A Father's Day to Remember

Today was Father's Day. Father's Day weekend actually started on Friday, when I got to ditch work a little early to attend a party at Megan's school (pictures from this are below). Most of the dads were there, and Megan and her class sang us a few songs, including "I love my daddy", to the tune of "you are my sunshine". Afterward we had some pizza, and Megan gave me a t-shirt she made. Saturday was quiet, although the kids and I did put together a new bookshelf for Riley and a pedal-less coasting bike for Megan.

On Sunday, we had cinnamon rolls for breakfast and hung around for the morning. Our big activity was to attend Robo Games, "the world's largest open robot competition", which was held in San Francisco. By the time 10 rolled around, Riley was starting to get kind of fussy. We didn't think much of it, but things took a turn for worse on the way there, when he threw up on himself in the car. Perhaps unwisely, we decided to press on, since he fell back asleep shortly afterward. We didn't have spare clothes for him, but we figured we could just buy him a shirt at the games.

The competition was cool. We started out watching some line-following robots attempt to follow a line, with mixed success. Next we spent about 15 minutes watching some remote controlled robots playing hockey, which was lots of fun. Both Megan and Riley seemed to like that a lot. Megan also really liked an acrobatic robot display next to the bot hockey - it was doing flips, cartwheels and headstands. Maura also found a nice shirt for Riley to change into.

The big event at the competition is the combat robot arena. It's this huge lexan structure (I think the announcer said it weighed 100,000 pounds), where if you're lucky, two robots enter and one robot leaves. If you aren't lucky, neither robot is incapacitated in three minutes, and then it goes to a judges' decision (boring). There are many different weight classes, from under a pound to 340 pounds. Within each class, the robots came in lots of shapes: wedges, spinners, cutters, flippers, etc.

In the first part of the video you can see a spinning robot that gave a huge whack to a wedge - but the wedge mostly stayed in place while the spinner flung itself across the arena (wedge won). In the second part of the video there's a robot with a flamethrower that roasted its opponent wielding a spiked spinning drum (flamethrower won). We saw another smaller bot that used a spinning bar to chop one of the wheels off its opponent, and a flipping robot that managed to pin its opponent by standing it on end.

We had great seats, great action, and were having lots of fun until Riley decided to barf all over Maura. Repeatedly. It seemed unlikely that we could buy Maura a new outfit at the robot competition, so we had to cut our event short and head home. We'll have to come back next year...with more changes of clothes.

After we got home, Riley and I sat and watched Robin Hood together. Things were looking up until he threw up again (fortunately I had a bowl by this time). Maura and Megan also went out to get us Chinese food. Our good luck streak continued as this promptly fell off the counter all over the floor. Sigh.

Megan did give me a nice snow globe with pictures of her and Riley in it just before she went to bed. It hasn't exploded yet, so I'm feeling cautiously optimistic.