About a year and a half ago, Tyla and I were trying to figure out how to work in a visit to Martin Luther College. Since then, I have been there FOUR TIMES. We had no idea that we’d be asked to be on the President’s Advisory Council or that I’d end up going to synod convention.
Tyla and I just got back from our latest trip. Elijah stayed home this time (thanks Megan!) and we got a weekend to ourselves. Visiting Minnesota in late September is a roll of the dice but we had beautiful weather with temps around 80.
Our meetings were wonderful. I feel like our group is really hitting its stride now that we have more context about the challenges that are being faced and the type of feedback that is helpful. Plus, now that we know more people, even our time outside of the meetings leads to valuable conversations whether we’re having dinner or watching a volleyball game. We also got to say hi to a couple friendly faces among the student body too.
Outside of the meetings, we did get a chance to watch two volleyball games and we toured Schell’s Brewery too. The Schell’s tour was rich on history. They have a lot to cover since the brewery has been around since 1860! In the picture below you can see that we got to visit their cave where they barrel age a special fall brew.
Thanks again to MLC for hosting us and we look forward to our next visit!
February of 2020 was the last time I built a PC. I had decided to build something that would do a better job handling video editing because I was just starting to teach myself Davinci Resolve. A month later, COVID hit, prices skyrocketed, and I was spending 5-10 hours a week editing video for our online church services. It was a huge blessing to have that new PC to speed up my work.
Fast forward to today and we’re nearing the end of Windows 10 support. The old PC that I use for a file server, cloud backup client, and security camera server is not able to upgrade to Windows 10 and I’m ready to replace it anyway. But instead of just building a simple PC for that, I decided to replace it with my 2020 PC and that leaves me “needing” to build a new main PC. Yay!
As usual, I spent a long time researching all my options. I recently bought the full license to Davinci Resolve Studio so I was targeting its requirements. I don’t game much on my PC but the video editing is nearly as taxing in many areas. Ken had just had a great experience buying a PC from Skytech Gaming and they had a pre-configured option that was almost exactly what I was planning to build anyway. I ended up building myself anyway because I could save money on the Windows license (with my company discount) and get double the RAM while saving myself a couple hundred bucks. Here’s what I chose:
AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance RGB 64 GB (2 x 32 GB)
Samsung 990 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Asus PRIME GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB Video Card
Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case
MSI MAG A850GL PCIE5 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
It was really interesting designing this using AI to help me. It was able to pull in a lot of reference material about my specific use case and compare multiple options so I felt like I was making a pretty educated choice.
All the parts finally arrived and I carved out some time on a Saturday to start the build. Pretty soon, I was very much regretting not buying the pre-built system. The first problem I hit was that I could not get it to POST. The motherboard just showed lights indicating it couldn’t find the CPU and RAM. I hadn’t done a partial test before putting it all in the case so eventually I gave in and completely undid the build, tearing it down to its bare components. It still didn’t work. So I pulled the CPU cooler off, cleaned off the thermal paste, carefully reseated the CPU and… it still didn’t work. I exhausted long checklists and after hours of work, I was nowhere. At this point I was looking up return policies to see if I could just get most of my money back and go with the pre-built system.
But then I finally noticed a line in a response from AI that pointed me to a video where a guy commented that he’s noticed that with recent AMD CPUs, you sometimes have to wait 5-10 minutes after it boots for the BIOS to figure everything out. Huh? It seemed crazy but what else was I going to try. I set a timer and walked away to cool down.
I came back to a glorious green light on the motherboard! I plugged in a monitor and could see the BIOS. Victory!
Almost. You maybe have noticed I started this part of the story with “the first problem”. That’s because when I plugged in my fancy video card, I couldn’t even get to the BIOS. I eventually got to a state where I couldn’t even boot to the BIOS with the video card removed! I had to reset the CMOS by using a screwdriver to jump two pins on the motherboard. I’m not sure if I changed something in the BIOS to get it working or if just reseating the card was what fixed it, but voila, it worked. I was then able to install Windows, add all the drivers, and that was pretty much the end of the build.
Oh and I should also mention that when I took the build apart, I broke the USB header on the motherboard. The specific connector used by Fractal for the front USB ports on the case is pretty much impossible to remove. Numerous other people have apparently had the same problem. I tried to repair it but eventually gave up and just bought a USB hub to sit on top of the case instead. It’s a frustrating reminder of the difficulties I hit, but in the end, it’s not that big of a deal.
With this rocky start, I keep nervously waiting for something to go wrong, but the machine has performed great! I had debated about liquid or air cooling, but the setup I have seems to be keeping everything cool and it’s much quieter than my last machine.
Even better, it runs Davinci Resolve Studio incredibly well! The last video I made for our trip to Yellowstone took 3:50 minutes to render on my old machine but this new one did it in 1:25! And when I’m editing the video and moving around in the timeline, it’s buttery smooth.
I’ll let the old machine sit for a bit before I pave it and turn it into my file server and security camera server. Hopefully this new machine continues to serve me well for many years… and next time I’ll buy a pre-built one.
(Note: You should be able to click on any of the photos in this post for a bigger view.)
Our main vacation this summer was a road trip to Yellowstone! We have been putting this off largely because of the horror stories about overcrowding, but we decided it’s not like the crowds are going to get lighter so let’s just go for it. I’m glad we did!
It’s about 750 miles from our house to the West Yellowstone entrance so we did the drive in two days. The first night’s stop was in Butte which left us with a fairly short drive the next day so we stopped in Bozeman to spend the day with some friends that we haven’t seen in a long time. They planned a nice hike for us and a picnic lunch. It was a great way catch up, let the kids run, and enjoy our time together.
