Author: cosmo

Last night I came home from work around 6:00, picked up the mail from the mailbox, and went up to the front porch. Imagine my surprise when I saw my Amazon package:

I’d purchased a pair of Levi’s, which you can see covered in snow on the lower step. The box is torn open.

My first thought was “Gee, thanks Mr. Mail Delivery Person!” I suspected the mail carrier had just thrown the box at the front porch, and upon impact it had burst open and flung the jeans out. But that doesn’t really make sense with the positions of both. (Physics!)

The mystery deepened when I brought it inside and noticed there was blood dripped all over it. It’s not clear in the photo, but the box had a bunch of blood on the open side, and there was more blood on the plastic bag encasing the jeans. You might say, “Come on, Jeff, it was probably just… raspberry jam or something”. But Laralee dripped some hydrogen peroxide on it, and it fizzed and bubbled… just like blood would do. (As a test, we put some H2O2 on jam, ketchup, etc. and none of them reacted in the same way. So we’re pretty sure it was blood.)

Then I checked the USPS web site and discovered (according to the tracking number) that the package had been delivered the night before. It was sitting on our front porch for around 24 hours before I found it. If the blood had been on the box when the mail carrier left it, surely it would’ve been dried and black. But no, it was definitely fresh, wet, red blood. Maybe an animal? We have a lot of rabbits and squirrels around the neighborhood. But there weren’t any animal tracks in the surrounding snow.

I find the whole thing completely mysterious. Laralee says she was “pretty freaked out” by the whole thing, and intends to call the Postal Service to get to the bottom of it. But honestly, I can’t think of what they might possibly tell her that would explain all this. In fact, I can’t even come up with a plausible story. (For example, a squirrel was digging at the box for some reason, then a hawk swooped down and grabbed him, spraying blood? Because yeah, that’s realistic.)

La says we should get one of those porch cameras. Normally I’d shrug that off, but heck, in this case I’m definitely interested to see what happened.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft continues to whirl around Jupiter, snapping photos that are absolutely amazing. Here’s the latest they published:

Juno was orbiting around 7,000km above the clouds when it took this particular photo. You can even see some detail in the clouds. The large white oval in the top left corner is an enormous cyclone.

Here’s one from May, showing more of the beautiful clouds on the giant planet.

Although we can’t see anything below the clouds (which are likely hundreds or thousands of kilometers deep), they’re fascinating and mysterious. Another reason to love science.

For lunch today, I reheated a piece of homemade pizza from last night. Of course I used the toaster oven, since the microwave leaves it soggy.

Imagine my surprise when the smoke alarm went off, and I looked into the toaster oven to see flames!

This photo doesn’t really do it justice– most of the oven was on fire, and only when I got most of it out did I snap a photo with my phone.

The result: wood-fired pizza! Not the plan, but hey.

Yesterday I saw a little rubber brush sitting on the kitchen countertop:

It’s about 1×2″. I asked Laralee what the heck it was. It’s a mushroom brush. Yeah, really. When we make pizza on the weekends, she likes mushrooms on hers, so she slices whole mushrooms and apparently felt like she was missing a way to lightly remove some of the dust from them before slicing. Enter the mushroom brush.

Who knew there was such a thing? And isn’t it marvelous that we live in a world where such things exist to bring joy to my wife?

(My follow-up question to her was whether we’re going to pack that away when we shut down the house and move next year…)

Dominion is my favorite board game (well, card game), and with Kyra off on a mission, I don’t have a worthy opponent to play against. Luckily at Gen Con, Dirk caught the bug and decided he loves Dominion as much as I do. Unfortunately we live 800 miles apart, so we can’t get together often.

Enter Dominion Online, which is a web-based version of Dominion that does a great job with the game mechanics. Of course it’s not quite like playing face-to-face over a table, but it’s about as close as you can get. So Dirk and I have been spending a few Saturday mornings here and there playing against one another.

