Don’t worry, it’s not as dynamic as the image suggests!
You may remember that we haven’t set any resolutions this year. Mrs Dim has, in fact, gone with the decision to add rituals, rather than set resolutions. (She looks at a lot of inspirational stuff online.)
One of the things we decided we should tackle this year was our evening indolence. Once upon a time, we drove an hour and half into London, did a day’s work, drove an hour and a half home, gulped down some food, and went out again to go to fencing class. We were, of course, younger then. But that’s no excuse for simply sitting down around 7pm, staring at the tv until 10.30pm and then going to bed. It’s not doing us any good. So, rituals.
In this case, when 8pm arrives, we declare ACTION HOUR and for that hour you have to get off the sofa and go do something else. If I wasn’t the one cooking, then I should start with cleaning the kitchen (The chef cooks, the diners clean.) Mrs Dim might opt to head to the basement for more pottery time.
An incense burner Mrs Dim made (and exhibited) last year. It’s not all mugs!
Action hour isn’t a lot to ask. We always have something we could be doing – I am certainly not short of hobbies.
Derek’s new dome still needs a LOT of work.
But an hour is enough time to do a little work on something, and tidy up a bit afterwards, and then we still have time to sit and relax in front of the TV before bed. But now we feel like things have been accomplished, the evening has not been entirely sofa-based.
When the kids were younger and Mrs Dim was feeling the stress of full-time work and trying to get us to keep the house clean, we invented “Tidy Friday”. When everyone was home from work and school on Friday, we would all be given jobs to do around the house – sweeping, mopping, emptying bins, vacuuming, laundry… Just an hour’s work each, and then the rest of the weekend would not be all housework. Tidy Friday wasn’t wildly popular, but it did work, and it was fair. Once the kids were older, they understood the logic of taking on specific tasks themselves, and there was no need for Tidy Friday. One day, perhaps, Action Hour will be retired too. But for now, it’s the shot in the arm we need to take on 2026.
As a family, we have always had bikes. We haven’t always biked everywhere, but we encouraged the kids to bike to school when it was practical (and with moving around so much when they were small, sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn’t.)
In recent years, the kids have mostly abandoned bikes for cars, work vehicles and transit. There’s more distance to cover, more risk on the roads and so on. Mrs Dim and I still have bikes in the shed, but we rarely take them out, despite our best intentions. So it was that last year, Mrs Dim remarked that, now we were aging a bit, perhaps we should consider electric bikes? I said something along the lines of “not riding e-bikes will be easier on our legs than not riding regular bikes” but she ignored me.
The thing is, e-bikes are expensive, and we already had bikes. Could we justify over a thousand dollars each for bikes that we might ride now and then? No. No we could not.
But then I started seeing adverts for Swytch, a company that made kits to convert your regular bike to an e-bike. Their website is HERE. It sounded great, but I had to dig quite hard to find out exactly how much cheaper than a new e-bike the kit was.The answer seemed to be “quite a bit, but still too much”, but once I was on their e-mail list, I started getting bombarded with sale offers. Eventually, we figured we would try converting Mrs Dim’s bike. The kit we went for (The “Go”, I think) ended up costing us just over six hundred dollars. I had to send away lots of details about the size of the front wheel and the make of the bike. I kind of expected the kit in the next month or two.
But it did not take a month or two. It took much, much longer. Now, I don’t know if I mis-read the information, or I just assumed that things don’t take so long these days. But eventually I received an email saying that, sadly, my delivery would be delayed by a few more months due to increased demand. See, Swytch don’t have stacks of stock sitting around, because their kits replace your bike’s front wheel with their motorised wheel. So they only build a new wheel when they have an order in. Otherwise they might have forty 24 inch wheels ready to go, and only orders for 20 inch wheels. Or whatever, I don’t know, I’m a playwright.
Anyway, I’d had enough. I was cross, and so I contacted Swytch and said I wanted my money back. I became even crosser when it became clear that their first line of customer service is an “AI” assistant. “She” asked me what my query was. I said I needed to communicate with a human, because I needed a refund. She said “I see you would like to speak to a human. What is it regarding?” because AI assistants are NOT, in fact, intelligent, and she couldn’t “read” my email which said exactly what I wanted. I wasted three more rounds of emails with the AI before I got through to a human, who apologised for the delay, offered me a discount and an extra accessory that we had wanted but not ordered because it was an extra $75, and we agreed on that. And I waited again.
