a peek inside the fishbowl

Our renovation has become all-consuming for me and I can think of little else. I woke with a start at 4:00 this morning wondering if our dining room is too small. (Is it? Did we make a mistake? Arrrrgh!)

I had a whole lot of home-related things on my plate yesterday and by the end of the day I was feeling like a wrung-out old sponge.

I did manage to buy light fixtures for our bathroom vanity. I picked them up at the Electrical and Plumbing Store in Bell’s Corners. We’ve purchased a few things here and I’ve always been very happy with the service. The prices are right too.

I managed to fall in love with the last two of these fixtures and so I negotiated a bit of a deal… which was lucky for me. I also bought a shelf/towel holder for our walk-in shower. I’m worried that it might be a bit large for the space. Because of the placement of studs in the wall, the actual shower unit (taps, rain head, and a rail with a handheld shower) is farther away from the far wall than I would have liked, but we’ll see if we can make it work.

The other biggie we accomplished yesterday was regarding paint choices.

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These are called Nanoblocks. We picked up a few sets at FAO Schwartz when we were in NYC in August (which I still haven’t written much about – sigh).

The girls chose a tree frog and giraffe. The giraffe has about 130 pieces.

Mark chose a penguin. I chose the terrier, which is charmingly depicted in this wee video:

I want to clarify that NANO means nano. The pieces are SMALL:

… which makes building each critter a whole lot more crazymaking challenging. Once I started thinking of it as a sort of puzzle I was able to have more fun with it. The kids were almost better at it than we were, what with their smaller fingers. Small fingers + small building blocks = success.

I think this one took about 30 minutes to build. The results are pretty adorable.

Meet our Nano Giraffe!

Cute eh?

I want to spend a couple of posts talking about some of the fun toys and games we’ve been playing with lately.

Until this week I had never even heard of Rummoli, but let me say, it is awesome:

Did you know that Rummoli is a Canadian game? I am suitably impressed by this fact.

“Rummoli is a family card game for 2 to 8 people. This Canadian board game, first marketed in 1940 by the Copp Clark Publishing Company of Toronto, requires a Rummoli board, a deck of playing cards (52 cards, no jokers), and chips or coins to play. The game is usually played for fun, or for small stakes (e.g. Canadian cent). Rummoli is similar to Michigan Rummy.” – Wikipedia

Apparently it is also called Tripoley.

So last night we pulled out a deck of brand new Tim Burton playing cards and a giant bag of Reece’s Pieces we bought at the Carlingwood Mall Bulk Barn a couple weeks ago just for this purpose.

Sidebar: We had bought the candy and were shopping around when suddenly we realized the CANDY WAS GONE. We backtracked, worrying the whole time, secretly scrutinizing the crowds for guilty-looking people with chocolate on their faces and orange smudges on their fingers. We figured that NO ONE IN THIS ENTIRE WORLD would turn in a large bag of candy (eight bucks worth if you must know) and it was with very heavy hearts that we went into One Last Store – a shoe store – before giving up and going home empty handed. And guess what, it was there. Uneaten! My faith in humanity was restored.

Thank you Dear People, for not eating our candy.

Anyway, back to Rummoli. It is a very easy game to play once you get the hang of it. It also seems to be a very gentle introduction to poker, which we are working up to because I think poker playing is a good skill to have. It’s counting, it’s strategy, it’s luck, it’s bluffing, it’s good sportsmanship… and I don’t think they teach card-handling skills (like shuffling, holding cards, dealing) in school anymore. Do they? ;)

You can probably buy a Rummoli board anywhere that sells games, but it’d be easy to make your own using a large piece of bristol board. (You can see what it looks like here.) The board is really just a place to lay your bets, a.k.a Reece’s Pieces.

Instructions are here, but if you’re like me your head will spin a little and you won’t quite be able to figure it out until you play it. I really suggest you do.

Our kids picked it up very quickly and everyone enjoyed themselves immensely. We started with 75 pieces of candy each, but next time we will start with less because everyone gets to eat their winnings afterwards and it was a bit much. :)

What about you? Have you ever played Rummoli? If so, what do you play with? Money, chips, raisins? :)