Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
Costco was having a killer sale on 32″ QHD monitors, so I picked up a few. I swapped out my trusty fifteen-year-old Hanns-G monitors (a mere 28″ each) for these bad boys:
Holy pixels, Batman! They’re awesome. Not only do I have almost seven linear feet of monitors from left to right, they’re much higher resolution than my old ones. That means there’s more crisp detail, and my browser windows and editors and emails and documents all have substantially more space. I’m lovin’ this.
It’s been a few weeks since our driveway turned into a hillside ice rink, and in those weeks we’ve been defeated twice. One morning we were heading to seminary (in the dark, as usual) and completely lost control of our car. We slid around 30 feet before coming to an uncertain stop, and immediately decided we weren’t going to keep going down. We texted all of the kids in our class right there to tell them not to show up that morning.
Yesterday things were good in the morning; a few warm(ish) days had melted some snow and shrunk the icy patches. We could even see gravel along stretches of the driveway! But it started to snow, and six hours later the driveway was covered in white. Now we couldn’t distinguish the “good areas” with traction on the gravel from the bad ones where there were still sheets of ice. This time, going downhill led to us sliding and spinning, eventually ending up stopped perpendicular to the driveway! Yikes. We pre-emptively cancelled seminary this morning.
So the ice beat us thrice, but we weren’t done fighting. We can’t keep cancelling things and hunker down in our house all winter. Last week we’d ordered some v-bar chains, which are specialized tire chains equipped with v-shaped spikes. They look like this:
Regular chains would just slide on the ice, but these things bite into it. Naturally they’re a pain to install, and since we only need them for the driveway (the roads are clear), it’s quite a chore to put them on at the house, drive down, and then take them off before heading out. Then again, it’s not like we have a lot of options. Today we slipped on the chains and headed down to pick up some packages that had been delivered.
Speaking of the packages, they were kind of funny:
I found a killer deal on monitors at Costco, so I ordered four of them. Of course we have a little mailbox (on the left in the photo) but any time we have packages, they’re placed in the blue bin we have a little off the highway. There’s no way UPS is going to come up the driveway to even the first switchback. I didn’t want all that equipment sitting in plain view of the road, so we had to go down to get them.
Anyway, after bringing the monitors up to the house, we turned around and went back down again and parked the car at the bottom. We took off the chains, and now it’s ready to drive out in the morning for seminary. We hiked back up wearing our crampons.
These things are amazing on the ice. They bite right in, and we don’t slip at all. I guess the v-bars are sort of like crampons for tires.
So, tomorrow we’ll get up extra early so we can don crampons and hike down in the black morning, climb into our cold car, and head out. This driveway sure doesn’t make things easy for us. But at least we have a way to defeat it now.
In many aspects of my life, I enjoy change. New things and new adventures are exciting. But in some areas, I’m very much a creature of habit who likes things to remain constant and predictable. One of those areas is my jeans. I’ve been wearing regular old Levi’s 550 jeans for around 30 years now. Every time a pair rips or gets too worn out, I just go and buy another pair. The beauty of this arrangement is that Levi’s 550 jeans have remained essentially unchanged for decades.
I tore one of my jeans last week, so I hopped online and ordered a pair. Today they showed up.
Excellent! These should last me another five years or so…
I was eating breakfast at my hotel this morning, and the news was playing. Imagine my surprise and delight when they aired an interview with the gentlemen in charge of the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania!
It’s not often you see someone in a coat and top hat, being interviewed while holding a large groundhog. The reason I thought it was so noteworthy is because the garb these guys were wearing, and the ceremony they showed (last year?) were just like the movie Groundhog Day. Watching that movie continues to be an annual tradition for me and Pepper, so I’m warmed up for this year’s showing…
For the past week, we’ve had (relatively) warm days where the temperature soared to the high 30’s and low 40’s. The thick layer of snow outside has been slowly melting. Then at night, it generally drops below freezing again. The result: our driveway is quite literally a sheet of ice.
Sure, there’s some gravel peeking through, but the bulk of it is ice roughly an inch thick. And when it’s warm during the day, there’s a thin layer of water on it. As everyone knows, a thin layer of water atop a smooth layer of ice is about as close to frictionless as you can get.
Sooooo… driving up and down the driveway is fraught with peril. This morning, heading out at 6am, we just sort of glided down it. Now and then the wheels would catch on some gravel, or we’d intentionally drift over near the edge where there’s still some slushy snow which provides a bit more grip. But overall, it’s pretty freaky.
After returning home and barely making it back up, we decided to break up the ice. Pepper pulled out our industrial ice chipper, I grabbed a sledgehammer, we donned our crampons, and marched down the ice to see what we could do. The results were… not good.