The wheel arrived this weekend. I’m not a great mechanic, but I was damned if this thing was going to sit around unused after all the fuss, so I got out my spanners and set to work.
You might ask why I’m doing all this in the study. Well, it’s COLD outside, and the instructions were on a PDF (with accompanying video). I wasn’t going to be squinting at a phone when I have two lovely big monitors, thank you. I got the old front wheel off, as you can see, but then there was an extended pause while I wrestled off the disc brakes and transferred that to the new wheel.
I was a little worried that the power pack didn’t fit in the right way up, but when I checked the instructions carefully I saw there were multiple options and one way up or the other didn’t really matter. So, the wheel was on, the brakes still worked, and the power pack was fitted! Just had to connect everything up.
For some reason, we had a LOT of cable. The distance from the power pack to the motorised wheel was a maximum of two feet, even allowing for the handlebars to turn (very important on a bike!). But we had over three feet of cable, so I used a LOT of the supplied Zip Ties.
And at last, the big question: Is it any good? Well, this model kicks in the motor when it detects that you’re pedalling. It’s a little alarming at first, going from a sedate five or six mph up to twelve. But the close next to our house has a reasonable hill at the entrance, and with the motor assisting me, I didn’t notice it at all. I don’t know how it’d be on the big hills round our way, but almost certainly better than no help at all, which is what we had before. Mrs Dim was certainly pleased with it, whizzing up and down our road on her test run. The range isn’t huge, but we’re not going to be going far, and I reckon we’ve spent less than half the cost of a brand new e-bike. The long wait was a pain, but the wheel fit straight away, despite my fumbling mechanical skills. If you’re thinking of upgrading to an e-bike and you’re handy with a spanner, it’s probably a good idea to check out Swytch and wait on their next sale…
We’re halfway through January. I know we are because I’ve been obsessing about numbers again. But it seems too early in the New Year to be this far through the new year. Mrs Dim and I agreed that we weren’t going to spend this year on the treadmill of life, so we arranged to make more of the occasional long weekend we get together.
We’re not able to spend huge sums of cash dashing off to exotic locations, but lucky for us, we live in one! We drove all the way to Vancouver’s North Shore (around half an hour away) and strolled through the mall of Park Royal to gawk at shops and get some lunch. We ran across an amazing outlet for a clothing company that Mrs Dim had run into before – Another Coyote . Check out the website, it’s a work of art in itself!
We walked off the lunch by walking out to the Welcoming Figure featured in the top picture, and walked all along the shore back to the car, which meant going through the dog walking area – Ambleside. It’s nice to see people and their dogs out enjoying the sunshine, after so many days of rain. Plus, of course, we didn’t have OUR dog with us, so there were no fights!
We’d booked into the Coast Lonsdale Quay and when we arrived it was to find that Mrs Dim was the Guest of the Day!
The view from the room was pretty good too.
After a restorative afternoon nap, we wandered out on to the dockside and grabbed a table at Tap and Barrel. We were done with our evening meal by 7.70pm and strolling back to the hotel.
We took the long way round to watch the locals skating in the Shipyards outdoor rink. We skated there a few years ago, but we were feeling too full and too fragile to risk stepping out tonight. Instead we admired the bright lights of Downtown Vancouver across the water.
We’re not going bonkers tomorrow either – we’ll leave the car in the hotel parking and catch the Seabus across to Waterfront and walk along THAT side of the water, before getting the Seabus back again to collect the car and drive back home. One night away.
It’s not a holiday, just some time out of the regular routine, taking advantage of the fact that we have Tiny Weasel at home to look after the pets.
It’s dark when I leave for work in the morning, and dark when I travel home at night. We’ve had another atmospheric river, so the rain has been falling for what seems like weeks. In another few days. it’ll be Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year.
So, like a lot of people, I’m looking for reasons to smile, and last night I had a great one. Firstly, my eldest daughter texted to ask if she could come and meet me at the library at the end of my work day. She’s on leave from her landscaping job to do full-time schooling for a certificate related to her work. It was lovely to see her, and we walked to the Skytrain together and chatted as we rode through the dark, rainy early evening. It was while we were talking on the journey that she said the thing that really lit up my brain. She had been talking about something that will also help her fiance with something and she said:
“So it’s really feeding two birds with one scone.”
