5 for Friday: Birthday memories

Caitlin, myself and a very young Zach circa 1997. Although this was technically Zach's first birthday, celebrating with the family is always nice.

As I said with my last post, Wednesday was my birthday.

I have had a lot of great birthdays (many that have happened in the past few years have been especially fun), so I thought I would trudge through memory lane and come up with some highlights.

5 for Friday: Taking trips

"What? Oh, this dinosaur? Yeah, I dug it up, no big deal."

This is my last post in the series for Summer 2011, which for me has been a great time with friends and some good memories. But there is one thing I did not do this summer which I probably should have considered: taking a vacation.

For my family, vacations were few and far between -- we took one-day vacations before they were cool. But that’s not to say we didn’t take a few trips in my lifetime of note. So here we go, my family’s top trips, at least as best as I can remember.

10 for Friday: Disney Movies

For a 7-year-old in the 1990s, there was no company as prolific as Walt Disney, especially their cartoons. So in order to do a countdown of my favorites at the time, I’m going to have to cheat a little bit.

So, here are 10 of the best animated features, according to 7-year-old me.

5 for Friday: Super Nintendo Games

Its on like, well, you know.

I play a lot of video games today. Probably more than I should. But for all of the time I spend in front of my PlayStation, I feel like the best gaming experience I had was as a kid.

I’m a major proponent of unique gameplay and “fun” games. Instead of titles like Call of Duty and Halo, my game collection tends to feature more discs that allow me to roll things up in a ball or play “Everlong” on a plastic guitar. That’s kind of my thing.

For me personally, the idea of fun gaming was at it’s peak with one system in particular: the Super Nintendo. The system featured a huge collection of great sidescrolling adventures with fun characters and brilliant animation (for the time). So with that stated, here are 7-year-old me’s favorite games for the Super Nintendo (warning: this list is based completely on what he owned/played at the time).

5 for Friday: TGIF

This lineup was the reason why TV was invented.

I’m going to be honest: I’ve been looking forward to writing this post since I started this blog.

So, remember that story about not having cable but never really having any problems with that? One of the biggest reasons why 7-year-old me had no problems with this was because network TV was, in his mind, actually pretty good and offered some excellent choices. And few were better than TGIF.