Studio711.com – Ben Martens

MLC Visit

Tyla and I have been getting increasingly more involved with Martin Luther College in New Ulm, MN. It’s Tyla’s alma mater and it is where ALL of our national church body‘s pastors and teachers are trained. (Pastor’s go on to Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary for an additional 4 years of post graduate study.) MLC is plays an incredibly important role of giving all of our teachers and preachers a solid foundation before they head out into their positions. There aren’t a lot of church bodies that put this much effort into their worker training programs!

Running any college would be difficult but running a small college that effectively caters to two majors and draws from a relatively small pool of people constantly presents new challenges. How much money do you invest in campus buildings or decreasing student debt or increasing the available classes or online training for post-college age students? The list goes on and on.

President Gurgel has started a new President’s Advisory Council and we were thrilled that he asked us to participate. We recently had our first meeting which was in-person and on campus. A huge thank you goes to Tyla’s sister, Megan, for taking vacation days to stay with Elijah at our house while we were traveling! In addition to a full day of meetings on Friday, we made the most of our time:

  • Full campus tour
  • Catching up with teachers we had in high school and college
  • Football game
  • Volleyball game
  • Schell’s Brewery
  • Disc golf on the MLC campus
  • New Ulm Glockenspiel
  • Dinners at 209 (the replacement for the Lamplighter) and the Kaiserhoff
  • Wanda Gag House
  • Reformation service at St. John’s
  • Flandrau State Park

Not bad for about 65 hours in New Ulm, eh? I had visited campus a couple times back in the early 2000s, but Tyla obviously had a lot more experience there and was a great tour guide. We were so happy to see the chapel (2010) and the fieldhouse (2022). Those are major additions that have a dramatic impact on the campus.

So what exactly does the President’s Advisory Council do? Honestly I think we as a group are still trying to figure it out how to be most effective, but at a minimum, President Gurgel is hoping that we can provide some new perspectives on situations that they are facing as well as being ambassadors for the school in our own communities. It looks like we’ll have more of these trips in the future, and I pray that we can add value to what the wonderful MLC leadership team is already doing.

benmartens November 7, 2024 Travel No Comments

Historic Aerials

If you enjoy maps at all, I warn you that learning about the content of this post may result in great loss of time for you.

Now that you’ve been warned, check out Historic Aerials. For any address, you can scroll back in time and see satellite images of what it looked like in previous years! You can even click the Compare button, choose a map on each side, and then adjust the transparency slider back and forth to really spot the differences.

benmartens October 31, 2024 Links

Wingfeather Books

When Elijah was younger, I heard about the Wingfeather Saga book series. It’s a fantasy book series for kids written by one of my favorite Christian musicians, Andrew Peterson. I read the first book and loved it, but it was too much drama for Elijah at the time, and it was so good that I didn’t want to turn him off by giving it to him too early.

Fast forward to last year when we were driving down to Oregon for vacation, and we gobbled up the first audio book. Elijah loved it! There are four books in the series and we both read them whole series. I don’t know if I would have given it a chance if I didn’t have a kid, but it’s a solid story even for adults. There’s plenty of humor and a really good story. We talked about it so much that Tyla ended up reading the books too, and now we’re watching the TV show as a family.

As if one of my favorite musicians authoring a great book series in one of my favorite genres wasn’t enough, there were more great connections:

  • The music for the TV show is done by The Arcadian Wild which Spotify will agree is one of my most-played artists.
  • There’s a character in the books named Armulyn the Bard. There’s a piece of trivia that connects him to another one of my favorite artists, Rich Mullins.
    • The character Armulyn is author Andrew Peterson’s tribute to singer-songwriter Rich Mullins with Armulyn’s name being a play on words: when pronounced correctly, it sounds like R. Mullin. Armulyn is even described and illustrated as looking like Rich.
  • And trivia within trivia… the Armulyn character in the TV show is voiced by the late Rich Mullins’s brother, Dave Mullins.

