Category: Just for fun

Sunflower Fields: Turn Towards the Light

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“I don’t think there’s anything on this planet that more trumpets life that the sunflower. For me, that’s because of the reason behind its name. Not because it looks like the sun but because it follows the sun. During the course of the day, the head tracks the journey of the sun across the sky. A satellite dish for sunshine. Wherever light is, no matter how weak, these flowers will find it. And that’s such an admirable thing. And such a lesson in life.” – Tim Firth

I have always loved sunflowers, but after hearing that quote, I adored them. I loved that they followed the light even when the sun was hidden away. No matter how dark their world becomes they turn to the light. Isn’t that just what we humans fail to do so often when our lives become darkened? What a beautiful reminder and how special it is that they do so resemble the sun to give us some of the light they have taken into themselves? 

When one thinks of sunflower fields, one may think of the endless fields of Tuscany and forget to look in one’s own backyard. I will say that sunflower fields have been gaining popularity, at least in my area with farmers now taking time to plant fields for visitors to come and enjoy. Most will allow you to leave with a single memento of your visit. One flower to bring you sunshine. At Second Mountain, you are encouraged to bring as many containers as you can because for just a few dollars, you can pick as many sunflowers as you desire! And I did! 

My mother and I drove up at the very end of the sunflower season to catch the last blooms of the season. We had been carefully awaiting this for almost a year as we had learned of this hidden gem to the north of us from a work colleague shortly after the sunflower season had ended. Unfortunately, peak sunflower season is in August which usually has beastly weather of heat and humidity. Being as my mother is an asthmatic those two are not the greatest combination for her being able to enjoy the great outdoors. Being allergic to bees, it was important for me to avoid warmer days when they would be more active, so we carefully watched both their facebook page and the weather, hoping for just the right conditions. Finally, at the end of the season the weather was just right; we packed up our car with containers and made the hour-long drive up north. 

Even in their last days the fields were a glorious feast for the eyes. The vibrant flowers naturally were turned towards the evening sun. A rock cover band played in the background, which if you enjoy such things, I am certain it added to the enjoyment. Not being a fan of such things, I did not find it particularly enjoyable. I would have preferred a cello performance or swing band, but to each their own. I am not one to dictate to others what sort of music they can listen to or even if music should be playing. Just if you do visit a field with live music, bring your earbuds or headphones so that you can put on something you do enjoy if the music isn’t to your taste. Then again, even if there isn’t a live band, bring them anyway. It is good to have music close at hand to enhance an experience or help drown out unpleasant noise. The small crowd of people were taking photos and harvesting flowers. I took some time to photograph the sunflowers to help capture the glory of the fields, even the ones who were nearing the end of their life cycle.

Perhaps, I am a bit gothic in nature, but I always found the end of the growing season to be beautiful in its own right. There is a certain loveliness to the death of a flower; having lived brilliantly and gloriously, it now loses its color, going quietly into that good night to make way for the next season. There is a quiet stillness about it as it is no longer abuzz with visitors, often robbed of its seeds by birds or other creatures. It is only a shadow of itself, like an echo. What struck me as even in their last days, they still were turned faithfully to the sun, never losing the light. 

Turning back to the brighter field, I gathered up sunflowers in my arms until I could carry no more. Walking through the golden sea, with my arms filled with flowers felt almost surreal, as if I had entered a dream. The flowers stand proud as if they are sentinels of the very sun itself. Stray breezes wind their way through the fields causing some to break their vigil to dance, perhaps rebelliously, but more likely for the sheer joy of our closest star. 


Personally, I enjoyed the fields most when the band was quiet and I could simply enjoy the wonder of nature. To have time to disconnect from the world and tune into the natural world. It was almost transformative to be in their midst, laden with the flowers, as if I were about to become a nature spirit one with the fields. The quiet of the fields let me really listen to the ecosystem going on around me. The buzz of insects and the way the wind rustled through the flowers. Truly, a sunflower field is summer incarnate and I made certain to fill my car with lots of summer. 

