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We’ve had the same couch in our family room for well over a decade. It’s been fine, but it’s also been showing it’s age a bit. After some thought and a bit of shopping, we decided to get a new couch and loveseat (the loveseat replaces the barstools we’ve had for almost as long, but hardly ever use).

Yesterday afternoon, the goodies arrived and we set them up:

A nice feature is they recline! Laralee gave it a test run:

To celebrate, we had some friends over and watched a movie. Both the couch and loveseat worked really well for that (because hey, the highest purpose of family-room furniture is to provide a better movie-watching experience).

One of the nice things about teaching seminary so early is that class finishes before the sun even rises, and sometimes I’m rewarded with a beautiful view as I come out of the building.

One of the main reasons I enjoy hiking and backpacking is the opportunity to see the amazing beauty deep in the wilderness. Although I love having a long line of distant mountains on the western horizon every day, it’s an entirely different experience to be in them, walking amongst trees and navigating rock fields.

The Royal Museums Greenwich just announced the winner of their annual 2017 Astronomy Photograph of the Year contest, and it’s absolutely stunning. It shows nebulae in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud.

Although I’m sure the photographer did a bit of retouching, the stunning majesty of this space scene is truly breathtaking. I love space science, and seeing things like this puts a lot of things in perspective for me.

The runners-up in the contest were also incredible; I really liked these two photographs of aurorae, from Russia and then Iceland:

Isn’t nature beautiful?

Me: (Logs into Chase bank web site)
Chase: Hi there! Please update your preferences for electronic statements.
Me: Sounds great! (Updates preferences)
Chase:

Sigh. You’d think banks– with their vast resources and need for the very best technology– would actually get stuff like this right.

I wonder if I’m missing out on an amazing new business opportunity by ignoring text messages like this:

After about two weeks in the Missionary Training Center, Kyra flew to her mission area today. She had to wake up at 3 in the morning so she could catch her 7am flight from Salt Lake City to Phoenix, then had a two-hour layover before flying to Bakersfield, California. Knowing how hard it is for her to miss her beauty sleep, I’m sure she was pretty exhausted when she finally arrived in the mid-afternoon.

This evening we received an email from the mission office with the happy subject line “your daughter has arrived”. Here she is with President Layton (her mission president) and his wife.

And the adventure begins! Bakersfield doesn’t have the greatest reputation as a city, and in fact several people have commented about how it’s hot, smelly, and kind of ugly. Someone called it the “armpit of California”. Well, today Laralee wrote an email to Kyra with this inspiring wisdom:

BAM.

Today Zaque asked out of the blue:

All of a sudden several of my servers went dark. I couldn’t access them, nor could I get to the firewall that connects to them. At first I thought it might be a hiccup in the internet connectivity to the datacenter, but after a few minutes I figured my firewall might have run into problems of some kind. I wrote to the colocation provider running the datacenter and asked if they could take a look, and this was their response:

Umm… what? My “power strip” is a six-foot-tall device bolted to the side of the cabinet, with a high-amp plug (not your standard wall outlet). It takes real effort to unplug that guy.

Luckily my servers all came back online fine, but wow.

When I’m captain of an ultimate team, I use a ‘D Board’ to track defensive plays. It’s a lot of fun, and now even more so because one of my teammates used his 3D printer to create a little trophy for the best defensive player of the night.

Our team name is “Discing with the Saurs” (the league’s theme is “dinosaur game shows”) so he made a simple letter “D” and added some scales and our team name. Pretty awesome.

Now I need to step up my defense, so I can take this bad boy home.

Following in the footsteps of her big brother, today Kyra left for her mission. She’ll start in Utah at the Missionary Training Center, and in two weeks she’ll head over to Bakersfield, California where she’ll serve for a year and a half.

She had a morning flight and the airport was surprisingly un-crowded, so we breezed through everything and were even allowed to accompany her to the gate! (You have to ask nicely.)

The long goodbye hug for mom:

(Actually, it wasn’t nearly as long as I’d expected, and there weren’t any tears.)

And away she goes!

We’ll see her again around April 2019. Godspeed, Sister Schroeder.