I banged away on this little patch of ice with all my might, slamming the sledgehammer into it, and succeeded in making a few good-sized dents in the ice and blasting a few chips off. Pepper, meanwhile, toiled beside me, banging the ice chipper into the unyielding surface. We spent about fifteen minutes working, at various points along the driveway, before concluding that we simply weren’t going to make a dent in it.
I love my house, but wow do I hate my driveway.
So I guess “livestreams” are all the rage these days. That’s where people broadcast themselves doing mundane things, and other people watch them. In some cases, “other people” could be hundreds or thousands. Apparently you can make money livestreaming.
Dirk has been building a “channel” on YouTube over the past year or so, and has become pretty popular… I mean, as far as having nearly 2,000 subscribers could be called popular. (I was one of his first subscribers!) A few weeks ago he invited me to join him for a Star Wars “watch party” which he’d livestream. Basically, that means the two of us would get on a video chat call, watch the original movie, and talk about everything from the movie to our childhoods together. I’d never done something like that, but hey, what are friends for?
Tonight we did it, and basically just talked for two hours while anywhere from seven to ten people (!) watched and made comments in the YouTube chat section. Although I don’t pretend to understand why people do that, it was fun to “hang out” with my friend for a couple of hours, reminiscing about the many many times we watched the Star Wars movies together during sleepovers.
The best part was probably when someone named overlap618 made this comment:
“Nooch your friend is much funnier than you and better looking. What is his channel? UNSUBSCRIBE”
My screenshot above doesn’t exactly capture Dirk (aka Nooch) in a very flattering pose, but it does capture the comment on the right side of the video. Hilarious. I like this overlap618 character.
Anyway, it was a good time and apparently we’re going to do The Empire Strikes Back in a few weeks.
Also, he has some “notes” for me about how to do better on a livestream. Because apparently I’m now a YouTube sensation.
Last night I stumbled on the greatest web page I’ve seen all year: the Michigan Department of Transportation’s “Snowplow Names” page! Yes, apparently in the Great Lakes State they officially name their snowplows (and publish it for the world).
This screenshot really doesn’t do the list justice, because it goes on for hundreds more. Some of my favorites:
Brilliant! If only I had more machinery around the house in need of names… I mean, we already have Nebula and Ruby, and our jet skis are named Trixie and Lil’ Pepe… and everyone tells us we need to get a plow for our driveway…
Our power went out the other night. When it returned a few hours later, we reset all the clocks that had dropped off. Later in the day, we noticed the oven and microwave in the kitchen were showing strange times. We reset them again. A few hours later, they were wrong again. But they weren’t wrong like “a few minutes fast”… instead, they were wrong like “many hours off, and completely different”.
For example, now it’s 7:52pm. I took a picture of these appliances, one of whom insists it’s 7:58am (so it’s now 12 hours off) and the other who says 1:45.
I don’t know what to make of it. They’re either really fast or really slow, but at different rates. How could a power outage cause something like this? And why in two different appliances? Are we in some kind of time vortex? Could it be aliens?
Well heck, whatever the cause, it would just be nice to have our clocks working. Argh.
Following up on the success of our Provo Thanksgiving, we had another family get-together in Provo for Christmas. We rented a townhouse– slightly larger than the one we had a month ago– and everyone gathered for a few days. And by “everyone” I mean “including Mom and Dad”. Or Grandma and Grandpa, if you’re our kids. Or Great-Grandma (“GG”) and Great-Grandpa, from Ollie’s perspective.
At nine months, Ollie is very fond of shoving things in his mouth.
He’s also fond of his Mickey doll, who he drags around and apparently punches when he’s in his crib just before naptime. Here he casts a wary eye at Great-Grandpa, who just wants to pick up the little bugger.
On Christmas morning there were piles of gifts, in a dizzying assortment of wrapping papers.
This year I enjoyed making labels that were more than just “To: You, From: Me”.
Everyone loved their gifts. Mom and Dad were delighted when they opened their box of “100% Authentic Flathead Lake Rocks”.
(In truth it was just a way to disguise the fact that I’d given them a gift card to Outback. Adding a bag of rocks made the wrapped present feel so much more intriguing, you know?)
New shirts were a thing.
After the boxes were opened and the wrapping was cleared, we sat down for some nice family portraits. This is the first time we’ve all been together in years!
Here’s a cool one: four generations of Schroeder men!
My amazing parents…
… and my beautiful offspring.
We played Sheephead and Skull King and Zackjongg (Zack’s mostly accurate but partly made-up version of Mahjongg). We watched a movie and went on walks and ate plenty of food. We talked and laughed and just thoroughly enjoyed a few days together. Good times all around.
As the sun was setting on a cold, foggy, grey day, I noticed the trees outside were coated with hoarfrost. I grabbed my camera and took a few shots of the magical spiky ice:
