As a holiday gift, I bought The Girl a light-up replica of the moon. It now hangs from a small nail on her bedroom wall. Its diameter is roughly thirty centimeters of textured, semi-translucent plastic and via a variety of functions on the included remote control can be selectively backlit to replicate eight phases of lunar illumination. Clicking her moon into just the right phase has become an indespensible part of our evening bedtime routine, fitting naturally and somewhere between the second of two storybook recitals and the charging-with-a-flashlight of the glow-in-the-dark stars clinging to her ceiling.

Tonight we are chatting under a waning crecent and eerie, green luminescence of five-pointed stickies.

“Can we play our question game again, Daddy?” She asks, tucked tightly into bed, throttling the helpless plush doll — her inseparable Lucy — under the crook of her arm.

“Do you have some questions ready?” I ask. I’m tracing my fingers lightly across her forehead to brush the hair from her eyes. “Good questions?”

She nods.

One could hardly call it creative brilliance in the art of game design, but as far as parenting tactics it has been nothing short of a sleeper hit. The Girl loves it despite — or perhaps because — that the rules are so ridiculously simple: she can ask me three questions, no more and no less, about absolutely any thought, idea or curiosity that happens to be cluttering her little mind — and I will answer her as honestly and thoroughly as I my own cluttered mind can muster. That’s it. That’s our game.

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Our breakfast cereal is narrated by the morning news while the Girl is dripping honey down the front of her pajamas. But then such a mess is nothing compared to usual coverage of overseas protests, international economics, and local traffic reports that have been following a late-night snow on the already icy streets.

It’s only a bit of honey after all, but: “Daddy.” She bleats. “Oh! *gasp* No!” And an exasperated and futile attempt to wipe the spill with fingers even stickier than the mess itself ensues.

“It’s just your pajamas. Wait.” I sigh, pulling a damp cloth from the nearby sink and — smudging-more-than-cleaning — dab the honey from the cartoon visage of some Disney princess emblazoned in fleece fabric. “Wait. Stop touching it.”

“In Syria today,” the news informs us “twelve protesters are confirmed dead after…”

Lately, my mind flutters with a variety of philosophical thoughts related to the parsing of complex language and complex ideas. How much can a kid really understand and how much more can they comprehend? What do they get out of things that they hear? Anecdotally, the art of reading stories aloud and observing the reactions of a little girl I know oh-so-well has revealed to me a definite threshold of understanding: there is a line in the snow — marked by a speed of my talking, the number of syllables in words and sentences and the density and abstraction of the concepts being read — where-after I may as well be reciting everything in pig-Latin for all the comprehension that is going on. But that line is increasingly more vague and more distant.

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Life isn’t a game. But a game can be a metaphor for life. I enjoy metaphors.

Once, this blog tried to take itself more seriously. It worked for a while. The author, after all, was simply trying to write about his life in a way that reflected his values and beliefs within the framework of opinion and analysis. Then it stopped working. Or, at least, it stopped being fun. And that was never the point.

This blog has been reloaded: Same author, but different framework.

Life, after all, is rarely about opinion and analysis, but is often about the tiny accomplishments and the lessons we learn from those accomplishments as we play — ahem, live — our lives. These little achievements don’t win us awards, are rarely noted, and are often overlooked. This is not a bad thing either. It just is. But, as much as I am a scientifically-minded geek, I am also a sappy, narrative-inclined writer. And this new format is much more in line with me sharing a message, sharing a metaphor, and sharing a story.

The gaming stuff amuses me and I hope it amuses you — and it’s just in fun. The stories on the other hand are non-fiction, and hopefully those entertain you, too.

So, from this point on, it I’ll be telling you a story. It goes something like this:

There was this family…