Fourth Race Around The Track

My youngest turned four today. 

I'm not sure how that happened so fast. All at once, it seems so recent that I was showing Ada her new baby brother lying in the crib in the hospital room, and that it was months and months ago that Connor was learning to use the potty. 

Connor has been an absolute light in our lives for four whole years. 

Of course, some mornings, the light needs to be turned down for an extra hour or three. Like this morning, Connor was up and out on the couch at 5am... Let me say that again. The little monster was awake at FIVE AY EMM!! Sitting on the couch, playing Switch... Claire found him when she gave up trying to stay in bed with the pains in her shoulder. 

I cooked pancakes and crispy bacon for his birthday breakfast, but made the critical error of not having it done before he unwrapped his birthday present. His visiting grandparents got him a set of Hot Wheels race cars, and Claire and I got him a Hot Wheels track set. Once he laid eyes on that, nothing else existed in the entire universe. 

The track set we got him has a launcher system and ramps and my entire morning and early afternoon was to the tune of *slap, shunk shunk, slap, shunk shunk, slap, shunk shunk, "Yay! I did it!" slap, shunk shunk, slap, shunk shunk, slap, shunk shunk...* Mistakes were made. I needed painkillers by noon. 

We picked up big sis at 3pm and went to a nearby activity center for some fun and play, and then went out for dinner together. The visiting grandparents joined us for all this too. Cake was just before bedtime, which could have been another mistake, but exhaustion soon over and the birthday boy was asleep as soon as his tired little head hit the pillow. 

It's hard to imagine that I'm signing Connor up for school this year. Next September, my youngest will be starting kindergarten. What am I going to do then? 

So much freedom...

The Tales Continue

November is done, and Christmas is on the way. Here's a little gift for you to start off the holiday season.

The Buck Fifty challenge is done, but I'm hoping that I'm not. I'd like to continue posting regularly, maybe not every day, and maybe not writing 150 words every post. With the freedom of...well, the rest of the year  that isn't November, I can write shorter posts, and I don't need to word count my first few paragraphs. 

I really enjoyed this year's Buck Fifty. Last year I was stressing about not writing a lot of just straight personal story stuff, trying to do more essays, or reviews or work that required more advanced planning and effort. This year, I quickly got into a flow of not having any idea what I was going to be sitting as I sat in front of my iPad and connected my keyboard. I'd start typing what I thought was a weak idea, and in a few moments I'd have a pretty good idea of what the post was going to be about. 

I think I'm going to be sticking with the "let it flow" life stories and updates for a bit, but I do have a list of non life stuff I want to write at some point, including the follow up to that world building thing I wrote last month. I am going to drop the Buck Fifty tag from the following posts, as I'd like to keep that for the November challenge posts. 

So all going well, I'll stick around for a bit. 

Let's look back at this post at the start of November 2022 and laugh at how little I ended up posting.  

Fighting Crime, Spinning Webs

I love Spider-Man. As a kid, he was the first comicbook character I collected. I had a huge collection of Spidey comics. I loved the 90’s cartoon. And when they started selling the US comics in stores in Ireland, the first one I bought was, of course, a Spider-Man issue. Though I was a bit lost, as the UK reprint collections I had been buying as well were about 6 to 8 months behind, so I had a lot to fill in. 

I was incredibly excited at the prospect of seeing my hero in live action in a major summer blockbuster movie with the budget and team to make it look good, and I adored the web swingers 2002 release, starring Toby Maguire. 

The follow-up in 2004, pitting our friendly neighborhood wall crawler against the awesome mind and might of Doctor Octopus took everything to the next level, resulting in a movie that still thrills me to this day. It did, however, get me in a not insignificant amount of trouble with my girlfriend for buying a super articulated 18 inch tall action figure released for that sequel, which I still have to this day, and I bring him to the cinema for the wall crawler’s big events, much to many other fans amusement. 

Although they generally get poor reviews from critics and fans alike, I unironically enjoyed the Andrew Garfield movies from the 2010’s. I still think that while the Toby Maguire had a much better Peter Parker, the Garfield ones captured Spider-Man far more accurately. But both are outdone by the Tom Holland series that brings Spider-Man and friends into the mega blockbuster universe that all began in 2008 with Iron Man. 

Being a comic character, it’s no surprise that I love his animated outings as well. The incredible Spectacular Spider-Man from 2008 is one of my all-time favourite cartoon series, with its gorgeous, clean, minimalistic designs, absolutely rocking theme tune, and top tier character development and story arcs. It died too soon, cancelled after only two seasons, ending on a cliffhanger, thanks to the purchase of Marvel by Disney. Disney! Till all are one! 

The theatrically released animated Into The Spider-Verse movie from 2018 left me utterly stunned in the cinema, sitting jaw wide open, gapping at the unique visual touches, the masterful characters and plot and the unexpected twists and turns, all wrapped in a genuinely touching story about family, love and loss. I consider it to be one of the finest superhero movies ever made, and certainly the best Spider-Man movie to date. 

All this to say that I’m very excited for the upcoming third instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man series, No Way Home. 

Earlier tonight, I got my tickets for the preview screening on Thursday, December 16th in downtown. I would have preferred to get tickets for my local theatre, but all the good screenings (Read: Not 3D) were sold out by the time I learned they were even available. 

Friday morning had lots of space, so I’m also going to go see it then.

And maybe once more over the weekend. I haven’t decided yet.

Of course I’ve decided. You know me too well. 

The Spirit Of Christmas

Since she was born, we’ve taken Ada to visit the same Santa every year, and gotten our annual Santa photo with him. This has sometimes required some travelling, but it’s important to us. When my brother Stephen was visiting for a year, Santa made sure to not only include him in the photos, but also get one of just us two brothers with the man in red.

Ada and I visited the mall the year Connor was born to say hi to Santa in late November, but told him we’d be back in a few weeks to get our photo, once our newest family member arrived. When we came back in mid December with a two week old Connor, Santa welcomed Ada with open arms, giving her a big hug and telling her what a wonderful big sister she had become. He held a tiny Connor and took extra time to get some extra special photos. 

Now, obviously, last year, we couldn’t visit Santa due to pandemic travel restrictions between Canada and the North Pole. Instead, Santa sent us a beautiful photo of him and his wonderful wife, Mrs. Claus, holding our annual family portrait. It also turned out that Santa needed a rest, and while it’s hard to say that the pandemic was ”good timing” in any context, it did mean he could take a break to rest and allow his new heart time to heal without feeling guilty that he might be disappointing anyone[1]. 

This year, with Santa, Mrs. Claus and all the wonderful elves vaccinated and rested and healthy, we got to visit in person again. He was as jolly and joyous as ever. Mrs. Claus was delighted to see us back, and it was wonderful to talk to them both. Santa made sure we all felt special, both kids and parents. And grandparents, with Claire’s parents here too! They were included in a set of group photos, as well as getting ones with just the kids and them together. 

A true Spirit of Christmas.

See you next year, Santa. 

[1]- Which is obviously ridiculous. If Santa needed a year off to recover, we’d all send him love and best wishes, and look forward to seeing him the following year. No disappointment, only respect for our Santa. 

The Perfect Crime

Claire gets emails for every transaction on our credit card, which is great for security, but terrible for surprises. In the age of Covid, most of my gift shopping is done online. It’s kinda frustrating to order the perfect gift, only to have my darling wife ask if I know anything about a transaction from “Gifts For Claire dot com”.  The best I can hope for is explaining away a purchase from Amazon. 

But, I have recently discovered the perfect solution! Related, I also recently discovered that my darling Claire doesn’t read my blog. 

