… 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,…
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…
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…
My phone is dying. It’s a Samsung Galaxy S8, which was not quite the best one available from Samsung at the time, because I’m one of those types who balks at paying more for a phone than I would for a laptop, but it was up there. Merely the price of an average laptop. But…