You readers KNOW I’m a pedant. It’s part of my other job, picking up on the tiny mistakes that people make and underlining them, so they can fix them before submitting their work for publication. Normally, someone mangling a saying or aphorism puts my teeth on edge. You know like “Taking it for granite”, or “I could care less…”
But this wasn’t really that. Eldest Weasel was taking a saying that runs counter to her nature – she is a huge fan of birds, having looked after two rescue budgies for years, spent time at the Raptor Rescue organisation on Vancouver Island, and she’s quicker than checking Merlin if you want to identify a local bird. So she wouldn’t WANT to kill two birds with one stone.
Eldest Weasel makes friends with ALL kinds of Raptors….
I may be a traditionalist in a lot of ways, but this kind of re-thinking aphorisms is very welcome. The only thing wrong with it is that she rhymes “scone” and “stone”, and where I come from, “scone” rhymes with “gone”….*
*I realize that making a statement like this is like saying “No, it’s pronounced gif, not gif” on a tech site. It’s opening the can and sprinkling the worms all over. But so be it. Let the worms fall as they may.
Some time ago, I bought a second-hand 3d printer. It had a bigger print area than the one I already had, but it came unassembled. I put it together as best I could, but then parts needed replacing, and there were more and more technical changes to make to get it to work. I looked for help on the internet groups and quickly discovered that the 3d printing community is actually two different groups. One group just like printing things, and see the printer as just a part of that, like the computer. The other part sees the printer as the MAIN THING, the reason for the hobby. What they print is inconsequential, the important bit is fossicking with the Z-axis and the step motors, and getting the right layer depth and so on. That second group couldn’t understand why I was annoyed that I had to do all this work to get my printer to print. Didn’t I understand that this was the FUN part?
Computers are a lot like this. When we got our first computer, it was a Sinclair ZX-81. You had to type in the programs in BASIC, and the computer could not remember the program after it had been turned off. After a while, we got a tape recorder that could store the programs. Then we got a huge upgrade, a BBC Micro B, that had sound and colour and real keyboard. There was a floppy disk drive, so we could even buy NEW programs written by other people!
And all too soon, I had a PC running Windows, and I no longer had any connection to what was happening inside the programs. And hey, that was fine by me, because, like the 3d printer, I cared more about what I could do WITH the computer, than I did about the computer itself.
But as the AI bubble stretches thinner and thinner, the companies that have over-invested in a stagnant tech are more and more desperate for customers to use it. So they force Copilot into every aspect of Windows, and older computers, or ones not designed for much heavy lifting, are overwhelmed by the bulk of the operating system.
Which is where the other half of the computing world comes in. Because the alternative to Windows is Linux, but Linux is most celebrated by people who DO know what goes on inside the computer. They are happy to access the code via terminal and root out this and GIT that, and fork the source and….I don’t know what. Until now, I’ve thought that Linux sounded good, but I didn’t dare try it on any of the machines we have because we can’t afford to lose them. And then Tiny Weasel got a new laptop at Christmas. Which meant I could ask them for their very, very old laptop. It would be heading for recycling anyway, so I could try putting Linux on it.
Now, when I say old, I mean this thing takes a full five minutes to go from switching on to the point where you can sign in. And once you’ve signed in to Windows, there’s another three or four minutes before the toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen. This machine is not well, and no amount of resetting to factory defaults has helped. It’s struggling.
But how do you GET Linux anyway? It turns out, this is the first problem. There isn’t actually a Linux webpage with a “click here” button. The webpage directs you to mirrors, multiple sites that host copies of the program to download. There are different versions (Distros) and different “flavours” of those distros. I decided (after reading far too many posts on the subject) to go with Linux Mint Cinnamon. Yum.
Alas, the first version I downloaded was not compatible with my machine. I didn’t know that, because I made several other mistakes first. I downloaded it to a USB stick, thinking that was how you installed it. But NO! First you have to install a DIFFERENT program on your computer that will take that downloaded file and make the USB stick into a flash drive. Then you have to persuade the laptop that it doesn’t want to boot up Windows when you switch it on, so you have to interrupt the boot sequence by simply pressing F2. Or perhaps F3. Or F4. Or Escape. Or maybe even F12. It is different for different laptops.
