Birchbark Achievements Unlocked

We arrived home last night after a week at my wife's family cottage. Even after 20-odd Summers of these trips, my feelings are still conflicted. It's isolated, quiet, and incredibly scenic. A better place for burning through your reading list, I cannot imagine. It's ageing badly, constantly in need of repair, and sports an outhouse. A better recipe for diverting your reading time towards repair chores, you will not find.

This year was different, however. Number One: we were there alone without any other family. Number Two: there were no major chores to tackle. This rare confluence of events meant that we could actually spend a week on Georgian Bay doing we whatever we felt like doing! And when a geek has a free time, a geek will do those things that make him or her a geek:

Reading: I finished all 784 pages of Dan Simmons' DROOD. I'll summarize that: I read DROOD.

Gaming: I finally got around to playing MUNCHKIN. My family - all four of us - learned to play (and love) MUNCHKIN. To satisfy any need for video gaming, I spent a lot of time wrestling Angry Birds out of my daughter's hands.

Watching: We brought a stack of Series 2, 3, and 4 Doctor Who DVDs to watch. Thanks to MUNCHKIN, we never actually got around to watching them.

So while a few of us got the DTs from Internet and Xbox withdrawl, I feel like we probably sustained at least a faint glow of geek. But it's still good to be back in a world where porceline is readily available.