Switching Horses

When I was a kid, one of our favorite family games was Yahtzee—Triple Yahtzee, to be more exact. My dad loved the game and, somewhere along the line—maybe it was a gift from Uncle D., I'm not sure—he acquired a brown leather dice-shaking cup. The cup was longer-lasting and a lot quieter than the red plastic cup that came with the Yahtzee game from the stores (apparently). By the time I entered the family (I'm the youngest kid by 5 years), Triple Yahtzee was so well-established in our household that we only bought replacement packages of scorecards.

Many happy holiday hours were spent shaking five dice in the leather cup, spilling them onto the card table, choosing the best combinations to suit one's number needs, marking the red-white-and-blue scorecards, and tallying them up at the end of the game. (Bad as I consider my math skills, they'd be much worse were it not for all that Yahtzee addition and multiplication.)

One of the maneuvers I learned playing Yahtzee was what my father referred to as "switching horses." Each player's turn consisted of three rolls: 1) Shake and roll the dice once, choose the best pair, or go for a sequence; 2) shake and roll again, then see which of the remaining dice best suit your goal for that turn; 3) shake and roll a third time, and mark your sheet with your cumulative best. "Switching horses" meant changing your strategy after the second roll. For example, say your first roll yielded two 5-dice and three miscellaneous numbers; you might set aside the two 5's and roll the three remaining dice, trying for more 5's (resulting in a 3-of-a-kind, 4-of-a-kind, or 5-of-a-kind, otherwise known as Yahtzee, worth 50 points!). However, if your second roll yields, say, three 4's, you'd likely consider "switching horses" and going for 4-of-a-kind in 4's or even Yahtzee.

The Yahtzee-Blog analogy is: I recently began a blog by a similar title on WordPress.com—lifeinatown.wordpress.com—but it's not as user-friendly as I'd hoped. Mainly, I really want friends and family to be able to receive email notifications whenever I post, but there doesn't seem to be a quick-and-easy way to activate that option. (I'm not the world's most techno-savvy person, but I consider myself pretty adept at figuring things out. My patience ran thin fiddling with the WordPress set-up.) So, I'm switching horses! I'm starting this blog and planning to transfer my previous posts from WordPress to Blogger. We'll see how it goes.