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Hexteria has been a rousing success thus far… people who have played it have generally enjoyed it. (Granted, those people are my family and friends, so maybe they’re just being nice.) Although there’s still a lot of work to be done to market and sell it, that’s a process that’s going to take months. In the meantime, I feel like it’s time to start designing my next game.

One of the challenges Hexteria continues to face is a lack of a theme. Although I throw around some medieval terms, at its heart the game is very abstract. Several people have commented on that, but at this point in the development it’s going to be tricky to layer a theme atop it without changing some of the fundamental mechanics. So, as I consider the next game, I feel like a good starting point will be a theme, rather than mechanics. Also, I’d like to make a card game this time. They’re (generally) simpler, and far easier to build, playtest, and publish.

I sat down with Kyra and Pepper today and asked them what theme they’d like to see in a card game. “If you were at a game store looking at a bunch of unknown games on the shelf, what would catch your eye?” They both agreed that dinosaurs would be the bomb. We spent a few minutes brainstorming what a dinosaur card game might look like. Fortunately Kyra just finished a paleontology class at BYU, so she actually knows quite a bit about the subject.

We chatted about mechanics and agreed this will need to be a “simple” game… one that takes a few minutes to explain, and maybe 20 minutes to play. It won’t have nearly the complexity of Hexteria, but that’s intentional.

As for the artwork, I decided to see how well I can draw dinosaurs. Here’s my first effort.

Yes, I know triceratops wasn’t blue. But hey, not bad for five minutes of sketching, right? (Kyra insisted on the smile… otherwise “she looks all grumpy”).

Stay tuned for updates on whatever the heck this turns out to be…

If there’s one thing people say when they see our house, it’s “Wow, this place has a lot of switches!“

I’m kidding– people don’t really say that. But I’ve said it many times. After moving in and noticing the great proliferation of switches, I finally had to put labels on them because there are many sets of three, four, or even (in one instance) ten switches in a row. I couldn’t remember what turned on what. I spent the better part of an afternoon going around slapping switches and figuring out what to put on the labels.

The kicker? Some of the switches literally do nothing. Flip them on and off, slide the dimmer, whatever… nothing happens. And yes, I’ve checked plugs on the wall in case some of them are controlled by switches. At one point Thom and I pulled off a switch plate on a particularly mystifying one, to find that it wasn’t actually connected to wires! Umm, what?

Anyway, after things like that, I felt like a few of the non-functional switches deserved clever labels. Here are a couple:

We don’t have a drawbridge (yet) but if we ever install one, the wiring and switch are in place.

I bring this up because today on the internet I saw a photo that proved I’m not alone.

Thank you, internet stranger! I’m not the only person who has to label my switches, and also not the only one who moved into a house with switches that simply don’t do anything.

Thom writes a weekly email called “Friday Randomness”, which is always a treat to read as I eat my Friday morning breakfast. Today he shared the story of Alex Honnold, the amazing free-solo rock climber who notably scaled El Cap a few years ago. That was a monumental achievement– some have called it the most incredible exhibition of human athleticism of all time– and afterward, he was asked about what was next for him. His reply: “Now that I’ve achieved that life dream, nothing is calling to me as much as it did. That’s what I’m struggling with.”

In his email, Thom posed a similar question: “Maybe any of you who have reached what you’d consider a defining pinnacle is essentially asking… Now what? That’s a tough one.”

I replied with a rather lengthy email, and after hitting send I thought “that feels like a good blog post”. So here it is.

Two years ago, as my planned retirement date crept closer, I started wondering what I’d do with my time. Freeing up 8 hours a day is a life-changing thing, and I’ve never been one who sits around reading books or watching shows. (I enjoy those things, but only in small doses.) “What if I get bored?” I thought. “What if the hobbies I’ve been thinking about getting into turn out to be dull?”

The day came and went, and I stopped working. But I didn’t get bored. That was my last summer in Colorado, and I filled it with ultimate and trips with the kids and lunches with friends and preparing to move to a new place. The time flew past, and then before I knew it, I was in Montana. Our kids were gone, we didn’t know anyone, and everything was at least a 15-minute drive away. Turns out, that just gave me new things to work on. Meet people. Explore the area. Make changes to the house. Figure out how to stay in touch with friends who are now long-distance. Experiment with new hobbies.

A year and a half has passed. I can’t really think of a single day in that time when I’ve thought “Man, today was a waste. I was so bored.” I’ve always had something going on. I’ve taught myself new things, I’ve explored and expanded hobbies that before I could only dabble in, I’ve met a ton of amazing people, and I’ve fallen in love with this little corner of the earth.

So what’s next? Well, I recently applied for a part-time job helping at the local high school. I’m starting a weekly gaming guild with a friend. I’m looking for opportunities to hang out with my kids and my new grandson. I’m planning summer trips, and thinking of the next hobby I’ll pursue.

In short, I think my answer to your question is that you just find some new pinnacles to climb. Retiring is definitely a Big One, but it doesn’t mean the journey’s over. Rather, it means that PART of the journey’s over, and now it’s time to start a completely different journey… one that’s a little more self-directed. Frankly, I don’t know where it’s going to take me in the next fifty years… or even the next five. But all the little adventures and accomplishments along the way are definitely worth getting over that first Big One. The pinnacle isn’t an end; it’s a beginning.

