And to think, I didn’t even realise that this needly tree hanging around outside my house was a larch, until it started to turn yellow and all the needles fell off.
It’s shaping up to be a pretty game-playing kind of Winter. And boardgame #1 so far (actually, it’s the only boardgame we’ve been playing, everything else has been cards or tiles or something), has been Settlers of Catan.
It looks a little something like this:
To play, you roll dice, collect resources (such as sheep), and build settlements and roads and things like that. But the most important thing is that like all good things, it’s also available in food form:
You can even play it giant sized at Burning Man (less tasty, but also fun)
And best of all, it’s so simple that even a baby can play!
A day trip to Vancouver to visit the Australian Consulate and get the Moosling an Australian passport to go with his Canadian one.
(Even visited the Apple store to play with an iPad, and the travelling part all went smoothly except for the part at the end of the day where I tried to sneak in a nappy change just before boarding the flight home, and of course because I was rushing it all went terribly wrong, and there was pee everywhere and a screaming baby and then I was paged to board early. Mission to use cloth nappies while travelling was successful though…)
In lieu of a proper book review, I’ll just give you some quotes from the book The Third Policeman. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from a book written in 1939 and set in rural Ireland. It’s just a little fantastical, and I can now understand why it wasn’t published until 1967. As one reviewer said – you’ll never look at bicycles the same way again.
“Tell me,” he continued, “would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?”
“It would not,” I replied.
“On a patent tandem?”
“No.”
“Dentists are an unpredictable coterie of people,” he said. “Do you tell me it was a velocipede or a penny-farthing?”
“Why should anyone steal a watch when they can steal a bicycle?”
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.”
“…You do not mean to say that these bicycles eat food?”
“They were never seen doing it, nobody ever caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that the food disappears.”