At work I am part of a team that mostly uses C#. Because I’m new to it (and sorely inexperienced) a coworker loaned me a copy of C# Design Patterns by James Cooper. I’ve found the book to be quite informative, a little too remedial at points, but generally quite enjoyable. You can look forward to seeing some of my notes from it, namely summaries of the various design patterns.

When I was 10 I had two best friends, Mikael and Alex, and we would spend all of our time together. One of our favorite activities was playing role playing games. (D&D, TMNT, Ninja’s and Superspies are the three I can remember of the top of my head) . Before we learned about girls we would spend our recesses hunched over a desk rolling die for initiative and combing through the Dungeon Masters Guide.

I’ve grown up some since then, but I still haven’t given up the nerd in me. I channeled that nerd towards technology and put aside the role playing for many years, but a couple of years ago Mary gave me Settlers of Catan for my birthday and I fell in love instantly. How could there be a whole realm of interesting, challenging, fun boardgames that I had never heard of?!? A way to exercise my love of fantasy/sci-fi and role playing without losing friends, personal hygiene and self respect! I was thrilled.

Since then I’ve picked up a number of other titles and have enjoyed them all. My friend Charlotte has organized a gaming group and we get together every couple of weeks, have dinner and play games. This has been a great experience and wonderful way of learning of (and playing) new games. Zombies, Apples to Apples, Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, 5 Crowns to name a few.

Long story short, I’ve added a new category for games. In future you can look forward to hearing more about my game playing experiences. Let me know if you’ve got any questions/thoughts about the games I talk about.

Happy New Year everyone.

I asked M. what I should write about and she recommended that I write about how awesome she is. I thought that was a good challenge, though I don’t want to call it a challenge… I mean, it’s almost too easy, right? Let me first start with the home made bagels that she made for our New Year’s brunch yesterday - salted, poppy seed, and sugar-cinnamon toppings. It doesn’t stop there, she’s an amazing cook - come over for dinner sometime and see for yourself.

Then there’s the buttons that she didn’t sew onto my coat. I pestered her for like 9 months for her to sew a button back onto my coat. And though she never did she taught me a valuable lesson about self sufficiency. Had I not sewn that one button onto my coat myself I wouldn’t have known how to sew the other three on that fell off not long after. Or, you know, she could have sewn all four of them on for me and I could have learned how to Tom Sawyer people into doing my work for me.

M.  does a wonderful job correcting my atrocious  spelling and grammar and she can even diagram sentences (but can’t manage to keep her shoelaces tied).

I also think that my M. is awesome because she’s reading this over my shoulder and I couldn’t really say otherwise at this point, could I? And that she’s patient and kind and most of all because she puts up with me.