Daniel J Isom

Boy was May an insanely busy month. It started with a trip to my mom's house for a meal and time with family before driving directly to Philadelphia to stay the night near King of Prussia Mall, where we went to Netflix House for Grace's birthday experience. Then we celebrated Grace's birthday a couple days later, followed by Ben's Spanish Immersion night. That led into a movie and dinner on Mother's day and the first of three straight weeks of concerts/performances on our normal date nights. The kids and Christine went to a K-POP Demon Hunter's dance party in Wilmington, Christine had her birthday, and the Duck Creek Library kicked off their summer reading challenge. We had to split the family up one night because Ben had his drama club performance as the Cowardly Lion in the The Wizard of OZ and Grace had her band concert at the same time. If all if that wasn't enough, there was still the kids' gymnastics classes each week, a couple of game days for me...

  April was...something. There were some really high highs and at least one very low low. Getting the depressing part out of the way, my birthday was...not great. One could argue quite terrible and possibly the worst birthday yet. It has nothing to do with getting older because that doesn't bother me, something I've often written about on here. There were just a series of events that ruined it and the fact that one is "supposed" to have a "good" birthday made it worse. Aside from that, I had a lot going on in all aspects of my life in April and had some really great experiences that made up for how poorly "my" day went. We started the month with a nice trip back to Syracuse for Easter to visit family. The day after we got back was the bad day, but then a couple days later Christine and I saw Alton Brown's live show at The Grand in Wilmington after going back to Farmer & the Cow for dinner. It was an amazing night that I could just go on a...

March felt like it was full of just the daily grind into busy weekends. There were after school practices, various medical appointments, a vet appointment, gymnastics, and the first mowing of the season. On the weekends there was cleaning, three game days, the new Pixar movie,  Hoppers , a birthday party, and I Love Smyrna School District day where Ben had a chorus performance. In anticipation for a busy final week of the month/first week of April, I took a rare Friday off to allow us to have a quiet final weekend before we spend this upcoming weekend in Syracuse for Easter. With the weather starting to get nicer, the kids got out on their new scooters and I set up the basketball hoop we got them for Christmas. Earlier in the month I found some time to update my "top 10" board games list which hadn't been done in six and half years. It was a fun exercise and post to write and has spurred me to revisit some old favorites, some of which stayed on the list while others dropp...

It's been six and half years since I posted some version my top 10 all time board games and I figured it was time to do a new update. I have written a top 10 New to Me Games list each year since 2023, but it's been too long since an all time list was written. This is technically the third update from  the original list , which had  one update  in the standard Top 10 format. The  second update  followed the format I'm using for this post, which is 3 categories with 5 game each. The rules from previous lists still apply:      1) I must own the game      2) I must have played the game more than once I've played A LOT of games since the last version of this list, both in number of unique titles and total plays. This is all in thanks to starting a new in-person game group that meets publicly, the kids getting older and interested, and really embracing online play on Board Game Arena . My collection has also grown substantially...

  The shortest month of the year had quite a bit going on including Ben's first band concert, 2 snowstorms that granted me days off, a game day with the kids, and seeing Kansas in concert. All in all it was a pretty good month overall, but it felt almost too busy with drama practices and various doctor's appointments sprinkled on top of everything else each week. Sticking with the shortest month, this might be the shortest opening to a wrap-up post all year. Blah Blog Log Didn't find time to write anything outside of the monthly Wrap-Up post. January 2026 Wrap-Up  - A trip to Disney, a new Ryan Murphy show, and some board gaming. Bored  Board Games Between a full afternoon of games with the kids that had 9 total plays and a lot of BGA time, February had 26 games played a total of 144 times. Snow storms forced a cancellation of an in person meetup but I rescheduled it to yesterday, so March will end up having 3 in person meetups. I also have started selling some games from...

What a month to start off the year. I was still fighting off the flu or some sort of respiratory virus that kicked my ass during the first week. Through that I had two new employees start and I had a lot of grant related work to do. Thankfully I was back to 100% before we took the kids on their first trip to Disney World over the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. I could probably write an entire post covering all the details but to sum it up:  We flew direct using Avelo Airlines out of Wilmington, which was the least painful airport experience ever. It also saved us a bunch of money both in airfare and parking. With the amazing help of my sister-in-law, we visited all four parks in 3 days. Ben and I did miss half of the day at Magic Kingdom because he was sick, but he bounced back for our last day at Animal Kingdom and Epcot. Rode a bunch of rides thanks to lighting lane passes. Grace and Ben are thrill ride seekers with Tron , Tower of Terror ,  Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic...