When I was in the Navy, one of the mainstays of our damage control training was using Peri-jet eductors to dewater spaces. As you can probably imagine, getting water out of your ship as quickly as possible has benefits...in combat situations, your ship is generally your only way home. Imagine my surprise yesterday at being called on to put that training to use.
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First Monday Book Day: July
Talking to Ourselves by Andres Neuman is a short novel from the Argentinian author that I read last month. I had read the first novel of his to be translated (Traveler of the Century) a few years ago and that was a huge 600 page novel of ideas. This book is very much the opposite of that, it is short and immediate and has a significant impact.
There are three narrators; Lito, the child, Elena, the mother, and Mario, the father who is dying of cancer, but hiding that fact from his son. All three of the characters are hiding things but the father's illness and approaching death shadows the book throughout. Father and son embark on a cross country trip that for the father is a last chance to create a memory, and for Lito is his first chance to truly enter his father's adult world. All three narrative arcs continue to dance around each other always approaching, but never do they actually connect and find common ground.
It's a book about family and grief and illness. Each of the three narrators is so fully realized and observed by Neuman that the book comes together very well. Neuman has become one of those authors that I will follow and read whatever comes out from him next (a story collection is coming in October, I hear - consider me excited).
That was one of my favorite books I've read in the first half of the year. Hopefully, you all have had similarly great reading experiences this month and we can while away the next few days discussing them.
Players of the Month: June
Our monthly honors.
The Games We Play – Summer Rollin’
So, after going for a couple months with barely playing any games, I've been rollin' in games the last couple weeks.
No Thanks - This is a pretty simple card game. There are numbered cards ranging from 3 to 35. Nine are randomly taken out of the deck. The rest are placed face down. Everyone gets 11 tokens. From the face down deck, one card is laid face up. The starting player decides whether they want to take the card, or say "no thanks" and put a token into the pot. The goal is to end up with the least points. Tokens work as negative points. Eventually, there are enough tokens in the center to make it worth taking the card, or someone runs out of tokens and HAS to take the card. It's a fun, simple quick game.
Dread Pirate - Now, I know the name sounds great for this game, but it's painfully dull. It's a roll-n-move game, where the goal is to get the most loot from four different ports and a center island called Dread Island. There's not a whole lot of depth to this, but the components were awesome. It had a cloth map as the player board, and heavy pewter ships to sail around on it.
Love Letter - quick short game that sounds girlier than it is. Goal is to end up with the highest numbered card. Each card has some text to determine what you do. Pretty quick and fun. Excited to try out the Batman version someday.
Trajan - This has been by far the heaviest game I've played lately. By designer Stefan Feld (his games have somewhat of a cult following). This game uses a mancala mechanism to determine what action you take on your turn. There are six different action types, and the way you weave them all together can get you points in a variety of ways. This has really climbed up my favorites list. I bought it used on BoardGameGeek, but I also play it on boiteajeux.net.
Agricola - I recently got this game used, and I've gotten it to the table 4 times in the last month. I've heard that you either love this game or hate this game. It's a worker placement game where the goal is to build the best farm. You can build up your home, build pastures, plow and sow fields and grow crops. There are also occupation cards and minor improvement cards, but I haven't gotten around to introducing those to the kids yet. I also play this occasionally on boiteajeux.net.
La Isla - I got this game for Christmas. On Father's Day, I finally got enough pull to get this to the table. It's another Feld (like Trajan), but the theme and mechanics are a mismatch. The theme is very light - it's all about capturing long extinct animals on a mysterious island - appeals very well to kids. The mechanics are complicated enough that kids either don't get it, or it just isn't fun.
I'm starting to get into a groove. It feels good. I just found another game group that meets on Fridays. They do mostly D&D type stuff, but the last Friday is always board games. I'm anxious to try it out next week. I've also been hitting a Wed lunchtime group at work that plays mainly 7 Wonders, but is open to other games as well.
In the meantime, when I can't get to the table I also tend to play a lot of games online.
boiteajeux.net - Quite a variety of games. The ones I play most often are Castles of Burgundy, Trajan, Alhambra, and Agricola. It has a ton of other games too.
yucata.de - Similar to boite, this one has quite a few games, some of them simple abstract type games, but there are a couple bigger, weighier games on it. My favorites are Russian Railroads, Castles of Burgundy (I play on both sites), Can't Stop, Way of the Dragon, Stone Age, and Just For Fun
My username on both sites is "joepunman" in case anyone is interested in starting a game with me. Both sites are primarily correspondence type sites, where you make a couple moves a day, and just take your turn when you get a chance. You can play live, but I rarely do.
