Growing Up with Computers

When I was little, Pong was a big deal.  There.  I have totally dated myself.  My older brother really worked at our parents and finally convinced them to buy him an Atari game system, the one that came with the game Adventure with the mazes and funny looking dragons and you, the player, were represented by a blinking square.  I can't believe how much time we spent playing that!  At school, we sometimes had the chance to use a computer that had a teeny, tiny monitor that was attached to the computer and keyboard.  My favorite game was Lemonade Stand.  It barely had any graphics, no color, and tinny music.  Ah, good times.  My younger brother only remembers the age of Nintendo and what came afterwards.  By then, my parents were worn down so he got a Nintendo, upgraded to Super Nintendo, and so on.  I'm pretty sure I gave him a Gameboy when I was in college or thereabouts and he LOST IT!  Never buying him anything cool again.

Penguin Girl likes gaming but not in the same way that my brothers do.  She will play indefinitely if given the chance but if we don't set up the Wii, it's as if she forgets we even have it.  She's got her crafts, her books, her ba-zillion penguins . . . quite a full life even without video games.  However, she is pretty captivated with the internet world of Webkinz.  There was a point when she was so excited about Webkinz that an opportunity to play on the website generated days of conversation fodder for her.  After a while, Car Guy and I both told Penguin Girl that we did not find Webkinz interesting at all, found them rather annoying in fact, and that she needed to do a better job at starting conversations by picking a topic that was mutually interesting to all parties involved.

Since I find the Webkinz so annoying, I tried to find something else to interest her.  I came upon 39 Clues.  She has been reading the books in the series as they are published.  She says the website is really fun.  I haven't read any of the books so I don't understand anything that she tells me about why the website is so captivating.  But it keeps her entertained while Mr. Destructo is napping.  And it does not involve Webkinz.

This weekend I'm going to introduce her to the idea of touch typing by using the BBC website.  I find the program hilarious because of the accent of the cartoon goat who is the typing instructor.  I actually don't touch type.  Shocker, right?  Even after mandatory high school typing class, college papers, grad school papers, and practicing law with endless legal documents, I still have to look at the keyboard while I type.  I could touch type if I really, really tried, but it would take f-o-r-e-v-e-r.  Maybe I should take a few lessons with the British goat.