After hammering all these buttons in turn and switching the machine on and off a LOT, I got to this screen:
Trying options one or three resulted in a blank screen with a flashing cursor. Option two resulted in the screed of text in the picture at the head of the post, but still no actual usable…er… Operating System?
So that left option four:
Aha! The boot has failed. Great. What now?
I admit, I was very, very unmotivated by this point. It was just too HARD! I went onto Mastodon and posted the pictures of my various failures and asked for help. As always on the internet, a good number of the suggestions were “Have you tried doing the thing that you are actually complaining about?”, but several sharp-eyed folks were able to spot details in the screenshots that told them I was trying to install the wrong version of Mint Cinnamon. Again, I don’t know how they knew that. They sent me a link to a different version, and I went through the same old dance of downloading, running it through the other program to get it onto a USB, then hurrying through to the room with the laptop and plugging in the drive. I crossed my fingers as I switched it on and…
Well. Look:
This is the splash screen for Linux Mint. You can see there’s one icon up there in the top left that says “Install Linux Mint”. I plugged in a mouse, it worked straightaway, and I double clicked on that icon.
There was the usual delay and excitement of sorting out a new computer kind of thing, but way less than you get with windows. When everything settled down, I had a nice clean install, and included in the software already was Libre Office, which does everything Office 365 does, but without charging or AI. So I had a word processor, spreadsheets and whatever “Draw” is. There were media players so I could watch movies or listen to music. There was a web browser and email program. I fiddled about with it for a bit, downloading files from the internet to try out the movies and pictures, and then I shut it down and re-started it. It took only twenty seconds to get from start to ready to use.
What I really wanted to do was come to my blog and say what a simple process it was, and how we can all stop being scared of Linux, but the truth is a little different. When I was told which version to try, the steps that I followed actually worked, and the change was made in less than half an hour, I’d guess. But I originally started working on this at 10.30am, took a break at 11.30am to walk the dog and have lunch, and got back to it at 12.30. By 2pm I had cracked it, and Mrs Dim had put on the final Downton Abbey movie, so it was time to come away and write up my blog. My takeaway is that if you want to try Linux, you need to have access to people who understand it, and you need to be able to provide a LOT of information about the computer you’re planning to put it on. To be clear, I think it is worth doing, and it sounds like it’s a lot easier and more useful than it used to be. It’s just not as convenient as the OS that is ALREADY on the computer when you buy it.
I think to think I’m quite smart and well-versed in the ways of the world, but there’s at least one way that I am a complete sucker: Clickbait Sci-Fi articles.
You see, part of my morning work routine is opening all the internet tabs I need for my job, and one that I always tack on the end is Google News, because it has a nice selection of world news, local news, entertainment news, and science stuff. But tucked away amongst those articles are some terribly tempting clickbait ones. Like these:
Most days I can resist them, but sometimes the urge to know WHAT underrated Sci-Fi classic is now on Netflix overwhelms me, and I click through, only to find it’s a mainstream favourite and I’ve been duped again.
What does ANY of this have to do with the book review?
Ah, yes, sorry, too much set up. Well, one of these underrated sci-fi series was made from this book. It only got one season, and the article writer said that was a shame, because it was getting really good, and it was based on this amazing book by Colin O’Sullivan. As I work in the library, I looked it up, and it was available, so I grabbed it.
You may know, by now, my views on LitFic. It’s not a favourite of mine. Sunny isn’t quite LitFic, I don’t think. It’s more that it’s a lyrical novel. The author sometimes repeats and varies sentences, not to amuse himself, but because that’s the way the main character’s mind is working. She’s in terrible grief, believing her husband and son have died in a plane crash, and she is alone in their Japanese apartment, surrounded by people she can barely speak to.
I read the whole book in one night – it’s not very long. It’s kind of touted as a thriller, as a conspiracy thing, but that wasn’t really what I found. It was an excellent study of grief, of isolation, of how the choices we make and the futures we imagine are subject to forces we can’t control.
But to be honest (and here be spoilers, I think) the conspiracy bit of it did not make much sense. Maybe it was the reading at one in the morning, but the big reveal at the end of the book did not explain the stuff that came before. I don’t want to outline exactly how it all doesn’t add up, because that would be giving away important details.