And so, dear Reader, I am free to explain my cunning plan. 

You see, I got a reloadable Visa card from Safeway and loaded enough to cover Claire’s gift on it. Genius! She’ll never suspect a thing. It’s not like I’ve posted it publicly online for anyone to read…

Okay. Not that cunning, but I’m pretty proud. 

I’ve now ordered the bulk of Claire’s Christmas gifts online. Next, I just need to make sure I get to the post first when they arrive. Apparently, opening mail addressed to another person doesn’t count as a federal crime if you’re married to the other person.

Lawnmower Man 2021

During the after-Christmas sales last year I managed to gab myself a virtual reality headset. Specifically, I got the shiny new Oculus Quest 2, an entirely self contained, wire free VR headset. No need for a beefy and expensive PC to process the games. Everything is done on board the headset itself. 

There are limits to this freedom. There is a curated storefront, so I can’t simply buy games on Steam to play on the Oculus right away, though with a link cable and a built in feature, you can use the Oculus as a pass through headset and play the greatest VR game ever made to date, Half Life: Alyx. But that would require the afore mentioned beefy and expensive PC, which I do not have. 

It’s also made by bookFace, and intrinsically tied in to the Facebleag infrastructure, requiring an active Facebukk account to log in and start using. 

However, although I only ever otherwise use it for messaging my local Pokémon Go friends, I do actually have an EffBee account. So, good to go, I did a little research. 

VR is a total body experience. Most games have you standing up, moving about, looking around, ducking, dodging, and swinging arms and hands about. This is a lot more than pressing joysticks and buttons on a traditional console. I have a full body tremor, mostly centred on my arms and legs. Would I be able to get into VR at all? 

It turns out VR, and VR exercise in particular, is really great for Parkinson’s. Basically something, something, something, distraction, something, blood flow, something, something, music, fun and tah-dah! It has been shown to have overall positive mood and health benefits. 

So I got in to the VR space focusing on that. All my first apps were fitness forward, such as the phenomenal boxing simulator Thrill of the Fight, and the rhythm action games Beat Sabre and Pistol Whip, my personnel preferred gmae in that genre. I really enjoyed playing all of these, but they were exercise games, and kinda started to become a chore to turn on. Over time, with a narrow focus on just those games, I lost interest in VR entirely. 

It didn’t help that I had no one to share the experience with, both in person and online. With Covid being very much an ever present threat, I couldn’t have friends over to show of my shiny tech to and share challenges with. And I made no effort to find friends online, largely because last year the Oculus was difficult to get hold of, so very few of my friends had one. 

But now a few of my Twitter buddies have one, and I’ve broaden my library thanks to discounts throughout the year, most recently the Black Friday sales. I now have a wonderfully fun, stunning looking, very real feeling mini-golf game, Walkabout Mini Golf. I’ve been having a lot of laughs with that one, and it allows online multiplayer with avatars and in game voice chat and sounds like a whole lot of future fun, because several of my friends already own it! 

Virtual Reality is here, now. Yes, unfortunately the cheapest, easiest entry, beginner friendly, expert featured machine is owned by a very, very evil mega corporation that willfully pushed lies and mistruths and corrupted millions of users opinions on governments, elections, science, vaccines and more. Sigh. But they really are the only horse in the race at this level. 

It is a thrilling experience to put on a wireless headset and discover you can freely move about within a generated environment, interacting naturally with objects and characters. It is equally thrilling to watch a friend try it for the first time and wave at a robot friend, then pick up a can and throw it at the robot, entirely without formal tutorials. 

I’m really enjoying my time in VR. My tremor rarely causes me any issues while I’m exploring my digital world. I can’t wait to see where this goes. 

I also can’t wait for the first time Ada and Connor try it themselves. There will be video. Dear Reader, I promise you, there will be video.

Order Up!

As the pandemic wore on, the alure of home cooked meals began to wear off, and with the rise of meal delivery services, such as DoorDash, UberEats and Skip the Dishes, new and varied meals were available at the touch of a phone screen. 

After a friend suggested a fancy burger place, and I started craving fancy burgers, I decided to try ordering from them. When I found them on my delivery app of choice, I noticed they also offered fancy deserts, so I ordered one for me and one for Claire. The kids wouldn't appreciate it, and there was ice cream in the freezer. 

The burgers arrived, nicely packed, and, packed in individual little plastic ramekins, fancy dips for my fancy chips (fries to my North American friends). I tried the watery yellow honey mustard with a chip. It wasn't very nice. I tried the thick dark orange peach sauce. That was too sweet.

But my kids loved dipping their chips in the fancy sauce, so I left them enjoy it. 

Dinner done and the kids in bed, I cracked open the fancy deserts for Claire and myself. Key lime pie for Claire, sticky toffee pudding for me. The pie was delicious, the pudding was...fine? It kinda lacked something. A little dry. You know, now that I think of it, I'm sure the description mentioned something...

I checked the app. In house fresh made custard and warm caramel sauce included.

I looked over at the sink, piled with the plates and leftovers of dinner, topped with two, barely touched ramekins of honey mustard and peach sauce...

I'd made a horrible mistake.

That sticky toffee pudding was delicious, with just a hint of potato chip.

The Visitors

Once again, my morning started at 6am, but I definitely looked at my watch at 4:45am. 

I got dressed and went out to the living room to find Connor sitting on the couch, in the dark, playing Switch. I might have snapped a little bit too harshly and sent him back to bed. Checking in on the Switch, the battery was only down 4%, so he couldn't have been there long. As soon as the kids I was caring for arrived, I went in and got Connor up to let him play. But not on the Switch. We have a strict "No screens" policy while friends are visiting. 

Once Ada got up, plans got into gear. 

A little before 8am, someone knocked on the door.

You see, dear Reader, Claire’s parents flew in from Ireland last night, arriving after the kids bedtime. They went straight to their accommodation, and crashed hard. However, jet lag is a cruel master, and they were up early, waiting for a text. 

Connor ran to answer it, as he loves to do. He checked the window to see who was there, and shouted "What are you doing here?!?!" The last time they visited was for his second birthday, two years ago. He's only ever known them through Skype.

Ada jumped up from her breakfast and hugged Nana. It was really nice to see that neither kid had even a bit of shyness around their grandparents, even after this isolated time. 

Technology. 

Amazing. 

Who Watches The Watch?

Technology is amazing. 

My alarm on my phone went off this morning at 6:10am, to have me up and ready when the kids I was caring for arrived at 6:30. Without even taking my arms out from under the covers, I silenced it with a tap on my Watch. 

I wear an Apple Watch, which connects to my phone and tracks my general heath, though I haven’t referred to it much. But I did recently start the sleep tracking feature, and now at 11pm I get a gentle pulse on my wrist to remind me that I should be heading to bed, and in the morning, at 7am, I get a gentle musical call to start my day on, if I’m not already up at crazy-o’clock for work. My Watch can monitor my heartbeat too, and tells me that I dropped to a steady 48 beats per minute around 4:30 this morning. I guess it can track blood oxygen levels too, because it somehow tells me that I dropped to a mere 12 breaths per minute around the same time.

I also know that when I go for a run it triggers the Watch to offer to track the run, and although it takes a few minutes to register that I’m trying to stay fit, and not, say sprinting away from a rampaging rhino, the Watch knows enough that it will post-date the run to roughly the actual start time, not the time I agreed to register the activity. 

I’m very grateful to have this technology available to me, even if I probably only use 10-20% of its features to their fullest. 

There are two features I love the most, though. Tap to pay lets me tap my Watch to pay almost anywhere. It’s just so convenient and secure not having to get out my wallet all the time. 

