A Basketful of Weekly Features

A week from Easter, Spring weather arriving and plants budding everywhere, I find it is time to refresh our weekly features.

This week's top five suggests items you can use as filler in your kids' easter baskets other than candy:

5. Super Hero Squad figures - Though the quality of these small, chunky figures has declined, they still provide something small yet cool to use instead of that annoying plastic grass or cavity producing jelly beans.

4. Spare Nerf darts - Orange foam darts in the bottom of the Easter basket looks just as festive. The slight drawback comes if you set a particularly weighty chocolate bunny on top of the darts. It could crease them and lead to jams, which you certainly don't want in the middle of an intense battle.

3. Mighty Beanz - They have the added bonus of being bean shaped just like the candy they may be replacing. However, their cost starts to add up.

2. Hot Wheels - Inexpensive, classic, cool. They may just be slightly too large to act in the exact same manner as the candy.

1. Lego bricks - You can get them in bulk, in just about any color and size. You may spend a bit more than you would on candy, but the dentist bills you save on down the road will make up for it and the fact that your kids can then build with the items taking up space in their basket that would normally be filled with stuff they throw away is so very efficient. Think of it, a chocolate bunny on top of a bed of colorful Lego bricks. Most epic basket ever!

This week's cool-ass thing you will never own is a castle. Sure, they say anyone's home is their castle, but I'm talking a real castle. Not only would the structure and the countryside it most like rests on cost a fortune, but then there is the ungodly amount you'd need to spend on central air and plumbing, because you do not want to use the system that was built into the castle, believe me.

This week's sign you are a nerd is that you keep just as close tabs on what the daily barometric pressure is as you do the temperature and humidity. What are you really planning on using that information for anyway?

This week's nemesis is movie popcorn. Despite my best efforts to try and eat better, I cannot resist eating that popcorn after its scent wafts through the lobby as I purchase my family's tickets nor can I resist allowing the refreshment vendor to slather said popcorn in loads of synthetic butter. I suppose all that is bad enough, but then I go and wolf the stuff down once I get to my seat, both out of a desire to eat it while it's warm and extra tasty and raw instinct to get my share of it before the bucket is empty. This results in a stomach ache after every movie I watch in the theater. Why must it taste so good?

This week's lesson learned is to try and keep the group of rambunctious kids playing in your house out of rooms with stand up lamps. Whether it be a kicked ball, a swung plastic lightsaber or a tripping body, something is going to take that lamp down eventually. Just pray it doesn't land on one of the culprits.

This week's equation helps you determine how many eggs should be hidden (by the Easter Bunny of course) on Easter morning:

The number of easter eggs to be hidden can be calculated by multiplying the number of kids the eggs are being hidden for (k) and the area of the hiding arena in square feet (a) and dividing that product by your deteriorating memory rating, a Transformer Generation Dad created stat which just so happens to exactly correspond with your age in years (m) and then subtracting from that the average age in years of the kids doing the hunting (t).

Finally, this year's Star Wars quote is one I posted this time last year, and see myself posting every time the week ahead contains Good Friday because I think it carries with it just the right mix of faith and irreverence: "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

That's all for this week's features. Thanks for reading. Check back soon for another movie review.