I keep mentioning Christian artists, but this book isn’t religious. It’s not an allegory or anything like that, but there’s also no garbage that you wouldn’t want your kids reading. There is a deity in the book but it’s not a main point and they just refer to him as “the Maker”.

Unless you really hate the entire fantasy genre for some reason, I obviously recommend checking out the books. I’m usually one for books over audio books, but I liked doing the first one as an audiobook because we got to hear the hidden jokes with the way things are pronounced and get more of a feel for Peterson’s intention behind the characters (because he narrates the book himself.)

benmartens October 11, 2024 Books

Hankook Tires for Model Y

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Earlier this year, we replaced our OEM tires with Hankook iON evo SUV tires. Efficiency and longevity were two big analysis points in my research. I can’t speak to longevity yet (though I’m tracking tread depth with every tire rotation), but I can give an update on efficiency.

First of all, I’ll say that it’s quite difficult to get objective research about efficiency. So many of the random posts online do a very poor job of analyzing the data. For example, they’ll make a post of their efficiency after 100 miles or they’ll show a month of snowy winter driving compared to the previous 2 years of all-season driving. To avoid some of these issues, I’ve waited until we had 10,000 miles on the new tires before making this post.

  • Over 40,000 miles with the original tires (Continental ProContact RX), we averaged 262 Wh/mi.
  • Over 10,000 with the new tires, we’ve averaged 259 Wh/mi!

The tires area already performing slightly better than the OEM tires and that’s even when they’re relatively new. Over time, traction decreases but efficiency increases due to less rolling resistance.

A lot of the recommended tires for this car are high performance which makes sense because the cars can be driven hard. However, we are more interested in overall efficiency and those high performance tires can easily use 10% more energy. This makes a big difference over time, or even on specific trips where you’re pushing the limits of your range.

Shortly after we purchased these tires, Tire Rack came out with an in-depth review of EV tires and they agreed that the Hankooks were much more efficient than other tires while still having good performance: Tire Test Results : Are EV-Specific Tires Better than Popular Non-Ev Tires? – 2024 Test 1 (tirerack.com)

We’ll see how long these tires last, but assuming they hold up ok, I’d happily buy them again.

benmartens October 8, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Tesla Range Estimation

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Last week I wrote about our trip to central WA. Part of the fun of those trips for me is the logistics of doing it with an electric vehicle. This one was a particular challenge because there are no superchargers up around the Grand Coulee Dam and it was going to be a long loop. If we left with 90% charge my estimate was that we’d get back with 15%. That’s ok, but it’s about the minimum that I ever shoot for.

While the Tesla itself will do everything it can to avoid you running out of power (as long you tell it where you’re going), my favorite pre-planning tool is A Better Route Planner. I’ve got the knobs tuned really well for our car and I can often predict it as good or better than the car itself at the start of a long drive.

To buy us a little extra cushion, I planned for us to eat a picnic lunch at the Gehrke Windmill Garden which Plug Share said had a handful of free NEMA 14-50 plugs which are good for about 10% battery charge per hour. I haven’t yet made any plans that require one of those random free spots to be functional, but I was happy to try it out and it did indeed work well. We added 6% to our battery while we ate and in the end, we made it back to the supercharger in Moses Lake with 20% so without the 6% charge we would have only been 1% off my pre-trip estimate.

When we do a trip like this, I always travel with our mobile connector and all my various adapters. If we got into a big bind, I would pull into an RV park and ask if I could pay $20 to take a couple dollars of electricity from them. We’ve never needed it, but it’s nice to have that as an option if we ever really got into a bind.