But the feature I use more that any other on my Watch is Find My Phone. Ever since I got a Watch and discovered this feature, if I have put my phone down anywhere and I can’t see it in a five second glance from exactly where I’m standing, I just tap my wrist and ping my phone, setting off a sonar-like ping sound, telling me exactly where my phone is. The fact that this feature works even when the phone is on silent or sleep mose is amazing. This one, simple feature has literally saved minutes of my life. 

Technology. 

Amazing.

The Trouble With Streaming

I loved DVD’s when they were a thing. The higher image quality and the ability to jump to my favourite scenes instantly were neat, but the thing I loved most about DVD’s was the extra storage space they provided, allowing studios the freedom to bundle extras like blooper reels, behind-the-scenes documentaries, commentary tracks and making-of featurettes.

I adored seeing the magic behind the curtain. It never robbed me of the beauty of cinema, but made it shine even brighter. I watched those bonus features more than the movie they came with. 

But as DVD’s and physical media transitioned into the streaming services, those bonus feature became more and more difficult to track down. Netflix never had making-of specials included with the movie for the longest time, and still doesn’t for most of it’s content. Neither Prime nor Apple TV seem to make a habit of it either. Occasionally, someone would upload such content to YouTube, and even more occasionally, it would an official source.

In their defense, Netflix does have a series called “The Movies That Made Us” that looks back at an ever increasing catalogue of classic movies and the trials and tribulations that went into making them. I find every episode fascinating, even the ones on movies I’ve never seen, like classic slasher Friday the 13th. They get wonderful stories from costume and set designers, scriptwriters, producers, and actors and more. The documentary series highlights the less often heard voices compared to studio produced making-of features, and getting far more gritty and truthful confessions on what it was like to create my favourite, and not so favourite movies. 

Most recently, Disney+ has embraced it full on though. The recent Marvel movies and series all have additional content to support them available directly on the service, and I love them! As soon as I finish the movie or show, I jump into the making-of stuff, because it’s right there! Often linked in the end screen. 

I hope this trend continues and we see a return to the overloaded content that used to be included on DVD’s. Netflix does have some great features up for it’s recent high fantasy series,  The Witcher, so, I live in hope. 

Whatever Happened To Harold Smith?

I recently talked about trailers and spoilers and the dream of going to see a movie, walking into the theatre knowing nothing of what I was about to experience. It has actually happened once in my life. 

Back in 1999 we were all still fretting over Y2K and I was in my second year in University College Cork. I had been going home at the weekends during my first year, but now I was starting to spend more time in Cork, hanging out with friends at the weekends.

One dark and cold Friday evening in November, the gang we all going to the cinema. A new movie had just come out and they were excited to see it. I tagged along out of curiosity. I went in knowing nothing. Like, absolutely nothing at all. Not an actor, not a setting, not even the overall genre. I don’t even know if I saw the poster while I was in the cinema that night. I suspect that my friends engineered it so I wouldn’t see the poster after discovering I was so ignorant to everything else at this point. 

The movie is called “Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?” Don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize it. Looking it up to help write this, it’s not going to make anyone’s “100 movies you must see before you die”. 

But I loved it!! I howled with laughter throughout. Every little twist and turn, every cameo, every sight gag and stupid pun was all new to me. It holds a very special place in my heart, though, to be totally honest, I haven’t seen it since. I don’t think it’s streaming anywhere, and I never saw it advertised on TV, even in the years after it’s release. 

If you can, maybe watch it. Don’t look up any trailers or cast list or plot synopsis. It’s a strange beast, but it’s a funny one. 

And with that, you already know more than I did 22 years ago.

Red Sky At Morning

Over the last few months our province has had a bunch of very unusual weather. 

Earlier in the summer we got trapped in a heat dome for a few days. Temperatures soared to 40° Celcius. It was too hot to just go outdoors. We had all the doors and windows closed, which is a bit counter intuitive, but when it’s that warm outside it’s easier to try to trap the cool air in. We had fans going almost all day, and I filled the bathtub with a few centimetres of cold water and let the kids come and go as they pleased throughout the day. It was nothing to joke about, though. There were a lot of deaths associated with the unexpectedly high heat, including a family member of a friend. 

More recently, the aurora borealis was visible twice over a fortnight from Vancouver, far further south than it comes usually. We didn’t see it ourselves, but apparently it was pretty cool to see. 

But then, most recently we got hit with a huge wet weather front from Hawaii, dubbed the Pinapple Express. The first sign that something unusual was happening was videos of an honest to goodness tornado showing up just south of where we live!! Last week, it poured rain for a solid three days, causing widespread flooding and mudslides, damaging roads and highways, and effectively cutting Vancouver off from the rest of Canada by road and rail for a while. 

Thankfully, where we’re located, we had very little disruption at all, without even any noticeable flooding. But there were parts of British Columbia that fared much worse, in particular, the town of Merritt, where all 7,000 residents were evacuated, and as of writing this post, some seven days later, they are still not able to return to whatever is left standing. 

It is not hyperbole to say that we have caused global climate change on a scale that has never been seen before. But I want to be very clear who I mean by “we”. Humanity has polluted the planet, over-fished the oceans, burned millions of acres of forest, created mountains of garbage that will be around longer than us, buried nuclear waste, and much, much more. But, reader, there is little chance that you or I did any of this. I don’t think my blog has that wide a reach. A tiny percent of humanity is responsible for this, scarificing all our futures for their present financial and political gain. They are the ones that need to enact real changes. Instead, they point their finger at you and I and tut-tut about straws or plastic packaging.

We are swiftly reaching a point of no return, a tipping point of cascading catastrophes that will decimate the planet. The changes the vast majority of the population can make are tiny. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, of course, but even if every person on the planet stopped using straws tomorrow, it wouldn’t be enough. 

Think of that when the next election comes up. Don’t ask what they can do for you, ask what they intend to do for the future, for the entire planet. Unfortunately, only those at the top have any power to force those mega corporations to make real change, but us here at the bottom can influence who sits in those top seats. 

Choose wisely.

No Spoilers!

Back in my day, we had TV ad breaks and pre-show cinema trailers, and we liked it!

Actually, we hated it. I recall trying to download tiny pixelated 480P trailers on the college computers at UCC just so I could watch Spider-Man web a helicopter full of bank thieves between two iconic buildings in New York. 

There was a time, however brief, when people would pay to see a mediocre movie just to watch a new trailer for a major upcoming release, such as The Matrix or Lord of the Rings. 

Today’s standard deluge of endless previews and promos and extended scenes and “first five minutes” were unheard of. You got a few trailers in the months running up to release, all made up of broadly the same footage, with maybe one or two unique shots to justify it’s existence. 

If feels like these days you can piece together 75% of a movie from the promotional material. In fact, the inspiration for this post was a clip from the soon to launch Hawkeye series for Disney+ that I watched just before starting to write this. I didn’t mind because the clip was short and while I’m looking forward to the series, I’m not super worried about light spoilers. It’s not like an official promo piece was going to spoil the ending or anything before the series even airs, unlike all those “What the Last 3 Minutes of the Big New Movie That Only Came Out Today Means” that are all over YouTube for every major release. 

On the other hand, I am already 100% sold on the upcoming Spider-Man Marvel Universe movie, No Way Home. If I don’t see a single frame, set photo, news article, rumour or trailer before I see the movie in theatres this December, I’ll be delighted! I have a bunch of keywords muted on Twitter in the hopes that they won’t show up on my feed. 

