Isolation Day 653 Game: Kids Against Maturity

A recent iteration in the fill-in-the-blanks card game genre, Kids Against Maturity is geared as a kid-friendly version of the insanely popular Cards Against Humanity tabletop game. The rules are simple: Each player (of ideally at least four) takes ten white Answer cards. There’s a stack of blue Question cards which players take turns reading … Read more

Isolation Day 651 Game: Uno Flip

Santa was kind to us this year. And among the games we got was a quick one called Uno Flip. A nice twist on the classic Uno card game, here the players use both sides of the cards as the game progresses. There’s a new action card called Flip, which makes the draw pile, the … Read more

Happy Jolabokaflod!

For several years now, my wife and daughter and I have celebrated Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic tradition of giving books to each other on Christmas Eve. The phrase basically translates to Christmas (Jol – think Yule) book (bok) flood (flod), and is pronounced something like YO-la-BO-kka-fludt. It essentially comes down to giving new books (and perhaps … Read more

Top 10 favourite songs of 2021

Despite the craziness of this year–hey, don’t tell anyone, but planning a reno and then moving out while purging a ton of belongings that was long overdue, storing half of the kept stuff and taking half of it with you once you finally find a place to live, then having one third of the household … Read more

Winter walk

We had a surprising accumulation of snow this past Sunday. It was my favourite kind of snowfall–big flakes that come down steadily but without driving or blinding; the perfect kind of silent snowing that you see in picturesque scenes in movies–and it stuck around for days in an unusual stillness of weather. The following morning, … Read more

Writing less, more

I recently read this (short!) post advising–with good reason–that people should write shorter stuff but more often. It struck a chord with me. I do, as I’m sometimes reminded (usually by my wife and daughter) tend to over-verbalize/over-write things. My wife sometimes tells me that when someone asks what time it is I tell them … Read more

What I read this month

I’m home. It doesn’t look like it yet–I’d say there’s a solid 85% of our stuff in the house that isn’t where it’s ultimately going to end up, which is making for a lot of chaos with pockets of usable space–but we’ll get there. And in the mean time, it’s still home, and there’s simply … Read more

What I read this month

It’s been a busy month of hunting things down for the reno and running around and picking up and dropping off and meeting and stress and calls and emails and then rinsing and repeating. I thought faucets were overabundant. But that’s only because we hadn’t gone too deep into the world of lighting. Good lord. … Read more