Holidays
The holidays are upon us! Xmas is getting seriously nigh.
Thankfully I was ahead of the game on my shopping this year. Nothing like avoiding a last minute scramble. I'd chalk this up to good habits and foresight but it's honestly mostly just laziness and the practice of keeping an up to date Amazon wish list.
We're now through all the holiday parties we're going to get to before the actual holidays. More will come afterwards. Good times have been had, and will be had.
Naturally, we're sick. I got a cold which I'm now mostly over, but my lovely wife and Owen are now in the middle of it. The good news is that it seems to pass pretty quickly, so with any luck we'll be clear by Xmas.
The Island of Sodor
I picked up a whole pile of Thomas toys for Owen. He's also received a number of Thomas toys from other people. Did you know that Thomas tracks (a necessary element for a line of toy trains) are not all compatible? It's true! Somebody had a business meeting at some point in which they decided this was acceptable, and I want to get five minutes alone in a room with that guy. Just five minutes.
For future reference: mechanical Thomas trains have their own tracks which only work with those trains. Wood track Thomas trains, with disk magnets and weird looking wheels, work with their own wooden tracks and with all the knock-off wooden track sets. Those wooden tracks also work with the mechanical trains. The die cast Thomas trains, with rectangular magnets and better looking wheels, work with the plastic Play And Go tracks but not any of the others. The plastic tracks work with all types of trains.
Owen already has 4 different types of trains (some of which he doesn't know about yet) and 2 different, incompatible track sets.
Seriously, these guys can all go fuck themselves.
(No, I'm not even close to done buying him trains. Why do you ask?)
Monkey
Me: "That's right."
Owen: "That's correct."
Me: As one does.
Owen: As Owen does!
Travel
We are off to Kingston for Xmas and back between then and my birthday. The in-laws will be up for part of that. I don't know what my schedule will look like, really. I've been telling people that they might get a call from me to go hang out or whatever, but we aren't in a position to plan anything solid yet. There are a bunch of people I want to see but I won't be able to before we're into January, which sucks, but between work and kids and stuff in general, I guess this is how things go.
What I'm trying to say is that I've been able to spend a bunch of time with awesome people (including some that I haven't seen for literal years and didn't expect to see any time soon!) but there just isn't enough time to see all the awesome people I know before the holidays get here. That's a pretty good problem to have, I'm not complaining, but if you're an awesome person and I haven't seen you yet, just know that I'm sorry and we'll get together in the new year.
The weather network says we're due for crazy storms or freezing rain or zombies or something, right on Xmas Eve. This might play havoc with our travel schedule. Of course.
Beer
As I mentioned on Twitter, my New Year's Resolution is to spend >50% of my beer budget on local craft brews and 0% at the Beer Store. I've decided to get a jump on that plan and so far it's going very well. Ottawa has just a ridiculous number of really solid craft brewers right now (mostly within the last 5 years) and you can easily get the bulk of your beer from them and not be missing out at all. What these guys are producing is so much better than what the big companies are doing. Not patronizing the Beer Store is just the icing on the cake of moral superiority.
Also, the Untappd app is exerting an upward pressure on my beer budget. Seeing all the unique beers you drink over a period of time really reminds you both a. that you have a huge variety of really great beer at your disposal and b. that there are so many really great beers you haven't tried yet. I don't know that the quantity of beer I'm drinking has gone up since I started using that app, but the median number of times I've had each given beer has dropped like a rock. Which is a good thing! Variety is the spice of functional alcoholism.
And In Conclusion
I am posting on this blog less often, but I really do like the format. I'm writing on Twitter much more than the blog but some things just don't fit easily into 140 characters.
This is going to be post #12 for 2014. I think that once-a-month is a reasonable quantity of posting for the blog, although I might well try to push that up a bit next year.
As ever, I find it interesting that I have this blog and my Twitter feed as a combined archive of all the stuff that's going on, and has been going on, for lo these many years. Since it's all in the public eye (not that the public, as such, as much reason to eye it) this all also has some historical context. I shudder to think of Owen, in some future time, going back and pulling out this content and reading it and wondering why his old man was such a dipshit sometimes. To say nothing of the far future history student writing a paper on western society in the years before the Zombie Apocalypse, and all the trivial bullshit we found so fascinating.
On that note, I think I'll wrap this up. Happy holidays to all. Stay safe, have fun, drink good beer, and spend as much time as you can with awesome people.
