minesweeper woes

Argh! I can't beat this game!! I seem to get down to the last 20-30 mines and then blow myself up.

Andy says he would have given up long before now. Then again, he beats this stupid game with relative ease. "It's just deduction!" he says, helpfully.


I had left the game up the other day, and A. had the screen cleared to the last two squares, where you'd have a 50-50 chance of choosing the wrong one....... so I finished the game and chose. Wrongly.

ARGH!!

SO I am on a quest ( and have been for the last two weeks or so) - BEAT THE GAME.

Maybe I should switch to Hearts for a while. NO. I must BEAT THIS GAME.

OK so I finished the Boston Jane series by Jennifer Holm. Overview: a girl from Philly goes to Washington territory to be the wife of a man who used to be her father's intern. She has attended finishing school. This leaves her ill-prepared for the realities of pioneer life. Because she was late in leaving Philly, her betrothed assumed she wasn't coming, and took off. So when she arrives in Shoalwater Bay (now called Willapa) - there is nobody to meet her.

It's rather amusing to see her struggle along, trying to live up to Miss Hepplewhite's standards when those standards are completely impractical for living /roughing it in the wilderness.

Still, this series misses on many counts. The native Chinook Indians are well-rounded characters - however, in contrast, Ms. Holm portrays thewhite men as flat, two-dimensional characters with the sole motive of acquiring the Chinook, Makah, etc. land, and putting the Indians together on one reservation. The only good white men are those who intermarry with the Indians, or adopt some of their culture. Sadly, there is a Catholic priest who makes the journey with Jane, with the stated goal of "converting the savages." He is portrayed as boring, witless, good enough in his own way, but like Miss Hepplewhite's guidebook for young ladies, his religion is immensely impractical in the Pacific Northwest wilderness. By the end of the first book he has made no converts. The Indians' spirit religion is shown to be superior.

Anyway, that's the jist of the first book. It's an amusing enough read; however, I came away with the impression that Ms Holm has very little use for "the white man's God."

There's also a weird subplot involving the ghost of one of Jane's traveling companions haunting her - tying into the Chinook belief that if you don't change your name following the death of a family member, you will be haunted by that person - The subplot resolved itself, somehow, but I wasn't quite sure of the mechanics behind it. At first Mary would haunt Jane with an angry expression, seaweed in hair, dripping wet and ice cold.......... but after Jane, at a point of crisis, resolves within herself that she might as well die in the Pac NW as well, it's no point to go on living in this hell.......then Mary appears to Jane as happy, bright and shining.......and never haunts Jane again. I mean, what was the point in that?! Jane had to decide life wasn't worth living for the ghost to leave her alone? I totally didn't get the reasoning there.

Anyway.

It's 10 am and time to start school.