However, last Tuesday a new trailer dropped, with loads of new footage and new big plot reveals. I had long before decided that nothing would get me to watch it, but as soon as it was online, YouTube helpfully pushed it into my suggested feed. Not an issue, I can just not click on it. But there was a new character reveal right there in the thumbnail. Worse, while I had gathered enough rumours in the months previously that I expected this particular character to appear, I now had their new look spoiled on me. 

I miss going in to movies blind, being totally shocked by every twist and turn of the plot, every reveal and cameo. It feels like the only way to achieve that today is to swear off the internet in the months before the release. And as much as I love you, Spider-Man, I love the internet more. 

Do The Robot

After over a year and a half of not being able to play board games, this is the third Friday in a row I’ve had friends over for an evening of laughter and fun around a table. Goodness, it feels good to see friends again. 

Tonight I decided to inflict the 2005 Avalon Hill edition of RoboRally on two of my neighbours. RoboRally is a notoriously long game among my college friends, but that’s mostly down to playing “Monopoly Rules”. That is to say, no one checks the actually rules and goes with the decision of the person who owns the game, in this case, usually in relation to maps and victory flag positions. RoboRally comes with a bunch of suggestions at the back of the book for maps that cater to Beginners to Experts, Short to Long games. We played a Short Beginner suggestion, and including rules teach at the start the game was finished in a hair over two hours. That might sound long still to readers outside the modern board gaming hobby scene, but remember that a lot of the time was just us chatting between resolving turns. 

However, Claire did comment upon seeing us start “Are you sure you have enough time?”

An early burst saw me reach the first flag a solid two full turns before my friends. Highlights along the way included a friend messing up an early game turn that resulted in him travelling in a big circle to end his turn in exactly the same space as he began it, and the time that I forgot that rotating right by 90° four times would put me back in my original orientation, not, as I needed, facing to my left. I failed the RoboRally Dance big time there. 

But the true highlight of the night was the final turn that saw my robot push one of my friends robots out of winning, only to immediately have my other friend reverse onto the third and final flag. In the end, all three robots were beside each other around the flag, but only one was sitting atop it as the victor. We all burst out laughing. 

A wonderful way to end any game. 

Eating My Greens

My mum is an incredible baker. She makes, hands down, the best apple tart I’ve ever eaten. Any time I’m out at somewhere for a meal and apple pie is on the desert, I tend to order it, just out of curiosity, but it never even comes close enough to make me sad it isn’t mum’s. And it’s not just apple tart, though that will always be my favourite. Buns, sponge cakes, trifles. She bakes Christmas fruit cake for half the village. She’s even done wedding cakes for cousins and neighbours. 

When it comes to desert, I grew up well fed and spoilt for choice. 

But I also grew up hating broccoli and Brussels sprouts. I thought steak was dry and chewy, made slightly more palatable when fried with onions. We had weekly boiled ham and cabbage until we were old enough to rebel.

As a kid, I hated potatoes. I hated them boiled or mashed. Roasted was acceptable, but they only got made for Christmas or Easter dinner, and I adored mum’s turkey and ham special dinners. 

So, imagine my surprise when I learned that you can cook steak to varying degrees, and medium was delicious, until I had medium-rare, and it was even more delicious! The joy in discovering you can roast broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and that they were flipping delicious like that! Imagine my cognitive dissonance when, as a grown man in his late 30’s (or possibly shortly after…) I cooked sprouts for the first time and ate most of them straight off the oven pan with a spoon, just horsing them into my mouth while I waited for the rest of the meal to finished cooking. 

Potatoes are delicious boiled with a few cloves of garlic, and mashed with a lot of butter!

In the Before Times, I made broccoli for some friends who very clearly accepted them with the polite side-eye glances of people who did not like broccoli at all, then asked for more five minutes later. Roasted, with soy sauce, ginger and garlic. 

I love my mum. I love her deserts and Christmas dinners. 

But I love my roasted veggies, and so does Claire. What about my kids? Not subjected to boiled mush, do they enjoy crunchy veggie flavour bombs?

Not a fucking chance. The little bastards won’t touch them, and scream if they find any on their plate. 

I’d be upset, except, more for me! 

It’s A Dirty Job, And I Shouldn’t Have To Do It

It’s the 21st Century. Humanity has reached for the stars, but mostly fallen short. Instead, it has a succeed in just making messy jobs easier. 

This isn’t a short story post. At the start of summer 2020, I uncovered our barbecue and opened it up to a greasy, yucky mess. When I wrapped it up for the winter as the weather got cooler in 2019, I gave the grates a rubdown, blasted everything with a high heat for ten minutes and left it at that. Anything else would be a problem for “future me”. 

Future me of summer 2020 hated past me of winter 2019. I pulled out the grates and spent literally hours with multipurpose cleaner and dishsoap and steel wool scrubbing them top and bottom. I destroyed our plastic washbasin. I sweated and slaved to bring it back to not disgusting. 

Never again, I swore. Never again. 

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that in the winter of 2020, I rubbed down the grates with some bunched up tin foil, blasted everything with a high heat and wrapped everything up for the season.  

As the weather warmed earlier this year, I looked toward the covered and wrapped barbecue and despaired. I really didn’t want to open it. 

But I had a plan. 

In the previous months my wonderful wife had started buying glasswear from thrift stores and restoring them, including a glass oven dish that was filthy with grease. She used oven cleaner to bring it back to a shiny, like-new condition. 

I sprayed it all over the grates and let it sit for a while, and the grease just rubbed off with, honestly, zero effort.

I finally got around to putting away the barbecue for the season yesterday, thanks to my Post-It note tasks system. Before wrapping everything up, I pulled the grates, sprayed them thoroughly with the oven cleaner and wiped them clean once it had done its thing. It felt good to close up a nice clean barbecue. 

Future me is going to be so proud of future past me. Present me is feeling pretty good right now too. 

Boy Racer

Connor was keeping up with his big sister and her friends when they went biking, even when he was just running along on his toddler bike last year. He could race along in the middle of them all up the gentle slope of the nearby Greenway. 

Of course, at first, he couldn’t go all the way up the 1.5 kilometres, and we did make the mistake of stopping early for him and breaking off to go get a cookie in Starbucks. That became all he wanted to do, resulting in a few tantrums. 

But pretty soon, and with a bit of bribery, he was doing the full distance, and with less complaining than his big sister some days. He’d zip up the former railway line, and on his way home, he’d lift both legs off the ground and cruise quickly down the hill. He could easily stay ahead of the rest, never took a fall, and always stopped well away from the roads. 

This spring he graduated to a pedal bike. The fact that there was a noticeable hole in his old bike’s tire letting the rubber inner tube poke through was a bit of an encouragement. At first he was just running like he did with his toddler bike, but getting frustrated with bumping his ankles off the pedals. Then he progressed to cruising downhill toward home again as he got more comfortable, testing out the pedals while safely rolling freely. 

And then one day, just like his sister did, he was off! He never used training wheels, going straight from the toddler bike to the pedals. He started cycling at less than three and a half years old! 

Connor loves to cycle. Ada loves it too, but only if friends are going, and often has to be coaxed into joining. Connor will run to get his bike helmet at the merest hint of cycling. He zooms up and back, and can even do the longer rides without issue or complaint. 

Next spring we’ll get him a big bike like his sister. 

And then walking along behind won’t be good enough. 

I’ll have to get a bike too.

To Do Or Not To Do

My list of tasks to get done had started to get the better of me this weekend. Thinking about the ever growing mountain of small tasks that sat at the top of a huge mountain made of a few big tasks, I just couldn't bring myself to start anything, and just watched YouTube or board games streamed on Twitch instead.

