Good lord, can Becky Chambers write. I mentioned late last year that Martha Wells wholly renewed my sometimes waning interest in science fiction books, and writing like Chambers accomplishes is going to keep it awake and attentive indefinitely. The story is about a mixed bag of interstellar races who work aboard a “tunnelling” space craft…
Another pretty good year for books, despite renos I’ve written about and a pandemic you may have heard of. In the chronology of how I read them, here are my top books of 2021: Zeroes is the story of what happens if some everyday, flawed people got superpowers. This particular group are known to each…
As I picked up my ebook again this morning, I realized that I was continuing to read from right where I’d left off… two days ago. I cast my mind back to yesterday to recall if I had read farther than I recalled, or maybe read some of the other book I’m reading–now’s one of…
… a Pixel 5. Not the current flagship Google Android unit, but one generation removed from it. Here’s how the decision happened, in brief:– It was an unlocked unit sold at a steep open box discount (everything included but unused; it literally hadn’t even had the cables or anything else unwrapped) on eBay for $500…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I’m applying for a job. Since my daughter was in pre-school, I’ve been working at a temp services agency while being a stay-at-home dad. Essentially the agency is the kind of place a business would go to if they’re hosting a talk in a hotel and need people greeted and have their coat checked and…
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,…