Today we connected via Google Hangouts (after trying Discord, which had horrible echo problems), so I was able to see his thoughtful expression as he considered what to play.

(He admits his webcam is terrible, which is why he looks all blurry.) It’s fun to taunt one another during the games, or scream occasionally at a really good– or really bad– turn. Both of us have sons who spend time in video game chats where they do exactly that.

Unfortunately I can no longer crush Dirk in every game. The padawan has learned much from the master, and now we’re more evenly matched. That’s more fun anyway. I should point out, however, that in the worldwide Dominion rankings, I’m in 6,364th (level 43 player, whatever that means) place while Dirk languishes back in 13,170th place and level 39…

This year for Halloween, I was stumped. I couldn’t think of a great costume, and since I love dressing up, it was kind of unnerving. I toyed with the idea of being Han Solo, but I’m blond. I thought about being Death, but don’t have a scythe (and they don’t sell them on Amazon). And I re-considered being Kevin Flynn of Tron fame, but the costume simply becomes too expensive when you put together all the glowing LED strips.

In the end, I decided to do a reprise of the Dread Pirate Roberts costume from four years ago. I still have all the goods, so it was easy to bring it together.

In a stunning coincidence, one of the teenagers in seminary also dressed up as the Dread Pirate!

I say “stunning” because I’ve found that most teens not only don’t recognize my costume (which I think is a pretty good likeness), but don’t even know who the character is. They’ve never seen The Princess Bride, or they’ve forgotten it. Even adults tend to mistake me for Zorro, which is inexcusable since Zorro always wears a hat.

Zaque grabbed a bedsheet and a couple of pillowcases, and masqueraded as a disciple. Here he is with Jesus:

Continuing tradition, my fellow seminary teachers and I all came to class in costume. Lyle was a pioneer farmer, and Jodi was an identity thief (get it? she’s clever with those puns).

I think the concept of What3Words is fascinating. It’s a simple, memorable way to define geographic locations with high precision. The entire planet is divided into 3×3-meter squares, and every one of those squares has a three-word “address”.

For example, my address is endearing.sunflower.subculture. Bam.

The goal of the w3w organization is to use their mapping algorithm and technology to provide a new way to accurately locate points on the earth. The use cases are myriad, from self-driving cars to package delivery (by truck or by drone) to simply giving directions. I’m curious whether it’ll “catch on”. In the meantime, maybe when someone asks for directions to my house I’ll just tell them to head over to “endearing sunflower subculture”.

Today as I left seminary, I was treated to quite a light show as the sun rose. Here’s the view from the church:

And from my car as I waited at the stoplight:

And a little while later, as I drove to work:

I guess getting up early does have some benefit!

In about a year, Laralee and I are going to sell our cars (and maybe give one to Kyra) prior to heading out on our mission. Then, a year and a half later, we’ll need cars again. So we’ve been thinking about what we might drive.

Of course we’ll need something to haul a pair of jet skis, and maybe a sailboat, so I’m leaning toward a Honda CR-V. Dad has one, and it’s really nice. It has plenty of towing capacity, and it’s not a huge SUV. I agreed to drive the “practical” car, since Laralee’s been stuck with the practical car for 20+ years while I drive the sporty coupes (if one can call a Saturn SC2 and a Honda Civic EXL “sporty”). So it’s her turn to have something with a bit of pep.

Today Zaque and I were driving home, and I noticed a nice-looking Lexus parked in a garage. I snapped a photo:

Mom has a Lexus that’s pretty sweet. I headed over to the Lexus web site to see what’s available, and was immediately drawn to the LC model:

I’m not sure if that’s what I saw in the garage (possibly a different model year?), but it sure looks like a fun car to drive. Unfortunately I noticed the sticker price: it starts at $92,000 and goes up from there. The hybrid model– which would probably be my choice– starts at a cool $98,000.

Alas, perhaps we’ll forego the Lexus and settle for another Honda Civic. Laralee says she likes the sporty look of the new models.