Alex and Kaitlyn have a long-running tradition of hosting a sock party every January. Apparently it’s a smashing success, and it’s a good way to wind down the college semester after finals. Taking a page from their playbook, we decided to do the same. April seemed like a good month for it, since the holidays are over but it’s still kind of cold and grey and wintry outside, and people are looking for something to do.
A couple weeks ago we handed out invitations with some instructions:
As with all our parties, we had no idea how many people would show up. We don’t ask for RSVPs and plans change anyway. In the end I counted at least thirty people. Imagine a bunch of full-grown adults sitting around laughing as we watched our friends unwrap the worst socks.
The wrapping was half the fun. True to the rules, people did some very clever things wrapping their socks. A set of sushi socks was enclosed in an old Chinese takeout box, complete with a fortune cookie! There were old tuna cans, a used bag from Subway, socks stuffed into a two-liter bottle, and even a pair of gaming-themed socks inside an ancient copy of Mille Bourne. It was hilarious.
At the end of the night we took some foot photos, but I was only able to get about half the crowd in this shot.
Honestly, we were really just looking for a reason to throw a party and get together with friends, and it turned out to be a bigger success than we’d expected. Maybe it’ll become a new annual tradition for us too…
If there’s one thing photographing the ocean teaches you, it’s how difficult it is to hold a camera perfectly level. I took nearly 1,200 pictures on our Hawai’i trip, and nearly every one featuring the ocean on the horizon had to be corrected for rotation. Here’s an example:
(At first glance this appears to be an incredibly boring photo, but I was catching the whales in the center of the shot.) Like most of my ocean shots, the horizon is off by 1.2 degrees, slanting downward to the right. Of course it’s not noticeable when taking the picture– it’s only when I pull it up on my enormous monitor that I can see the slant.
I guess it’s good to know that I’m consistent, always around 1.2 degrees off. And it’s also good that straightening the horizon takes just a few seconds…
For over three years, we’ve had a huge pile of tree debris and brush sitting beside our driveway. It was placed there by a forest management guy named Herb who was handling the fallen trees from the legendary windstorm of 2019. Technically it’s our neighbors’ property, so they paid Herb for the work, but Herb ended up deciding not to finish the job, and left a number of massive piles scattered across their land. They’ve been eyesores to us, so we finally talked to our neighbors about it and got permission to burn them.
Here’s what the main pile looked like this morning:
It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the pile is probably six feet high and at least twenty feet in diameter. It’s pretty massive. And I was standing on the driveway when I took the picture– that’s why we get to see it every day when we leave or return.
Our trusty friend Allen came over today with his propane torch, and showed us the proper way to burn debris. (“I’m kind of a pyro”, he kept mentioning.) When he first lit it, the flames were impressive and probably shot ten feet into the air.
He continued around the pile, lighting it at different points. The heat was intense.
Once the main pile had settled a bit, he torched another nearby pile. It’s not as big, and a little farther from the driveway, but still something that should’ve been taken care of years ago by Herb.
Now Pepper and I are glancing out the window now and then to make sure nothing gets out of control. Already the pile has been reduced to a lot of ash, and is generally just smouldering. In the end, I’m not sure if we’re going to actually gain anything with this project; it might just end up looking like a big ugly pile of burned debris. But hey, I learned how to do one more manly outdoorsey Montana thing!
For a few years, my investments have been humming along. When I login to the brokerage portal, I get a nice graph of the money locked up in stocks. I check every month or so, just so make sure retirement is still on the table. For some reason, back in February the brokerage decided to add my mortgage debt to the graph. The result is sort of disheartening.
Now, instead of looking like a reasonable retirement plan, it looks like I’m setting myself up for failure. Hmm. Maybe it’s good to have this perspective, though?
It’s been three months, and I’m still going strong in my quest to learn Spanish this year. It’s been fun learning words and phrases, even though most of them feel a little useless at times. I’m not sure how often I’ll need to tell someone “El museo es cerrado” (“The museum is closed”). But hey, you need a foundation of some kind, right?
To be honest, the most fun part of this journey has been doing it with friends and family. At the end of December I “recruited” people to join me in learning a language. Kari and Mom agreed. Pepper, Kyra, and Kaitlyn signed up. Even Alex decided to join us, although he’s absolutely fluent in the language. Brandon and Marie. Katie was a late addition to the group (mid-February) but has already put a ton of lessons under her belt. Each week we’re randomly assigned to “friend quests” where we have to accomplish something with the help of a friend. Pepper seems to get quests like “Complete 10 lessons”, while I end up with “Get a perfect score on 30 lessons”. All in all, though, the “gamification” of learning a language has proven to be a blast.
Marie and I have been jockeying for position for a couple months now. For whatever reason, we seem to do the same amount of work in the app, so our experience points (XP) are always right around one another. As a result, I often get notifications like this:
So of course I have to jump back into the app and do a few lessons to build up my XP. Then she gets a notification and busts out a few lessons. On and on it goes. It’s become a running joke between us. The good news: both of us are learning a lot as we compete for those XP.
