the giraffe life

My local library saves me a ton of money! Since I stopped buying books in 2012, I've checked out and read 142. So I'd estimate the library has saved me about $1500 (minus 75¢ in late fees :) ) just in the past two years, and who knows how much in my lifetime. In return, a while back I decided to volunteer my time. But I make a terrible volunteer. I was told to move the biographies from one set of shelves to another, which of course meant looking at every volume, carrying it across the library, and then reshelving, making sure all the books were in the proper order. And that led to me studying each spine, wondering who the person was, briefly paging through to see if there were any interesting photographs, filling a piece of scrap paper with names of people to google, and setting aside biographies I wanted to check out immediately.  About an hour later when I had only managed to move about a hundred books (and had reached my checkout limit of 20), the librarian graciously sa...

The title says it all. I really enjoy board games. Growing up, we had a ton of board games that we would play with friends or siblings, and as a family. Of course, my tastes have changed over my twenty-ish years of playing board games, but these are some of my favorites. Apples to Apples : Very simple concept here - cards with a word on them and cards with a category or group of some kind on them. Everyone plays their card that will best match whatever the current category is and the judge selects the best one (not knowing who played which card). We laugh every time we play this one and there's plenty of trash talking about how certain you are that someone will pick your card. And the judge has so much freedom - I like to pick cards that are quirky or the opposite of what you'd expect, which the people who are playing "properly" don't always appreciate ;) Pay Day : I think this game illustrates how much I've always enjoyed thinking about money and finance...