A Familial Spotlight

See my grandparents?  They're cool.

My grandparents rock.  I mean it.  My grandparents could totally beat up other people's grandparents, but they wouldn't because they're classy like that.  They are action-adventure grandparents.  They pretty much kick all the ass.

Last weekend, I went to their pad.  One of the nice things about being here is that it's only about two and a half hours away from their mountain abode.  Grandma invited me up so that I could do school work in a new location and be fed good food, and other nice things.  Their house has a picturesque view of the mountains, and stepping inside, you might be fooled into thinking they were average grandparents, what with Grandma's crafts, and Grandpa's trains downstairs, and the homey bric-a-brac on the shelves.  You would of course, be dead wrong.  I was serious when I said they were action-adventure grandparents.

Grandma has been playing Tetris pretty much since it was invented.  That, in and of itself, is not an amazing detail.  However, she also bought a working Super Nintendo at a yard sale some years back, and consequently bought every Tetris-styled game for it she could.  Most people, upon sitting down to play games with their grandmother, might expect to win pretty hard.  After suffering a number of crushing defeats at her hands, I had to admit that Grandma was the superior player.  Sure, it's not Halo.  But how many people have ever been schooled at any video game at all by their grandmother?

It doesn't end there.  They are world travelers, and have only stepped up their game.  Oh sure, everyone goes to Europe.  There's recognizable toilets and nobody has to buy leech-proof socks to go there.  So they did that, ages back.  Russia.  China.  Turkey.  Like people on a scavenger hunt for continents, they started branching out.  Grandma, in search of the best shopping in the world and pretty things, Grandpa in search of birds.  They go to Costa Rica on a regular basis, because a little town of rain forest paradise just happens to be their sister city.  Apparently finding habitable regions too tame, they took a cruise to Antarctica to see the penguins.  They went to India with my mom and stepdad, and they don't even like Indian food, that's how hardcore they are.  They've showed me their pictures of the Sydney opera house, and movie-picturesque New Zealand.  Fairly recently, Grandpa took a trip to Borneo, which is where the leech socks came in.  They have traveled in conditions that make me cringe, and I am pretty travel-hardy.

The upshot of all this is that I admire these two immensely, and am in constant awe of their atypical grandparent behavior.  (Not to mention that Grandpa still remembers songs from when he performed in H.M.S. Pinafore in high school.  I remember, like, one line from performing in high school.)

To the rest of my family -- You guys also rock, but these two deserved a shout-out for hosting me over the weekend.