The weather wasn't helpful either. This weekend had been wretched, with three days of non-stop rain that has caused the complete evacuation of one town of 7,000 residents, washed away roads across the provence and blocked railway lines. As of Monday evening, it was officially declared that Vancouver is cut off from the rest of Canada by road and rail. 

We made it out Sunday from the weekly big shopping trip to Costco, and that was the only time we stepped outside the door. I watched Enchanted and Marvel's Shang-Chi on Disney+. 

This morning was no better. The rain was still pouring down. We walked Ada to school and in the way back I went to Safeway to buy some supplies. I got home and made brunch for Claire, Connor and myself and decided to make a concrete list of what I needed to get done over the next few days. 

At first, it was a list on my phone, but I realized really quickly that it was just as easy to ignore that. Instead, I grabbed a stack of Post-Its and a Sharpie. Not sponsored. Other brands are available. But, if anyone reading this works for either company, call me. 

I wrote one task, or group of related tasks on each Post-It, and stuck them to the fridge. Once I had all the ones from my phone up, I stood back, looked upon my work, and did a random unimportant task that wasn't at all on the list. 

Instant failure. 

But with that out of the way, I went back to the fridge. 

I vacuumed the entire house, washed the kitchen and bathroom floors, cleaned the oven top, sent three important emails, wrote and sent invoices, started the paperwork to register Connor for kindergarten next year and took out the compost, to name just the tasks I remember, because as I completed a Post-It, I ripped it from the fridge, scrunched it up and threw it in the (recycling) bin, where it now belonged. And all while listening to board games being played on Twitch. 

There see still, at this moment, eleven Post-Its on the fridge. But that's a lot less than this morning. And there'll be a lot less tomorrow evening. 

Note to self: Buy more Post-Its. 

Objects of Power

Objects have power, but not all powerful objects are fancy or powerful looking. It’s the classic ending to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the chalice of Jesus was a simple wooden cup. Because he was the son of a carpenter, you see. Look, if you didn’t get that reference, I really can’t help you. 

When we left Ireland in 2011, we stored a lot of stuff in our families homes, and our amazing friends held on to a bunch of my board games. Each time we’ve travelled home since, we’ve come back with a bit more of our past lives in tow. Books, games, figures, objects that we hold dear and that are important to us. 

But those objects were placed in safe keeping for that reason. They were important to us. 

Before we left Ireland I working in a preschool with a wonderful group of kids and their family’s. Before leaving, I received some lovely gifts in thanks, and while I’m certain there were lovely chocolates, wine (I know, but, whatcha gonna do?), deodorant (long story) and other very thoughtful things, one would become and unexpected Object of Power that endures to this day. 

One of the girls I worked with took a little more work to connect with. An only child, she had some minor behavioural issues. I’m no trained child psychologist or behavioural therapist, but I think she might have had some mild autism, or ADHD. She had difficulty controlling her emotions, and rarely made eye contact. But with love and patience, we became good friends, and I really enjoyed working with her, and I like to think, she enjoyed her time with me. 

My parting gift from her family was a wonderful, warm, woolen sweater. They knew I was Canada-bound, and had apparently spent time there before their daughter was born. 

I still have that sweater. I still wear it every year when the cold starts to creep in. Every time I go to my closet in late autumn or early winter and push back the t-shirts and light hoodies that take up most of the space to pull out that sweater, I think of that family. 

I hope they’re doing well, where ever they are. I hope they occasionally think of me. And I hope that some day, some how, I can tell them how much their gift from eleven years ago still means to me. 

I’m Sure It Was Really Good Too

Well, this is annoying. Earlier today I took a shower. That’s not unusual. I shower all the time. But this time, I plotted out an entire post that I really wanted to write, based on an idea I had earlier in the week. It was a non-fiction piece, another personal diary entry.

But I’ve just been sitting here staring at a blank screen, searching through a blank mind, failing to recall even a hint of what my genius idea was. Honestly, I kinda hoped that by starting to type, something, anything would come to me. But I’m exactly 100 words in and still nothing. Seriously. The figure “100” is actually the 100th word in this post. Though now I can’t edit anything that comes before. 

I just checked my notes and it’s full of really interesting ideas for posts. I’ll make an effort to use one of them tomorrow. 

Sorry. 

My Friday Adventure

Last night I sat down early to write my 150 words in order to free up my evening to watch a TV show. Tonight, it’s super late as I start writing. In fact, technically, I’ve kinda missed Friday entirely. It’s already 12:10am as I write this sentence. But that’s okay, because, like last Friday, I spent the evening hanging out with friends playing board games!! 

Actually, that not entirely accurate. I spent most of the whole day hanging out with friends playing board games!! And even more time travelling about with board games as a goal. 

This morning, after dropping Ada to school, I packed my bags, kissed my wife and son good-bye and travelled far across land and water the far off shore of North Vancouver. Took me about 90 minutes by bus and SeaBus. I noted on my way that I believe this was the first time I have travelled on the SeaBus without children in at least seven years, possibly ever. Taking this rare opportunity, I sat at the back of the passenger ferry, rather than gazing out the front window. 

I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since the pandemic began, and we got a lovely lunch, on his recommendation. The reason for our meeting was to swap games. I had a game he ordered, and he had one I ordered. With the swap done and nothing to rush away to, we played two board games and had a lovely chat and much laughter. 

Around 3pm we parted ways. I travelled once more on the Seabus, this time gazing out the far more enjoyable front window at Downtown Vancouver drawing ever closer.  I adventured onwards to my Friendly Local Game Store to add two more board games related items to my Bag of Holding. I chatted with the owners, but didn’t stay long! I had places to be and more games to acquire. 

I took the bus back through downtown, getting off before crossing the bridge and walked to visit a friend who had (you guessed it!) another board game for me! He took my arrival to be a good time to head out himself, and we walked and chatted together much of the way back towards the bus before separating and going our own ways, him to buy Christmas gifts (in November?!?), me to finally trek home. 

I returned to my domain around 5pm, ate dinner with my family, put the kiddos to bed, along with the nightly brushing of teeth and reading of the story books. Mud Puddle is the current hot piece of evening literature among 3 to 6 year olds. Some time around all this I managed to squeeze in an hour playing a very silly and fun drawing game with online friends on Twitch. And digital friends are real friends too.

By 8pm, I had the company of two more of my friends in my home. We talked about the news of the day, before playing two board games, neither of which I won. 

But victory was never the goal. Good company, laughter and friendship were my reward, and my day was filled with it. It is late, now just gone 12:40am. It is time for this adventurer to rest, and with a little luck, dream of board games. 

To Watch A Show

 I’m not sure what to write tonight, but I’ve sat down to try to mash out my 150 words as quickly as possible, only because I want to watch the newest episode of the science fiction series Foundation that went live on Apple TV just a few hours ago. 

Is there anyone else out there that fits in the Venn diagram overlap of “Reads Denis’ Blog” and “Watches Foundation”? I never read the books it’s based on, but according to those in the know, apparently neither did the folks that made the series! Fans of the books tell me, while the show uses characters and themes from the novels, it’s like they read a Wikipedia page, got bored after the Principle Characters section and made everything else up. 

And I love it! It’s crazy far future sci-fi, with ships that travel faster than light, empires that span multiple star systems, clones, and math that accurately predicts the future, but only in huge, civilization spanning level, not the actions of individuals. 

The special effects are high budget movie quality, with huge cities, vast wastelands, and elaborate, shiny spaceship interiors. Much of the sets were built and filmed in Limerick!! There are plenty of Irish accents among the secondary cast, and plenty of Irish names in the credits for all sorts of roles. 

