Agricola
No, it’s not a cough lozenge from Sweden. Instead it is the new “it” modern boardgame. Agricola game out last year in Germany and won the Spiel de Jahrs award for best game at the Essen game show, the largest show in the world. It recently came to America and it quickly sold out its first print run with a second one hotly anticipated next month. The concept of the game is that each player is a small farming family in central Europe in the late 1600s. The family takes actions to improve the farm and the family with the most diverse and balanced farm at the end of the game is the winner. Notice that I said balanced. Read more »
Posted: September 23rd, 2008 under Balance.
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So Saturday was the big neighborhood garage sale and we had a ton of baby clothes, sheets, and toys to sell. These things are always big sellers on garage sale day, so I looked forward to getting rid of stuff we didn’t use and make a little cash along the way. This is the only garage sale we have each year because of the sheer magnitude of it. Literally thousands of people come on this weekend. The traffic is horrible with our normal street turning into an unmarked one-way due to the number of cars there. The fact that we are basically trapped in our neighborhood that morning helps to motivate us to actually have a garage sale. After all, if thousands of people are going to be walking by, might as well see if they want our stuff. 
I’ve mentioned that growing up I was a geek in the classic sense of the word. I liked computers, games of all kinds, Star Wars, and comic books. Interestingly, I still like all that stuff but I’m no longer a geek. The difference between now and then? Social skills. Unfortunately, it took me until deep into High School to realize that how I interacted with people had a direct affect on both them and myself. I climbed down off my high horse and realized that what I thought made me superior was really just a defense mechanism and made it harder for people to like me. 
My father bites his nails or at least he used to. Looking back on my life I distinctly remember starting to bite my nails because my Dad did it. I’m not sure what the exact logic was behind it, but I was young, under 10 easily, and I wanted to be like Dad. I can’t imagine how many pounds of fingernails I’ve digested over the years, ugh. I kept biting well into my early twenties. One day, though, I decided for whatever reason that I needed to stop doing it. Thus began my quest to break a lifelong habit. 
When Hope was a baby, I’d feed her every Sunday morning. It typically happened around 6:00 in the morning and I’d go downstairs, get her bottle ready and then pick her up from her crib. I’d sit down in the living room and give her a bottle, trying to be as quiet as possible so Amy could get some more sleep. I’d turn on the TV and looked for something that I could have on but not pay much attention to. Well on SpeedTV they had live Formula 1 races and since they were usually in Europe, they started just at the same time as I started feeding Hope. So I’d put them on and watch the cars go by. By the time Hope stopped taking a bottle, I was hooked on the sport.