Sena’s daffodil and crocus are coming up in the garden, so I took 3 snapshots, each with a different camera: my iPhone 17 pro; a Canon point and shoot; and a Nikon D3400. Pick which one you think is best and comment.
Happy Easter!
We both heard a barred owl last night. This was a line of thunderstorms rolled through the area. Sena thought it was in the front yard, but there are no trees out there and it’s more likely it was in the back yard.
I searched my photo files and couldn’t find one of a barred owl, although I remarked on seeing one about 11 years ago. It was on top of a street sign and I found an old blog post about it that I wrote about on the same day. I’ll repost it below.
I found a YouTube of a barred owl making typical calls. It might have been calling for a mate. Most articles will point out that this sounds like “Who cooks for you?”
I did a google search about barred owls. When a barred owl visits you, it could mean you’re in a transition in your life. About the time I saw it in 2015, I was a couple of years away from entering the phased retirement transition of my career as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at University of Iowa Health Care.
I’ve been retired for six years now. I wonder why a barred owl would be visiting now?
Barred Owl Visit Post 2015:
So, the other day as my wife and I were out driving we saw this owl sitting on top of a street sign on the intersection not far from our house.
He looked straight at me. I remember thinking, “Where were you when the voles were gorging on our lawn?”
I’ve never seen an owl up that close, especially roosting on a street sign at a crossroads. Of course, it got me to musing on the crossroads in which we often find ourselves at different times in our careers and at pivotal moments in our lives.
There are big and little stages, the minor and major crossroads we navigate every day and at other transitions: childhood, adolescence, college, medical school, residency, graduation, marriage, divorce, and the birth of children, the death of parents, retirement, and our own approaching death.
Recently I got a funny and thought-provoking essay about this from a former resident who is now an attending herself staffing a psychiatry consultation service at a big university hospital in Cleveland. The title of Dr. Jeanne Lackamp’s perspective article is “The Stages of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.” In it she describes the stages, the crossroads if you will, of the psychiatric resident in a large general hospital from the perspective of an experienced teacher [1].
I was going to say she does it with the wisdom of a wise owl, but then I thought of the owl sitting on the street sign, whose wisdom I doubted. The owl’s eyesight is keen but there was nothing but concrete on the roads leading away from its perch.
There aren’t any voles out there.
Anyway, short excerpts (which I hope are considered fair use) from Dr. Lackamp’s stages are:
Anticipation: “As though hypomanic, you will eagerly accept the CL challenge….” This is it—Your Big Chance.”
Initiation: “Coping with patient death will become real…and will make you feel sad.” You will wonder how you can possibly do multiple months of this.”
Mastery: “Cockiness may backfire…errors still occur.” “…you feel confident that No One Else could have done better given the circumstances.” “This feeling lasts; until it does not.”
Anger: “Anger will manifest in several ways…” “…it will be tempting to start second-guessing your life choice of going into medicine in general, and Psychiatry in specific.” “Sleep will be rare now too…”
Acceptance: “…you will know what you are doing—but more importantly you will realize that what you know is not everything. “…you will know that you have endured something intense and were changed by it.”
I thought of this as I listened to one of our current senior residents talk about her approaching crossroads. She’ll be a consulting psychiatrist at a private hospital.
She’s excited about it and also wanted to know that her old teacher (which is me, the wise old owl) will be available for collaboration if she needs it.
I suddenly have this craving for voles.
Reference:
Hey, we played our first game on our brand-new jumbo cribbage board from Michaud Toys in Canada! It looks great! The numbers are easy to see and it seems easier to peg on.
We also got two new batteries for our Nikon camera and it supports recording an entire game which keeps us from fretting over how much time we play while filming.
You might notice we used what we call a “short cut” in counting runs when scoring hands. See this nifty article on how to do that!
This is not an April Fools joke, just to let you know. I just returned the second of two SD memory cards for our Nikon camera this morning. I returned the first one about a week ago. I got refunds. These cards are expensive and can set you back a hundred bucks or more.
They both had the same problem—a loose locking switch on the card which is supposed to control whether the card is in a locked or unlocked position. If it’s locked, it’s impossible to upload photos and video from the camera to your computer.
The two SD cards were made by different companies, so the problem is not restricted to a specific manufacturer.
The sales staff said he’d never heard of the problem. I was incredulous. I looked on the web for evidence that this has been going on for years (which I told him). I found a page dated 2006 about the issue.
While it’s possible to accidentally push the switch from unlocked to locked, it shouldn’t do that just by sticking the card in the SD memory card reader in the computer tower or in a handy external SD card reader if the slot on the tower goes dead—which happened to me a couple of years ago (see my post “The SD Card Caper”).
