Daniel J Isom

I barely worked in July which made it a really great month. We ended up taking two weeklong vacations, one back to visit family and friends in Syracuse and the other to visit family in North Carolina. When I was at work, I was grinding through provider validation, among regular work duties, ahead of my annual conference in Rockville later this month.  Some of the highlights of our Syracuse trip were visiting  Little Ray's Nature Center , getting to play disc golf with my friends, and seeing  Minions & Monsters  in theaters. In between our trips, Christine, Grace, and I went and saw  The Odyssey . This year's North Carolina trip started with some car trouble right when we arrived but despite the cost, it didn't really affect the trip. We got a lot of sun on the beach and at the pools, did our annual ice cream competition each night, and just had a great time relaxing. Blah Blog Log I was barely home in July so there was just the one post. June 2026 Wrap-Up -...

June is one of my favorite months of the year, despite the temperatures rising to uncomfortable levels. It marks the end of another school year and enters us into a time of vacations and a laid back schedule. To start the month there are always a few end of the year ceremonies for the kids, which for this year included two "Fly Away" ceremonies for the boys since they'll be in new schools next year. Both received awards and we couldn't be more proud of them. June is also our wedding anniversary month, bringing us to 16 years married this year. We didn't plan a big trip for this one but we did spend the night in Baltimore to have dinner and see Daniel Tosh perform. There was also Father's Day which, if you know me, I don't care about because it's a made up holiday. However, the kids an I went disc golfing together so that was a nice way to spend a few hours together.  If all of that wasn't enough, it's also Ben's birthday month so we celebr...

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...