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A few years ago, at Pepper’s family reunion, someone brought out a pair of boxes they’d found stashed in an attic somewhere. The boxes contained the journals of her grandfather, John. For over two decades, he wrote almost daily in personal journals about things happening in his life. Everyone had a good time looking through them to find the dates when they were born, then laughing about Grandpa John’s comments, which were typically things like “Cecil and Donna had another baby. A boy today.”

Although everyone thought the journals were cool, no one knew quite what to do with them. Stashing them back in an attic to gather dust seemed pointless, but there weren’t any volunteers willing to take and house them. After the reunion, I suspect they just went back to the attic.

Fast forward to this year, when we hosted the family reunion at our place. Once again, the topic of the journals came up. I suggested that someone scan them… that way, everyone could access them if they were curious, and they wouldn’t take up space. Everyone agreed. Then someone asked who would do it. Silence. Long, awkward silence. So I volunteered, and inherited the boxes. The journals have been in my office for a few months now, and I finally decided I should get cracking on this project.

Because the scanner will require the pages to be loose, I’ll need to disassemble the journals themselves. It’s kind of a tragedy, but then again, the whole point is to get rid of the physical items! I took a few photos of them before I started ripping up bindings and (gently) tearing out pages.

Several of them had little locks on them, whose keys are long gone. This journal is from 1962, almost fifty years ago:

The oldest one– when Grandpa John first began to journal– was dated 1938!

Here’s an example of what he wrote:

On Tuesday, August 23, 1938, he “went to Idaho Falls to look things over in regard to finding a house to live in this winter”. A couple of days later, on Thursday, he was “fixing pig pasture… one pig was hurt yesterday with the electric fence”. And so on. It’s pretty cool to read about the mundane things happening in the life of an Idaho farmer eight decades ago.

Once I’ve finished this project, and have thousands of pages of journals online somewhere, will anyone read through them? Honestly, I doubt it. But I suspect now and then it’ll be fun to jump in there and look at a few entries and remember Grandpa John.

And so it begins…

As fall advances inexorably onward, the larch trees around our house are starting to fade from their brilliant yellow to a more subdued gold. And today is probably the last sunny blue-sky day in a while, as our forecast calls for rain and snow for the next week. I figured I should hop outside and snap a few pictures of the last bit of yellow.

Several friends have commented– and I agree– that the fall colors this year have been spectacular. Last year was a little more muted, so it’s been great to see the gold on all the mountains around us. What a magical place to live.

Kyra watches Ollie quite a bit, and she often sends pictures of the two of them. Today’s was particularly good because, in her words, “This is the first time he’s smiling in the same picture as me!”

Last night we had a gang of bears visit our front porch. Four of them, in fact.

Apparently they’re roaming the forest in packs now. Maybe they’re looking for a few more morsels to fatten up?

Although it’s getting late in October, today’s weather was gorgeous. We accepted an invitation from our friends Gary and Susie to join them in a kayak expedition on Lindbergh Lake. The fall colors are in full swing, and the forest around the lake– and in fact in the entire area– is an incredible mix of evergreen and brilliant yellow larch.

The water was glassy smooth when we started, but the wind picked up and for the remaining three hours we were on the water, it was a bit choppy. But the sky was crystal blue without a cloud in sight, and all of us kept commenting on how beautiful the trees and lake were.

Lindbergh Lake is about four miles from end to end, so we went all the way down its length and then back again.

Afterward, we stopped for pizza at Rosa’s, making a great end to a great day.

I’m really enjoying this hobby of designing board games, and over the past few months I’ve been collecting a lot of bits ‘n pieces to use in new games. I bought a couple of “bead boxes” from Michael’s so I can use them to organize all of these little bits.

I’m now a fan of these four player colors, which are color-blind friendly:

I call this my Game Development Kit (GDK if you want to sound cool) and I’m excited to see what else I can do with it. I suppose it means a hobby is becoming more serious when you start having boxes full of things for it…

We roll along highway 35 a lot, and now that we’re well into October, it’s becoming quite a pretty drive.

It’s not a great picture… I shot it by holding my phone out the window as Pepper sped along. Believe me when I say the fall colors are much more spectacular than what you see here.

It’s been a year and a half coming, but the Forest Service is finally out in the Flathead National Forest behind our house. After the windstorms a year and a half ago, there was a lot of timber down in the forest. Apparently it can be a serious fire hazard, so for almost a year we’ve heard of plans for the USFS to come in and remove the fallen trees. As of about a week ago, they’ve been running trucks and heavy equipment off in the distance. This evening we decided to see their progress.

Well, they’ve removed far more than just the fallen trees. Pepper and I hiked up into the hills and were shocked at how much they’ve removed. It’s almost like they’re clear-cutting the forest!

In their defense, it’s probably much easier to just clear an area than work around standing trees to remove those that are down. And when the forest is pretty thin (as it was after the storms), the remaining trees are much more vulnerable to future wind events. More to the point, I’m not a forest expert, so I’ll trust they know what they’re doing and in the long run this will be better for the forest.

After trudging across this barren, dusty landscape, it was nice to get a beautiful view of the lake in the evening sun.

Well, it’s mid-October, and that means it’s getting a bit too chilly to be out on the lake. Sure, in our first few months in Montana we were more brave and went on the water around this time, but after a long summer with many opportunities to enjoy the lake, we decided it’s time to put our toys to bed. As it happens, today is a gorgeous day– with the sun shining and temperatures in the mid-60’s, we were tempted to take the jet skis out one last time. But instead we washed and winterized them. They’re looking pretty sharp:

We’ll cover them with a tarp and let them sit through the winter months. I’m looking forward to a warm spring day when we can take them out of hibernation…

As I continue working on my latest board game, I’m glad I have a few boxes full of little game bits and pieces. Most of the games I really enjoy tend to have a gazillion pieces, so I figure it’s natural that the ones I design do too. Today I was testing the latest iteration of Terra Hexia, and it seemed to work pretty well. I snapped a few photos, so I can look back later (when the game is in a finished state?) and see the “rough draft”, so to speak…