Reliving my childhood

As part of reliving my childhood, I've started to collect Legos as I had to give mine up in one of our moves. The Lego sets these days seem so much more sophisticated than what I remember. The Lego City series look neat (OK, maybe I never grew up), so I've bought a few of the pieces. During the assembly process (it is so much easier to put these together after going through high school and college :-)), I've noticed a number of things about Legos that most people probably wouldn't notice. For instance, the scale of some of the pieces is totally out of whack. One of the pieces I have is a police dog that is about half the size of the police officer (this is the dog's body, not head), so that's a pretty big dog. In the rescue helicopter I put together, it has wheels. I've been on a rescue helicopter; it has skids. Maybe some helicopters have wheels, but I don't think it is common. I know I'm over analyzing things, but I can't help myself.I also noticed that the rescue collection uses the Star of Life logo which is a registered trademark of the US Department of Transportation. Do I think that Lego has permission to use this logo? I really don't think so. The trademark for the symbol says: THE CERTIFICATION MARK IS USED BY PERSONS AUTHORIZED BY APPLICANT TO CERTIFY THAT EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE VEHICLES MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS A), THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE PERSONNEL OPERATING THE VEHICLE HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS B), OR BOTH. Do the Lego toys meet this requirement? Are the little EMTs in the set well trained? Does the ambulance meet the DOT standards? It doesn't make any noise (unless I try to sound like an ambulance), so I know it doesn't have a siren. In any case, I'm having a good time assembling my kits. I just need to find a place to put my new toy collection.

Losing your car in the parking lot

I know at times, we've all lost our car in a parking lot. Even for me as someone who always has a clue where my car is parked, I've lost my car in the Horton Plaza parking garage. If you've never been there, they have fruit and vegetable levels. The problem is that there are 2 concentric ramps, so if you enter the garage from the mall on a vegetable level, you can only get to your car if it is also on a vegetable level and vice versa for a fruit level.

My dad, however, has a funnier story about losing his car at the marathon, yesterday:

I searched the parking lot for my car for about 45 minutes and couldn't find it. Ah-ha! The Garmin was in my pocket and the last location in its memory was the car location. So I turned it on, set the last location as a waypoint, opened the antenna, and said Route To! It said 200 feet SE. I turned and looked and there it was on the other side of a fence.

I don't remember the fence being there when I parked. It was a temporary type and I think it was put up to form the exit route after the event.

Good thing, he had his Garmin iQue 3600 with him. Knowing him, he'll start adding waypoints when he gets out of his car.

To be a kid again

Last weekend, my wife and I went up to Downtown Disney in Anaheim to have dinner with her parents. While we were there, we stopped into the Lego store. I was a big fan of Legos when I was young, but in one of our family moves, I had to give them up. As I started looking around the store, I was in heaven with all the Legos there; I'm particularly fond of the City collections as I used to build my own little cities before they really had the themes. The prices of the Legos were not all the unreasonable to a working professional, but when I was young, Legos almost seemed out of reach due to not having a job. If I could be a kid again earning a nice living, that would be cool as I could buy all the Legos I wanted!

While I can't be a kid again, I can at least try to re-live my childhood by building up a Lego collection again.

Social experiment

My wife and I went shopping for a piano last week and as a little experiment, I decided to see if the salesman would really talk to us. I wore shorts and had on my Teva sandals. My wife and I look pretty young, so we're usually ignored or get poor service. When we walked into the store, we went over to one of the least expensive pianos and started looking. The first salesman asked if we needed help, we said we were just looking. The second salesman that came over to us not only didn't ignore us, but spent a lot of time talking to us and telling us about the pianos. In addition, he took us to more expensive pianos! I was pretty shocked, but pleased with the service. I wish more places (including restaurants) were age-blind and treated us like we should be treated.