Daniel J Isom

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...

  March was an odd month, especially with Easter being at the end of it. Not as many segments in the post, but it was still a pretty productive month overall with some good stuff to share. Blah Blog Log February 2024 Wrap Up  - Great television, a podcast live show, and "The Cracken". Bored  Board Games March saw an uptick in number of plays and the same number of unique games of the year as played in February. I logged 64 plays across 32 games, 19 of those being new for the year. That brought me to 34.83% of the way to part one of my goal (600 plays) and 50.67% of the way to part two of my goal (150 unique games). There are four or five games that I wanted to highlight from this batch, but two really stuck out and both happen to be new games (one isn't even published yet): Let's Go! to Japan  - I don't own this game, but my friend Eric from our game group got this recently and I liked it so much after the first play that I requested a second play the following me...

I was sick with the flu for a portion of the month, but it was still pretty jam packed. Christine and I saw two live shows, we visited the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science with the kids, and I still found time to play a bunch of games. Blah Blog Log January 2024 Wrap Up - Board games, a mobile game, and a delicious sandwich. Criminal Podcast  - A favorite podcast of mine and I got to see their live show. Hidden Cup V  - One of the best Age of Empire II tournaments. Bored  Board Games Due to being sick throughout the middle of the month, I wasn't able to keep up the incredible pace that I set in January. However, I did still play quite a bit more than I typically played up until recently. I logged 45   plays across 26 games, 19 of those being new for the year. That brought me to 24.1% of the way to part one of my goal (600 plays) and 36% of the way to part two of my goal (150 unique games). Only two of the games were new to me, so the game I'm going to high...

Last night Christine and I attended a live event for one of my favorite podcasts, Criminal . From their website, "Criminal is an award-winning podcast about true crime. Stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle." Unlike a lot of true crime media, the stories aren't typically gruesome or horrific. The host, Phoebe Judge, does a great job of taking out certain details of the more violent stories which allows her to tell the story, as it happened, in a more nuanced way. Since starting the show in 2014, there have been more than 250 episodes that have been a joy to listen to.  For their 10 year anniversary, Phoebe, co-creator Lauren Spohrer, and the rest of the Criminal team are currently on tour doing a set of live shows across the country. Knowing my love of the show, Christine asked if I wanted tickets to go when they went on sale months ago. So on a cold night in Glenside, PA, a town just north of Philadelphia, a few hundr...

This blog has always been a hodge-podge of opinion pieces, reviews, personal updates, and other posts that typically fall in the food and board gaming spaces. It's also been somewhat of a diary at times over the last almost 7 years. I've previously written in posts that I really enjoy sharing what's going on in my life. Writing yesterday's post really reminded me how much I miss spending time creating new content for the blog. I've been flirting with starting a regular posting schedule, but couldn't quite settle on what I thought would be realistic. It's not so much for a lack of ideas or things to write about, it's really more about time and my reluctance to commit to something because I'll eventually find it to feel like work. With that all being said, this post is to announce and preview my new Monthly Wrap-Ups. During the first week of each new month, I'm going to post a wrap-up of everything that happened the month before. I don't think...

  August wasn't great overall. I hope I'm not losing steam. 1)  Write at least 2 blog posts each month I shared the a podcast that I really enjoy,  The Endless Honeymoon Podcast Our cherry tomato plants have gone crazy, now I just make batches of Roasted Cherry Tomato Pasta Sauce . 2)  Complete the 10 x 2 Board Game Challenge We didn't get any of our challenge games in with Shawn and Kelly and we never found time to play together. I'm starting to get concerned that we're not going to make it at this point.  3)  Bake at least 2 different baked goods each month August was an okay month for baking. I'm back into weight loss mode, so I've not been super keen on baking much because I'm usually the one who ends up eating most of it. That being said, I did work on my my bread a bit. To start the month I made peanut butter dark chocolate Oreo chunk cookies that I saw on Facebook. They turned out pretty darn good and everyone in the house who tried one seemed to...

Right about the time everything started to shut down and the world started to quarantine, I stumbled upon The Endless Honeymoon Podcast . It's hosted by Moshe Kasher and Natasha Leggero, a husband and wife who are both stand up comedians and they're both hilarious. They recently celebrated the one year anniversary of the podcast, so I thought I'd spread the word because it's one of my absolute favorites. Building off of their Netflix special, The Honeymoon Standup Special , Moshe and Natasha offer love and relationship advice to callers while also roasting them a bit. As funny as the answers to callers questions can be, the advice is always helpful and relatable to anyone who has ever been in a relationship. Sometimes they bring guests on the show to help give advice and they're almost always comedians that you've probably heard of like Patton Oswalt, Judd Apatow, and Seth Rogen. Adding one or two extra comedians to the calls often creates hysterical chaos. The ...

I love to laugh so naturally I'm drawn to stand up comedians, sitcoms, and comedy movies. As funny as ensembles casts are on TV and in cinema, watching a single person stand up on stage telling jokes produces the best and hardest laughs from me. I'll laugh so hard that I'll cry, can't breathe, or even hurt my sides. Nobody makes that happen more than Bill Burr . His brand of angry comedy where he rants about everyday situations absolutely kills me.  Rolling Stone magazine called him "the undisputed heavyweight champ of rage-fueled humor". That couldn't be more true. Here's an example of said humor: On The PF Collective , we do a Top 5 topic every week and earlier this year we ranked the best stand up comedians; Bill was obviously my number one choice. His stand up is great but another big reason for that is his Monday Morning Podcast . Twice a week (Monday and then Thursday for the Thursday Afternoon Just-Before-Friday Monday Morning Podcast ) he...

I wanted to talk about podcasts, their origin, if you've heard of them, what ones you listen to, etc. But everyone knows about podcasts, whether they listen to them or not, and the origin story isn't very interesting so all I really want to know is, what podcasts do you listen to?