It’s feeling very much like autumn, so Pepper and I decided we need to take a few more hikes to celebrate the end of another amazing summer. We called our friends Gary and Susie, and the four of us headed up to Jewel Basin. We hiked to Birch Lake, which is a beautiful little spot.
We climbed the steep hills and had a commanding view of the northern Flathead Valley. Spectacular! When we arrived at the lake, we snapped a selfie and enjoyed some lunch together.
Hopefully we’ll squeeze in a few more hikes like this before the snow falls…
Our guest bathroom has always been kind of annoying. The shower is like something you’d find on a cruise ship, where you can’t even lift your arms while you’re washing. The sink is a dumb-looking pedestal. And there’s no storage whatsoever except a couple of tiny shelves in an ugly medicine cabinet. We’ve talked about making some changes, but it wasn’t until today that it became real.
After choosing a contractor (there’s no way I can do the sort of remodel we envision!), we arranged for someone to come and do the demolition this morning. The bathroom looks a bit bleak now…
Because house projects tend to go sideways for me, it came as no surprise when I was unscrewing a little shelf from the wall and suddenly heard the sound of water gushing… behind the wall. I reversed my screwdriver and the sound stopped. Hmm. Looking more closely, I wondered if the builders had taken a three-inch wood screw and just driven it right into the wall, missing the stud and hitting a water pipe instead.
Yep.
After shutting off the water, we tore out a section of drywall (visible in the top right of the photo above) and confirmed that the screw was indeed right through a plastic water pipe. It’s been in place for twenty-five years with nary a drip. Fortunately it wasn’t a major problem, but it just made me laugh because that’s how it always seems to be for me.
Hopefully that’ll be the only thing that goes sideways. More bathroom news soon…
After an initial playtest of my second attempt at Itzan, I decided to shelve the game for a while. It just didn’t feel compelling; it didn’t have a spark. But I’ve still been thinking about a new game. I decided to create something with a far-future science-fiction theme, and considered a massive gameboard with a map of the galaxy, pieces you’d place, cards you’d draw, and so on. I drafted a set of rules and sat down to design the board itself.
Then I hit a wall because the spaces on the board would need tokens with special abilities, but the tokens themselves would be too small to explain the ability. Many games deal with that by adding icons to the tokens, forcing everyone who’s playing to learn the “language” of those icons and (in some games) look up the particular token in the rulebook or some sort of reference. That really disrupts the game, and can be time-consuming and frustrating.
Instead, I decided it would still work to scrap the board, tokens, and other pieces to create a game that’s almost purely based on cards. Of course one of my go-to mechanics for games I design is resource management, so there will be a few piles of cubes representing the various currencies in the game. I rewrote the rules and shifted the entire mechanic to one of drawing, buying, and placing cards.
Normally for a game prototype, I’d whip up some cards and print them on cardstock for my early playtesting. In this case, though, there would be almost four hundred cards in the game! Printing, cutting, and then shuffling and using that many cardstock cards is a pain. Instead, I put together some rough (but decent) designs and sent them off to a card-printing company. Forty dollars and two weeks later, I received my huge stack of cards.
And now it’s time to test Galactics.
The cards look pretty sharp, and it’ll be fun to playtest using something that looks semi-professional. I’ve already found a handful of things that will need to be changed– abilities that are confusing or overpowered– but I can “house rule” those during testing.
I’m excited to get these on a table with friends and see how the game goes…
We were down in Missoula today, and there happens to be a Winco. As everyone knows, Winco sells bulk foods– including bulk candy– and that means I can pick through a bin of Tootsie Pops and pick only the colors I want. This takes me back to the time I bought a whole box of onlypurple pops. Or, years later, purple and red.
So I picked through the bin, and walked out of the store with about three pounds of suckers.
For several years, Kyra’s been thinking about moving to New Zealand. There’s always been a reason why it didn’t work out– mostly because of her jobs– but she finally has a job that’s remote so she has the flexibility to do it from anywhere. Why not work from New Zealand?
So she applied for a one-year visa (a special program offered to young adults), received it in January, and started looking for the best time to leave. Sometime around April she bought an airline ticket from Los Angeles to Auckland, and then it “became real”. She’s spent the last few months researching, planning, and packing. She came up to Montana one last time so she could leave her car here, we had a grand time playing games and watching shows and biking and coloring our hair, and then we got to today.
Today we drove down to the Missoula Airport and said goodbye in the lounge.
She went through the security line (with maybe two other people in it!) and was off on her grand adventure. I’m excited for her and looking forward to all the cool stuff she does and cool people she meets…
Kyra’s heading to New Zealand in a few days, so she’s purging all sorts of things she won’t be taking with her. Amongst those things were a few almost-empty tubes of hair dye (technically “hair makeup” according to her), and she felt like we might as well use them up. So we did. Then we all went out for pizza.
We got a few looks, and had a conversation with Nate at Rosa’s, who knows us well and definitely noticed the change. I explained that you’ll hear stories of dads whose little girls want to play dress-up together, and do hair or nails, and of course the dads do it. Well, my little girl isn’t so little any more, but I’m still willing to play dress-up with her now and then.
It’s been almost three years since I complained about Montana’s state flag, and in that blog post I wrote quite a bit about Minnesota: they had a flag almost as bad as Montana’s, and the state legislature decided it was time for a change. They solicited design suggestions from the general public, the predictable craziness of internet submissions commenced, and eventually they settled on a new design.
In 2024 their new flag was announced. It’s not bad… certainly orders of magnitude better than the previous one.
I wonder what it would take for Montana to reconsider theirs? I happen to be friends with a state senator… maybe I should bend his ear. Hmm…
Back in El Centro, we learned the word Magnicephopolis from Marilyn, and we proudly drive around with our license-plate frame. Well, today I received a surprise package from her: a t-shirt!
Apparently she ordered a batch of them for the people who regularly attend her Roots class, and she didn’t forget me. Thanks, Marilyn!
Out in California, east of San Diego, is a little community called Manzanita. We’d drive by it on the 8 many times during our mission, and I always thought it was a fun name: “little apple”.
We have an unsightly, weird, twisted tree in our yard that I’ve thought often of just cutting down. But today while I was working in the yard, I noticed it’s heavily laden with a lot of little apples!
We’ve noticed these before, of course, but for some reason this year’s “harvest” seems unusually bountiful. I have no idea what sort of apples they are, but I grabbed one and took a big bite. They’re very tart. I suppose with enough sugar they’d make a decent cobbler or something, but I’m not about to sit around and eat out of a bowl of them.
Still, it’s kind of fun to have a manzanita tree in our yard. I won’t cut it down just yet.
Over the years I’ve tackled a lot of house projects. It’s a foregone conclusion that no matter how simple a project may seem, I inevitably end up running into something that makes it much more complicated, and take much longer. It’s like some twisted rule of the universe, and it’s incredibly frustrating for me.
We installed some new can lights into the guest bedroom in our house, because it had pretty dim lighting. No longer! These new lights are blindingly bright, and at night it’s kind of overwhelming. Clearly a dimmer switch was needed. I bought one and grabbed a couple of screwdrivers to install it. It’s a three-way, which of course is a little more complicated, but I’ve worked on a handful of them before so it doesn’t intimidate me.
Well, I removed the old switch, installed the new one, and flipped the breaker back on.
To my shock, surprise, and great pleasure, it worked. For the first time in my history of house projects, something worked the first time!
Grinning from ear to ear, I shoved the wires back into the outlet box and screwed on the faceplate. Maybe I’ve finally turned a corner…