I also have my eye on Mom and Kyra, who aren’t far behind. Pretty soon I’m going to be seeing multiple notifications a day about how I’m a slacker and need to do more.
Two and a half years ago, I started working on my first serious board game. I called it Hexteria, since the board was made of hexagonal tiles, and it had a catchy ring to it. Over the course of those two and a half years, I played it over and over with friends and family– probably fifty or sixty times in all– tweaking it each time. Those tweaks grew smaller and smaller, until last summer when I decided it was finished. (With projects like this, I feel like I could tweak it forever, so at some point I just had to make the call.)
I considered what to do next. I could have my single copy of the game, and pull it out now and again at game nights. Or I could take another step and do some marketing, with the goal of putting it out to the world. The latter path seemed more difficult, since I know virtually nothing about marketing, and wasn’t sure anyone would actually want to pay money for this creation of mine. And to be honest, the fun of designing a game was in designing and playing it; making it commercially available didn’t feel like it would give me any more satisfaction. Sure, it would be kind of cool if a bunch of strangers saw it online and decided to drop some money on it, but it wouldn’t really add to what I’d accomplished.
So it sat on the shelf for a while. Then there was a moment– I can’t quite identify it– when I decided I should take that last step after all. Without attempting to market it, the journey felt like a book that was missing the last chapter. I went to work. The first problem: “Hexteria” had been claimed a few months earlier by a company who’d built a little puzzle app for kids. They had claim to the trademark, and it didn’t make sense to fight for naming rights. I had to come up with something new. As it happens, on our road trip last summer, we passed the city of Indio, California. “Indio” seemed like a cool name, and a quick online search proved that it wasn’t really used for anything but that city. And no one would confuse a city with a board game, so that became the new name.
I worked for a long time on the design elements of the game. I liked the artwork for the board tiles, but I needed more. A game box. The rulebook. Promotional graphics. I’m awful at graphic design, so I dove into the internet and found some artwork I liked. I redesigned the cards, rewrote the rulebook, built a web site, listed the game on several well-known web sites, and finally felt like things were ready to go live. I created a Kickstarter page and built the explanation and graphics. I did a lot of work on the finances of the game, figuring out how to manufacture it as inexpensively as possible while still providing a “premium” experience with the game components. In the end, I was able to force the price down to $75 a copy. It felt a little high, but there was nothing I could do about it unless I wanted to redo the entire game and source the parts in China (an adventure in itself). I listed it at that price, which means I won’t even make money on the enterprise. If the Kickstarter campaign succeeds, I’ll barely break even… in fact, I’ll likely lose a little bit of money. But that’s okay if I can get it into the hands of a hundred people.
This morning I clicked the big “Ready to Launch” button on the Kickstarter page, and the campaign went live. Indio is out there, ready for people to buy it. I texted some friends who like board games, and told them about it. To my surprise, most of them signed up and bought a copy. (If any of you are reading this, I’m really grateful!)
Now it’s a waiting game. The campaign will run for three weeks, and at the end of that time, if there are roughly a hundred people signed up to buy it, I’ll be working on manufacturing and fulfillment. If not, I’ll know I wrote the final chapter in the book and can close it. Either way, I’ll be satisfied.
When we moved into this house, there was a massive pool table waiting for us. It’s been fun playing eight-ball and nine-ball and even Skunk, but we find that we don’t really use it all that much. When little kids happen to be visiting, they enjoy slamming the pool balls around, and inevitably someone gets a finger crushed or a ball goes careening off the table and bounces across the room. So pool has sort of run its course for us.
When we were down in Arizona a few months ago, I had an opportunity to play some ping-pong with my brother-in-law and nephew. It was a blast, and I’d forgotten how much work it can be to lunge for a long shot, or the satisfaction of putting some great spin on the ball. I miss the table we had at Zing (well, technically it’s still there). I’m definitely rusty, but my old tricks came back pretty quickly.
So when we returned home, I started shopping around for a ping-pong table topper. We don’t have space for a full table, but we can definitely put the table surface atop the pool table. The best part is we can just lift it off and slide it under a bed, and pool’s back on the menu. I found a topper I liked, and put in the order. Now we’re in business.
I’m excited to brush up on my skills, and looking forward to some games against friends.
(Note to Thom: sorry I couldn’t get it in time for your visit. We’ll play next time.)
Tax season is upon us, and I’m working through all the exciting numbers. I wonder if having three 32″ screens and still needing more space for the various forms and documents is a bad sign…
My friend Brooke wrote something thought-provoking:
“You can count how many seeds are in an apple, but not how many apples are in a seed. We might never get to see the fruits of our labors or the impact we have on others, but they’re there.”