This probably sounds crazy to non-EV people and it would have made me way more nervous before we got into the EV world, but now I just view it as expanding my comfort level. When we first got the car I got nervous when we dropped below 50% charge. Now I’m much happier to play games to optimize our supercharging (15-50% is MUCH faster than 50-85% for example) and I’ll try to arrive at home with 10% or lower so that I can “fill up” with much cheaper electricity at home. Part of the fun of all this for me is knowing that in 10-20 years, this will all sound silly because there will be so many chargers everywhere. Our family goal is to hit every county in Washington. Privately I’m keeping track of which counties we hit in the Tesla versus our gas truck because I think it would be fun to say we hit them all in an EV. Some of the northeast and southeast counties will be quite a challenge!

Bonus fact: The Model Y was already the world’s best-selling vehicle in 2023 and now it is very close to being the best-selling vehicle in the US, already having knocked off the F150 and hot on the heels of the Rav4.

benmartens October 1, 2024 Uncategorized

Moses Lake for a Weekend

While we did just get back from a great trip, we decided to squeeze one more in before the weather gets rainy. I don’t remember how it started but we have a random family goal of visiting all the counties in Washington together. With that in mind, we headed east. For those of you not familiar with our state, you may picture Washington state as wet and cloudy. That’s true on the west side of the state between October and May but the east side of the estate is a desert. There are literally tumbleweeds blowing around. It’s a dramatic change with just an hour drive east over the mountains.

Our base of operations was Moses Lake, but the drive out there was slower than expected because the I-90 bridge over the Columbia River is being worked on for the next couple months. We sat through a 5-mile, 75 minute backup squeezing down to one lane. Oops.

Saturday morning we headed north for Grand Coulee Dam. Tyla and I have been there before but Elijah had never seen it. Grand Coulee Dam is mind-boggling big. It was originally created to supply a huge part of central Washington with irrigation but now it also supplies power for about 2 million homes per year. There are lots of stats, but suffice it to say the ~1 mile long dam is one of the biggest concrete structures in the world and the 10th most powerful hydroelectric dam (3.2 times more powerful than the famous Hoover Dam.) We got there for the first tour at 10am, but unfortunately the tour has really been neutered even after the initial changes after 9/11. You no longer get to visit the generator area. The tour briefly takes you down to the pumping facility which is interesting but too short. The rest of the tour is a drive across the top of the dam with a stop walk around at the top. I guess it’s still worth doing if you’re there, but don’t make that the key point of your day. Luckily for us, it was just one piece of the puzzle!

After the tour we had lunch at the apparently brand new Billups Sub Co. It was delicious but way more expensive than I was expecting. We got our food to go and ate it at a nearby park that had free EV charging (more on that in a later post.)

After lunch we headed northeast to Koontzville and then east to Highway 21. I don’t think we saw any other cars on that part of the drive and a forest fire had ravaged the area only a couple months before. It was quite a sight. Once on Hwy 21, we headed south to the Keller Ferry. This ferry is tiny compared to the ones we’re used to in the Puget Sound. It only holds 20 cars! The north dock is movable and gets moved upriver to a different spot when the river is too low. There’s no schedule and no fee for the 10 minute crossing. This sounds like a simple part of the trip, but we all said it was our favorite!

From the south ferry dock, we headed straight back to our hotel in Moses Lake for some swimming, food, and rest. Our drive back home went smoothly and we got through the construction in Vantage, WA before it had backed up at all. After getting through that, we did stop at the Thorp Fruit & Antique Mall. It was fun to go inside afer driving by so many times. We came back with a box of apples, but if you’re looking for really good deals, I think you should look elsewhere. It wasn’t bad but it felt like a mildly good sale at the grocery store, not the kind of deal you get buying straight out of a field.