The cast is great. I think, among a quality selection, my favourite actor is Lee Pace. I love every time his character appears on screen and I’m excited to watch his plans and plots come together. That, and I WANT HIM TO DIE! I want him to die a slow and horrible death, and suffer for every moment of it. Oh how I’m going to enjoy that episode when it surely happens. 

If you enjoy sci-fi, think about adding Apple TV to your list of streaming services you’re borrowing from a friend. 

Though that might be tough, as there aren’t many of us around. 

Addendum: Well, I watched the latest episode and it was great. Almost no sign of Lee Pace, but with the size of the cast, not every actor gets to be in every episode. Can’t wait to see what happens next week. 

Creative Writing: World Building

I wanted to flex my storytelling muscles a bit, and had an idea for a… thing? Not a story, not a setting, just a fun element of a bigger idea. But in order for that to make any sense outside of my own head, I felt I needed to set up the world, even just in very broad strokes. So this post is a World Building exercise for a fantasty setting. I hope it’s even vaguely interesting.  

***

Massive creatures roam the land and seas, magic is wielded by those who can and those who can’t seek to survive through cooperation or corruption. 

But that is now. This is After. 

In the Before, the world was order.  Mother Earth slept and the planet was calm. The Wardens could not access magics and creatures were hunted for mundane resources. The largest animals on land were of the likes of elk or elephant, while the seas were rich with whales and massive schools of fish. Few people ever travelled further than the horizon around where they were born.

Then there was the Between. Over a millennia ago, the stories tell of a time when the stars fell from the skies day and night. The land was reformed and reshaped, and parts of the ocean bubbled and boiled. New monstrous creatures arrived in the wilds, and over a short few generations, the Wardens were awoken by Mother Earth to protect the people from the new, magical threats. The planet cooled for a time, and weather grew more erratic. But as the stars came back to the night skies and the day skies returned to blue, the planet calmed and settled into it’s new normal. 

That was generations ago. Since the Between, truth has mixed with tale, becoming legend, myth and religion. Mother Earth has worked to bring balance to all once again, but while it is no longer the chaos of the Between, neither is it the order of the Before. 

The After is a time of agriculture and adventure. Humanity has settled across the globe, guided by the knowledge and gifts of the Wardens. They thrive and have adapted to living in any climate or territory. A few regions are controlled by some of the larger wild creatures, such as certain species of pyrvians or the swarming and burrowing cicabras. Those are generally respected as off limits by anyone nearby, but brave or foolhardy adventurers sometimes quest for resources unique to these creatures.  

But creatures migrate and expand and seek out new homes for any number of reasons. The Wardens help to influence them away from large settlements when possible, and when not, assist in relocating the population affected. 

Occasionally, this results in ghost towns. Even more occasionally, it can result in a ghost city. Our heroes live in one such city. The once great city of Grand Port Cove is now more pirate than politician, brigand than baker, mercenary than merchant. Those who live there live in relative peace through mutual understanding that everyone else doesn’t want to be here too. 

That, and the issue with the krakataur. But that’s for another day. 

Wheels Of Freedom

Ada got her “big kid bike” with training wheels in the summer of 2020. Her two best friends both got bikes around the same time, and we went cycling several times a week together.

We’re lucky enough to have an old rail line bedside us that got paved over to become a wonderfully safe, traffic free and gloriously smooth and relatively flat pedestrian and bike path. All our kids learned to cycle on this, with the freedom to cycle far ahead of the parents. They knew even back then to stop far from the crossroads and wait for us to catch up. As they got faster and faster, we trained them to stop partway at key spots to let us keep within a comfortable distance. 

It wasn’t long before they were all cycling about 16 blocks up the walkway several times a week. As the walkway is at an angle to the streets, that works out to about 1.5 kilometres up and other back. The trip home was a breeze, as it was a gentle slope downhill all the way. 

Some time in August or September I think, Ada’s bike suddenly “lost” it’s training wheels. There was a few days of crying that she couldn’t do it, or was afraid she’d fall off, and then, without warning, one day she was off! Again, that wonderfully flat and safe walkway was so helpful. She never took anything close to a bad fall that I can recall, but did injure herself quite badly, though only scrapes and bruises, on a friends scooter, travelling much slower.

It wasn’t long before she was going faster and further than ever, and I was really struggling to keep up on foot. We cycled all the way up the walkway to the next big shopping street, 30 blocks away, or 3.5 kilometres, several times before she was even six. 

I learned to cycle when I was 12.

Slow Down, Ease Up

Just two days ago I posted about diffficulty modes in video games. 

Today I woke up to a discussion about exactly that on Twitter, initiated by a video showing off the accessibility features in the newest racing game from Xbox Game Studios, Forza Horizon 5. 

The Forza series has been the benchmark for realistic racing games on Xbox and PC for over 15 years! It incudes a number of entries in the Motorsport series, which focuses on realistic racing, and the Horizon series, which is a bit more arcade fun and wacky and stuff like driving cars out of airplanes in mid flight. The physics are still very realistic, but the team just turn up the action movie dial a few notches to make everything pop a bit more. 

Forza Horizon 5 technically launches tomorrow, November 9th, 2021 as I write this, but plenty of streamers, reviewers and personalities of all kinds have early copies. 

One of those early access folks decided to share a video of an option in “Accessibility” where you can turn down the game speed from 100% to as slow as 40%!!! The physics and everything else still functions as normal, but the world is moving up to 60% slower!! Naturally, this option is only available in single player, off-line mode.

This.

Is.

INCREDIBLE!

I’m not saying I’d need to drop it as low as it will go, but even a few percent at a time until I find the level I can play at. I’ll happily start at 100%, of course, and enjoy the early challenge, but the fact that, as things get more frantic and chaotic and requiring quicker reactions that I might not have, I can just slow down the world by 5% and enjoy the game.

I have no idea how difficult this is to programme, but I hope more and more games start thinking about adding a feature like this. I hope some time that it stops being a feature and starts being a standard. Something like this would make Metroid Dread, a very tough game with no difficulty options at all, accessible to me.

Thank you, Xbox Game Studios! Thank you for thinking of gamers like me. You rock!

When Life Hands You Lemons, Stay Positive

I was diagnosed with Early Onset Parkinson’s Disease in October 2012, but I’d had a tremor since about April of that year. 

I started medication in September of 2018, which was a little late, if I’m being honest. I had travelled home to Ireland to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary and show off Connor, who was around eight months old, and my family said I was a lot more shaky than they expected. That was on me. I probably should have started medication six months earlier, but…well… I didn’t want to. 

I started at a very low dose of one pill three times a day, increased to four pills over a day after a few months, and then added a single slow release pill for nighttime to help me sleep. I stayed on that dose for a long time, but in the last few months, I noticed I was fighting my tremor more and more, and getting tired and sore more often. 

I decided to meet with my neurologist a few months ahead of my scheduled check up, and we both agreed that I should increase my dosage. At first, I just added another half pill to each dose, and scheduled another visit in six weeks to see how things are going. 

At that check in, we agreed that the effect of the half pill was insufficient, and I increased my dosage another half pill. This effectively doubled my daytime dosage from a month and a half previously. 

That evening, I decided I needed to get out of the house and away from the kids for a walk. I wouldn’t say I was upset or depressed or angry. Just… glum? I just needed to get out and go for a walk and clear my head.

I fired up Pokémon Go on my phone to distract me while I walked and noticed that a gym nearby had some old Pokémon that were due to be knocked out, so I sat on a bench across the street from it and battled the digital monsters. 

I was just finished and had installed my own pocket monster when a senior lady stopped and asked if she could ask me a question. I figured it was about my tremor, because it was showing a bit at the time. Most people notice my tremor, but very few ask about it, instead nervously trying not to be too obvious as they watch my arm. 

