We enjoyed a nice dinner at the Steak and Seafood place, and then went to see "300" a great movie about the Battle of Thermopylae in Ancient Greece. In the movie, King Leonidas of Sparta blocked the only road through which the massive army of Xerxes could pass...300 Spartans held off an army led by King Xerxes numbering in the hundreds of thousands (including, according to the movie, lots of ninjas and mutant giants)...
One of the things that made the Spartans so tough was the Agoge, a rigorous and gruelling training/toughening regimen which involved taking young boys from their families at a young age, and subjecting them to all sorts of harsh training and discipline to shape them into hoplite soldiers...
This afternoon, I decided that Ben has lived much too soft a life, and decided to bring a little agoge into life in Lake Clear...
Above, you can see the young King Leonidas being lead away from his family at age 7...
I'd miss Ben if strangers in togas led him away, so instead, I threw him into a snowbank to get things started...
Next he was banished to the bottom of a steep hill, and I hurled snowballs at him from the top, teaching him important lessons about ducking and weaving and the advantages of holding the high ground...
Despite facing superior forces, as had the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, Ben rallied to return fire, and held his ground...
Here Ben can be seen trying to take advantage of natural cover to avoid overwhelming force from the sky...when I threatened to blot out the sun with my snowballs, Ben responded, "so much the better, I shall fight in the shade", as did Dienekes, a Spartan soldier when told about how numerous the Persian arrows would be in a similar strategic situation while at Thermopylae...
Ben had to face a final challenge during his experience at the bottom of Snowhill...the dark hound...luckily he knew that Zeke simply wanted to eat one of the snowballs that we were whipping back and forth at nearly light speed...
King Leonidas faced a similar challenge during his agoge, except that his snowy showdown with a large black canine ended with a really sharp stick, instead of a snowball, inside the beast's mouth...
Having conquered the beast, Ben was allowed to rejoin Lake Clear society, having successfully completed his agoge...he had suffered in the extreme, but it was certainly a different Benjamin who climbed out of that snow-pit of heck...
Before we went back inside, he used his newly acquired, battle-hardened, adversity-honed, strategic skills...as I would find out a few seconds later, he had a snowball hidden behind his back, and tricked me with the old, "look Daddy, something shiny"...I fell for it like a ton of bricks, and paid the ultimate price with a chilly neck...
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