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!
