about

I've been an elevator and escalator service tech for going on eight years, on-call rotation, mostly commercial buildings. It's a trade built entirely around error codes, service bulletins, and the gap between what a manual says should happen and what's actually going wrong in front of you, and that habit followed me home more than I expected it to.

I fix elevators for a living, mostly office towers and a couple of hospitals around Grand Rapids, Michigan. Most of my day is spent up in machine rooms and shaft pits checking error codes against a binder of service manuals, and I've gotten weirdly good at spotting the difference between a real problem and a sensor throwing a fault for no reason. I come home and go straight down to the basement, which my wife long ago stopped pretending was a shared space. Two kids upstairs, a workbench, a shelf of games, and a stack of books that doesn't shrink no matter how fast I read. I got into board games because a coworker kept a folding table by the parts counter for slow afternoons, and it turned into a real habit once I had my own place to run it out of. I read mostly science fiction and the kind of nonfiction that makes me rethink something I assumed was settled. I write these up when I've actually finished the thing, no review copies, no schedule, which is why the dates on here jump around more than a normal blog's would.

where i am: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Started keeping index cards clipped to a rack by the basement stairs, one per book or game, title and a one-line verdict, after losing track of what I actually thought about something a few months out. Up to about sixty cards now.

what's here

Book reviews, board game reviews, and whatever else I feel like writing about. No schedule, no affiliate links, nothing sponsored. I write about a book or a game when I've actually finished it and have something to say, which is why the dates on here are irregular.