While I admonish your dear reader to not live in regret, I do have a small regret from our trip. Not having more containers to bring even more sunflowers home! Part of the joy of our trip was having a house filled with sunflowers. Every corner of our living room boasted these bright blooms. It was like we had brought the sunflower fields home with us! They lasted for about a week and a half which more than made the trek worth it, even though there were closer fields nearby which were just as glorious to witness. 

How can you visit a sunflower field?

Unfortunately, most of the sunflower fields will not permit you to cut their flowers by the bucket full. So if you are looking for the ability to bring as much of summer home with you as possible, that may be a bit tricky or cost you quite a bit more than my $10 admission. However, there are plenty of places which offer sunflower fields to visit and photograph. Personally, the bigger the fields the better they are, but do not count out the smaller fields, for their charm. 

I encourage you to take your time when visiting. Don’t fill it up with endless photos but rather take moments to pause and drink in the moment. The blossoms of the sunflowers are the last hurrah of summer before the leaves begin to turn and fall all too quickly becomes winter. Bask in the warmth of the season, let it seep into your bones for you will need those memories when the wind roars and cuts through to your core. Enjoy the brightness of the yellow blossoms, because color will be slowly drained away after one last defiant show by the trees. Take the memories with you into the winter of life so that way when the darkness comes, you can recall the lessons of the sunflower and turn towards the light. 

Completed: Late Summer 2022

Miles from home: 45

Cost: $10

Challenge Mode: Nerding Out in My Favorite Game

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It may surprise you dear reader, to discover that I am a bit of a nerd or perhaps it was obvious from the start. I have written about the importance of having bucket list items that are unique to yourself and I am a firm believer of practicing what one preaches as well as leading by example. Therefore, I will share with you one of the items that are unique to me. I’m not sure that I can be said to be a gamer as I don’t tend to play many different games. I usually tend to play one or two for a long time and they are typically mmo’s that play with my boyfriend as a joint activity. 

However, I still have goals and enjoy completing challenges within the games that I play. In the spring of 2014, I found myself playing World of Warcraft’s Mists of Pandaria expansion with a singular goal, obtaining the elusive challenge mode armor. As the name implies, it was a specific challenge to be completed in the game. According to wowhead, only 9% of profiles obtained the achievement associated with obtaining the armor. That isn’t to say it was the hardest achievement in the game, I am certain there were more difficult challenges, but it certainly was difficult requiring a player to truly master an individual class. It was especially challenging, since I chose a class I had never played before, opted to “boost it” to skip over the pesky leveling process and then jumped into my first challenge mode dungeon without having done much more than read a general guide on how to play it which only added to the difficulty.

To those unfamiliar with games, I apologize if my description seems a bit obtuse, in the interest of brevity, I shall not overly burden you with lengthy explanations. I suppose the closest analogy that most people would get is to pretend that a class in a game was a position on a sports team, say a quarterback. The quarterback plays a specific role on the team and has specific responsibilities for that position. In a game, the positions have specific moves that only that position or class can utilize in the game. In this particular game, there are challenges known as dungeons in which a group of five players work together to defeat a series of bosses or “villains”. On second thought, I probably should have picked a different analogy considering how little I know about sports….I digress. 

What made it challenging was that unlike the rest of the game, certain advantages that one could typically gain such as better equipment to make it easier to defeat bosses, inside the challenge mode dungeons those advantages were stripped away, requiring you to rely less on your equipment and more on your skill alone. Hence, the thrill of overcoming the challenge presented. Imagine if you will, you were given sneakers that helped you run faster and then you were asked to run the same race track again only this time they gave you shoes with lead weights attached. Then told you, you need to run the race even faster than you used to. 

From Blizzard’s announcement. As you can see, they wanted to give us a mode where we could push ourselves as players.

