Last Day of Summer 2018

Bust-a-move is a puzzle arcade game in which two adorable iguana-like characters operate a marble-launching trebuchet to try to halt the advance of an ever-growing stalactite of baubles. It plays a bit like a game of reverse Tetris but instead of stacking distinctive shapes, you just match colors. Connect three or more marbles of the same color and away they fall.

Were you to rewind about two months you would find me prostrate in the middle of a lake in northern Kentucky, reflecting to myself, “Get the marbles… Get the marbles… Get the marbles…” and making small circular motions with my forearms as though I were one of the pudgy iguanas in Bust-a-move and I was dutybound to reload my trebuchet. Now why, you may wonder, would I have been so preoccupied with pantomiming the whimsical antics of a reptilian arcade sprite whilst I was in immediate danger of drowning? Funny you should ask. You see, I had been knocked temporarily senseless by being slammed face-first into the water at high velocity while botching a very simple directional change on a wakeboard. This particular type of mishap is known in the water surface sports community as “catching an edge.” 

Speaking of violent failures, I spent the last day of summer in 2018 doing the least summery thing that there is: going to a college football game. A few years ago, my brother-in-law and I decided that it would be fun to make a trip to the University of Michigan’s “Big House” and that whenever his beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers came into town, we’d pull the trigger and buy the tickets. Given that Nebraska was 0-2 for the first time since 1957, neither my bro-in-law nor I were realistically expecting a victorious outcome, but then again, neither were we expecting the litany of ineptitude that led the Huskers to a 56-10 blowout loss.

I hope you all had wonderful summers. Here’s to a beautiful fall.

-Ryan