Kyra is one of those people who needs to have the “right numbers” in her life. By that I mean when she’s adjusting the volume on her car stereo, she only uses even numbers. And not just any even number; she says things like 10 are out. So, 8 or 12 are acceptable. Or maybe 14.

The other day she was complaining about her drive from Utah to Montana to visit us. It was a little chilly outside, so she was using the heat in her car, which has one of those temperature dials. But 75 wasn’t the right number, and 74 didn’t work either (I’m not sure why– the rules are evidently complicated). So she’d have the heat on 73 but after a while the car would get too cool. She’d turn it up to 76, but that was too hot. She literally spent hours of her drive alternating between “a little too cool” and “a little too hot” because she couldn’t just set the dial to 74 or 75…

All those poor people in the Midwest and East have to drive so slowly…

Over the weekend, Pepper and I drove down to Utah to meet our grandson for the first time. He’s a cute little guy, and it was a lot of fun to remember how small babies are. We have a lot of photos like this:

And this:

Of course, being three weeks old, he did a lot of this:

Alex and Kaitlyn were good sports as we all vied for a chance to hold Ollie. I guess in some ways, it’s nice as a new parent to have a bunch of people willing to take the baby for a while.

Ollie’s pretty talented, too… here we are, singing a cover of Billy Joel’s Piano Man.

We also had a chance to see a bunch of family members who came out to attend our niece’s baby shower (Alex and I dodged that bullet and had lunch instead). It felt like a mini family reunion!

On Sunday morning we wandered around the BYU campus and took some great pictures:

We even played around with some of the experiments in the science building, including the Vortex Cannon (sounds cool, right?). I’m on the second floor, looking down at Kyra, and I can aim this big metal drum at her and then thump the black rubber membrane to throw a big poof of air right into her face. Isn’t science amazing?

After a great weekend and a long drive, it was nice to crest Polson Hill and see the Flathead Valley again:

We’re looking forward to seeing little Ollie become… well, bigger Ollie. These guys grow so fast…

With temperatures soaring into the 60’s and the bright sun shining down, it was time to get back out on the water. Although I enjoy the winter here, it’s hard to have a huge, beautiful lake right in front of us but not be able to spend time on it. So each spring, we wait eagerly for a day when it’s finally warm enough to brave the frigid water.

Yesterday we loaded up the kayaks and headed out to Loon Lake, which is a small lake (or large pond, depending on your definitions). It was great to have a leisurely paddle for a while. We saw geese, ducks, turtles, and probably a loon or two. A few logs in the water had lines of turtles on them, all sunning themselves and enjoying life until we came up to look at them, at which point they’d slip quietly into the water and then, a moment later, poke their little heads up to see if we were still there. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of them, because my camera was misbehaving.

Today we de-winterized (summer-ized?) the jet skis and headed down to Yellow Bay, our favorite put-in for Flathead Lake. I fired up my jet ski and zoomed out into the bay, but sadly, Pepper couldn’t follow because her jet ski had a rough go of it. Something wasn’t working quite right in the engine, and she could barely get up to 30mph… and couldn’t make any sudden stops or sharp turns, which are pretty much the best parts of riding jet skis. So she sadly putt-putted back to shore.

Although the air was a nice 60ish, the water temperature is still probably in the 40’s. It’s cold enough that when you step into it, you literally suck in your breath. And after a minute of walking around the shallows (to get the jet skis on and off the trailer), you can’t feel your toes any more. We always gear up in wetsuits, full water shoes, and neoprene gloves… here’s a view of my foot and the shallows.

But it’s still dang cold. It’ll be awesome to spend summer months back on the lakes again.

I’m setting up some “smart home” software so I can do fancy things with switches and plugs and cameras, and I was excited to see the Sun as one of the devices in my list. My excitement turned to disappointment, however, when I received the following error message:

I can’t control the Sun from this software. Dangit.

I’m eating some Skittles for a snack, and I asked Pepper how she would eat them. Just shove a handful of them in your mouth? Or sort them by color? If sorted, are they eaten in a particular order?

We both agreed that we’d sort by color, and yellow/lemon are the worst. So you eat those first, to get them out of the way. Then you go through the rest, preferably from worst to favorite. Here’s my Skittles tableau:

It’s worth noting that I have a combination of “traditional” Skittles and “wild berry” mix here, which explains the blue and pink ones. And the pink/strawberry and red/cherry ones are equally awesome, so they can be properly eaten together.

Today marks a quarter-century since the fateful day I married my best friend. It seems like those years have just zipped past, and occasionally when we’re sitting around watching a sunset or sitting in the hot tub or finishing watching a movie or whatever, one of us will say something like “can you believe it’s been this long?”. And it’s not in a bad way; it’s pretty cool how the time has passed and yet we still love being together.

I’ve posted this picture a few times, but it’s my go-to shot from our wedding because it sums up so much about us.

I’m glad I’ve stuck with her all these years, and I’m looking forward to at least twenty-five more…