One doesn’t need to have played wow or even any other video game to recognize that there is a certain satisfaction that comes from executing a skill based challenge rather than being afforded the ability to overcome it through other means. Consider bowling, if you score 70  – 100 points, it’s considered a good game. How would you feel if you executed a game with an end score of 120 on a lane with bumpers which prevent your ball from going in the gutter resulting in you obtaining points that would have otherwise been zero? How about if you executed the same score on a lane without bumpers? What about one that had obstacles or other handicaps? Almost all of us have had the experience of having the training wheels come off and being asked to perform at a high level. The sense of victory one feels at having conquered such a challenge is a rare treat in our modern age. 

Each dungeon was timed, requiring a small team to execute the challenge within the limit in order to obtain the achievement. Not only that, but also the game required a player to complete the challenge on 9 different dungeons, each with their own mechanics and barriers. One had to learn how to quickly work with a group of strangers to execute a given strategy that may not always work given the makeup of the group you were with. Sometimes, a combination of classes simply did not work for a given dungeon like when I was on a druid healer and my boyfriend was playing his druid tank. There was one fight where the druid healer simply could not keep the tank up. We switched up the tank to a warrior and it was much easier to keep the warrior up for that particular fight than the druid. He switched to a different healer and had zero issues staying alive. 

It was a bit of an adrenaline rush to play through the dungeons, responding in the moment to what other players were doing,and alternating how I was approaching a fight given the semi-randomness of the mechanics. I would use moves that I rarely if ever used before, because I never needed to. It felt like I was pushing each class to its limit of what it could do to pull out all the stops. I felt like I was learning more about how to actually play the healer role than I ever had before. I noticed that when I went into other areas of the game, it was much easier to recover bad pulls and botched mechanics.  

My very first CM armor set! Isn’t it pretty?

Not to mention, it was just plain fun to dance around damage, throwing out heals, keeping other players from the brink of death, damaging the boss as time and mana allowed, all at a high level of performance. I enjoyed the hyper focus it required keeping an eye out on everyone’s health bars as well as the pools of damage one needed to avoid, making split second decisions about casting a move quickly or casting a slower spell to conserve mana, being mindful of the cooldowns on all of the moves that one could use and and timing them to support the cooldowns the other players were using at the same time. One wrong decision could mean having to restart the entire dungeon again. 

There were so many failed attempts. I spent hours trying to conquer just one of the dungeons, trying again and again. Still, at the end of each successful attempt, I was elated. At the end of all nine, I had the sweet reward of victory, the achievement, a cool mount and of course one of the best looking armor sets in the game. Might some people think it’s worthless chasing a digital reward that only appears in a digital world? Perhaps, but it represents having conquered a particular skill based challenge. As I stated before, only 9% of profiles obtained this achievement, so I think it’s something worthy to brag about. Besides, it’s my list and I can do what I want!

One of the great things about playing games is that skills gained in a game can be generalized to life outside of the game. I found myself more confident in overcoming challenges in my everyday life and managing stress and anxiety in the moment to still perform at a high level. In other words, managing my performance stress in the game, helped me manage my performance stress at my job and school. It also helped me gain skills in working with other people in high stress situations to achieve mutual goals, something that as a social worker, I’ve needed to do many times. There is value in pushing yourself even in a leisure activity to perform at a high level of skill because of how those skills transfer to other areas of your life. 

So what’s your challenge armor?

Obtaining the challenge mode armor is now an impossibility, (at least for now) as the dungeons to obtain them were removed from the game after the release of Warlords of Dreanor. However, the principles of this item can still be obtained whether you play WoW or not. The first principle is of course picking an activity that is unique to you. Maybe you don’t play games, but you knit or garden. The second is pushing yourself to perform that activity at a high level of skill. Is there a sewing project that is particularly difficult? Maybe there’s a musical piece that is known to be a beast to play. Maybe you play a sport and you want to master a certain skill. 

You may be surprised at how satisfying it is to have mastered something new and the confidence that follows to other areas of your life. Perhaps, you will need to involve other people and make new friends along the way or strengthen existing relationships through a mutual bond of overcoming the challenge together. Even years later, those who completed the challenge modes with me reference that time together and talk about the experience. In fact, I enjoyed completing the achievement so much that in the following expansion I jumped at the chance to get the new challenge mode dungeons completed to obtain special weapons. 