My takeaway from this was that I wasn’t sad I had missed the TV show, because I don’t think I would have enjoyed it. The writing in the book is somewhat hypnotic, and though it’s not a style of book I might have chosen if I’d known what it was going in, I really appreciated that aspect of it. The story was a great set-up for a letdown, but I’m not sure I would use that as a reason not to try the book. Get it from a library and give it a go. Maybe read it in the daytime though.
You keep saying you’re a playwright, but then you talk about working at the library. So, you’re a playwright AND a Librarian?
No. Not everyone who works in a library is a Librarian, the same way not everyone who works in politics is a venal, money-grubbing leech on society’s backside.
That’s not a helpful metaphor.
Yes, I get what you mean. And no, I’m not a Librarian. Librarians are trained and educated, they go to university to study and get qualifications. I’m a library clerk, which you can do with no more than High School qualifications, and what’s more, I work for the Home Library and Accessible Service, so I deliver library materials to people who can’t get to the library. I can work on the Circulation desk, and I occasionally do because it’s good for me, but most days I’m driving the van, or packing for the next delivery.
So, when do you write plays?
My job is only part time, so it’s four days a week. It’s also nine to five, pretty much, so I have evenings and extended weekends for other things. But I’m an undisciplined writer, who tends to write when I can’t avoid writing, rather than writing at every opportunity. That’s why my output of plays is low these days, compared to when I was a househusband.
You’re saying looking after kids is less work than work?
I have only my experience to go on. I only had three kids to look after, and other people have more. But yes, I found more time to write when the kids were my main occupation, and yes, I still got the laundry done, the meals made and so on. Mrs Dim still found stuff that I hadn’t done, but the kids were clean and fed and alive at the end of each day, so I got a pass, even if I didn’t get a medal.
So you’re only a part time playwright?
You could say so. When I was a baby writer, I got a magazine called “Writing” and they would interview famous authors. Every one would feature a “Tell us about your working day” and it would be all:
“I get up at Seven and have breakfast, then walk the dogs along the beach. I return at eight, and sit down in my study overlooking the sea to write for a couple of hours. I take a break with my spouse and we dry herbs or shell peas in our rustic kitchen. Then I go into town for the afternoon, and may do another couple of hours writing at my club.”
It wasn’t helpful, is what I’m saying. Sure, that’s what we’d all LIKE to do, but it didn’t tell ME anything about fitting writing a novel into an actual life. I grabbed time when the kids were doing swimming lessons, or skating lessons, because otherwise I would just be sitting there.
You could have been talking to other parents.
If I was an extrovert, I wouldn’t have longed to be a writer.
I wrote in the evenings sometimes, when Mrs Dim had things of her own to do. I occasionally asked for time to write in, times when Mrs Dim might take the kids somewhere. But mostly I forced the writing into times when I felt ready and able to write. When I went back into the world of work, my writing output actually went up a little for a while, because I felt the opportunities to write were fewer and more precious. But even at my most prolific, I was never going to earn a full-time salary from my plays.
Yeah, but could anyone? From playwriting, I mean?
I don’t know. I know that the few playwrights I have actually met tend to be thrilled if they are selling ANYTHING. One rather elderly gent I met back in Bournemouth seemed offended that I got royalty payments each month – if you don’t earn a lot in royalties, they tend to let the money pile up a bit before cutting a cheque, so to speak. But we (TLC Creative) get paid every month.
But don’t give up the day job, eh?
Nope. I have another ten years or so before I retire, and I’m hoping that my income from the plays will continue, and I’ll be a retiree, writing plays. I should qualify for a City pension, which will be useful, but I won’t be buying any private islands.
You can find AND READ all of my scripts right here.
I was at work for at least part of “Cheese Week”, that weird time after Christmas, but before New Year. No one really knows what day it is, because we’ve just had a weekend, of sorts, and a lot of folks are on vacation, because why would you go in to work if you had the option to stay home? Anyway, I got an email from Mrs Dim asking if I wanted to go with her to “Written in Clay” at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was an exhibition of some of the pieces collected by John David Lawrence (pictured above). As you may know, Mrs Dim’s hobby is ceramics, and she was keen to go and see if there was any inspiration to be had from this display. I went, because it’s always fun to go places with my wife.
We decided to drive into town because we had stuff to talk about, and conversation is easier in the car than on the Skytrain. We parked quite a way from the Gallery, and enjoyed the stroll through Downtown because the rain had stopped at last. (Downtown Vancouver, by the way, is weirdly inconsistent. Old buildings, scruffy buildings, empty lots, smart hotels, all side by side and crowding each other out.)
