BoomFlag

We were sitting around the dinner table last night, talking about death (yeah). I mentioned how I want to be cremated, and Zaque responded with:

When I die, I want to be cremated, and then have my ashes placed gently in a really nice fancy cloth. Then I want someone to roll up that cloth really tightly, shove it into a t-shirt cannon, and fire it directly into the chest of my worst enemy.

Alex finished his spring semester at BYU, so he’s back home for a few months before heading off for fall semester. Kaitlyn came with him, which was really cool because we can hang out with her for a few days before they head to Kansas City so he can meet her family.

Here are the two lovebirds, sitting together in front of the open door (for a bit of a breeze) while they play some online game with each other.

It’s like they’re made for each other!

Well, it’s official: Alex is engaged. A little over a week ago he proposed to Kaitlyn, and she accepted.

They promptly headed off to Middle-Earth for a photo shoot. Here’s a nice picture of them romping through the Shire, with the Misty Mountains in the background.

I’m really excited for the two of them. Next is the fun part: planning a wedding!

Every few weeks I get together with a group of friends and we play board games. Between all of us, we have a pretty broad collection of games, varying from silly to strategic to simply epic.

Last night I watched the guys play a relatively new addition called Gloomhaven. The game itself costs over a hundred dollars and comes in an enormous box with hundreds of pieces. It’s a four-person game, and they were already in the middle of a “campaign”, so I didn’t join. But I watched and learned the rules. Much of the game looked like this:

Meaning there were tons of cards and pieces on the table, some confused looks as people read the various cards, and frequent referrals to the thick rulebook.

Yeah, maybe this one is a little too complicated for my tastes. After two hours, they’d almost finished the first of two rooms they were exploring that evening. I headed out to pick up Thom, who’s visiting this week, and wished them the best as they continued to figure out all the craziness.

I dropped some things off at the Zing office yesterday, and it was the first time I’d been there in a couple of weeks. Since I’d left, the building owners had installed some kind of weird meeting room at the top of the stairwell.

These nice chairs and a little end table are literally in the hallway as you come up the stairs to the second floor. I’m really not sure what the expectation is: are the businesses on that floor supposed to hold meetings there? Should clients wait in the stairwell until their appointment? I just don’t know what to make of it… except that the cost of it is going to be reflected in my HOA fees. Hmm.

I’ve had stacks upon stacks of computer parts in my basement office for years. Every now and then I’d go through and purge the old stuff, but still they filled my closet and shelves. Now that we’re preparing to move, it’s time to get serious.

This morning I filled four big bins with old computers, monitors, and parts that I’ll take for recycling.

It’s funny to see that I still have my old IOMega Zip drive (those things were the bomb back in the day, when all we had was floppy disks to move data between computers). Of course there are stacks of floppy drives, video cards, and I even found an old 14.4k baud modem. Yeah, I’m so glad I’ve saved that for almost 30 years.

I found my very first computer’s motherboard, complete with the original 386 chip running at a screaming 33MHz:

And my first laptop, a sweet Toshiba that weighs about as much as four modern laptops:

This puppy is the one I used to start this blog, way back in 2002. I’d sit on my bed clacking away, writing blog posts. I’d take it on trips and plug in the PCMCIA modem and dial into NetZero to check email in Netscape Mail and browse the web in Navigator. Yep, those were the days.

Now all this stuff is heading off to Best Buy, which is the closest place I could find that recycles computer parts. I wonder if any of them will recognize some of these antiques…

Once again we had a baby rabbit fall into our window well. Zaque noticed the little guy while he was mowing, so he rescued him and then sat with him in the family room for a little while.

What’s funny is whenever this happens, the rabbits don’t seem frightened or even skittish. They just sit quietly with Zaque, not attempting to run away or anything. He set this one on his shoulder and watched a TV show for a while, and the rabbit just enjoyed the show. Clearly Zaque has some kind of weird talent at calming little critters.

I stumbled across this, and thought it was grand. It was included on the Voyager spacecraft as a message to… whoever finds it.

Back in the early part of this millennium, when we moved from Superior to Longmont, we hired a moving company to load and unload all our stuff. It was really nice having a bunch of enormous muscular Tongans hauling all of it while we just directed them to the right rooms. I think it cost us around $1,200, which didn’t seem too bad at the time.

Now, as we contemplate our move to Montana, I’m thinking about doing the same thing. I called a few local moving companies and, after meeting with a few of them so they could inventory our house, I’m sitting here looking at three estimates. The cheap one is for just shy of $5,000. There’s another for $6,000, and a third for almost $7,000. Ouch.

I’m not sure what Laralee and I were hoping to see; that $1,200 move was seventeen years ago and involved about twenty miles between houses. This time we’re hauling everything nearly a thousand miles. But still, those estimates kind of shocked us and we just can’t see the sense in paying that much.

So, I’m jumping over to U-Haul, where I can rent a truck and car trailer (since we can’t drive three vehicles to Montana). It looks like this will cost us around $1,300. Unfortunately no Tongans are included.

Ahem. A poem by Kyra when she was 8: