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“Sometimes the hard thing and the right thing are the same thing.”

— Me

As the days tick past, and our mission approaches ever closer, I’ve been pondering all of it. I’m excited about the opportunity to do something new and different, and the adventure of living in a new place, and the chance to serve people who need help. I know that serving a mission is the right thing for us to do at this time in our lives.

But I’m also going to miss my family and my friends, and playing board games, and designing board games, and throwing parties. I’m going to miss the beautiful Montana summers, and jet skis, and visits from friends, and visits from family, and twice-a-week lunches at Rosa’s Pizza. I’ll miss meeting up with old friends, and going skiing, and backpacking, and road trips, and of course my annual fall trip with my favorite brother. There are so very many things I’ll miss, that I’ve more or less taken for granted these past few years. I find myself wondering why I’m “giving away” a year of my rich, full, blessed life to serve a mission.

And then I remember that it’s because I have a rich, full, blessed life that I can do this at all. What I’m really doing is giving away a year of my life to help someone else. Pepper and I will fill our days with work and service. We’ll help youth and young adults as they navigate the treacherous and often confusing waters of their lives. We’ll teach and (hopefully) inspire people to see the bigger picture. We’ll dedicate our time and our efforts to the Lord’s errand. We’ll follow the example each of our kids set as they gave away years of their young lives to serve missions of their own. And finally, we’ll follow the example of the Savior, who gave away everything for all of us.

So yeah. A mission is going to be a hard thing. But it’s also the right thing. And it’s going to be awesome.

My games are finished.

In the past few years, I’ve designed (and now produced) six different board games. That doesn’t count several aborted attempts– I have four or five games that didn’t make it past the prototype phase, and a handful of others that didn’t really get past the idea phase. It’s been an interesting and creative journey, and it’s stretched me a bit since I’m not naturally a creative person.

My first game was Indio.

Although I made an effort to sell it publicly via Kickstarter, I found that the time and money to do that just wasn’t worth it to me. I don’t design games for commercial success; I do it as a creative outlet. It was a good learning experience, but one I likely won’t repeat. Since that failed attempt to market my game to the world, I’ve just focused on creating the games themselves, and then publishing a single copy of each.

Interestingly, I found my original notes and prototype cards from what became Hexteria and then Indio.

It was a card game based on using the three classic elements (earth, fire, and water) to combine them into materials (metal, clay, and power), and using those materials to build structures (village, city, and factory). I remember it being fairly drab, but the seed of that idea eventually blossomed into the “forging” concept that’s part of Indio. At the time, designing a game felt pretty overwhelming. Yet now, I find myself designing entire games on a single airplane trip!

Anyway, after Indio I created a “spin-off” game that I called Indio: New World. Yeah, I’m not terribly original with titles, although it was originally going to be Terra Hexia. It’s fairly simple but hasn’t proven to be very popular with my game-playing friends.

Following that, I designed Chronium which is a lighthearted time-travel game. Everyone who’s played it says it’s quite good, which is gratifying.

I struck on an interesting scoring idea, and it evolved into Onward, a card game where you work cooperatively as well as competitively. I find it to be really fun, but the reception’s been sort of lukewarm.

At the same time I was designing and testing Onward, I was also working on a completely different game. That one was based on exploring and building a map as a core part of the game, and although the initial theme of expanding into the galaxy was a failure, I pivoted to make a game about exploring the Pacific Ocean. It became Utu.

This one is by far my favorite. I find it to have an exciting mix of “push your luck” as you explore, resource management (which I love), player interaction, and vast replayability. Plus, it was my first foray into AI art, which has been a tremendous boost to my game design efforts.

Finally, there’s Dicee.

Pepper claims this is her favorite game of mine. Another fun facet of this one is the fact that Zack is my co-designer; we worked on it together during Christmas and it didn’t take much to turn those scribbled index cards into a nice printed game.

As I leave for a mission, I’m going to be taking a year-long break from playing deep board games, and a break from the creative endeavor of designing them. It’s satisfying to “wrap up” all these games just before heading out, and I’m excited to return to my hobby sometime next summer.

A few days ago it felt like winter was behind us, and the flowers were beginning to blossom. But today we woke up to this:

The snow had come down overnight, and although it doesn’t look like much on the ground (where it had already melted a bit), there was probably two inches on other cold surfaces. We took a walk down the driveway and enjoyed the crisp wintry (?) day.

I suspect it’ll be gone by the evening. For now, we’ll get a brief reminder of what April is like in Montana…

One of the things I’ll probably be doing a lot on the mission is wearing a suit.

I’m not really a fan of dressing up, and much prefer being barefoot (or wearing sandals, if I’m out in public) with shorts or jeans and a t-shirt. But missionaries are a bit more formal, and since Pepper and I will be teaching church classes almost every day, we decided it was probably time to update our wardrobe a bit. My suit dates back about fifteen years, and I have a “backup” suit that Mom and Dad bought me in high school (yes, it still fits).

She went out with the hijas, and they spent something like four hours in thrift shops and various clothing stores around town. I had my weekly game with the Mahjongg Mafia, followed by board games and pizza at Rosa’s, and then hit a few stores myself. Since I’m not really very knowledgeable about what looks good, I texted a few photos to the ladies to get their opinion.

Despite my facial expressions and bare feet, they said they loved the suit. So now I have a third one. Hopefully I’ll be as stylish as my wife as we serve!

Although most of the yard is still brown, and the trees don’t yet have leaves, there are a few bold flowers who’ve decided to brave the cool spring days.

The bees are happy to see them as well.

For some reason, daffodils are scattered around the area, including off in the forest. I’m not sure what these little pink ladies are, but they’re pretty.

Maybe the snow is finally behind us…?

Kyra’s best friend Hannah has been a part of our lives for over two decades. She’s pretty much our second daughter. Now, as Pepper and I are preparing to head out on a mission, we worked out a plan for the two of them to house-sit for us. It’ll be a year in Montana for them to have adventures together. Hannah showed up a few days ago, and we’ve been having fun together. We stopped to see the sunset over Flathead Lake on our way back from some pizza at Rosa’s, and the girls simply had to pose.

Pepper and I didn’t want to miss out, although the sunset isn’t really visible behind us…

We’re excited to hang out with our two daughters for the next few weeks!

Our nephew Julian (aka Julio, although I’m pretty sure I’m the only person on the planet who calls him that) is moving from Seattle to Austin. He asked if he could swing by our house “on his way”, even though we’re very much not on his way. Still, we enjoy having him visit, so we set it up.

On the drive here, he hit a decent bump at highway speed and messed up his shocks and steering. His little Toyota Matrix was heavily laden with everything he was moving– including not only clothes, bikes, computers, and kitchenware, but his entire couch. All told, it was probably hundreds of pounds more than the car was really made to handle, and smashing into a bump didn’t end well. He was able to limp to Polson, driving slowly, and drop off the car at an auto shop. Since it was the weekend, we’d have to wait to hear what was wrong and how it could be fixed. In the meantime, we might as well have some fun, right?

Julian was great about cooking and working alongside us. I thought it was funny to see him and Kyra with their matching evergreen shirts.

For a few days, the weather was superb. We sat in the courtyard in shorts and caught some sun.

We even played some board games outside, basking in the warm spring day. Here Julian carefully considers how to get his little people to the island, avoiding the sea monsters chasing him:

The games continued after dark, when we fought for control of Tokyo…

… and also played Dicee and Skull King. Julian taught us Caravan, which is a cool two-player card game in which he trounced me every time (Kyra had better luck against him). We played Deuces Wild, which he introduced to us years ago, but apparently we misunderstood some of the rules, and we’ve changed a few rules to make the game more balanced and interesting… so we renamed “our” version to Twos Are Special.

After a few days of goofing off, we heard about the car. Apparently the shocks had been messed up pretty badly and needed to be replaced. Everything else appeared to be in order. To Julian, that was good news because he figured he could replace the shocks himself. We retrieved his car, he ordered the parts and scheduled them for overnight delivery, and again we waited.

When the parts showed up, we drove to Polson to pick them up. I borrowed a jack from a friend and Julian went to work.

It was good that his car had been loaded with everything he owned, because that included his impressive toolset. Before long there were car parts strewn throughout our garage.

It took two full days of work, but he succeeded in replacing the shocks. A test drive along the highway went well, so it was time to stuff his stuff back into the car. Again I was impressed by how much he was able to fit into such a small car. There wasn’t much room for anything else…

Although his visit turned out to be more work than anyone had expected, we still had a good time. We wish him well as he starts a new life in Austin.

Now that Kyra is living here (and will be for the next year), she’s settling in. Today I saw her relaxing on the couch… the grey couch. Wearing her grey snuggie. Wrapped in a grey blanket.

I suppose if you’re going to lounge around, you might as well be color-coordinated about it.

For a few years now, Pepper and I have been planning to serve a mission for the church. These so-called “senior” missions are quite different than the ones the younger people serve. We’re so proud of all three of our kids for spending 18 to 24 months of their young lives sacrificing their time in the service of God, and I wanted to do something similar.

Well, we finally got organized and submitted our application in mid-February. Typically it takes a couple of weeks to receive an assignment, and then typically you head out “into the field” a month or so after that. The weeks went by, and we didn’t receive anything. Granted, our church has something like seventy thousand missionaries serving worldwide, which means every week there are around 1,400 either leaving or coming home. I’m sure it’s a complicated process. Still, I was impatient to go… or at least to know our assignment so we could plan.

The weeks continued with no word, but today we finally received our call. We coordinated a video chat with the kids so they could all watch us read it. In the olden days, mission calls were sent by mail, so you’d have this big envelope to open and a physical letter to read. Alex read his in 2015, and Kyra got hers in 2017. By the time Zack went on his mission in 2019, calls were sent electronically. It’s a little less exciting, but the end result is the same.

So I set up a camera to record a video of us opening our call, and it apparently only recorded a couple minutes before stopping– and that was well before we actually read the juicy parts. Here we are getting ready, looking at my computer monitor as we opened the web page:

Sadly we don’t have video of it, but when we got to the assignment we both smiled pretty wide. We’re going to serve in the San Diego Mission for a year, beginning in mid-May. To be more specific, we’ve been asked to work in the city of El Centro, California, which is about 120 miles due east of San Diego. It’s in the middle of the Imperial Valley, and less than ten miles from the Mexican border. We looked up the climate and were dismayed to learn that on average, it’s hotter than Phoenix… when we arrive in late May, temperatures will likely be above 100 degrees already!

But we’re going to be teaching and working with youth and young adults as part of the church’s religious education program, and we’ll also be serving in the community in whatever capacity we’re needed. We’re excited about the opportunity to dedicate a year of our not-so-young lives to a worthy cause.

Kyra moved to Montana today!

In preparation for our mission, we coordinated with her to house-sit while we’re gone for a year. Her best friend Hannah is going to move here as well, and the two of them will live rent-free (whee!) and take care of our home. So last night Kyra loaded all her stuff into her car, and this morning at about 3:30 she headed north.

Unfortunately she didn’t get very far. She hit a slick spot on the freeway, spun out, and backed into the concrete median at a pretty good speed. She called us– much to our surprise at 3:30– and we spent a few hours working out what to do. A tow truck moved her car to a body shop barely two miles away (benefits of a big city) and she waited at a nearby 24-hour McDonald’s (thanks again, big city) for the shop to open so she could figure out what they could do.

She told us the car didn’t look too bad, and maybe they could adjust the bumper a bit and she’d be on her way. Admittedly, it was dark and she was pretty flummoxed. Later, when it was light, she sent some photos of the carnage.

Hmm. I’m not sure they can simply “adjust” the bumper.

She ended up securing a rental car through State Farm– who was really fast and helpful– and with the incredible help of some of our friends in the area, transferred all her stuff to the rental car and drove north.

In the end, I’m pretty sure the car is toast, but she wasn’t hurt, and now she’s safely here and ready to spend a year in Big Sky Country.