So none of those activities were monumental but it added up to a nice weekend and some more family memories to add to the pile.

benmartens September 26, 2024 Family, Travel

Cruise Tips

We’ve done three cruises now so clearly we are experts and you should get your info from this post instead of the endless barrage of other internet content on this topic. Kidding of course, but here are three things that I think are helpful when planning a cruise, especially your first cruise:

  • Understand the differences between the cruise lines. There is a cruise line for everyone, but not every cruise line is for you. If, for example, you pick the cruise with the lowest price that you can find, you might leave wondering why people like cruises. There are a variety of pages to help you decipher the pack, but here’s one example. We’ve done two cruises with Royal Caribbean and one with Celebrity. The Royal Caribbean ships had a lot more activities and were more focused on families with kids while Celebrity was a little fancier and had an older clientele.
  • Get a balcony. There are generally four categories of rooms: interior, exterior view, balcony, and suite. We have always sprung for the balcony rooms and honestly, I think I’d probably rather skip a cruise than not have a balcony. I suppose there are exceptions to that, but I spend a lot of time reading and napping on the balcony. There are a lot of people on a cruise ship and this is a fairly private place where I can be outside, have a great view, and enjoy myself. For this reason, we also generally get a room as high up on the ship as we can since it usually equates to a better view, especially in ports.
  • Skip the packages. The base fare for a cruise is a pretty good deal. You get the room and access to a bunch of free food 24 hours a day. It’s impossible to beat it if you’re staying in hotels and eating at restaurants. That being said, you can easily spend way more than the base fare. For example:
    • Each ship has restaurants that cost extra money. Are they good? I’m sure! But will you be disappointed if you only eat in the main dining room, the buffet, and the other free snack food places around he ship? No way! The food is one of our favorite parts of a cruise and we’ve only ever eaten the included food options.
    • While the idea of unlimited alcohol seems enticing, it’s shocking to see how many people opt for the drink package. On our latest cruise it was $95/day! Individual beers were around $8 and mixed drinks were about $15. Are you really going to drink 6 mixed drinks a day or a dozen beers just to break even? And are you going to do that for each of the seven days of your cruise? We have never gotten that package and just say that we’ll buy them individually, but we never end up getting anything at all because we’re so full from the amazing food.
    • There’s free WiFi on board that lets you use their app to see activities, reserve things like laser tag, see the food menus, etc, but if you want to access the internet, get ready to pay a bunch of money. On our cruise it was $26/day for a single device and that’s only if you pay for the entire cruise (so that’s $182 for a 7 day cruise to access the internet from one device.) You can also buy a 24 hour pass but you’ll pay in the mid-30’s for that. I love unplugging on a cruise, but on this latest cruise, I didn’t do a good job of that. Since we were going to be in Alaska and Canada, I knew we could use our cell phones in the ports and had planned to connect with people to share info about when we’d be getting back, etc. Seeing the flood of email and texts ended up being a shot of unwelcome stress during the trip and I wish I had just left my phone off the whole time.

There is a cruise to fit just about everyone and you can customize each cruise in a lot of ways, but those choices can have a big impact on your experience and your bank account!

benmartens September 23, 2024 Travel

Best of YouTube

It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post. We subscribe to the ad-free YouTube because it’s the streaming service we watch the most. Yes, there are lots of garbage videos there, but if you want to learn something, there is an endless flood of educational content too.

First up we have a video from Donut. Honestly, this might be one of the last videos I watch from that channel because my favorite hosts left to do their own thing at the new Big Time, channel, but this is still a great video. In 15 minutes (and what appears to be a single take), they explain every part of an engine:

If you have even a passing interest in engineering, check out Stuff Made Here. Every video is a home run, and his most recent video is no exception. He set out to make the world’s smallest bicycle. It’s incredible how much energy he puts into these ideas!

And finally, here’s a shoutout for the Practical Engineering channel. There are so many interesting videos with solid explanations of things that you might take for granted. He recently had a good one that goes into detail about how French drains work which is worth watching even if you already think you know, but for this post, I want to highlight “Why Railroads Don’t Need Expansion Joints.” Think about it… you have a thousand miles of a solid metal bar baking in the sun. That must expand and contract a lot! How do they deal with it?

benmartens September 19, 2024 Links

Kids Bakery Sign

I was approached a few weeks back by a girl at church asking if I could make a sign for a kids craft fair/bake sale that she was entering. She quickly drew a picture of the logo she and her friend had designed. I’m frustrated that I can’t find the original drawing, but I took what she had and made a vector version of it on the computer. I actually started with Copilot to generate some similar ideas and then I combined all the ideas in Inkscape.

