I picked up my young friend at 8 a.m. We went to Daylight Doughnuts for a stylish morning meal.
Then we took his bicycle to Performance Bicycle. The bike had a bent wheel, which we asked them to remedy.
We drove to Elm Fork Nature Preserve in Carrollton. We walked through this wooded area, and enjoyed the trail that came out near pond. Then we headed down the street to Sandy Lake Amusement Park. Sandy Lake Amusement Park is 40 years old. It is something of a Dallas County tradition. We played miniature golf on a course in imperfect repair. The course featured huge concrete slopes. When one golfed uphill, it was hard to keep the ball from rolling back to one. When one golfed downhill, a ball could go an 1/32nd of a mile after a putt. We liked the course very much. We did not keep score assiduously.
The park had peacocks, goats, and a tilt-a-whirl. We first played games in the arcade section.
The arcade had a very old pinball machine called Game Show. My young friend played the first game. When he lost his first ball, he said "I want to play again", being too young to realize that one gets 3 balls in pinball (and far too young to remember when one got 5). He had an amazing time playing his third ball, scoring over 6,000,000 on a game that awarded a free game at 3,600,000. Later, I made 3,900,000,also winning a game. We liked the games at the arcade.
We got a package of ride tickets and rode some rides. We rode the rock-o-plane, which is like a little ferris wheel in which each rider is enclosed in a cage capable of spinning. My young friend liked to make it spin and spin, which would not have been my own choice of activity.
Then we rode the scrambler, followed by the ride which is usually a boat going in a half-arc, but today was the Space Shuttle. By the time we were on the tilt-a-whirl, I was entirely queasy, which is very unlike me. I watched while my friend rode the last ride. Still, we had a good time at Sandy Lake.
We dined at China King buffet in Carrollton on Josey, where I managed to eat healthy food and not fried foods. Then we went to Game Stop, where my friend had a gift card from last Xmas. He bought a used game on sale, wisely preserving credit on his card.
We then drove to Escape Coffee Shop in Allen. I described to him how I had gone to the internet archive, located some horror movies in the public domain onto a small USB and had similarly loaded some netlabel music I thought he might enjoy. This proved a good decision, as he was soon sitting in the coffee shop, watching Bela Lugosi's "White Zombie" on his computer.
My perception is that zombies and something called the Zombie Apocalypse capture a great deal of kids' attention nowadays.
I dropped him off at home, and went for an hour-long walk on Trinity Trail, north of Brockdale Park. I was delighted to come upon 4 young armadillos, more than babies but clearly not worldly-wise, who stayed very near me as they foraged. Here is what one looked like who was, as armadillos do, digging for food:
After a failed trip to Radio Shack, I went to Best Buy to get a gift for my wife for our anniversary. A young man there helped me find just what I sought.
My wife and I wanted to eat outdoors in the gorgeous Spring weather yesterday. We went to Bluefish Grill, but the noise of a retro band playing soul covers drove us away. We ended up at Hedary's, a quiet Mediterranean restaurant in Allen. We enjoyed sitting on its porch.
We came home and rented the movie "Skyfall". This James Bond film was fascinating for an hour, but then it lost its way.