Sunday 12-21-25 Home, New Pinball Challenge & More

 

Home Sweet Home

 

We're home after a week camping trip to Bastrop State Park and Buescher State Park. During our trip we did 36 miles of walking and hiking total. The temperatures in the morning were in the 40's and 50's, one morning it was 31 degrees. The high temperatures were in the 50's, mid 60's and mid 70's. It was great sleeping weather. We had a super camping trip. 

Our drive home was a different route than on the way up. Instead of taking highway 71 we took highway 290 to highway 95. The drive was two lane highways through Paige, Elgin, Taylor, Granger, Bartlett, Holland, Little River/Academy and Temple. We saw a lot of cattle and ranches. It was a peaceful drive for 102 miles.

Before arriving at home we stopped and filled the Minnie. We got home about 10:45. We emptied some of the items out of the refrigerator and the clothes we wore. It didn't take too long because we left some stuff in the Minnie, if the weather permits we hope to go on another week long trip after Christmas.

 

Bastrop State Park

 

Buescher State Park

 

Last week we left home before the new weekly pinball challenge started. The weekly challenge ends on Sunday at 1:00 our time and the new one begins at the same time. Larry asked if I wanted to play last weeks game. I said sure if he didn't mind installing it. Last week's challenge was Flash Gordon. He downloaded the game and installed it in both 2D and VR. I played it for a half hour and my high score was 358,000, which put me in 77th out of 83 participants. Larry then installed this week's challenge, which is Tron. We had played this game back in January so he had some of the files already on the machine and it was already set for three balls. I played Tron for a few times. My first high score of this challenge is 68,268,350. This score put me in 4th place out of 10 participants.

 

Flash Gordon

 

Tron

I played six other pinball games, which were Cirqus Voltaire, Godzilla, Iron Man, Star Trek the Next Generation, Star Wars and Transformers. While playing Godzilla I came in as high score #10 and Transformers I came in high score #4. I had fun.

 

Cirqus Voltaire

 

Godzilla

 

Iron Man

 

Star Trek the Next Generation

 

Star Wars

 

Transformers

Larry has a lot of e-books on his e-reader. Some of them have been on there for years and he will never read them. They were free books written by amateur writers that he got when he first got a Kindle back in 2017. He ended up removing 11 books. That still leaves him with a bit over 100 unread books. The list grows when we are not traveling and shrinks when we are. He subscribes to an e-mail list called Bookbub, each day he gets an e-mail with suggested books. He has his list set for certain categories of books for $2.99 or less. Most of the books he gets are either free or less than $2. Most days he gets nothing but every once in awhile something sounds good and has really good reviews. He enjoys seeing what books show up. 

I played the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event was Event: Two Game Tango Mini of 6 games (3 Spider and 3 Pyramid). It took me 17 minutes and 11 seconds, which put me in 13th place in my group. I played Angry Birds Friends and Angry Birds 2.

We started to get caught up with the YouTube videos we follow.

In the evening we watched Abigail on Prime Videos. It was a Russian fantasy action movie about a young woman (Abigail) looking for her father who was taken from her when she was a child. It was translated into English. It wasn't that good because the script and acting wasn't very good, maybe because of the translation. After Larry went to bed I watched Iron Man from our collection of movies.

I ended up doing 12,000 steps. I did a fifteen minute workout by doing a Jazz routine I learned years ago. I haven't done it in a long time but I did it tonight to help get my steps.

 

Relaxing in front of the television