I ended up making two identical signs using round, pine blanks from Home Depot. I sprayed them with shellac and then covered them with Oramask the girls wanted to paint them after I was done.

The girls did a nice job painting the signs and it sounds like their bake sale was a hit! After learning a bit more, it sounds like lots of market setups have one day a year where the booths are run by kids. If you have a crafty kid, check for options in your area!

This is the third sign I’ve done on these round Home Depot blanks. They are a great size and relatively inexpensive so they’re a good option, but if you have a good source for other 3/4-1″ thick blanks in different shapes, please let me know. It would be fun to give people options of other shapes too.

benmartens September 16, 2024 Woodworking

Royal Caribbean Cruise to Alaska

For our big family vacation this year, we chose a cruise to Alaska! Tyla and I did two cruises (cruise 1 post and cruise 2 post) before Elijah was born, but we had saved an Alaskan cruise because it was so easy to do. Sometimes those easy/local things get put off for a long time!

This cruise was on Royal Caribbean’s “Quantum of the Seas” ship. We chose it because our first two cruises were with Royal Caribbean and the related Celebrity cruise line. We knew they had good family programs and Elijah was still within the age limit for their kids club.

We had four stops on this cruise:

  • Icy Strait Point, Alaska – This isn’t really a town. It’s a purpose-built cruise port and the small fishing village of Hoonah is nearby. We didn’t schedule an excursion here and just ended up walking along the shore about halfway to the town before returning. The popular activity here is a giant zipline. It was cool to set foot in Alaska for the first time, but the port didn’t wow us. While we were parked in the port, we spotted a few whales!
  • Skagway, Alaska – We were excited for this port because it was a bigger town and because we had booked a zipline excursion. (The most popular excursion is a train ride up into the Yukon.) Unfortunately, we never got to stop there! The winds were gusting over 40 knots, and they were blowing the ship around so much that it couldn’t dock safely. The captain tried twice but it didn’t work out so the rest of our itinerary was slightly modified. We were bummed to miss the port but thankful that we booked through the cruise line, so our excursion was immediately refunded.
  • Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier – This wasn’t really a stop, but it was a “view from the ship” destination. We drove through the narrow fjord called Endicott Arm. It’s only about a half mile wide so getting a giant cruise ship through there is a bit of a feat. The Dawes glacier is at the end of the fjord and there are an increasing number of icebergs along the way. We were excited to spot seals on one of the icebergs as we went by. We went as far as we could before the icebergs got too thick and then the captain spun the ship around so we could all view it easily.
  • Juneau, Alaska – Our modified itinerary gave us a full day in Juneau instead of just the afternoon. We got off the ship in the morning and spent a couple of hours walking around the shops near the port. After lunch back on the ship, we got off again for our Jeep excursion. This was basically a 4.5 hour car rental. The Jeep came preprogrammed with waypoints and a related audio guide. The best stop was the Mendenhall Glacier. We stopped at the main visitor center area and did a 2 mile hike out to Nugget Falls. It was pretty rainy all day, but we were prepared, and the Jeep was stocked with extra umbrellas. It also had gold panning equipment, but we only discovered at the very end that the gold panning spot wasn’t in the default waypoint list. We added that to our trip and spent a few quick minutes realizing that understanding the concept of panning for gold is a lot different than remembering how the different tools work in the cold rain while you’re in a hurry to get back to the ship! After returning the Jeep, we had about half an hour before they pulled up the gangway so Tyla and Elijah were kind enough to let me stop into Alaskan Brewing and have a beer.
  • Victoria, British Columbia – There’s a US law that says a cruise cannot leave a US port and return to a US port without stopping in another country unless it is registered in the US. That would have huge tax implications for the cruise lines so there’s always at least a token stop in another country. In this case, we arrived in Victoria at 5pm and left at 10pm. Unless you’re eating dinner on shore and exploring in the dark, this isn’t really an ideal stop. We didn’t schedule an excursion but we did get out and walk around. We headed east out of the port along the coast and found ourselves out of the crowd and enjoying sunshine for one of the first times on the trip.

