It's 2014

January 1st was meant to be a holiday. I was going to catch up on a bit of work, but mostly do stuff around the house, take down the Christmas tree, hang out with the family and go to a family party that night. I think it was around 11am, after being pretty lazy for most of the morning, that I got my first indication that things were unraveling.

The east coast was bracing for a massive winter storm - Hercules - and all the airlines were cancelling flights in bulk. Things escalated quickly and by the time I finally broke away from the computer and hopped in the car with the family at 4:30pm we were in a Code Yellow. The yellow means everyone's highly encouraged to work.

Luckily, I'd planned ahead enough to have bought and wrapped gifts for the kids' gift exchange and a white elephant for the adults. I was also pretty happy about our white elephant, which was a Duck Dynasty Devotional book. I figured mostly anyone who ended up with it would be amused by it and also possibly find some use for it. We were meeting mom and all my brothers and sister and their families at Chuck-a-Rama. My nose was pretty much in my phone, responding to email,  the whole way to Orem and because I wasn't paying attention I let Chris shoot right past the turn, so we were late getting to the restaurant.

It was a great dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes and plenty of scones with honey butter, and fun to see everyone (including Logan who somehow instigated an explosion with his milk!), but my phone was going off the hook with alerts the whole time. When I checked, I saw that we'd gone into a Code Red and were expected to start our 24/7 rotations in the office. Sigh..... Chris, Jordan and I drove straight back home and Jemma went to the party without us.

What ensued was eight days of non-stop madness. We (meaning my team and I) worked around the clock for over a week. It hasn't technically ended yet, but I'm not going to go into detail here. I'll only say that this year at work, so far, has been quite interesting.

During those first few days, there was also a basketball tournament at Olympus. I took enough time away from work each day to go to the game, partly because I promised myself I wouldn't miss any games this year and partly because I was volunteering at the tournament - taking tickets, etc. It was a fun tourny. Fun to watch Jordan and the team play. They had one loss (very close), but mostly great wins. The season has continued with wins by a large margin.

Also, during the days of non-stop work, I was finding myself restless and having a hard time switching my mind off work. (I was also dreaming about work. One night I dreamt that we were going through emails, so many emails, of cat photos and videos and I requested that someone create an email queue and call it Cat Pix.) At some point during those days, I remembered that I'd been meaning to watch Sherlock, but hadn't ever seen it yet. So I started with Season 1, Episode 1 on Netflix one night while running on the treadmill. Because the episodes are 90+ minutes long and I was only giving them about 30 minutes each night, it took me a few days to get through each episode, but I was hooked. Hooked! Loved it. I love the humor, how closely the mirrored many of the details in the books, the characters - Sherlock's focus and lack of social-awareness, John's quick wit, Mrs. Hudson!! I'll only admit to being mildly obsessed. The best thing is, even though I've now caught up on all nine episodes (which span a few years, and the next episode is still a few years off!), I'd be happy to re-watch any of them because they're so full of detail.

I like to think I'm pretty tech-savvy, but quite often, things happen that make me realize I'm hardly ever on the most cutting edge. One night, I saw that Granite School District (which is quite a funny, and sometimes clever,  Twitter account), had tweeted something like, "stop playing Flappy Bird and go to bed." I thought they were trying to make a stodgy reference to Angry Birds and figured it was time for them to up their game. But then, a few nights later, we'd just BEAT Orem by a good 14 points (and Orem was THE team to beat for us, this season). Jordan mentioned that while someone was at the foul line, he'd asked one of Orem's star players what his high score was on Flappy Bird. Everything about it cracked me up - the fact that they were chatting during the game like that, the fact that Flappy Bird was a real thing, AND to find out that his high score was 60-something, which didn't sound all that impressive and apparently was impressive...I had to download the game.

I will readily admit that I've never been great at games. I rarely feel competitive or dedicated enough to pursue them for long and my reflexes aren't the fastest. So Flappy Bird, first of all, looked like a horrible low res version of Mario (or something...). After three tries to figure out how to make the bird fly, Jemma leaned over my shoulder and said, "Oh, just tap it to make it flap it's wings." Yeah, it was her first glimpse ever of the game, and she instinctively knew that.

It's a horrible game. Practically impossible. I had a high score of 1 after playing for about 30 (wasted) minutes. Jordan can get over 20 (his high score now is 64!). I've watched him play, but I still don't know how he does it. I guess it's the rhythm and having the right touch. Ridiculous, really.

And tonight, the developer of the game announced that he's taking it down tomorrow. Said he can't keep up. The whole thing is crazy because, despite it's impossibility, it's suuuper popular. It'll be interesting to see what happens, but it's got me thinking about:

Why was it so popular?
What is it soooo hard? And, why is that fun?
What's the developer going to do next?
What does this say about us and what we like?

I think really, what I love about the whole Flappy Bird thing, is just the irony. The irony of it all.