I haven’t worn a watch regularly in a decade, but I’ve wanted a Phosphor E-Ink watch since they first came out, and finally got one, their new black-on-black model. It’s got really clean lines, and that elegance of design extends into the display in a way that would be difficult to achieve with any other technology.
After school Nefarious and I went to High Park along with a school friend of hers. I can’t play like I used to, but the good news is that as she gets older her demands on me are shifting toward the mental more than the purely physical, so the timing is such that the disease does less damage than it would if it had started to express itself a few years earlier. It’s actually really nice going to the park because it means that they can get exercise running around, and I can (speaking of e-ink) bring along my Kindle and read — the Kindle is a purchase that I continue to be happy with, and while I still do buy print books, I look for them first in an electronic format because my taste has quickly evolved to me preferring to read on the Kindle.
On the way home from the park we stopped for some groceries, and also picked up Monopoly. Nefarious is always asking to play, but until now she only had the Junior/Disney-Princess versions, which are completely mind-numbing to play because they are so simplified and dumbed down. Not that “adult” Monopoly is a great game of skill, but it’s a ton more fun to play in this version.
This game will actually be a multi-day epic, as we played until about 8:45, and then made milkshakes and drank them while we read more of The Order of the Phoenix, which we’ve now consumed over six hundred pages of, bringing us to the beginning of Dolores Umbridge’s reign as Hogwarts Headmaster, so it’s quite exciting and Nefarious is always begging for another page when bedtime finally arrives. I’ve started doing a new bedtime experiment where she is allowed to read if she’s not tired — and since every kid says “but I’m not tired!” every single night, I figure this was an easy way of avoiding this debate — and so far it’s working really well and not being abused (I feel like I would have abused this right as a kid). She reads for about ten minutes and then turns out the light, so that’s about perfect. Yesterday afternoon she sat and read a book that a friend gave her at her birthday party for about two hours — it’s such a joy to see this, both because of parental pride, and because it brings back fragments of my own childhood memories of spending days reading.
Driving to school (and back from it) is going to be no fun, starting today, because they’re ripping up the exact section of Bloor street that I need to drive four times a day (ie. there and back twice), reducing traffic speed to a trickle. It didn’t help that today I woke up at 7AM with my alarm, took my medicine, and then immediately fell back asleep and didn’t wake up again until 8:11… Eleven minutes after I’d normally be out the door. Somehow, miraculously, we still managed to make and eat breakfast, prepare her lunch, and got her to school on time. She’s made me promise though to get her there as early as possible tomorrow morning because the kids that get there early get to play chess before classes start.
Other than that, tomorrow is Caitlin‘s birthday. Woo woo!
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Talking about clocks. This is ultra neat… https://gajitz.com/suicidal-metal-wall-clock-counts-to-a-century-falls-apart/
I invariably used to try and ‘stretch’ bedtimes as a kid, usually by complaining that all my friends were allowed to stay up much later than I was. My mother could always tell, though, because I was so fractious and badly-behaved the next day if I hadn’t had my full quota of sleep.
do you have any standard cheats for playing monopoly?
i always played where all the money paid out from the chance/community chest cards would go towards whoever landed on the “Free parking” spot next.
since my friends in school always played like that (and this spanned 3 different elementary schools) i was really surprised to find out it’s not an actual rule.
We used to have a set of house rules for Monopoly that most people seemed to enjoy:
1) All penalty fees were put into the free parking fund.
2) Properties didn’t have to be bought or auctioned, players could choose to not buy and play would continue.
3) After getting a hotel on each of your properties you could buy a second round of houses and subsequently a second hotel. Prices would be hotel + price for number of houses, and once you had two hotels it would be double.
4)Depending on the number of people, players could enter a second piece as a place holder on a property or in jail, allowing their original piece to go around the board up to three times. Players can only put one holder down at a time, and they can only use it up to three times in a single game.
For properties, the player who put a second piece down couldn’t collect rent on the property but kept others from buying it. Once they reached start a third time they must either buy the property or put it back into normal play.
For jail, players place their holder in jail and move their original piece around the board as normal and collect rent. As with normal jail rules, however, they have three chances to roll doubles to skip the fine. However, if the player uses a holder for jail and does not roll doubles or obtain a ‘get out of jail free card’ they must pay an increased penalty. The player rolls both dice and multiplies that by the normal $50 fine to determine their penalty.
I love your shirt!
&& your daughter is going to be a genius, kudos to your parenting.
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