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It’s been over a year since the Magnificent Seven (or Six, or Five, depending on who can make it) were together. Last summer we were in Missouri, and this time it was back to Nebraska. As usual, it meant a fabulous four-day weekend with a lot of board games.

Aron’s custom-made gaming table continues to be the only way to play a proper game.

Derek continues to drink Diet Pepsi in staggering quantities, and now has a gallon-sized water bottle that’s very much not for water.

I couldn’t resist a little AI magic with that photo.

Derek is also a fan of immensely complicated games based on history, and despite some protestations from me and Dirk, he pulled out a massive game and spent forty minutes explaining the rules before we took two hours to play three of the nine rounds of the game. Dirk’s expression sums it up pretty well:

We finally abandoned the game, as it was clear it would take the entire day. Sorry, Derek.

Bech and I snuck out to Potbelly for awesome sandwiches while the rest of the gang played pickleball.

As always, it was really great to hang out with my best and oldest friends. I love that we’re still doing this kind of stuff after forty years together.

Long long ago, we found a little race car suitcase at a yard sale and it became Zack’s. He’d take it on all our trips, stuffing it full of clothes and toys (and frequently not enough underwear) and pulling it around on its little wheels.

Now, some twenty-odd years later, I found it in our attic and decided it was probably time to retire it. The plastic handle had long ago broken off, having been replaced with a single piece of red yarn for some reason. Zack had already served a mission (with a different set of luggage) and is living happily in Utah and probably not planning to use it for any upcoming vacations.

I sent Zack and the kids a couple of pictures for old times’ sake…

I took it out to our trash pile. Rest in peace, little suitcase.

But then Alex and Kaitlyn jumped into the conversation and said Ollie would love a little suitcase. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? So Pepper brought it with her on a trip to Utah this weekend, and lo and behold, the little suitcase lives on with another little boy who loves it…

Around the time our main daughter Kyra left for New Zealand, our second daughter Hannah was joining the Air Force. She’d decided to enlist so she’d have a path to get into college and start a career. Both of them were struggling with knowing what was next in their lives, so they both made some major changes. Spoiler: it’s turned out great for both of them!

After a grueling six weeks of boot camp, Hannah graduated. We couldn’t be there for the ceremony, but she shared a selfie:

Her dad and older brother Rod came down. We haven’t seen Rod in many years, but he’s thriving in the Army and is really proud of his little sister (even though she’s in a different branch of the military).

A few weeks after that, she completed her first set of coursework and was certified on some sort of aircraft (I’m not sure about all the details). She sent a picture to demonstrate what sorts of things she has to understand…

… and one of her with her certificate.

She’s doing great, gaining confidence, and starting on a great adventure. We’re so proud of both our daughters!

I was working today and got a hankering for a pizookie. I’m always surprised at how many people have never heard of a combination pizza and cookie, but basically it involves making a batch of (typically) chocolate-chip cookie dough and then baking it in a cast-iron pan.

The result:

So good. Sadly, even after sharing some of it with Pepper, I couldn’t finish the whole thing– it’s probably the equivalent of about eight normal cookies! Obviously it’s something that’ll require friends to enjoy.

I bagged up three more pizookies so I’m ready for those friends.

It’s feeling very much like autumn, so Pepper and I decided we need to take a few more hikes to celebrate the end of another amazing summer. We called our friends Gary and Susie, and the four of us headed up to Jewel Basin. We hiked to Birch Lake, which is a beautiful little spot.

We climbed the steep hills and had a commanding view of the northern Flathead Valley. Spectacular! When we arrived at the lake, we snapped a selfie and enjoyed some lunch together.

Hopefully we’ll squeeze in a few more hikes like this before the snow falls…

Our guest bathroom has always been kind of annoying. The shower is like something you’d find on a cruise ship, where you can’t even lift your arms while you’re washing. The sink is a dumb-looking pedestal. And there’s no storage whatsoever except a couple of tiny shelves in an ugly medicine cabinet. We’ve talked about making some changes, but it wasn’t until today that it became real.