So, if you get bored watching the Twins or got voted out of Survivor, come try your hand at an online board game. Or let me know what else you've been playing lately!
Movie Day
Okay, let's do this. I've seen a good amount of movies since I last got to talk about them, so hopefully today allows me to BS about movies.
Summer Mix
First Monday (Observed) Book Day
- Don't know if there are any William Gibson fans here, but I read his latest book, The Peripheral, this month and thought it was very good. The world building was fantastic, and although I was a little let down by a very tidy ending, I would still rank it among my favorite sci-fi books from the last year or so.
- I read Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater this month in my Vonnegut re-read project. Cat's Cradle is still pretty great, although it's funny how much I remembered the post-apocalyptic parts of the book considering how little of that there actually is. Mr. Rosewater was not my favorite of his, but it was one of the novels I hadn't read before, so the completist in me is happy to have read it.
- I finished The Last Policeman series (The Last Policeman, Countdown City, World of Trouble). Easy books to read, and I liked the setup for the mysteries (society is breaking down as an asteroid will destroy the Earth very soon).
- I also finally got around to reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine. It's a powerful book. I was looking for where others posted their thoughts (I know Pepper and CH have read it as well), but didn't immediately find it. It's very much worth a read.
Players of the Month: May
Our monthly honors.
Fish class
I signed up for Master's swim classes at my club, and have been going for the last 4 Tuesday's at 6:30PM. There are about 12 of us in the class, and a third of us are focused on endurance (long-distance) swimming for Triathlon. Actually one of the guys wants to do really long distance swimming - a later post on that (he recently did 10 miles).
My challenge is to add kicking to my swim, which I started with this class - beforehand I've done all my swimming with my arms. So I am kicking now, but not correctly. My coach has suggested several improvements, but I can't see what I am doing now with the advice.
Today at lunch, NBBW and I were discussing a way to drag some kind of device behind you while you swim with an embedded iPhone so you could film your kicking pattern. One idea was a strap around your waist, with a cord hanging behind you dragging a floatable device that would be holding your iPhone in a vertical position underwater (in a clear plastic bag) pointed towards your legs and able to capture your kicking movement. More to come on this...
Father Knows Best – overwhelmed
Sometimes I wonder if we made the right decision
Two weeks ago, we accepted a foster placement of an almost 2-year old girl I'll call Dakota. We thought it would be a good fit. She was just a year older than our youngest. Our other kids have demonstrated friendliness and acceptance to a couple of other foster children we've accepted in our home. I would say that we've had good experiences with previous foster children in our home (granted, they were for very short amounts of time)
Just before Dakota came to live with us, we worried about whether or not this placement would actually happen. A part of us was worried that something would prevent us from having an opportunity to care for this girl. We were very excited at the possibility though.
A lot has changed in just a month.
Dakota is a very high energy child. This means that she's constantly on the go, and eats and poops A LOT. Her curiosity gets her many places that she shouldn't be, and I feel like we're constantly correcting and redirecting her. All the while trying to remember her past and why she came to be placed into care in the first place, realizing that you need to have a different approach to children from foster care than you do your own children.
It has been incredibly difficult, and it's taking a toll on my wife and I. My wife has been bearing the brunt of the work, spending most of the day with her, trying to homeschool our other children in the meantime. Luckily the older children are somewhat independent and able to do much of their work on their own. By the time evening comes along, I try to be intentional about helping out by taking more direct responsibility for Dakota and let my wife have some time to herself.
Dakota does not like bedtime, and would much rather play and run around in her room. Once she finally does go down, we try to get as much sleep as we can, taking the same approach that many take to caring for newborns - sleep while she sleeps.
I believe it has less to do with her being a foster child, and more to do with the fact that she's nearly 2. I'm hopeful that we can move past this and come to a new normal with her in our home. However, our sanity seems to be taking a hit.
We're going to a family camp this weekend that we scheduled months ago. I'm not sure how it's going to go, as both my wife and I are very concerned how Dakota's presence is going to affect the family dynamic. If you pray, please pray for our family and for Dakota. If you don't, well, keep us in your thoughts anyway.
How have you been feeling overwhelmed lately?