Daniel J Isom

      December followed November with 2 blog posts, no games, and lots of baking. The year as a whole went really well for blogging and baking. I was successful of doing at least two of each of those activities each month, but we didn't make it on the board game challenge. It was a bit of a risk including that one, but it's given me some perspective going forward regarding my board gaming goals. Overall, I'm happy with what I was able to accomplish in 2020. For 2021, I decided to be very aggressive and set 6 goals. You can read all about them here . For now, here is what I accomplished in the last month of 2020: 1)  Write at least 2 blog posts each month I stated that  Christmas is Canceled . Wrote a recap of the unplayed games I was able to get to the table in 2020. 2)  Complete the 10 x 2 Board Game Challenge As I stated in the intro, we didn't get anything played in December. It was part giving up and part canceling gaming with friends because of COVID....

2020 has been a dumpster fire pure and simple. Between being stuck at home for nearly a year, watching our favorite restaurants close, and dealing with the kids' virtual schooling, this year has sucked. However, compared to most, our year has been decent. Neither Christine nor I lost hours at work, we've been fortunate enough not to contract COVID-19, and the kids are doing amazingly in school. We even found time to spend together as a couple and as a family despite the many restrictions put in place. For obvious reasons, we didn't travel back to NY this year. It's the first time since moving to Delaware over 9 years ago that we didn't make the drive at least once. While I was sad not to be able to go, we did have family visit here and there over the summer. We expected there to be a good chance of going up to NY for Thanksgiving or, if not that, at least having people visit over Christmas. First we had to cancel our NY trip. Then this week we made the very tough de...

I've been struggling to find inspiration to write about anything lately. I have some ideas, but every time I sit down to write I just don't feel motivated enough to actually do it. This post was going to be about one of the YouTube channels I watch, but even that didn't seem very interesting. So why not a health update? It's probably one of the things going on right now that I'm actually excited about. If you read the blog, you'll know my journey of weight loss/gain and exercise (or lack their of) is always going on behind the scenes. Back in June, I wrote about the website Darebee  and how it was really helping me. It's been about six months so here's where I'm at today. Lowest Weight as an Adult As of a week before Halloween, I started consistently weighing 175 pounds. That puts me below my all time low as an adult when I was down to 177 in July of 2019. It's been nearly a month and I've kept that weight, give or take a pound depending on t...

As I wrote in my 10 Years of Marriage post, Christine and I were supposed to take a trip this year. Obviously that couldn't really happen because of all the Covid-related quarantines and travel restrictions. We decided we did still want to get away for a couple days, so we were looking for places down by the beaches here in Delaware. Then more restrictions were put in place down there due to an increase of new cases. The fact that a ton of people would still be down there made me look elsewhere. So I hopped on Airbnb and started looking for smaller towns on the coastlines, that's when I stumbled across the Fairwinds Cottage in Chesapeake City. Chesapeake City only takes 45 minute to get to through the back roads of Delaware and Maryland from our house in Clayton. It was a beautiful drive that didn't feel very long at all because we'd never been down many of the roads that we took. As you can see in the picture above, the town is broken up into two parts by the canal. ...

A few months ago I wrote about my new favorite sport, Marble Racing , something that I'm still very much into (Go Hazers!). Shortly after I got really into watching marbles zoom down sand courses and around formula-1 style tracks, I was turned onto another racing channel. 3DBotMaker is a youtube channel that does something similar to Jelle's Marble Runs, only with 1/64 scale diecast cars. Now I've never been much of a car guy, but my brother and I had hundreds of these diecast cars when were were kids. We'd spend hours making ramps and courses to race them. So naturally I took to watching this after seeing a single race. The ascetics and courses have gotten better and more complex each season. What used to be just plastic track in a room has now become an incredibly elaborate set up with lots of detail using the scenery you'd see on a model train table. Another addition to the production value is a pair of announcers who do commentary on the race, much like wha...

Just before the chaos that is Coronavirus shut everything down, I stumbled upon marble racing. I've always been a fan of oddball sports, so it was no surprise when I immediately took to it. At first, I though it was just videos people had done where a handful of marbles raced down these elaborate sand courses (Marble Rally). Little did I know, it was so much more. Sure, there are some one off races, but there are seasons where marbles qualify to get into them. Then the same marbles compete in race after race, gaining points depending on how they finished. At the end of the season, a champion is crowned. I would have been all in for just the sand courses, but then I found the youtube channel of the people who runs these races. On top of all of the one off races on sand and other elaborate outdoor courses, there are also marble Olympics (now named Marble League). They adapted various Olympic events where both individual and teams of marbles compete for medals. Points are tracke...