chicken for lunch.

The county requires our septic system to be inspected every four months. In today's mail there was a letter from our septic inspector saying he was retiring and our account would be moving to a new company owned by his son, along with this the price was going up. 

Another septic inspection company, Brazos Septic Solutions sent us a letter about their prices and they were substantially cheaper. Larry did a little research on Brazos Septic Solutions and the reviews are very positive. The have held a license with the state for more than a decade. He also called the county (Bell) to ask if Brazos Septic Solutions was certified to inspect systems in our county. He left a message and is still waiting for the county to call back.

I did the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event was Event: World Tour Mini of 10 games. It took me 42 minutes and 10 seconds, which put me in 13th in my group. I played Angry Birds 2 and Angry Birds Friends.

I played seven games of pinball, which were Attack From Mars, Blizzard of Ozz, Dracula, Elvira Scared Stiff, Mustang, Transformers and World Joker Poker. I didn't get on the board playing pinball but had fun.

 

Attack From Mars

 

Blizzard of Ozz

 

Dracula

 

Elvira Scared Stiff

 

Mustang

 

Transformers

 

World Joker Poker

Yesterday, on YouTube, Larry saw a video of a Batman Forever pinball game that looked fun. It is not a new game, it has been around for years. There are over 1500 virtual pinball games available, new and updated games come out frequently but some games hang around for years without being updated, this was one of those. He decided to install this game on the mini cabinet. It was quite challenging. The newest version had sound issues, he tried a number of things to get it working, he finally got it working using an older version of Virtual Pinball. However, he could not get the sound working with the current version of Virtual Pinball in VR. He found a much older version of the game that was designed for VR. It had a scripting problem but he was eventually able to fix that. This VR version will not work in non-VR so he will have to use two versions of the game. 

While I danced to Ett Larry continued to debug the game. He still wants to fix a couple of sound issues on the VR version. 

In the evening I attended Ett McAtee's Weekly A2 dance at 6:30 pm for an hour. Ett called four tips to 9 participants. I had fun dancing with friends.

 

Ett McAtee

 

After the dance we watched Tracing the Divide on Amazon Prime. It's about two 40 something life-long friends who  ride their bikes on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. The route is 2400 miles long, it runs from the Canadian boarder in Montana to the Mexico border in Texas. They did the distance in 24 days. It was a documentary and was very good. Then I watched Die Another Day, which is a James Bond movie. We have four James Bond movies in our collection of movies. I ended up doing 3,000 steps.