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It’s still weird to think of myself as a grandpa, but hey, here we are. Little Ollie turned one today! He’s a quiet, introspective little lad.

He loves helping Grandma Pepper with her board games (or maybe he’s just after some grapes and a Triscuit).

For his birthday, we hosted a party at The Villa. I say “hosted” because honestly we didn’t do anything more than provide a place for everything to happen. Kaitlyn’s family showed up in droves, and they brought food and chairs and tables and treats and piles of gifts. We had a full house, and a grand party. Frankly, once he discovered the ball pit (!) his mom and dad bought him, he was pretty content there and didn’t have much interest in the other gifts.

Eventually he worked through the other gifts, and I’m sure he’s going to enjoy them for a long time.

One really cool thing: we posed for a big group photo before the party broke up, and in it are three of Ollie’s four pairs of great-grandparents.

That’s not something every kid can say! I’m not sure if he’ll remember it– heck, in the picture he’s just staring longingly at his toys in the corner– but this will be a good picture to show him someday. I’m glad Mom and Dad could come out to celebrate with us, and that Kaitlyn’s family was able to drive up from their various Utah homes.

Happy birthday, little guy.

Finally, after a year and a half, a terrible contractor who took our money and disappeared, and a complete restart, we have solar power! Thirty panels sit on our roof, and yesterday the final inspections were completed and the electric company switched the meter so we can feed power back into the grid. I flipped the switch (actually I turned a large black knob) and the electrons started to flow.

It ain’t much, but it’s a cloudy winter day so we can’t expect much. In the next few months we should really start cranking out some power. And we’ll add another 20 or 30 panels to the roof to nearly double our production.

Will we ever recoup the cost of this system? Not a chance. I can thank a dishonest contractor for that, since we basically paid for the system twice. But it’s kind of cool to be making our own power…

Mmm… tax season again…

As we were driving home tonight, we came down into the Flathead Valley near St Ignatius, and wow was the sunset amazing.

Here’s the view of the Mission Mountains, on the east side of the valley:

And here are the Salish Mountains, on the west side:

Epic.

So it’s time to celebrate the 25th anniversary of my 25th birthday. About a week from now, Pepper will hit another prime-number milestone birthday. Both of us struggle with gifts to give one another (and what to ask each other for), so we decided to celebrate this milestone with a slightly bigger gift than usual.

We bought a house.

Well, okay, technically it’s a townhouse, meaning we don’t have to do anything outside. With all three kids living in the same city in Utah while they attend college, we agree it’s important we visit them as often as we can, before they graduate and scatter wherever their jobs and families take them. It’s tricky to spend a lot of time in their apartments, since they’re cramped and have roommates everywhere. Staying at short-term rentals for Thanksgiving and Christmas worked well, but it’s a hassle and frankly kind of expensive for what you get. Why not just buy a little townhouse where we can stay when we visit, and have the kids come over and join us?

Unfortunately, the housing market is kind of nightmarish right now, so “little townhouse” doesn’t really work. We were hoping for something with a bedroom or two and a nice family room where we could all gather. From what I can tell, such a thing doesn’t exist. In this area, you can either buy a dumpy college apartment (complete with student tenants locked into contracts that don’t expire for another six months), or a huge single-family home on a postage-stamp lawn. I finally tracked down a few townhouses, and although they were all larger than we’d intended, we felt like we had to take what was on offer. After a few failed attempts to buy something, we landed this one. The whole process was lightning-quick– at least by real-estate standards– and we went from offer to closing in about three weeks.

Now we have a nice “little” place near the kids! There’s a decent kitchen…

… and Alex has already settled into the front room.

We celebrated my birthday by driving from Montana to Utah, then hung out with the gang. For Pepper’s birthday, we’re going to drive back up to Montana. Fair’s fair… if we had to drive on my birthday, we should certainly drive on hers as well.

All in all, it’s been kind of a crazy few weeks, and I admit there were a couple of times I said to myself, are we really doing this? But I think The Villa (as we call it, because it’s part of a development called Tuscan Villas) is going to prove to be a lot of fun and a great way to spend some quality family time together.

Thom, Katie, and their two kiddos stopped in for a visit this weekend. We had a great time with them. The weather was absolutely gorgeous– unseasonably warm and sunny for early February, which made for some nice days out in the snow.

We went skiing (of course).

Sefton, who just turned five, strapped on his cute little skis and managed to take a run down the mountain. This particular run is called “Widowmaker”, although that’s not really an apt name since it’s pretty gentle. Still, this was Sefton’s third time on skis ever and he did great.

We also went hiking (of course). We grabbed snowshoes and headed up north of Whitefish (near the Canadian border) but when we arrived we found that the trail had been packed down pretty well by previous snowshoers, so we just needed crampons. It was a beautiful hike to a lake, and Sefton was a champ. He made it a full five miles, chattering and laughing the entire way.

As always, it felt like their visit was over too quickly. We’re hoping to get out to their place in a few months, and then have them back for a summer visit so we can play on the water…

As someone who knows a lot about computer networks, it bothers me when I watch movies where they show people “hacking” computers and– to add to the realism, I guess– there’s a bunch of gibberish text on a green screen. Often when I look closely (yes, I do that) I see impossible IP addresses.

A proper IPv4 address will have four numbers, separated by periods, where each number is between 0 and 255. Full stop. So when I see things like

# ssh 510.72.614.12

Access granted!

it just… makes me cringe.

Anyway, I can give a pass to the movie folks, but today I was doing some research about static addresses and I came across this helpful banner on an IP provider’s web page:

Wut.

While the movie folks are excused, a company whose actual business model is selling dedicated IP addresses should absolutely not have an impossible address in their example.

Of course it’s ridiculous that I was so upset by this that I took the time to write this blog post. But pet peeves are a funny thing…

It’s been pretty chilly for about a month now, with temperatures hovering in the teens most days. We figured it was a waste of electricity to keep our hot tub simmering at 104 degrees, so I unplugged it. Now, with Thom and Katie coming to visit, and the temperatures climbing into the 30’s, it seemed like a good idea to fire it up again.

I shoveled all the snow and ice out of the way and opened it up. Hmm.

That’s a half-inch of ice across the surface of the tub. I punched through it and managed to break it into chunks, but the water is kind of “stale”– meaning it’s been in the tub for a few months now– and there’s some sediment I’d like to clear out. That means draining all the water, vacuuming and drying the interior, and then refilling it. Oh, and then cranking the heat again. All in 30-something-degree weather.

Sorry, Thom and Katie, no hot tub this time around.

I feel like I post a lot of sunset photos here, because the western view from our house over the lake is so amazing. But this morning I caught a brilliant sunrise as Pepper and I were leaving seminary. Here’s what it looked like from the church building:

Six minutes later, as I was driving to Kalispell:

It was barely past 7:30… a reminder that the days are getting longer. Soon enough the sun will be coming up at 6am!

Another 8 inches of snow fell last night. Fortunately we’d parked our car at the bottom of the driveway, so we hiked down and headed off to seminary. When we came back home, we both agreed we needed to shovel the really treacherous parts so they wouldn’t get a chance to add another layer of ice atop the one already there. There are three particularly dangerous areas where the slope is steep and there are drop-offs… and naturally those are areas that build up a lot of ice which doesn’t seem to melt much.

We went to work. Looking up the hill, it’s pretty impressive to behold:

It was funny to think how we used to gripe about all 60 feet of our driveway in Longmont. Shoveling that seemed like such a chore. Now here we are, working on a driveway that’s almost half a mile long.

Fortunately the snow is pretty powdery today, so we made (relatively) quick work of it. Once we reached the bottom, we hoisted our shovels and trekked back up.

About an hour later, I heard a truck outside. Todd, our “plow guy”, was climbing the hill in his big pickup. We had no idea he was coming, or even that he would– the last time he was here, he said our driveway is “the worst I’ve ever seen” and seemed pretty hesitant to even tackle it. But I guess he felt like he could make it. He must’ve been a little surprised to see it already cleared! Fortunately he had a load of sand in the back, so I asked him to spread the sand as he went back down. Combined with our shoveling efforts, the sand should at least make the driveway navigable again.

It’s crazy how much I obsess about this dang driveway. Knowing I can get down to the highway without (1) hiking and (2) crampons is actually kind of a relief. Here’s hoping some warm weather in the next few days will whittle away at that bottom layer of ice, and we won’t have to keep spending mental– and physical– energy on this!