hwan.com

Back in September we took a family trip to Peterborough -- a sort of holiday for Sora and I and a regular work day for MJ. I guess I must be getting old because I found the 2+ hour drive draining, a real slog. The Prius is a pretty comfortable ride but my body complains from sitting that way for so long. Arriving in Peterborough, my first time, felt both familiar and strange. I could see how the freshly resurfaced downtown attempted to hide some dusty history, bringing to mind the downtowns of Kitchener and Guelph, which I guess makes sense as this is another university town: The same 60s low-rise downtown, pockmarked with signs of poverty, the same pre-war homes, many chopped into multi-unit rentals, the same bafflingly congested roads that compete with inadequate public transit. Our hotel was located just outside the downtown and served well enough. Sora found the experience exhilarating, excited by the new bed, a new room with just mama and papa. We ordered some Greek takeout, very...

It may have been an inevitability but the truth of experiencing it was no less upsetting — our family caught COVID back in April, a punishing trial affecting each of us differently. For me it ramped from a mild cough to a day of chills and aches, unable to function outside of the barest of essentials; a week later it had exited my system, a brief but fearsome storm. During my downtime, confined to my bed, I managed to catch up on Game of Thrones, the ending for which I had never seen, and had managed to avoid spoiling. How it came to mind I don’t recall for I had all but forgotten it after Sora’s birth/the pandemic’s rise; certainly I found it engaging enough to finish, even after all this time. I still find its extreme physical and sexual violence difficult to sit through. And speaking of difficult to sit through, how has Ontario decided to re-elect Doug Ford. How. True, the alternatives were not particularly palatable — Del Duca? And Horwath? What a woeful state of affairs! It seems ...

I absolutely hate how the world is shaping up, just a frog boiling slowly in greed, misinformation, and lack of critical thought. I don't think I've said it here but as a former member, the skeptic movement has been an abysmal failure, handcuffed by the notion that one can think and live purely on logic like some alien creature, free of "human" feeling. How absolutely frustrating it is to have the right answers but not willing to use one's voice. I frankly pity and loathe them. I wrote the above back in February, when the "Freedom Convoy" was honking its way into everyone's ears, eating up media time and darling to anti-mandate-minded small business owners. And now it's March and Putin has decided to start a land war with Ukraine, threatening nukes and all, hundreds already dead, fascists looking to see how to fill in the power gaps. For once America's wolf was real, though it seems not of the mind to really do anything about it outside of sa...

2022. Fun to say and hard to believe. The pandemic continues as Omicron crashes across the country. Sora's daycare had an outbreak over the holidays so we've extended our stay at my parent's home. Though it's not our childhood house, it contains enough relics to cast a haze of memories over me whenever I'm here. Hwan and Sora 2021 has passed, one day melting into the next. We've so far managed to avoid catching any of the 'rona, though to be sure we've had more than our share of colds and flus as Sora builds up her resistances through the daycare. It has kept our fall months especially busy, with barely time to recreate. We did manage a trip in August to Saskatoon to see MJ's family, bathing ourselves in the dry prairie heat. Despite the stress of pandemic travel and it being our first flight with Sora the trip went without incident. I watched a fair bit of Netflix last year, and maybe I'll review in another post. In terms of video games, not muc...