Grocery Bag Book Covers

One perk of my Dad owning a grocery story was using the paper grocery bags to cover my textbooks to replace the ones school provided for me at the beginning of the year.

Sometimes it was the cheap glue wearing out, or the books going from the locker to my backpack which damaged the covers

I preferred the grocery bag covers because they had more room to draw on.

In addition to the grocery bag book cover, I’d color in the white space of this notebook. The lucky kids with the quad colored pen would do large sections in a different color or “tye-dye” it. I only had blue or black ink pens so my covers were boring.

Video Games

I wonder if my age has anything to do with my limited interest in video games. The first console we had in our home was Intellivision and according to Wikipedia it was available in 1980 (but not sure exactly when we got ours), I was 9 years old then and by that time I had a decent amount of LEGO and toys.

Perhaps having physical toys to play with, especially LEGO, fueled my imagination so much that I didn’t need video games. Going outside to play was a big part of my youth. Having woods behind our house to explore and in the winter we could safely sled down Welwyn Lane.

The Intellivision games I preferred were ones that didn’t require a lot of jumping but Auto Racing had a curve that would bring me to tears of frustration.

That frustration came from playing a game for weeks to months and I still couldn’t beat certain levels. Tron’s Deadly Discs was fun until the level where enemies would come at you from all 4 sides and I couldn’t block them all.

Sure I could have practiced more but cartoons after school were just as entertaining.

Another contributing factor (and many years later) may have been when I got my own computer in 1997 and would buy a new game every other month. This led me to not finishing a previously purchased game because I was engrossed in the new one. The other downside was if I couldn’t get past a certain point due to not being good enough, a difficult puzzle (with no help from a message board), or losing interest because it was another First Person Shooter (this didn’t deter me from buying another one next month).

While I enjoyed my Xbox and the games that were made for it, I lost interest… until Xbox 360 and Fallout 3. After finishing the main quest and playing through all the DLC’s, I boxed it up during an apartment move and kept it in the box till I donated it.

I was going to get a PS4 and ‘No Man’s Sky’ but the negative reviews and the thought of “I’ll play it for a while, get bored, and get rid of it” came right after.