As usual, there were big protests going on at the Vancouver Art Gallery, because it has a nice plaza out the front. This one was Pro-Palestinian – Hooray! And round the back there was a rally in support of making Iran’s government non-Islamic. Well, I’m in favour of separating Religion and Legislature, so Hooray there too.
I was glad I’ve spent so much time talking to Mrs Dim about her hobby, because a collection of works is different to one artist putting on a show. In the latter case, there’s often a progression, or a common theme. Here there were six or seven different artists represented, and the works came from all across their careers. The table I’ve pictured here doesn’t contain one artist’s work, but several, and they’re only numbered, so you have to check the guide to see what is by whom. But Mrs Dim could talk knowledgeably about the various processes, whether something was slab built or made on a wheel. She recognised some of the glazing techniques, and pointed out things that were a real risk to make – they could have exploded in the kiln, or parts could have sagged or cracked. To a layman like me, most of the stuff looked like the stock of a thrift store, but Mrs Dim knew better.
I was much happier when we wandered on into the display for “Monsters in my head” by Otani Workshop. Despite the name, Otani Workshop is one man, and he makes (occasionally huge) whimsical figures and heads. Although they may be monsters of a type, they’re not fearsome. Even the giant skull was sort of cute:
As well as a large selection of his pieces, there were videos of him making them, and discussing the thoughts behind them, which I always find fascinating. I know the whole “What IS Art?’ discussion can be vexed and controversial, but to me, Art must have intention. That’s why AI will never make art. It might provide illustrations based on someone’s prompt, but it won’t make art because it has no intention, no purpose to the style or colour choice. Just a mathematically calculated average of other, real artists’ work.
Anyway, we loved that display, and moved on to the third floor to look at “We who have known Tides“, which is a display of indigenous art, dealing specifically with living on the coast. The coastal indigenous peoples have a deep relationship with the sea, and a lot of the ways they used the coast to provide for themselves are now being acknowledged as wise and sustainable practices, unlike the rapacious methods we Europeans brought over with us. Fancy that.
Looks like traditional Ceremonial garb, doesn’t it? Well, look closer at that “mountain range” on the skirt there. It’s guns, being dropped by the Thunderbird. This whole piece is in celebration of the strength of indigenous women.
The nice thing about the Vancouver Art Gallery is that it isn’t huge, so you can spend a little time there and see it all. We wandered back out into the faded sunlight and strolled back to the car, still talking about what we had seen, and what new ideas it had sparked for Mrs Dim to try in the New Year.
Art is expression, art is inspiration, art is a refuge.
I play video games, but I don’t consider myself a gamer. That may be an odd choice, but it makes sense to me. I don’t pursue the latest game, or the latest console. I like playing games, but I don’t like playing games online with other people, especially people I don’t know. When I have time for gaming, it’s usually twenty minutes here or there. I want to switch on a specific game and play, not wait for other people to log in and join, then argue about what we should do.
All this is background to one of the best Christmas presents this year. I managed to find a working Wii system for Mrs Dim for our anniversary, and then for Christmas got the upgraded parts and disc for Wii Sports Resort. See, the Wii may not be the best console, the fastest console, the best graphics or whatever, but it is the ONLY console that has consistently entertained the entire family.
Back when Mrs Dim got her first Canadian job, she celebrated by buying a Wii on her way home. Over the following years we added the Sports Resort games and the additional motion sensors, and then the balance board and the Winter Olympics games (set right here in BC!) It was the one system that Mrs Dim could actually be enthusiastic about. We played Mario Kart as a family, had Sports resort competitions, played on the balance board together.
We eventually got rid of the Wii, but almost immediately regretted it. Nothing else came close to that family appeal. I was delighted to be able to get a working system for our anniversary, and playing just the simple games that came with it – tennis, bowling, and so on, was instantly fun again.
This week Tiny Weasel and I went head to head on the Sports Resort Bowling, which is the same as regular bowling except you can unlock 100 pin bowling, which is just as daft as it sounds. Mrs Dim took her turn playing Dogfight, where you fly your plane around the Sports Resort island, trying to pick up more balloons, which you tow behind your plane. At the same time, your opponent is trying to get the same balloons and shoot YOUR balloons off your plane.