I recognized this lady from the neighbourhood, though only in passing, so I assumed she’d noticed it before. I invited her to join me on the bench and she sat beside me. 

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but are you the young man that lives on [Street Name] that has Parkinson’s?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“I’m a friend of [Neighbour Friend]. He told me about you. You see, I just got diagnosed with Parkinson’s myself earlier this month.”

Ah. That was not where I was expecting this conversation to go. 

We spent some time discussing the condition. She hadn’t even had a second meeting with her neurologist. She hadn’t had any discussion on medication, so she had lots of questions about that. 

For her, the future was uncertain. It was all new to her, and more than a bit scary. After talking for a while, she was amazed at my positive attitude. I talked about how, according to my neurologist, a tremor like mine could have been either Parkinson’s, a stroke, or a tumour, so, given the options, I pretty much lucked out! I joked about how I felt like I’d won the lottery with my diagnosis, as of the 10% of the population that will get Parkinson’s at some point in their life, less that 5% of those will get it before they turn 50. I’m a fraction of a fraction! 

After we had talked for a while, we parted ways, but not before introducing ourselves to each other, and I told her that she’s welcome to say hi any time she sees me out and about. I’d love to talk to her more, hear about how things are going, and answer any new questions she has. 

So much went in to us meeting at that exact time on that exact day. I had to chose that time to go for a walk. I had to stop to play Pokémon at that moment. She had to be walking home at that exact time, and then think to stop to ask a question that must have been a little stressful for her to bring up. 

Because destiny brought us together at that exact moment, I was able to talk to her when we both needed it. She appreciated my positivity and openess and getting some answers to her questions. I felt a weight lift off me, and cleared my head. It was nice to talk to my new friend and share some positivity. 

I really am generally quite positive on this subject, and while I find it difficult to bring up in conversation (“How is your cup of tea? By the way, I have Parksinson’s.” “Oh! You like Back to the Future too? Actually, I have…”), I’m happy to discuss it when it does come up. It’s just tough to bring up.

Hint, hint…

Easy There Now Lads

I’ve played video games since I was a kid. I took great pride in playing my favourite games over and over and mastering them at the higher difficulties. I loved replaying levels or maps over and over until I could speed through them, almost on instinct alone. 

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about my experiences playing the Spec Ops co-op missions in Call of Duty Modern Warfare, replaying the oil rig level for literally weeks until my friend and I beat it and leaped from the couch hugging each other and screaming!

I remember borrowing the Star Wars game Force Awakens from a friend and playing through it on Easy difficulty, because I just wanted to experience the story, but the game ended up being so easy, I felt I had missed out on some of the experience of the story. I used to play Gears of War with my brother on the highest difficulty, because anything less wasn’t fun. The challenge was part of the thrill. 

But that was a different time and a very different me. I can’t play games the way college me could. Or, indeed the way 30 year old me could. 

I have Parkinson’s. My hands seize up during intense gameplay. My tremor intensifies as my pulse quickens. My reactions aren’t as fast as they sometimes need to be. Long, multistage boss fights are mentally exhausting as well as physically. 

I also have a four year old who loves to play games! He wants to just fly his spaceship and blow up the bad guys. He wants to take down a massive Prime and show me he got the Core. He wants to drive his car around the city and not care about having to win all the time to see more. 

For both of us, an Easy difficulty is a blessing. We each have innate difficulty modifiers already that make playing the game much harder. 

He just wants to enjoy the gameplay loop, I’d like to experience the story. Together we’ll finish your game, but it’ll take dozens of hours and constantly having to explain if you spend all our resources on paint schemes we can’t build the Power Towers we need to unlock the next area of the map. 

Let’s just play the goose game and terrorize a small English town again. 

I’m The King Of The Castle

After lamenting the fact that I miss my friends and haven’t played board games in months in a recent post, I got to play a board game with friends tonight!! Hah!!

I decided to have a few games picked out of my collection that I’d enjoy, but let my friends pick which one we actually play. I’ve been in the situation that all board gamers dread where friends call over for a night of games, than spend an hour just trying to narrow down their options from a huge selection. It’s not fun. 

As such, I pulled out three games from my shelves that I thought would be interesting, but also were varied in play style, and dusted them off. Literally. I had to get a cloth. It’s been a while. Most of my game shelves ahven’t been touched since I rearranged everything way back at the start of LockDown 1. 

Tales of the Arabian Nights is a storytelling game, with a huge book of adventures that you can encounter on your. journey, in classic Choose Your Own Adventure style. It’s fun and funny but a little random at times, and I prefer to play it with the goal of telling a fun story, than reaching the victory conditions and winning. 

Quantum is a space strategy game of colonizing planets. It is compact, tight and clean. I’m terrible at strategy games, but this one is just at my level. Plus, your spaceships are represented on the board by dice, with each face a different ship! Very neat. 

Kingsburg is a dice rolling worker placement game, I guess? You usually roll three dice, and depending on the rolls, you can decide the board spaces you want to use. If you roll 2, 3, and 4 on your dice, you could use spaces 2, 3, or 4 with individual dice, but also combine them to potentially use spaces 5, 6, 7, 8, or even 9! The choices become really interesting as you develop your kingdom, with some buildings allowing you to modify dice rolls. All this, and you have an ever looming threat of attack at the end of each of the five game years. 

My friends chose Kingsburg, and we had a blast. Lots of blocking one another by taking the exact space someone else wanted, and plenty of space during the game for chitchat and relaxed discussion. Despite the fact that neither of my two friends had played before, and I hadn’t played in about eight or nine years, it was a supremely easy teach. I had brushed up on the rule book this evening, and watched a How To Play video, which was more than enough. 

It felt good to be back playing games among friends. I wonder why I haven’t been doing it more often…

Oh…

Oh yeah. That. 

For The Joy Of Books

We’ve been reading books every night to Ada since she was a toddler. She’s always loved books. That means, of course, that we’ve been reading books to Connor practically since he was born, and he loves it too. 

Every night we read at least two books, one that each kid picks, but often we read more. Some of the current popular picks are Hugs and Smelly Socks by Robert Munsch, while A Visitor For Bear by Bonnie Becker has been Connor’s favourite for a while now. Personally, I love the book Ada Twist, Scientist, by Andrea Beaty. 

Claire has been reading chapter books to Ada, broken up over several nights, starting with Fantastic Mr. Fox and Matilda by Roald Dahl, and currently they’re working through Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, Claire’s favourite book. 

But, since starting school, Ada has been bringing home lots more books to read from both the school library and the class teachers collection. While the books we have to home are all a little much for her to read, school have really simple books for her to start practicing her own reading skills. 

And that’s how, a few weeks ago, Ada read a book to me for the first time. It was so momentous that I marked it in my calendar for posterity. 

Books have always been special to both Claire and I, so it’s really great that we can pass that joy on to our kids, while sharing a special time every evening where all screens, music and distractions are put away, and it’s just us, some books, and a host of magical characters. 

Would You Like To Play A Game?

I love board games. 

Since we all got locked in our own homes, a number of resources to play board games online together have grown rapidly in popularity. When they originally launched, in The Before Times, I think much of the board game community gave these digital board game platforms a bit of a snarky side-eye. The whole point of tabletop gaming was the tabletop, sitting with friends, sharing a space. Whether at home or a convention, the point was to get away from the computer screen that was dominating the rest of our lives. But with that not really an option, the idea of meeting through a digital application and chatting over Zoom or Discord while playing swiftly grew in popularity.

Of course, some board games have had a digital version for years. I love being able to play Burgle Bros, Ticket To Ride or Carcassonne on my iPad, churning through single player games against the AI at my leisure. 