Completed: Summer/Fall 2014 (I completed it on Paladin, Druid & Priest)

Miles from home: 0 – completed from my computer 

Cost: $15 monthly sub-fee as well as $60 for the expansion at the time.

Spontaneous Experiences are Buried Treasure!

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There are some things in life one cannot plan for, but when opportunity comes knocking one has to be ready to follow the white rabbit and see how far into wonderland the journey will take you. This is a short story about how I once found buried treasure. 

It was my senior year of college when one of our friends who graduated the year before decided to come back to campus for a visit. She introduced us to a new idea, geocaching. She explained the concept was that someone would put out gps coordinates of a container that participants would seek out in order to exchange goods, usually trinkets and the like. The containers had a log that one would record one’s name. One of the caches she was seeking out had a location somewhere on our campus. I wasn’t quite sure about the entire process, but it seemed like an interesting idea. Being the naturally, adventurous types myself, my roommate Ray and Laura set out to look for the cache. Keep in mind this was back in 2009 when many of us didn’t have smartphones with gps capabilities. We had a printed out map with coordinates and gumption. 

Soon we found ourselves out in the trails of our campus, looking through the undergrowth of the deciduous forest. You may think that I exaggerate when I speak about my college having a forest or trails, but the truth is, Messiah College (now Messiah University) had a rather large undeveloped section of campus called the “back 40”. It was always one of my favorite places to visit during my time there. Despite having walked on the trails many times, I had not ventured off the trails before that day; mostly because of my run in with a snake my first week on campus, but that day was not a day for cowards! Victory to the brave! 

I distinctly remember crunching through underbrush, keeping an eye out for poison ivy and snakes. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or how I’d know if I found it, but I was determined to help my friend on her small expedition. It was around an old wooden bridge that we discovered not what we were looking for, but rather an old tin can that had been hammered shut. We checked the map and the coordinates, the tin was decidedly not the cache in question. At first, we sort of dismissed it and continued our search but to no avail. Intrigued by our discovery, though disappointed that we had not been successful in finding the cache, we headed back to our campus apartment.

It took quite a bit of doing, but eventually we were able to pry open the can to reveal a mud filled container of something. We dumped out the contents and were surprised to find it had been filled with quarters. We immediately began counting out piles of 4 and then stacking the piles up 10 at a time. We quickly discovered we had found over $100. Buried treasure! 

I had not set out that morning to find treasure, it was a spontaneous adventure untaken on a whim. Nor was it an especially long adventure, but it was memorable. And yes, I understand that $100 is not exactly buried treasure, certainly not in today’s economy, but to three poor college students it certainly felt like treasure.  

How can you find buried treasure?

I cannot promise that you’ll find treasure if you decide to go geocaching, but there are plenty of aps out there that will allow you to participate.  

To embody the principle of this particular post, embrace spontaneity. Go on that silly adventure with your friend, you never know where it will lead or what you will find. I have lots of stories that begin with an invitation to something unexpected. I have yet to regret saying yes. Having a list and making plans is all well and good, but one should not be so bore-sighted on the current goals that one is not open to opportunities that arise. Sure you might not have $100 at the end of the day, but you will have memories made with someone dear to you which is worth far more. 

Completed: 2009

Miles from home: 0 (when counting campus as the home point)

Cost: Free

Escape Room

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The clock was ticking and every moment counted down to either our escape or doom. Even if we managed to beat one clock, another was also ticking, an uncertain one because just as quickly as we were solving the puzzles, so was the other just through the bars. If we could just solve the puzzle we would win! Her fingers trembled with excitement as realization struck and my sister’s friend exclaimed “I got it!” We were off! But so was the other team. Knowledge that they were as close as we were semi-scattered our members for a brief second before order could be restored, but it was the delay that would cost us. As we tried to get our final pieces in place, we heard their yells of elation. We were too late, by mere seconds. We did complete the puzzle, we were not about to simply throw in the towel completely, but the sting of defeat was still there. We looked over at the other team, well played sirs and madams, well played. 

