The rhododendron is West Virginia’s state flower.  Rhododendron bushes are found in wooded areas throughout our state, although some people plant domesticated varieties in their yards.  They look exactly like the wild rhododendrons.  We went hiking at Kanawha State Forest today, and while en route, we saw many rhododendron bushes blooming in yards throughout the South Hills area.   

Our neighbors have a lovely rhododendron bush in their front yard that is currently in full bloom.  I’ve admired it each spring for the 12 years that we’ve lived in our house, and it only gets bigger and more beautiful every year.

I finished one of the two weekly challenges on Pogo.com last Wednesday afternoon, after the new challenges came out that same morning.  It was a Sweet Tooth challenge, and it wasn’t difficult. 

The other challenge this week was another story.  It was in Chess, a game that I know next to nothing about.   One of my brothers tried to teach me to play Chess many years ago, but I wasn’t too interested in it.  I’ve never really had any other opportunities to learn to play Chess, and it’s something that I’ve never actively wanted to learn.  Pogo has a tutorial, but since I’m under the impression that Chess can’t be learned very easily, I didn’t want to bother with it.

Anyway, the object of the Chess challenge was to win 3,000 tokens.  Unfortunately, it takes a win in Chess to really get a worthwhile number of tokens.  Pogo gives a few tokens to the loser in Chess, but the amount is almost always in the single digits.      

My friend M. won her Chess badge by playing with another person on Pogo who was offering to help anyone who needed it.  Sometimes people on Pogo will help you win your badge if you’ll help them win theirs.  Other people just want to be nice and don’t expect anything in return.  However, I didn’t want to get into in the position of accepting someone else’s help when I couldn’t reciprocate due to my ignorance about Chess.  

So, I played against a robot for awhile, just to see what would happen.  I lost every game (a bunch of them), and managed to creep up to only 100 tokens.  At that rate, it would take me days to win that badge!            

Alexander likes to rib me about my “addiction” to Pogo.com.  When I complained to him the other night that I wasn’t making much progress on my Chess badge, he offered to help me with it, despite the fact that he was working on a job that was due the following morning.  He knows how to play Chess, and he is actually pretty good at it.  I agreed to cook him a batch of fried potatoes and onions while he took a break from his job and worked on my badge.  

He played against robots, won every single game, and finished my badge in about an hour.  Yippee! 

Our 2002 Honda Odyssey van had an 8:00 appointment at the dealership this morning.  The rear brakes suddenly started to squeal last week, so at that time, they installed new brake pads.  They also discovered that the rotors were rusted and needed to be replaced.  They didn’t have the rotors in stock, so they had to order them and schedule the van for another appointment today.

They’d originally told me the repairs would take an hour, so I told Alexander he could just stay home and sleep, and I’d sit at the dealership and read my John Adams book until the van was finished.  However, the service manager started his vacation last week, and things were obviously not running smoothly in the garage this morning in his absence.  They told me this morning that the repairs would take about two hours.  Instead of sitting in the waiting room for that length of time, I opted to get a ride home with the dealership’s courtesy car.  The driver was ready to go at 8:30, and I figured I’d be home by 8:45. 

Another customer also needed a ride home, although his residence was about 20 miles away in a completely opposite direction from my house.  He said he was in a hurry (I wasn’t), so the driver took him home first.  

This dealership has an assortment of vehicles it uses as courtesy cars.  Today, the driver was using a newer model Odyssey van.  I sat in the middle seat, and the other rider sat in front with the driver.  For some reason, the other rider didn’t use his seat belt.  So, every couple of minutes the seat belt reminder light on the dashboard would blink and the beeper would start beeping, but it didn’t faze this guy.  The driver kept acting as though he wanted to say something to him, but he never did.  I thought about mentioning it myself, but I decided to keep quiet.  After about 10 miles of this, the guy acted really surprised and finally buckled his seat belt. 

I got home at 9:30 AM.  After all that, I almost wished I’d stayed at the dealership and read my John Adams book for two hours until the van was finished.    

Peter’s neighborhood friends, Matthew and N., both have electric scooters.  Matthew’s scooter is blue, with a seat and a basket.  I’m not sure of the make, but he says he’s had it for about 8 years.  N. has a Razor E200 electric scooter.  Peter loves scooters, and he and Caroline have several scooters between them, but none are electric. 

Caroline voluntarily plans to continue working on her lessons during the summer.  I also want Peter to do some extra work during the next few months, but he wasn’t exactly thrilled at that prospect.  Since I’m not opposed to bribery in certain instances, I asked Peter what would make that idea of doing some schoolwork over the summer more palatable to him.  He considered my question for approximately 30 seconds, and replied, “an electric scooter.”

We discovered that K-Mart is currently having a sale on electric scooters.  We went there last night, and ended up purchasing a Razor E100 electric scooter on sale for around $86.  We brought it home, put it together (which consisted of assembling the handlebar stem), and put it out in the garage to charge overnight.  

The directions specify that it has to be charged for 18 hours before its first use.  Peter, of course, was counting down the hours until his new scooter would be ready to ride today.  I gave him permission to try it out a couple of hours early, and since it seemed to work okay, I gave him the go-ahead to continue riding it until the battery gave out.  He gave it a thumbs-up.