I like playing the swordfight showdown, where you engage in Kendo-like combat across the entire island – just you against a horde of console-controlled opponents. Yesterday I played for over an hour, and today my arm hurts.
We often wonder why Nintendo doesn’t continue to produce the Wii. Judging from the dodgy sales on Amazon and other platforms, there’s plenty of demand, still. None of the other consoles have quite captured that mix of complexity and whimsy that seem to be the hallmark of the Wii games – making you interested in playing, keeping you engaged, feeling like you actually DID something. Compared to the weird angry/tired/motion sick feeling I sometimes get after extended bouts of playing Borderlands 2 on the PC, it’s quite a change.
So, yes, we’re happy to have a Wii again. We may not go quite as bonkers with trying to get so many peripherals again – after all, with only three of us in the house right now, we don’t need so many controllers. Even when folks came over for New Year’s Lunch, two controllers was fine – the games are entertaining to watch, and it seems like the kids still enjoy spending ages fine-tuning their “Miis” to make them look as perfect as possible.
It’s been at least fifteen, nearly sixteen years since Mrs Dim came home with the first Wii, and I think we’re happy with the new one. We won’t need a new console again.
It’s the first day of the New Year, and all across the Blogosphere (do they still call it that?) people are setting out their hopes, expectations, and resolutions for 2026. But not me.
I’ve talked far too much about why I’m not going to have any resolutions, so I thought I would do an introduction instead – I’ve been lucky enough to collect some new readers this year, and it might help them to know a little more about who I am and how I got this way.
My name is Damian, but most of the time I answer to Dim. I was born in the UK and lived there for thirty odd years. Well, most of them were odd. I got married and had three kids. My wife, the irrepressible Mrs Dim, was an officer in the Royal Air Force, and we travelled a lot around the UK, but when she retired from that job (after 16 years) we emigrated to Canada.
We live in BC, because if you have the whole of North America to choose from and you choose anywhere other than BC, you need your head examining.
I started this blog to document our first year in Canada. It was originally called “The Great Canadian Adventure”, but following a course on getting people to read your blog, I changed the name to “Damian Trasler’s Secret Blog – Do not Read!” Yes, it was a dare, and I won. The original title is now preserved in the e-book version of that first year of posts, which you can buy from Amazon:
When we arrived in Canada I had no job, because I had been looking after the kids for over a decade. I wanted to be a novelist, but all my experiments in that field had shown me I was not good at writing interesting books. By chance, I had fallen into play writing, and had won a couple of minor awards. Better yet, some friends had invited me to co-write some panto scripts, and then sold those scripts to a publisher. The publisher (www.lazybeescripts.co.uk) asked if we had any other scripts, and so we sent them my plays. Now, twenty six years later, we have over a hundred scripts with that publisher, and something we have written is performed somewhere in the world every month. I know it is, because I get a little payment every time.
After a few false starts at employment, I got a job with the library and have been very happy there ever since. I still write plays, I still juggle, but I never wake up dreading going to my job.
My library. Yes, it’s a bonkers building, but it’s a great place to work.
Why’s there a dalek at the head of this post? Well, because my hobbies occasionally get out of hand. I used to make fake props from movies that I liked – mostly Star Wars. Then my Eldest Kid asked me if we could make a full-sized Dalek for her to drive around in. So, we did, with the help of the Project Dalek Forum , a dedicated group of enthusiasts around the world who can provide plans, measurements, advice, and places to go to recuperate. We finished Derek in 2018, but have rebuilt him three times since then, and take him to a number of conventions, and sometimes just out and about in Vancouver because it’s funny.
So this blog, once laser-focused on the struggles of a young family to adapt to their new environs, is now a mish-mash of my latest play ambitions, trouble with my 3d printer, a funny thing I saw while on the road (my current job in the library is delivering library materials to people who can’t get to the library. It’s a joy.), or a book or movie review. In 2024 we went to see a show at the wonderful Metro Theatre, and I have been going back regularly ever since, and writing up reviews of their shows too.
So, welcome, come on in, pull up a chair. This is a safe space, more or less, as long as you stand back when I’m juggling. I’m a little rusty these days. Feel free to ask any questions if you think I missed something, or click back through the posts to see if I covered it earlier. I probably didn’t, but all those clicks will look great on my stats, thank you!
Damian Trasler's Secret Blog - Do Not Read! 