My team after our loss.

In 2007, the first escape room was launched by Takao Kato in Kyoto Japan. A fan of manga and in the publishing business, he told the Japan Times “I wondered why interesting things didn’t happen in my life, like they did in books. I thought I could create my own adventure, a story, and then invite people to be a part of it. The world certainly accepted such an invitation as the concept of “escape rooms” swept nation after nation. Ironically bringing everything full circle as it can trace its roots back through “escape the room” video games, adventure game shows on television, which spawned from D’n’D where you can be the protagonist of your own adventure, which is exactly the appeal. 

For me my love of puzzle adventure comes from the now classic video game of Myst. My siblings and I spent hours going through the game, sharing notes and progress, taking turns trying to solve the puzzles. I still enjoy puzzle games on the computer, but an escape room allows you to really feel and experience the story in a different way because of course you’re in the actual environment interacting with the physical objects. I’m not necessarily a fan of having a timer, since it means I can’t be as reflective as I can be in the video game. I happen to enjoy just exploring an environment, taking in the physical artifacts of a civilization as a semi-anthropologist. Do I care that the civilization doesn’t actually exist and is only a game? No, but I shalln’t digress too much. However, most escape rooms aren’t set in exotic alien civilizations so I needn’t worry about having my contemplations being overly rushed. 

Escape rooms allow you to be “in” the story, solve the crime, stop the villain, rescue the princess and all do it before needing to be home for supper. For a brief time, the outside world stops existing and you can live out the fantasy of being the hero. They are often done in small groups which means you can bring your friends along for the ride. Some you can even pit your friends against each other as I did. Others are purely cooperative. It’s a chance to get away from screens and enjoy something different. Some of the puzzles are easy, others quite fiendish and you can select the level of difficulty based on where you want to go . There are leaderboards in some places where the fastest teams to complete a given puzzle are showcased. 

For me, I joined my sister and her group of friends for a dueling escape room. The theme was the old west where a group of convicts were trying to escape the jail. We started off “tied up” with ropes that we had to “undo” by way of a rope maze and then we were off. Trying to open safes, collect clues, decipher scripts and even throw balls to try and knock down clues that were trapped on the other side of the bars. Each side had to solve puzzles, racing each other to the finish. At one point we were forced to work together despite the competitive nature of both teams. Neither team made use of the control room for hints instead spying to steal from one another. 

The showdown room….

Either way, completing it was a fun mental exercise of trying to think fast under pressure, learning how to quickly work together as a team and allowing different people to play up their strengths. I was not the person to throw the balls at the cards to knock the clues down so we could see. However, I’m a natural leader so there were times when I jumped in to give direction to help divide up the tasks. Nothing quite like being thrown in the middle of an adventure with a new group of people that you have to learn to work with quickly! 

So if you think you might want to join your friends for a semi-real life mystery adventure, an escape room may be for you. 

How can you complete your own escape room?

The cool thing about escape rooms is they come in many shapes and sizes. You can even order smaller versions online to do at your home which I did in the middle of the pandemic. It’s not quite as immersive as an actual room, but it was still quite enjoyable. If you want something that is in between an escape room and a boxed version, you could do as my sister’s friend Joanne does and make your own puzzle game for your friends. 

My sister and her team solving the mystery of who broke into the backerey!

Every few months, she invites a group over to her home and introduces them to a mystery that has to be solved or a race that has to be completed. She hides clues around the house along with various puzzles that we have to use those clues to solve. We usually compete in teams for prizes, but we always have a good time working together and unveiling the answers. One doesn’t need a large room, filled with stuff to create an escape room or a lot of money to make one. It can be just as fun or more so to create it for your friends and have them create one for you. Take turns, start a yearly tradition of hosting a party. Bucket list experiences are all well and good, but cultivating close personal friendships through shared activities that everyone can enjoy is even better! 

Completed: 2019

Miles from home: 33 

Cost: $125 for 8 people (about $16 per person) / For an at home party, you will most likely spend about $50 – $100 on various materials for a group of 12 – 16 people.