As I continue thinking about what I’m most grateful for in my life, my kids are pretty high on the list. Let’s start with Alex. Here’s a guy who is smart and funny and creative.
He reminds me so much of myself. Many a friend and family member has remarked that Alex seems like a younger (and more handsome) version of me. He’s goofy and has a sense of humor like mine.
He’s an explorer, and someone who you know will always choose the right.
Now that he’s married and expecting my first grandson, it’s been awesome to watch him grow into the role of a good husband (and, soon, father).
It’s a darn good thing he was our first kid, because he made it easier on us.
The leader of our church, Russell M Nelson, shared a really cool video where he talked about gratitude and how it can be a powerful force to bring joy into our lives. In this crazy year, we could all use a little more of that. He encouraged everyone to express their gratitude on social media with a hashtag #givethanks. I don’t really engage in social media, but this blog is sort of my personal social media and it’s always fun to look back on it over the years, so I figured I’d accept his challenge here.
When I reflect on all I’m grateful for, the one thing that immediately comes to mind is my amazing wife. She’s been my companion and best friend for almost 25 years now.
I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman who could put up with me for that long. She’s smart and gorgeous and funny.
She’s wise and thoughtful and patient.
She loves being outdoors almost as much as I do. And she’s a total stud.
Yep, in the immortal words of John McLane, “She’s the best thing that ever happened to a bum like me.”
It’s nearly Thanksgiving, which means it’s time to get cracking on our annual Christmas cards. I have an idea for this year’s card which is decidedly mediocre, so we had to take some pictures. I’m fortunate that I married someone who’s a good sport about all of this. (Honestly, I think it’s mainly because I only ask about five minutes of her time, and I do all the rest myself.)
Our photo shoot was pretty amazing. Let’s start with the “power shot” that looks like we’re about to start a WWF match:
There’s the cheesy “engagement photo” shot…
Our “celebratory shot”, in which I look like a complete idiot:
And the “toasting shot”, which is questionable on many levels:
Which one(s) will be on this year’s card? Ooh, the suspense…
It was cool to see the alpha version of Hexteria’s printed tiles, which were basically designs I made up so I could have “real” hexes instead of leftovers from my ancient Settlers of Catan game. I boxed up three copies of Hexteria and mailed them to friends and family for testing, and now I’m waiting to hear what they think.
In the meantime, I received new hex designs from my nephew Tim, and just had them printed:
Whoa, these are much cooler than the ones I designed. That’s what happens when you go with a pro!
Today I’m heading out to my favorite local pizza place so I can playtest the game (with the shiny new hexes) with some friends. One step closer to becoming a famous game designer!
I keep thinking it’ll be cool to see a “real Montana winter” with four feet of snow right outside my door. Well, we’re not quite there yet. But over the past couple of days we had a pretty steady snowfall, and now that it’s stopped and the sun has decided to show her face, it’s fun to see a foot of snow atop everything.
Pretty! If only our driveway didn’t require all-wheel drive and studded snow tires…
Earlier this year, we decided to get a generator so when the power goes out, at least we’ll have water and heat (both of which are powered by electricity). It seemed simple enough, and I felt like I could just organize a handful of contractors and make it happen. Well, summer is apparently a very busy time for contractors around here, and the pandemic made it worse because everyone’s doing house projects this year. After being ghosted by most of them and turned down flat by others (“the job is too small” and “you’re too far away” were common reasons), we finally opted to just hire a generator company to handle everything.
The only thing they can’t do is install the gas line to get propane to power the generator. We have a thousand-gallon tank buried in our front yard, but (naturally) the generator will be in the back of the house. Somehow we needed to install about 200 feet of piping. I thought I had it all lined up with the gas company two months ago, and last week– literally the day before the project was going to happen– they said they couldn’t do it because we didn’t have a trench dug for the pipe. Umm, what? I thought that was part of what they were doing. Nope, they said– I have to trench it. I was pretty exasperated, and started frantically calling contractors. Everyone was still busy, and it’s November, so the weather is threatening to freeze the ground. If I couldn’t get the trench to lay the pipe, I couldn’t get the generator, and we’d have to wait until the spring thaw.
After failing to secure a contractor, Pepper and I decided to cowboy up and do it ourselves. I rented an excavator (the ground is far too rocky for a simple trencher) and we went to work. This thing wasn’t exactly one of those monster earth-moving machines– it was more like an oversized Tonka toy.
I got the hang of the levers pretty quickly. Pepper gave it a whirl but despite intense concentration, she ended up kind of swinging the bucket around like a drunk construction worker.
So we agreed I’d run the excavator while she did “support work” to make the job faster. There’s nothing quite like tearing up your beautiful lawn just to lay a 3/4″ pipe.
After almost six hours in the chair, breathing diesel fumes and slamming levers around, the trench was finished. We laid the pipe and went to work pushing all that dirt back into the ditch. The excavator was a lifesaver, because it was amazing how much dirt there was.
Once that was done, I had the rare privilege of repairing the sewer line I’d accidentally destroyed. It was unmarked, and fairly shallow, and although it gave up a good fight against the excavator’s hydraulics (I thought I was pulling on a huge rock, which had already happened many times), it eventually exploded into a bunch of PVC shards. I had to dig it out and then cut the pipe. Whee!
After what seemed like hours but was probably about 30 minutes, I had the new pipe installed.
We raked literally tons of dirt, gravel, and rock to tidy up a bit, and the end result of two days’ hard labor isn’t too awful.
I guess I can cross off a couple more things on my “things to do now that I’m a Montanan” list: run an excavator and fix a sewer line. Sheesh, I’ve done more house projects in the past year than I’ve done in the previous forty-seven.
Today I was putting together an online poll for some friends, to figure out when we can have our next virtual game night. I was using Doodle, a web site that has a quick and easy (and free!) way to create polls. But the site didn’t work, because it told me I was blocking ads. I turned off my ad blocker so I could finish my poll, and the software I use to block tracking scripts (Ghostery) went haywire. Check out the purple column on the right:
68 trackers! This single web page is using that many different scripts and sites to track me and deliver ads. Holy smokes.
For those people who think they’re “anonymous” on the internet, or wonder how Amazon and Facebook can suddenly display an ad for something they were looking at on a completely different site, here you go. And this is just for a simple little poll…