The holidays are upon us! Xmas is getting seriously nigh.
Thankfully I was ahead of the game on my shopping this year. Nothing like avoiding a last minute scramble. I'd chalk this up to good habits and foresight but it's honestly mostly just laziness and the practice of keeping an up to date Amazon wish list.
We're now through all the holiday parties we're going to get to before the actual holidays. More will come afterwards. Good times have been had, and will be had.
Naturally, we're sick. I got a cold which I'm now mostly over, but my lovely wife and Owen are now in the middle of it. The good news is that it seems to pass pretty quickly, so with any luck we'll be clear by Xmas.
The Island of Sodor
I picked up a whole pile of Thomas toys for Owen. He's also received a number of Thomas toys from other people. Did you know that Thomas tracks (a necessary element for a line of toy trains) are not all compatible? It's true! Somebody had a business meeting at some point in which they decided this was acceptable, and I want to get five minutes alone in a room with that guy. Just five minutes.
For future reference: mechanical Thomas trains have their own tracks which only work with those trains. Wood track Thomas trains, with disk magnets and weird looking wheels, work with their own wooden tracks and with all the knock-off wooden track sets. Those wooden tracks also work with the mechanical trains. The die cast Thomas trains, with rectangular magnets and better looking wheels, work with the plastic Play And Go tracks but not any of the others. The plastic tracks work with all types of trains.
Owen already has 4 different types of trains (some of which he doesn't know about yet) and 2 different, incompatible track sets.
Seriously, these guys can all go fuck themselves.
(No, I'm not even close to done buying him trains. Why do you ask?)
Monkey
Me: "That's right."
Owen: "That's correct."
Me: As one does.
Owen: As Owen does!
Travel
We are off to Kingston for Xmas and back between then and my birthday. The in-laws will be up for part of that. I don't know what my schedule will look like, really. I've been telling people that they might get a call from me to go hang out or whatever, but we aren't in a position to plan anything solid yet. There are a bunch of people I want to see but I won't be able to before we're into January, which sucks, but between work and kids and stuff in general, I guess this is how things go.
What I'm trying to say is that I've been able to spend a bunch of time with awesome people (including some that I haven't seen for literal years and didn't expect to see any time soon!) but there just isn't enough time to see all the awesome people I know before the holidays get here. That's a pretty good problem to have, I'm not complaining, but if you're an awesome person and I haven't seen you yet, just know that I'm sorry and we'll get together in the new year.
The weather network says we're due for crazy storms or freezing rain or zombies or something, right on Xmas Eve. This might play havoc with our travel schedule. Of course.
Beer
As I mentioned on Twitter, my New Year's Resolution is to spend >50% of my beer budget on local craft brews and 0% at the Beer Store. I've decided to get a jump on that plan and so far it's going very well. Ottawa has just a ridiculous number of really solid craft brewers right now (mostly within the last 5 years) and you can easily get the bulk of your beer from them and not be missing out at all. What these guys are producing is so much better than what the big companies are doing. Not patronizing the Beer Store is just the icing on the cake of moral superiority.
Also, the Untappd app is exerting an upward pressure on my beer budget. Seeing all the unique beers you drink over a period of time really reminds you both a. that you have a huge variety of really great beer at your disposal and b. that there are so many really great beers you haven't tried yet. I don't know that the quantity of beer I'm drinking has gone up since I started using that app, but the median number of times I've had each given beer has dropped like a rock. Which is a good thing! Variety is the spice of functional alcoholism.
And In Conclusion
I am posting on this blog less often, but I really do like the format. I'm writing on Twitter much more than the blog but some things just don't fit easily into 140 characters.
This is going to be post #12 for 2014. I think that once-a-month is a reasonable quantity of posting for the blog, although I might well try to push that up a bit next year.
As ever, I find it interesting that I have this blog and my Twitter feed as a combined archive of all the stuff that's going on, and has been going on, for lo these many years. Since it's all in the public eye (not that the public, as such, as much reason to eye it) this all also has some historical context. I shudder to think of Owen, in some future time, going back and pulling out this content and reading it and wondering why his old man was such a dipshit sometimes. To say nothing of the far future history student writing a paper on western society in the years before the Zombie Apocalypse, and all the trivial bullshit we found so fascinating.
On that note, I think I'll wrap this up. Happy holidays to all. Stay safe, have fun, drink good beer, and spend as much time as you can with awesome people.
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