Loulou Downtown

Game Playing : Tomb Raider

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Loulou

After I opened the paper-wrapped package Nick handed me with a wink last month, I did a little happy dance. Now, I am a happy person but can’t say I dance a little jig of joy all that frequently. Yes, I do so in my mind after finding an excellent item at the thrift store (which I did last week … new Thrifting Finds post coming up next week!), but an actual arms-in-the-air-yahooing kind of thing is not my norm.

Why this happy dance then? Well, the package contained the newest Tomb Raider game for X-Box. I’ve played a couple of these games, featuring the brave adventurer and explorer Lara Croft, so I knew that I was in for a whole lot of fun with this new game.

I don’t often talk about my video game-playing hobby but I usually have a game on the go at any given time. Sometimes I will play them through fairly quickly and with others I’ll just come back to them every so often when I’m in the mood. I can’t say I enjoy all video games, as the ones that are simply ‘shoot ‘em ups’ leave me uninterested, but the ones with a progressive storyline and lots of brain challenging puzzles really grab me. The Lara Croft games offer me exactly what I love in a video game.

I just finished it this week and was not disappointed for a moment.

Well I should be honest and say that I got all the way to the final battle but gave up after multiple tries, but the final battles of these types of games are always really hard for an average gamer like myself to complete and I have found that I don’t really miss out by not always wining that last, almost impossible, showdown that most games end with. All I miss is watching the credits roll.

For anyone wondering how I got these pictures … using my old lower pixel camera I took photos of the hd television set and then cropped them with Photoshop.

Now, I don’t expect to convince non-players to suddenly turn to an X-Box for captivating inexpensive entertainment, but I will close in saying that I found this installment of Tomb Raider to be a really good time.

Watching a Tulip Bloom

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Loulou

I’ve mentioned that this was an excellent year for the tulips in our garden.

This wasn’t a complete surprise because we planted some new ones last fall (posted about here) which turned out to be quite spectacular. Without knowing what we were doing when we got the new ones, we managed to get some which bloomed early, some later, and some really late, which continue to grace us with their beauty today.

But what did come as a surprise was the number of really old ones that bloomed that haven’t done so for years. Some of these were planted by the people who lived here before us, and some were planted by me the first couple of years that we moved in. For more than five years these bulbs have been dormant (I’m not sure of the exact gardeners’ term for what happened to them) and then suddenly this year decided to bloom their little heads off.

This resulted in a stunning display to tulips at our place this year. It was thrilling! (It’s the small things, right?)

We have already decided that when fall rolls around again this year we are going to add more because it was just too much fun seeing them all come up like magic.

You can see some photos I took of the flowers and how I made greeting cards from them in this post, but today’s post is about this particular random one which, before any of them had bloomed, I had found broken off by an animal. Not sure what animal but it could have been the same skunk that Nick shooed away from our front door only last night. Don’t worry, it went away peacefully.

Anyway, I found this tulip laying on the ground but I had no idea what it would look like because at that point they were all green buds. So I brought it inside and this is what unfolded.

The vase is the one I found in my most recent thrifting trip, discussed here.

My heart goes out to those effected by the devastating tornado that struck in the USA yesterday.
loulou

Caturday Goes to the Dogs : A Good Girl Waiting

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Loulou

Hi. I may have blown out the cute-meter with these shots of a little hound dog I came upon while walking along Queen Street the other day. What do you think?