After choosing a contractor (there’s no way I can do the sort of remodel we envision!), we arranged for someone to come and do the demolition this morning. The bathroom looks a bit bleak now…

Because house projects tend to go sideways for me, it came as no surprise when I was unscrewing a little shelf from the wall and suddenly heard the sound of water gushing… behind the wall. I reversed my screwdriver and the sound stopped. Hmm. Looking more closely, I wondered if the builders had taken a three-inch wood screw and just driven it right into the wall, missing the stud and hitting a water pipe instead.

Yep.

After shutting off the water, we tore out a section of drywall (visible in the top right of the photo above) and confirmed that the screw was indeed right through a plastic water pipe. It’s been in place for twenty-five years with nary a drip. Fortunately it wasn’t a major problem, but it just made me laugh because that’s how it always seems to be for me.

Hopefully that’ll be the only thing that goes sideways. More bathroom news soon…

After an initial playtest of my second attempt at Itzan, I decided to shelve the game for a while. It just didn’t feel compelling; it didn’t have a spark. But I’ve still been thinking about a new game. I decided to create something with a far-future science-fiction theme, and considered a massive gameboard with a map of the galaxy, pieces you’d place, cards you’d draw, and so on. I drafted a set of rules and sat down to design the board itself.

Then I hit a wall because the spaces on the board would need tokens with special abilities, but the tokens themselves would be too small to explain the ability. Many games deal with that by adding icons to the tokens, forcing everyone who’s playing to learn the “language” of those icons and (in some games) look up the particular token in the rulebook or some sort of reference. That really disrupts the game, and can be time-consuming and frustrating.

Instead, I decided it would still work to scrap the board, tokens, and other pieces to create a game that’s almost purely based on cards. Of course one of my go-to mechanics for games I design is resource management, so there will be a few piles of cubes representing the various currencies in the game. I rewrote the rules and shifted the entire mechanic to one of drawing, buying, and placing cards.

Normally for a game prototype, I’d whip up some cards and print them on cardstock for my early playtesting. In this case, though, there would be almost four hundred cards in the game! Printing, cutting, and then shuffling and using that many cardstock cards is a pain. Instead, I put together some rough (but decent) designs and sent them off to a card-printing company. Forty dollars and two weeks later, I received my huge stack of cards.

And now it’s time to test Galactics.

The cards look pretty sharp, and it’ll be fun to playtest using something that looks semi-professional. I’ve already found a handful of things that will need to be changed– abilities that are confusing or overpowered– but I can “house rule” those during testing.

I’m excited to get these on a table with friends and see how the game goes…

We were down in Missoula today, and there happens to be a Winco. As everyone knows, Winco sells bulk foods– including bulk candy– and that means I can pick through a bin of Tootsie Pops and pick only the colors I want. This takes me back to the time I bought a whole box of only purple pops. Or, years later, purple and red.

So I picked through the bin, and walked out of the store with about three pounds of suckers.

It’s a good day.

For several years, Kyra’s been thinking about moving to New Zealand. There’s always been a reason why it didn’t work out– mostly because of her jobs– but she finally has a job that’s remote so she has the flexibility to do it from anywhere. Why not work from New Zealand?

So she applied for a one-year visa (a special program offered to young adults), received it in January, and started looking for the best time to leave. Sometime around April she bought an airline ticket from Los Angeles to Auckland, and then it “became real”. She’s spent the last few months researching, planning, and packing. She came up to Montana one last time so she could leave her car here, we had a grand time playing games and watching shows and biking and coloring our hair, and then we got to today.

Today we drove down to the Missoula Airport and said goodbye in the lounge.

She went through the security line (with maybe two other people in it!) and was off on her grand adventure. I’m excited for her and looking forward to all the cool stuff she does and cool people she meets…

Kyra’s heading to New Zealand in a few days, so she’s purging all sorts of things she won’t be taking with her. Amongst those things were a few almost-empty tubes of hair dye (technically “hair makeup” according to her), and she felt like we might as well use them up. So we did. Then we all went out for pizza.

We got a few looks, and had a conversation with Nate at Rosa’s, who knows us well and definitely noticed the change. I explained that you’ll hear stories of dads whose little girls want to play dress-up together, and do hair or nails, and of course the dads do it. Well, my little girl isn’t so little any more, but I’m still willing to play dress-up with her now and then.