Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

Yeah, still alive. I kind of fell off the Internet there for a couple of weeks. Not blogging, barely making use of any other communications tech. Still reading a lot of stuff, but all input, no output. This was not a planned thing, I just found that my real life was taking up too much [...]

Collected from here and there about the networks, for your amusement or edification, I would really like to believe the story of Denny & Peach is a vignette that accurately captures a bit of the wonder of the world. But even if it’s a fiction, it’s a lovely little one. Also, SWORD CANE! Same thing [...]

Between this whole house-selling/house-buying thing, and the relatively insane week I’ve had at work, I have been neglecting the blog. Let’s catch up on a few things that have popped up in the meantime. I may have mentioned here before that I enjoyed Farmer’s Riverworld books (for getting me into Burton, among other things), and [...]

In addition to all that “moving to Ontario soon” drama outlined below, there’s a whole other life milestone that got passed today: my daughter went to school for the first time. We got up a little early this morning and had a pancake breakfast, and then we all went down to where Sarah would meet [...]

Holiday Monday has kept me too busy to properly blog, so you get a bit of a tab-closing list instead. I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway. I’ve seen some stories about tough [...]

There you see Sarah receiving her first belt at her taekwondo class. The final part of her belt test involved kicking through a board. I expected it to be some kind of styrofoam or balsa or something–she’s only four years old after all. But no, it was a pine plank, and a decently thick one. [...]

Very rarely does one of those “ten photos, each with a paragraph of text” photo features in one of the major papers make me tear up–I want to say never, but my memory is not the wondrous thing it once was1 so that might be a bit of a reach. It’s moot anyway, since this [...]

Sarah’s “big” Christmas present this year was her own iPod Nano, and a little clock/radio/dock that she could use to play it in her room. We had been having a lot of fun listening to songs in the car, taking turns picking songs, and she liked both being able to pick songs, and looking at [...]

A recent cleaning and reorganization process resulted in our more-or-less reclaiming the upstairs family room from our daughter. Not that we’ve kicked her out of there, but we’ve removed a bunch of her stuff from the room, making it seem less exclusively hers. A consequence of this is that we had room to add a [...]

My family is away this weekend, visiting more of our extended family. I couldn’t go with them, for a combination of reasons. One of the consequences of this is that I am getting to do some things I haven’t done in more than 4 years. Yesterday, I woke up at 8AM, rolled over and went [...]

I should note that while I maintain a little bit of hipster irony about the whole Christmas thing (for instance, this made me laugh right out loud) there are some other people in my household who are completely into it. And, since I am completely unable to say no to them, I have found myself [...]

In an attempt to somewhat balance the “what a terrible parent” image I presented earlier this week, here’s a short account of some of what we’ve done over the last couple of weekends. This past weekend featured a family trip to the movies to see one of the two HRM showings of the new(ish) Cirque [...]

There are things I miss, but not enough to pay the price for having them. “The Old Man Dreams” Oh for one hour of youthful joy! Give back my twentieth spring! I’d rather laugh, a bright-haired boy, Than reign, a gray-beard king. Off with the spoils of wrinkled age! Away with Learning’s crown! Tear out [...]

Part 1: Apparently we’re raising a racist. So, apparently Sarah has joined the Klan. Imagine the scene: we’re out for lunch on Saturday, having our usual meal at Tarek’s, which is very busy at lunch, with a very ethnically diverse crowd. It’s a Turkish place, and it’s great–we’ve been there most Saturdays for the last [...]