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Pepper and Kyra built a wheelbarrow today. I came across this scene.

Apparently some of the screws were a little tricky…?

“Go big or go home”, they say. Well, we have a lot of wall space in the lounge of our party house, and our 70-inch TV seemed kind of small against it. But really big TVs are expensive– it’s much cheaper to buy a nice projector. So that’s what we did.

Now we can watch movies that literally take most of the wall. The screen is about six feet high and around eleven feet wide (150″ diagonal, if you’re doing the math). It’s a little hard to see during the day, unfortunately, but at night it’s awesome.

Here’s Kyra beside the screen, for scale:

I’m reminded of Weird Al’s famous song “Frank’s 2000-inch TV”, which includes the timeless lyric

The picture’s crystal clear and everything is magnified
Robert De Niro’s mole has got to be ten feet wide…

We pulled up a Robert De Niro movie to test this. It’s Stardust, one of my all-time favorites. Here’s his mole:

Okay, maybe not ten feet wide, but still pretty impressive.

Anyone want to see a movie on the big screen? Come on over!

Kyra’s running the table.

Since the big painting job starts this week, we want to avoid being in the house when the paint crew is throwing tarps over everything and the air is thick with fumes. Luckily we have an entire other house to move into! So we’ve moved some of our things to the party house, including our desks and computers. Here’s our “new” bedroom:

Don’t even get me started about that bedspread (which was left by the former owner). Wow. It’s so awful it defies words. To everyone who’s stayed in this bedroom to date, I’m really really sorry. I promise I’ll get a new comforter soon.

In any case, it’s nice to have a place where we can “live” for a week or two while the paint goes on. I’m excited for the upcoming transformation.

It’s finals week at BYU, so Kyra’s sitting in bed working on the test for her Personal Finance class. It has questions like “Steve bought a car for $15,500 with a 4-year loan at 3.9%. What are his monthly payments?”

She has a magic calculator that lets you enter things like “present value”, interest rate, and loan term, and it’s supposed to spit out the monthly payment. But the calculator itself is pretty confusing, and since she was getting frustrated I offered to help. I couldn’t figure it out either, and eventually downloaded the manual for the calculator to see if I could get it to accept the right inputs.

Both of us plugged in numbers but couldn’t match any of the multiple-choice answers on the test. She decided it felt pretty much like this:

Next week, we’re having the house painted. We’ve been agonizing over colors for a full week now, and after using little one-square-foot swatches without much success, we decided to get some two-pint samples and paint the actual walls. We thought we had some colors decided, but once they went on the walls and we could see them beside the wood trim, or in different light, we changed our minds. Three trips to the paint store later, we have ten samples in hand and we’re testing them all over the place.

That’s led to some crazy stripes of color on the walls.

The good news is we’re narrowing it down, and have only two or three leading contenders. But today is a grey, snowy day so the lighting isn’t ideal. We’re hoping for some sunlight in the next couple of days so we can see the colors better.

In the end, there will be several thousand square feet of walls and ceilings with this paint, so I sure hope we choose well…

Today was (mostly) sunny and in the 50’s, and I felt like it was time to break out the jet skis. Anticipating this, I spent about an hour yesterday de-winterizing them and making sure everything was in shipshape order (that’s a nautical term). We hitched up the trailer and headed down to Yellow Bay, which is the closest put-in point on Flathead Lake.

We let Kyra take the “fast” one, and she said she hit 46mph at one point.

We headed over to Wild Horse Island, which we’d last visited in October. And we saw… some wild horses!

I’m not sure how “wild” they are– I imagine there are plenty of people who hike around the 2,100-acre island, so they’re probably quite used to seeing humans– but we didn’t want to get too close.

Here’s a picture of the ladies in their sleek wetsuits:

We also explored a few other nearby islands. Shelter Island is privately owned and has an enormous house… I think their boathouse is bigger than my entire home.

Nearby Cedar Island appears to be uninhabited. We would’ve gone exploring but there wasn’t really a good place to beach our jet skis. The water level is still around nine feet lower than full pool (that’ll change in about a month).

Overall, a great time. We’re hoping to go out again tomorrow!

I was chatting with Zaque today, and somehow we got on the topic of the Saltine Challenge. Back in college, my friend Zvonko and I challenged each other to see who could eat the most saltines without any other food or drink. (Hey, we were at Denny’s at 2am. Also, that’s the kind of stuff you do in college.) I remember losing– I think he polished off 14 and I only got through 12.

Zaque told me his Saltine Challenge is to see if you can eat six saltines in sixty seconds. It doesn’t sound too hard, right? Well. Kyra and I sat down this evening to give it a go. Pepper is above this sort of thing, so she just watched and laughed at us.

After sixty seconds of half-chewed salty mush in my mouth, I had to admit defeat. I finished four of the six; Kyra only ate three.

She insists that, with practice, she could do it. Apparently she’s going to work on it tomorrow.

Last July, Zaque gave Kyra a little metal replica of the Black Pearl, Jack Sparrow’s ship from Pirates of the Caribbean. This weekend, after almost nine months, she sat down to put it together. It’s made of a very thin metal, laser-etched into teeny pieces that have to be assembled with a tweezer.

The finished product is pretty cool. Now she just needs to add a tiny undead monkey.

We’ve lived in this house for just over six months now, and it’s time to start making some serious changes. The former owners really liked the color green– specifically, mint green— and had matching carpet, walls, and furniture. We replaced the carpet before we even moved in, and we’re about to re-paint the walls.

The challenge, of course, is that we have a 40-foot cathedral ceiling in the great room, and it’s pretty much impossible for me to visualize what it might look like if we paint such a huge surface. That’s compounded by the difficulty of looking at tiny paint swatches to see if the color is good.

But we selected some colors, and yesterday we went to the paint store to pick up some sample jars and sample squares. I painted the squares and we were able to at least have a larger swatch:

It’s still hard to tell, but we moved around the house and put the swatches in various places (testing lighting conditions). We feel pretty good about them. The painter is scheduled to start in a week, complete with a scissor truck to reach the 40-foot ceiling. This will certainly be an adventure.