Month: November 2019

Zaque just sent me a quick email:

There’s these two old guys in my ward who claim I’m the spitting image of “Buddy Holly”, and I can’t look things up on Google. So a picture of him would be fun, because I’m “Buddy Holly reincarnated for the Lord.”

Since he doesn’t know who Buddy Holly is, or looks like, I figured I’d do some quick photo work. Here’s a classy old photo of Buddy:

And here’s one of Zaque a few months ago:

See the resemblance?

How about now?

As Zaque continues serving his mission, he has opportunities every Monday to write emails to people (which I forward on to a larger group), and if he’d like, he can use Google Hangouts to chat with his family. For the past two weeks, he’s attempted to chat with me, but both times Pepper and I were in the middle of something– once in town, and once at a friend’s house– so we couldn’t engage. Last week he chatted with Kyra, and this was one thing he wrote to her:

HEY I GOT A STORY

So basically I came home and decided I wanted grilled cheese. Like realllllllllly wanted grilled cheese. So I made 3 grilled cheeses and drank a big glass of milk. So I’m just like, “Shoot, I won’t be able to poop for a week!” So then I just start eating a bunch of Hot Cheetos, hoping that they will, through black magic, somehow cancel each other out and I can poop regularly.

Not gonna lie. My poopin’s been good.

So I guess it worked. It’s all about the miracles of God.

Saw this yesterday, loved it.

It’s not often I get annoyed by a box of graham crackers.

But seriously, when I open a new box and find that the top inch of the box is empty space, and there’s around half an inch of gap on the sides as well, it’s annoying. They could easily have fit another 2-3 crackers horizontally, and just shortened the box to the height of the bags inside it. What’s with all the tomfoolery here?

Pepper and I headed up to Flathead Brewing Co, which is a local brewpub that hosts a trivia night every Wednesday evening. We knew the food was good (we’ve been there before) and we were looking for something social.

When we walked in, we met a small group of friends who invited us to join their team. Although we did horribly (the categories were things like “presidential nicknames” and “birthstones”), we had a good time chatting with our new friends. We stayed well after the game was over, talking about the area, our lives, our kids, and so on. It was a ton of fun.

At the close of the evening we bid farewell to Ashley, Cheryl, and Adam… hopefully we’ll go back some future Wednesday and team up with them again!

Out of the blue, I just got a text from Bech:

So of course I pulled out a piece of scratch paper and did some math. I sent the answer back, and we agreed it was right (he doesn’t actually know the correct answer, so he had done the math as well).

Then Pepper walked into the room and asked why I was doing math on a piece of scratch paper. I showed her the text. She just shook her head and said, “You guys are such nerds.”

All along Highway 35, people have fake road signs posted by their driveways. I think it’s mainly because on the east side, driveways simply meander up into the forest without any clear markings, making it difficult to find houses as you’re flying past at 50mph. Our postman, George, told us that many years ago, the Postal Service allowed some of the people to change their fake streets into real “addressable” roads. For example, our friends the Zavalas were able to create Zavala Lane, and you can find it on Google Maps and write a letter to that address.

Although we can’t have an official USPS street in our name, we needed a way to help people find our house. After deciding against the Easter Island head idea, we opted for a fake road sign. Today we put it up!

Now we won’t have to navigate using the red van (which is no longer there) or even the mailbox with a lawnmower. We can just tell people to turn into Cosmo and Pepper’s Place. Boom.

In Spokane there are streets called Thor and Freya. Cool!

The other day I had my cell phone in the vest pocket of my blue jacket, and I heard a bunch of beeps. Apparently I bumped the button somehow and took a whole series of pictures. Here’s a compilation of all nine shots, which are basically photos of the inside of my jacket pocket.

Clearly I should be an artist!

When I first struck out on my own, I named my new company L5. It was in reference to the Lagrangian Point in astrophysics– I’m a rocket scientist, after all. Within a few months I’d realized that L5 was a horrible name for a company, not only because it doesn’t mean anything to people who aren’t rocket scientists, but because the domain– l5inc.com– had its own set of problems. Is that a lowercase “L” at the beginning? A capital “I”? The number “1”? Is the “5” an “S”? And so on. A new name was in order, and after at least ten minutes of thought I came up with neoBox. If nothing else, the logo was breathtaking.

Umm, yeah. A graphic designer I’m not.

Anyway, neoBox was born and it took a few years before a second renaming landed on Zing Studios (with the help of my partner Lily, who’s much better at marketing than me). But for the past eighteen years, I’ve owned the neobox.net domain, even though the company has technically been defunct for nearly that entire time.

Now it’s time to renew the domain, and I’m going to have to let it die. There’s no reason to perpetuate it, and the dozens of email addresses I’ve used over the years will just have to bounce.

So, another (small) piece of my business history will be relegated to the trash heap of history. Sayonara, neoBox.