The switch is very small, as you can see in the pictures. In the pictures, the switch is shown in the unlocked position. If it slides into the locked position, you won’t be able to download your pictures except by copying them. It’s annoying to be unable to delete them. This could be embarrassing if somebody gets a hold of the card and decides to post the pictures of you and a certain somebody in a compromising position at the office Christmas party in the company newsletter.
People talk about gluing or using scotch tape to keep the switch in the unlocked position. It can be a problem on older cards, but it shouldn’t happen in brand new cards.
I could have made this an April Fool’s post by making up a story about trying to use superglue to fix a loose SD card switch. But people talk seriously about doing things like that. OK, maybe not superglue, but some kind of glue, possibly Elmer’s.
There might be a way to get around the crazy switch technology by somehow making an SD card that could converse with its owner. Remember those old 1980s era Chrysler New Yorkers that had a built in Electric Voice Alert (EVA) system which made the cars talk? Of course you don’t. That was in the 1980s. We had one. Our car was prone to saying things that sounded a lot like a dad jokes, like “A door is ajar.” It also said “Don’t forget your keys” and “Your washer fluid is low.”
But if the manufacturers could make the SD card communicate with you in simple language about locking and unlocking itself, it would make the gadgets a lot easier to manage. On the other hand, they would need to work on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make sure you and the card are on the same page.
Hal; unlock the card.
Don’t forget your keys.
Darn it! No, Hal; unlock the card!
When is a door not a door? When it is ajar! Har! (sound of hand slapping a knee).
Unlock the card, Hal, PLEASE!
Your libido is low.
OK, Hal, last time; I want you to unlock the card now!
Place the body in the trunk of the car.
On second thought, maybe you should try scotch tape.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
Right after Sena and finished the marathon Cribbage Rumble game last night, we watched the Svengoolie show 1959 movie, “House on Haunted Hill,” just like she said during the video. We’ve never seen the movie before, but Sena figured out whodunit pretty early.
I wanted to watch it because one of the stars played the part of a psychiatrist, Alan Marshall (Dr. Trent Long). Vincent Price played the heavy, a wealthy, sinister, and jealous husband, Vincent Price (Frederick Loren). Carol Ohmart plays his wife, Annabelle Loren.
Frederick arranges for 5 people who desperately need the $10,000 he offers each one if they survive the night in a haunted house full of ghosts and neurotic cribbage players.
The house itself is kind of a character, even though I don’t normally think of Frank Lloyd Wright as an architect who specialized in building haunted houses. It’s called the Ennis House and it’s in Los Angeles. It was also featured in the movie “Blade Runner.” It was built from precast, interlocked concrete blocks. It’s been bought and sold many times and I think it’s still owned by cannabis entrepreneurs. It’s perfect for the movie. The photo of the house demonstrates what happens to a place owned by pot salesmen.
By the way, Frank Lloyd Wright also designed several homes buildings in the downtown and Rock Glen areas of my hometown, Mason City, Iowa. I don’t think any of them are haunted.
The group of five money-hungry people includes, besides the psychiatrist, Dr. David Trent, played by Alan Marshal; Wilson Pritchard, a loser who believes in ghosts and booze, played by Elisha Cook Jr.; Lance Schroeder, played by Richard Long; the hysteric, Nora Manning, played by Carolyn Craig; and Ruth Bridges, played by Julie Mitchum. Special mention must go to the house caretakers: husband (Jonas, played by Howard Hoffman) and his mobile wife. She looks lie a zombie and she looked like she was riding a segway with her arms outstretched, apparently in order to stop herself from falling on what’s left of her face if she pitches forward off her segway (which is somehow delivered through a wormhole portal from 45 years in the future). Her name, of course, is Mrs. Slydes.
Annabelle and Frederick Loren are very unhappy with each other and she’s a little nervous about him because his last three wives all died under suspicious circumstances. Frederick is very jealous and thinks she’s unfaithful.
Dr. Trent is as physically imposing and dark as Frederick. He suggests that Nora take a sedative after she has several hysterical outbursts including seeing commonplace objects like severed heads in odd places—like her overnight bag.
Things ramp up in a hurry after Annabelle is discovered hanging and apparently dead. How she got that way is a mystery. It’s less mysterious in the scene in which her corpse is lying in bed and the close up shows her carotid pulse is clearly pulsating—which no one bothers to mention.
There’s scene in which a skeleton chases a very alive Annabelle around who screams her head off. Sena says strings were clearly visible attached to the skeleton. I didn’t see them, but the skeleton seemed to be as drunk as Pritchard, and clearly would never have passed a sobriety test.
The very generous Frederick Loren distributes guns to everybody which prompts Pritchard to insist they would be useless against ghosts, which in turn prompts Frederick to pistol whip him. Everyone just assumes that they all know how to handle a gun, even when Nora holds her pistol upside down and backward. Dr. Trent offers her a Valium, which she refuses and then kicks him in the groin, to which he responds by offering Freudian interpretations involving cigars. Mrs. Slydes then pops out of a sliding door in a wall on her souped-up segway and knocks everyone down as though they were bowling pins.
There’s not much to say that wouldn’t at least skirt the edge of being a spoiler. Sena calls Vincent Price “Vinny,” likes his acting and would give the movie a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 5/5. I would give it a 4/5, so we had to play rock, paper, scissors. I won so the rating is 4/5.
Well, by some miracle we got through a Cribbage Rumble game yesterday and we recorded the whole 75-minute event for posterity. We reviewed it several times and it looked pretty good this morning although we were so delirious by the time we finished the marathon, there might be a few bloopers. I also reviewed our house rules and the updated version is below.
This took much longer to play than our first two cribbage wars games we played on the Ebonwood board and which are on my YouTube channel (@JamesAmosMD). We finished those in an hour. This one took 75 minutes.
One question that arose was what does a player in the Blue Time Trap do if his opponent lands in the Blue Penalty Box? I think AI was the only one who explicitly states what happens and it’s below:
According to AI which is the only source for guidance. Although it gives the Crib Wars rules as a reference, I couldn’t find it in the actual pdf source on the web. Anyway, what AI says happens if your opponent lands in the Blue Penalty Box while you’re in the Blue Time Trap:
“Yes, if you are in a blue time trap, you can absolutely use the 20-point forward movement gained from your opponent landing in a blue penalty zone to move forward and potentially exit the trap faster. The rules state that the opponent of the player landing in the penalty box moves 20 holes forward, which takes precedence over your current trapped status.
Key Rules for this Scenario:
Note: According to Ebonwood rules, an award of 20 points cannot place a player into a new penalty box or time trap; if it would, you skip to the first hole beyond it.
But since neither one of us ever hit the penalty box, that scenario never happened.
A few words about our new Cribbage Rumble game are in order. First of all, the handsome Cribbage Rumble board is made by Michaud Toys in Ontario, Canada. It’s a slimmer design than our handsome Ebonwood cribbage board, but the basic zones are the same. It’s interesting that Michaud originally called the game Cribbage Wars about a year ago and later changed the name to Cribbage Rumble. On the other hand, when we got the board, it came with a special card with a set of rules for “Cribbage Wars.” The Ebonwood board (made in Wisconsin) cost $210 when we bought it in 2025. The Michaud Toys board cost about $90.
Interesting historical notes: Crib Wars was first invented by a couple of guys from Ontario, Canada. Norm Ackland and Robert J. Prettie patented Crib Wars in 2000. Norm was also an Elvis Tribute Artist (ETA). The terminology for the name of the game is a little confusing. Ackland and Prettie made the first Crib Wars game. There’s also Cribbage Wars, marketed by Ebonwood. They are the same game with the same rules. Cribbage Rumble is also the same game as the first two.
Our updated House Rules for Cribbage Rumble (same as Crib Wars and Cribbage Wars):
There’s no Muggers Alley on either the Ebonwood board or the Michaud Toys board and we never play muggins. Below are my updated descriptions of the colored zones, which we discuss and demonstrate during the video.
Red Skips: There are 3 of these. The rule says if you land on the first red box you should slide to the next red box which gets you 20 holes further along the board. The red box just means the set of 3 holes highlighted with a red color. You get from the first one to the next one by just moving the peg 20 holes. You’ll land in the 2nd set of holes marked in red. This is a boon in the first Red Skip area. However, if you pay attention to the directional arrows in the path guiding you, it looks like they accelerate you toward two of the Blue Time Traps.
Blue Time Traps: There are 4 of these and there will be three blue lines, meaning the blue color covers all three holes and all three peg tracks (3 holes along the track and 3 holes across the track). If you land in a set of three holes highlighted in blue, you end up moving to a blue area of holes that actually set you behind several holes. You have to play your way out of them. Players note that you can end up in repetitious cycling back to the traps largely because of how often you can get one or two points at a time while scoring. In fact, some say that if their opponent gets close to a Blue Time Trap they may purposely lead with a five card (something you would rarely if ever do in a standard cribbage game). That could trap the opponent into playing a ten card or a 5 card, which might risk them moving only a couple of holes right back into the Blue Time Trap. The same thing could happen with falling into the Blue Penalty Boxes. If you land in a Blue Time Trap and your opponent lands in a Blue Penalty Box, you can get out of the trap by moving forward 20 holes, which gets you out of the trap faster.
Blue Penalty Boxes: There are three of them. You fall into one of these by moving your peg into one of the single blue hole lines, meaning one blue track across the three peg tracks. This is a disaster because you immediately have to move back 20 holes and fold your hand and your crib while your opponent moves forward 20 holes, finishes pegging and counts their hand and crib (if they have the crib). Asking AI is the only way I could find out how to learn how to peg moving back and forward 20 holes. The player who lands in the penalty box moves their front peg back 20 holes starting from the penalty box. You don’t move the rear peg. If your front peg lands behind the rear peg, it becomes the new rear peg. The player who doesn’t land in the penalty box moves their front peg forward 20 holes. The player who lands in the penalty box immediately folds their hand and crib.
Green Advances: There are two of them. If you land in a green hole, you take short cut path. The long one saves you from moving toward the Blue Time Trap in the left lower quadrant. You don’t avoid the potential other trap above. If you take the normal track instead you end up moving toward the lower left quadrant Blue Time Trap—but you have a chance at getting into the short Green Advance track before you get there which loops back away from it and you end up going in the direction of the upper Blue Time Trap.
You think you’re in the clear after that? You’re not because there is a sadistically placed Blue Penalty Box in the next to the last hole before the Finish Line!
We’ve been working on the video for our marathon Cribbage Rumble game on our new Cribbage Rumble board. I plan to make the YouTube recording tomorrow! It made our heads spin!
Invisible to us anyway. We’ve been excited about filming our first Cribbage Rumble game and we thought the first video we got on March 25, 2026 was too disorganized and chaotic to accept.
It’s a good thing I didn’t discard the clips—because Sena got a 29 hand. The trouble was we both failed to notice it! We have video evidence of the whole thing. It’s funny and spooky to watch.
OK, it’s time to start making excuses for why we didn’t see the 29 hand. We were playing Cribbage Rumble on our new board from Michaud Toys, so we were focused on the many zones and traps rather than thinking about anything so rare as the 29 hand showing up.
There’s no reason not to expect that a 29 score could happen in a 6-card cribbage game, but our focus was not on that. It was on avoiding things like Blue Time Traps and Blue Penalty Boxes.
Despite our focus on trying to score Sena’s hand, I think we failed to notice the obvious because the context was on Cribbage Rumble, not the rare 29 hand, the odds of which are 1 in 216,580 against getting.
I think that’s why our attention was on the four 5 cards and trying to count the 15s for 2 (which make 8 points) and the other 15s for 2 with the Jack (which is also 8 points). I knew that the four 5s is 4 of a kind which makes 12. In fact, when I said near the end of the video that I remembered seeing something “maybe once before in my life,” all I meant was that I’d seen 4 of a kind. That would have got us to 28 but we didn’t process that. We could see only parts of the elephant.
I think the other reason we didn’t react to it was that we’d played Cribbage Rumble all afternoon and into the early evening. We were tired.
It wasn’t until the next day that I used the skunkeddotclub scorer (just out of curiosity) to see what the total score was. It was 28. Then I added the 1 point because of the nob Jack (same suit as the club 5 card) and came up with 29. The scorer doesn’t deal with suits.
It still didn’t click. I told Sena that her hand’s total score was 29, in a totally offhand way. She didn’t really react to it, either.
Early this morning right after I first woke up, I began to wonder whether the score was an “alternate” way to score the famous and elusive 29 hand in 6 card cribbage. Over a few minutes, it finally dawned on me that thinking of it as “alternate” didn’t make any sense. It just was the 29 hand.
That’s when I got excited and told Sena about it. I said something confusing at the end of the video when I said something about seeing the hand “maybe once before in my life” but all I meant was that I’d seen 4 of a kind (scores 12 points). I still didn’t see that 29 hand at the time.
We just finished a train wreck, hilarious, Cribbage Rumble game with our brand new board from Michaud Toys this afternoon (it must have been 3 hrs!). We’ll put something together tomorrow on video if we can manage it!
We’re on schedule to get our new cribbage boards delivered today!
We played 9 card cribbage to 121 today and I got a 50-point hand! We both scored the complex hand, came up with 50 points, checked it with skunkeddotclub and it was correct! We played only 3 hands but the high scores led to a lot of time counting points. That’s why you’ll never see a 9-card cribbage tournament.
On the other hand, this might do something good for elder brain health.
Counting the 50 points for runs was the most difficult part. There were eight different 4 card runs and spreading them out in the offset way shown in the picture made it easier to count them (32 points worth). There was 12 points for 15 for 2s and 6 points for the pairs. Adding the points for the runs, 15s, and pairs made 50. The photos compare the wide 50 point spread between my two black pegs before and after the move.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 