But this is different. Digital platforms like Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia and their ilk are basically physics engines with little intelligence beyond maybe snapping appropriate elements to appropriate spots. You need to learn the rules of the game you’re playing, as if you were playing it on a table, but you also need to learn the “rules” of the platform, such as the button combinations for actions, or how to hide you hand of cards. They might automate the setup, but if you want to grab all the cards and flip them over and dump all the pieces into the wrong bag and award yourself a million points, the application isn’t going to stop you. There are a few platforms where games can be programmed with all the rules, but they tend to have a much smaller catalogue, as it takes a lot more to develop games for them. 

I know many of my friends use them a lot, and love playing on them. Or at least, accept playing on them enough to join weekly game nights. Game designers have leveraged them for advance playtesting, or giving reviewers access to their game without needing to ship promotional copies across the world. Crowdfunded games, that might not even have physical copies yet, can get a digital version written up and distributed ahead of the campaign to drum up interest and let prospective backers try before they buy, so to speak. 

This is all great. It’s allowed board games to spread even further, given more people easy access to the hobby, or to sharing the hobby they’ve already loved for years with friends and family across the world. It’s kept people in contact with their groups when they couldn’t get together, or allowed gamers to find entirely new groups, playing with other fans of their favourite game in other continents. 

And I dislike it. Quite a bit. 

I wouldn’t say “I hate it” even though that would be a more dramatic and punchy way to continue this post. I’ve played one game recently on a stream with two friends and it was great. Honestly, it was a whole lot of fun, and it was so nice to be able to game and chat with people not in my immediate family. 

It’s just not why I game. 

I don’t play to win. That’s not to say I don’t try to win. If you’re not at least trying to beat the game or your opponents, then you’re wasting everyone else’s time. It’s just that winning isn’t my reason for being there. I love to sit at a table, chat face to face, feel the cards, tokens and plastics bits and bobs, get excited at a critical roll of the dice, or gasp together at the wrong event triggering at the right time. I love to look my friend in the eye as I take their territory, and then stare them down as they take mine. 

Online gaming can replicate almost every aspect of a board game needed for it to function as the rule book demands, but it can’t match the experience of a shared space with great friends. 

I miss my friends. I miss board games. But, if all goes according to plan, it won’t be for much longer. 

Since Last We Saw Our Intrepid Adventurers

A lot has happened since I last set aside time to write more than a tweet or four. This time last year the CoVid-19 vaccination was still a dream, something in the far future. We were facing the cold, dark winter stuck indoors, away from family, friends, and neighbours. 

But things have gotten significantly better! Claire and I are both fully vaccinated since the summer. Our kids still aren’t able to get the vaccine, so we’re still being cautious. While activities have been restarting, we’ve been avoiding any large crowds still, and especially avoiding indoor events. 

We have been around friends again since last Spring, going cycling multiple times a week and playing at the various playgrounds near us. As summer rolled around and the case numbers started to drop, we’ve even had friends visit our home, and been to theirs. We’ve kept our bubble small, but that’s been enough. The kids have loved having visitors again, and in some small ways, things feel almost normal. 

Last year, Ada stayed out of school for the entire year, doing daily Zoom classes instead. She loved it, often getting set up five or ten minutes beforehand. She loved doing her assigned homework and showing it off the following day, and while we didn’t let Connor disrupt the class, he certainly absorbed some of what was happening. When asked to be part of a preschool language study group over Zoom, he prepared homework of his own to present at the start of the call, much to the utter delight of the researcher. 

But this year, Ada started in-school learning full time right from September. Claire and I were a little nervous. Case numbers were likely to rise as kids grouped up again, and restrictions had already been relaxed. On top of that, this was our first baby, off to school after a lifetime of Daddy Daycare. On her first day, she waved goodbye, took her friend’s hand and said “Let’s be brave” as they walked through the door together. There were some tears, but not from Ada. 

At the end of the day, she came bursting out to tell us all the amazing things she had done. Her teacher for that first week was surprised to hear she hadn’t been in class last year, as she just slotted in to the routine. I was so proud. She’s loved going to school every day since, and her classmates love her. Apparently she’s the popular kid, playing with everyone in the class.

On the other side, it’s been great having Connor by himself for the first time. We’ve done a bunch of stuff just hte two of us, and his favourite is taking transit, something that we hadn’t been doing throughout the pandemic, so the last time we would have even been on a bus was when he was about two. We’ve taken trips on the bus, hte metro trains and the seabus, for no reason other than to do it. We’ve sometimes gone all the way to North Vancouver, just to get an ice-cream, turn around, and transit home again. He’s a cheap date. 

Claire injured her shoulder towards the end of summer and decided to quit her job to give herself time to properly recover. The future there is uncertain, but filled with possibility. While I’m certain she’d love to spend this time writing, currently she’s dusting off her crochet skills and creating hats and scarves, as she can’t move her shoulder much at all. That’s also why she’s not doing NaNoWriMo this year. 

I continue to provide childcare to a number of preschoolers, the newest of whom was practically a pandemic baby, and hadn’t been with anyone other than mum and dad before coming to me when mum started back at work. She settled right in and is a bubbly, happy, energetic addition to our days. It’s been great having all my “bonus kids” around, as it keeps us in a routine. When it’s just me, Claire and Connor, it’s too easy some days to just throw on YouTube and relax for the day. Which is fine now and then, but I get wrapped up in my own thoughts if I have too many quiet days in a row. I need things to focus my energy on. Though I’m fairly certain there are parents at the school who are very confused by the man that shows up with a random number of children during drop-off and pick-up, sometimes even a different number at each on the same day.

So that’s us in 2021. There’s much more we’ve done, but I’m keeping some stuff back for potential dedicated posts. Consider this a broad stroke overview. More to come. 

The Most Magical of Months

First off, this isn’t a “Sorry I haven’t been writing, I promise to do better” post. The last post in this blog is from December 2020, and that’s fine. There’s a very good chance that there will be a big gap between a similar post this December and November of 2022, when I do this Buck Fifty thing all over again!! 

That’s right! It’s back! So I’m back. This time last year I joined in with a small but passionate community to write just 150 words a day for the month of November. Others do NaNoWriMo, where they try to write the first draft of a novel in a month, or Movember, where they try to grow a mustash in a month. I can’t do either of those things, the former because that is typically around 50,000 words, so, yikes!, and the latter because it’s itchy. So, so itchy. 

But 150 words I can do. In fact, I already did it! I successfully wrote 30 posts during November last year, each at least 150 words. Actually, not to brag, but my shortest post last year was 180. You have no idea how much I had to talk myself out of making this post check in at exactly 150 words. 

Weirdly, while writing what you’ve read so far, I almost felt Iike I was cheating. I had originally sat down with an entirely different post in mind, but as I started typing, this is what flowed out. For a brief moment I caught myself thinking “Is writing about the Buck Fifty challenge itself a valid post?” But the answer is “Yes! Absolutely!!”. 

And I like it. It sets the scene for the next 30 days.

The joy of Buck Fifty is that it doesn’t have to be a single novel length coherent story, or a perfectly manicured facial hair. It can be whatever you make it. A stab at that script idea you’ve had bouncing around. A series of tabletop RPG ideas. Designs for a board game or video game. Movie or game reviews. Short stories. Not a whole novel, but 150 words at a time on an aspect of the world. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a month of daily blog posts written to amuse and inform, but mostly, written for you, the writer, to look back on in years and decades time and think “I’d totally forgotten about that hilarious day. I’m sure glad I wrote it down in this online public diary format that I can reference at any time.” 

Now, wouldn’t that be something?