Writing for the future

About a year after my son was born, when my memory started working again, I started writing a blog about the things he was getting up to.

I started it on 19 September 2010, 2718 days ago. In that time I have made 733 posts, roughly one every four days. Obviously there are peaks and troughs, but that’s a nice average to have. Enough time can pass between each one for something new, nice or surprising to happen and warrant recording.

I don’t use pictures, only words, because I’m keen that moving blogging platforms, or the vagaries of image resizing don’t destroy it over time. In 18 months my son will be ten, I think that’ll probably be enough posts to get it printed out and bound. I’ve used https://www.lulu.com/ many times with great success, but there are other services which do WordPress-specific imports so hopefully I’ll find something which lets me do it nice and easily as well as making something that looks good, and lets me preserve my digital record well past the ability of any digital records management.

Playing games

Growing up I played the board games that you might expect a kid growing up in the 80s to play: Scrabble, Monopoly, Frustration, Cluedo and so on. Although I mostly enjoyed them, they were all tedious in their own ways. The more interesting the game, the longer it took, and the more “adult” it was seen to be and was therefore either out of reach of my younger sibling or took to long to play with my parents. Today is very different.

Sites like https://boardgamegeek.com/ mean that it’s possible to find games for my kids which don’t take too long to play and are also accessible for their ages, meaning they’re much more fun!

As well as some of the classics like “Guess Who” and “Connect 4” we’ve acquired Kingdomino, Castle Panic and Labyrinth, all of which are good fun.

On our horizon I can definitely see Catan Junior and Ticket to Ride: First Journey (Europe). Hopefully my kids will be able to look back on the board games they played with pleasure rather than mild horror, and will be able to play better, more interesting games as they grow up.