With the skipped Skagway stops and the two ports where we mostly just walked around, a lot of our time was spent on the ship. Thankfully the ship had a ton of things to keep us busy!

  • SeaPlex – There was an indoor area on the top decks called the SeaPlex and we spent a lot of time there. Aside from the usual staples of ping pong, foosball, cornhole, etc, they had a big sports are that would change throughout the day. Over the course of the trip we used that area for bumper cars, roller skating, laser tag, soccer, and dodgeball. It was quite impressive and they did a good job of knowing which events needed to have a pre-registration so you didn’t have to wait in line for a long time.
  • iFly – There is a chain of indoor skydiving places called “iFly” which is basically a cylinder on top of a giant fan that lets you practice free falling. The ship had one of these too! We pre-paid for an extended session which got us extra instruction and two 1-minute flights. One minute sounds short but it felt plenty long when we were in the tunnel. All three of us did that initial session. Later we discovered that we could also sign up for a single flight for free. I’m glad we did the paid session first because the free one included very little instruction. Tyla was nice enough to stand outside the tunnel and take pictures and video of Elijah and I flying!
  • Rock climbing – There was a two-story rock-climbing wall on the side of the ship with a wide variety of routes for different skill levels. The wall was closed most of the time because of wind and rain, but Elijah got to spend about an hour there our last full day on the ship.
  • Pools – The ship does have an outdoor pool, but it wasn’t used a lot on this cruise because of the weather. The indoor pool got a lot of use but somehow never seemed overly crowded. Elijah spent a lot of time in there and especially enjoyed it when the water was sloshing around during the rockier days at sea.
  • FOOD – My main challenge on a cruise is figuring out how I’m going to be hungry enough for my next meal! The two basic choices for food are the main dining room and the buffet. We chose to eat our breakfasts and lunches in the buffet and then ate dinner in the dining room around 7 or 8pm every night. We chose the “My Time Dining” option which gave us a private table and the option to move our dining times around. We were very lucky to get a window table and the same great waiters every night. They would usually end up encouraging us to order multiple appetizers, entrees, and desserts so that we could sample many different items. Aside from all that great food, there were also endless ice cream cones, pizza, and hot dogs available. There are a lot of specialty restaurants that cost money, but we were more than happy with the included offerings.
  • All Access Ship Tour – We paid for a 2.5-hour tour of the boat and got incredible behind the scenes access to backstage of the theater, galley, laundry, engineering, food storage, and even the bridge! They provided little speakers that hung on your ear which made it easy to hear what was going on. It’s amazing to see everything that needs to happen to keep 4000+ guests fed and entertained. There are people working extremely hard for long hours with no days off so that you can enjoy your time napping and overeating.

This cruise was quite different from our previous cruises.

  • It was obviously much cooler and wetter than our Caribbean trips.
  • In the Caribbean, we barely remember ever feeling the ship move, but the movement was impossible to ignore on this trip when you were walking around or lying in bed. It never bothered us or kept us from doing anything.
  • On the first cruises I remember lots of naps and downtime where we would kill an hour or two just reading or staring at the ocean. With an 11-year-old in tow, that didn’t happen as often and we had to spend a lot more time figuring out how to keep him entertained and fill time. I once heard someone say that as a parent, you don’t take vacations, you just play tour guide for your kids. So my love of cruising so I don’t have to worry about logistics didn’t play out this time, but it was still worth it.

With the missed port and the different dynamics of having three people’s wishes to coordinate, I would say that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I booked it, but it turned out differently great. We have a lot of wonderful memories together and we’re all dreaming about doing it again!

benmartens September 9, 2024 Uncategorized