Month: July 2025

Enter To Win? Sure, Why Not!

Friends, I’m a big believer in micro-dosing bad decisions. Have some small vices here and there, at a scale where it doesn’t matter and won’t blow up in your face, so you don’t make all your bad decisions at once and explosively. Venting the saucepan, etc. etc. I have a similar rule for hope.

My standing hypothesis is that the stereotypical midlife crisis (see: buying a car) is an abrupt expression of needing something to look forward to, or at least the idea of a something forward to engage positively with. I think most of us could use a not-quite-midlife crisis right now, without the raw expenses of purchasing a vehicle. My solution? Free-to-enter sweepstakes.

In the perpetual vein of if it’s free to use, it’s because you’re the product, sweepstakes are a marketing ploy built either on garnering contact info to advertise towards, or buying your attention outright with the prospect of free stuff. If you’re willing to field that, there are many websites that dedicate themselves to compiling the links, and the one I’ve taken recently to is The Freebie Guy! Which also covers actual freebies and steep discounts, but I’ve only paid attention to the sweepstakes, because window shopping Free Paper Towels For A Year or a trip to Universal is an enrichment activity. (There were, when I first checked, four or five different trips to Universal up for grabs. They were all different promotions. My favorite was probably the Jurassic World one with the scratch-off dinosaurs, though the How To Train Your Dragon rendition of Flappy Bird came in close second.)

Interestingly, if you partake of the daily entry options at their optimal frequency, you get to be familiar with the aesthetics, daydreams, and the user interfaces, until you have opinions on all of them. Such it is that I forgot to enter “the pepperoni one” (Hormel Pepperoni is giving out a most-expenses-paid trip to somewhere) (“somewhere” is four different locations, and which you enter for is your pick) before midnight Eastern and I’m sad about it. It was one of the first sweepstakes I ever entered, and it closes tonight! The march of time is alarming. I’ll miss window shopping that trip to CancĂșn.

(Obligatory disclaimer that if you enter for a big-ticket item, like a car, be prepared for the income tax. That is a thing that exists.)

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What You’ve Got

I am, tragically, deep in the delights of audiobooks, new games, etc. etc., such that tearing myself away to write this post was an exercise of will. But! They raise an excellent point. Most of my distractions at the moment are a product of our library’s Summer Challenge, and my participation therein, trying to finish enough items by the end of July to win prizes, and completing the per-household Bingo card for chances at more! This has done exactly what it was intended to, and forced me to take stock of what library resources I’m not making full use of yet. Here’s what I’ve learned:

-Your library likely has a staggering amount of online resources! Ebooks and audiobooks, yes, but also potentially music, movies, TV shows, and ours even offers access to Great Courses! Which are well-regarded, but definitely expensive.

-Along with checkout resources, there are databases for language learning, practice written driver’s tests, and information resources for finding books you like! These will vary wildly depending on your library, and they’re definitely worth getting to know.

-There are back corner sections of physical resources you had no idea exist. I checked out a how-to-read-Braille kit last year, because Experience Kits were on the Bingo sheet. We have physical media for audiobooks, board games, and a not-zero amount of video game cartridges – I didn’t even know there was a Lego The Incredibles game!

-There’s a good chance your library’s digital media covers more languages than its physical media does. If you’re looking for practice, e-media is your friend!

-The library program usually has something neat going on. That may seem obvious, but I periodically forget to check and then surprise myself by the summer concerts or presentations they’ve got going on. There really is something for everyone.

-I can’t speak for anyone else’s regions, but if you’re in northern Illinois, it’s worth checking to see if your library partakes of the Explore More Illinois or Museum Adventure Pass programs, both of which can get you admission and/or discounts to a whole host of local attractions. We checked off that Bingo spot by going to the Ellwood House Museum in DeKalb, which I may write about separately. It’s a great way to find museums you didn’t know existed!

I adore our library and make use of its resources constantly, and I’m sure it still has features I don’t know. So take a moment, and see what you have to work with!

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Teide By Night

While we were in the Canary Islands, we partook of a Teide by Night tour, which picked us up near our hotel and gave us a full-evening experience of Teide National Park! The same bus was assigned to us to us for the whole trip, from pickup to drop-off, and for the hour climb through more and more residential areas, to the mist-laden forest above, and through the perpetual cloud cover into bright and sunny mountains.

We stopped at a restaurant briefly, with the opportunity for snacks; saw canaries (our first of the trip!) out and about while we waited; and headed back out in no time at all, off to see viewpoints. Gorgeous views from the bus, stop, step out, take photos, rinse and repeat – you can spend a whole trip in this park, so there was a lot to cover. The peak was not one of them – for that, you need a permit, far enough in advance to not be sensible for large tour groups.

And it was, indeed, a large tour group, or at least the company is – while our bus had maybe twenty people, there were three or four buses all running at the same time, and we all came in to dinner together, slightly staggered. It’s difficult to stagger them too far, you understand – after dinner, we all headed out to watch sunset, and it’s not like that waits for anybody! I enjoyed the food, certainly, but sunset was the stunner, made better with warm mint tea to stave off the impending cold. Another moment at the restaurant – bathrooms, liquor tastings for those who partake – long enough for the sky to darken, and then we were off to watch the stars. I learned more about where the constellations are in relation to each other and the information they actually convey than I have in the rest of my life! And the pre-set-up telescopes allowed us to get several special looks at the sky, including of a nebula. Magic.

This one… was a lot. As you may gather from the sheer quantity of stuff happening, there was a lot of rushing from place to place, and it’s definitely not for anyone who wants to stay in one place for an extended period of time, or have finer control over in which places you stay at a given moment. That said, if you only have a day for Teide, as we did, this was incredible, and any trip to Teide would be, with guaranteed clear weather and even clearer view of the stars. Difficult to be subject to the whims of clouds when you’re above them! Literally. So this was a delight.

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Have You Built A Coral Reef Today?

Ecosystem: Coral Reef is a closed-circuit deck-passing game, by which players use the dwindling supply of available cards to build a 5 by 4 grid of marine life! Everyone will wind up with their own completed ecosystem, but the particulars will grow harder and harder to orchestrate, leading to some… very strange placement. Coral floating at the surface, anyone?

Instead of having each organism’s effects on the cards, each player gets a cheat sheet, which will lead to a lot of cross-referencing in the early stages of the game. Each life form has a different bonus, most of them points-based, many of them in relation to the organisms they share rows, columns, or adjacency with. A couple of them have actions, like the octopus, who lets you move another card! Very important, as once cards are placed you can’t move them anymore. And sometimes you thought you knew what you were doing, and then your neighbor handed you a shark. Y’know, a normal problem.

Regardless, this one was a lot of fun, with point-stacking mechanics everywhere and an additional bonus for your least points-yielding type, be they producers, prey, or predators – which, being based off the point total of that variety and not merely the number of organisms, can be a hell of a bonus! This is definitely a ‘write down your math’ kind of game. And isn’t it gorgeous?

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