Later that day we made our way down to West Yellowstone, MT. Our Airbnb was just west of town in Island Park, ID so that meant every day we started in Idaho, crossed Montana, and spent the day in Wyoming before reversing course back to the rental house.
Yellowstone is enormous. It’s bigger than Connecticut and Delaware combined. Planning a trip into an area that big is a lot of work, but after our success in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, we again turned to dirtinmyshoes.com for this trip. We used the 4-day itinerary for Yellowstone and it was fantastic! It’s ridiculous to say we saw the whole park in 4 days, but we certainly saw a huge percentage of what most people see when they go there. You could spend a lifetime exploring all the trails, but I don’t feel like we missed anything and I don’t know what we would have tried to see if we had another day. Aside from the luxury of not having to research and plan, we also avoided almost all the crowds! There was only one time that I had to circle a parking lot for a bit, and there were many times where we arrived to be the only car in the lot or it was less than 20% full. This made our trip so much more enjoyable! The park very rarely felt crowded for us, but as we’d drive back past places we had already visited, the crowds were obvious. You could easily have a miserable time if you were visiting things at the wrong time. In fairness, we did start our days very early. One day we were in the park before 6:15 and I think the latest we entered the park was 7:30. That’s a big help, but the itinerary was also critical for seeing things in the right order to avoid the hordes.
Going into the park, I knew about Old Faithful and bison, but I didn’t really have an appreciation for the diversity of the landscape. You could divide many of our experiences into three categories: geothermal, wildlife, and water.
Geothermal: Old Faithful is of course the most popular geothermal feature but there are so many more in clusters around the park. I’m glad we saw Old Faithful, but other areas were similarly (or more) impressive. I really enjoyed the Norris Geyser basin. There wasn’t any one particular feature that stood out, but there are some really amazing views of the whole basin steaming. The land formations up by Mammoth Hot Springs were also really bonkers to see.
Wildlife: While we saw animals every day, day 3 was our big animal day. We saw fields with hundreds (thousands?) of bison, bison on the road in front of our truck, grizzly bears, black bears, elk, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn. (On a previous day we also saw a fox.) The highlight of that day for me was getting to our main trailhead for the day and having it swarmed with people. We quickly figured out how to predict what kind of animal was around by how many cars were there and this was a “bear crowd.” Indeed, there were two bears very far off in the distance, barely visible to the naked eye. Guides with spotting scopes indicated it was a grizzly and a baby. After the crowd dissipated, we ended up doing our hike anyway even though it took us directly closer to the bears. We stopped periodically to look at them through our binoculars and ensure that they weren’t getting any closer. They were probably a couple miles away and there was a river crossing between us, but we did stop our hike a little short of our final destination just to be extra safe. On top of the ones we could see, there were also strong warnings about bear activity in the area. Two bison had duked it out the previous week with one of them dying. Rangers had moved the carcass away from the road and that carcass turned into a feeding ground for a lot of animals. All that was left when we went by were part of the spine and the skull. I always carried bear spray.
Water: Yellowstone River starts from an enormous and beautiful lake and the plummets down two waterfalls in rapid succession as it dives into the “Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.” We spent one morning viewing the falls from four or five different spots. The Lower Falls are especially beautiful in the early morning light. Later in the day we stopped for a picnic lunch along Yellowstone River. After carefully stowing our food back in the truck so as not to attract animals, we went back for a stroll along the river. We were all taking our own path when suddenly Elijah and Tyla noticed that we were walking right past a sleeping bison! Tyla and Elijah were able to turn around and walk back but I had already gone past it. There weren’t a lot of good options for getting around it so I just went back the way I came and thankfully it just stayed where it was. You can make your own estimate from the picture below but I’d say we were within 30-40 feet. It may not look like much from the picture, but it’s another thing being there with them. They are huge and unbelievable fast and nimble. I felt pretty bad about this one because I had spent the whole trip trying to be the first one to spot any animal when we were out since I knew there were some nerves in the family. But in this instance, I got distracted looking at the river and watching my step to not sprain an ankle on the rocks. I’m thankful it didn’t turn into one of those “look what the stupid people did in Yellowstone” situations.
We just got a new Canon R8 within the last year so I took that along each day. It was reasonable to carry with the 28-75mm lens but on our animal day, I took the monster 70-200 lens. On the one hand, it feels silly to take pictures in Yellowstone when there are so many better ones available online. But on the other hand, it’s really fun to have pictures that line up exactly with our memories. I tried to take a lot of photos with Tyla and/or Elijah in them, but I still took a lot of scenery pictures too. One of them got printed to poster size and another one at 8×10. Both are hanging on our walls at home.
As a packing reminder for our next trip, we did have some binoculars along but I wish we had another set or maybe even a nicer set. We used them a LOT. For Yellowstone in particular, it also would have been fun to bring our infrared thermometer along to see how hot some of the features were.
Booking a trip anywhere in the western US in the late summer is a gamble. Beyond the normal questions about heat and rain, there’s a good chance that you’ll at least have enough smoke to mess up the views or at worst, there’s enough smoke that you don’t even want to be outside. We were incredibly blessed on all fronts with the weather. It was cool in the mornings, warm in the afternoons, and we had nearly perfect air quality. There were some sprinkles while we were visiting Old Faithful but that was perfect timing if it had to happen. On our first day as we were driving back to the rental house, Elijah pointed off to the horizon and said, “What’s that?” It was a brand new fire starting! Not only did I have to think about whether we might need to evacuate or how we would know, but I wondered what we’d find the next morning. Despite the fire growing, it was never a danger to us and amazingly the smoke never impacted us in the park! Shortly after we left, the weather deteriorated and there was a lot more smoke. We could not have asked for better timing.
Whenever we do a trip like this, we like to play the license plate game. Elijah used to be our scribe and he would mark things off on the sheet. Now that job has transitioned to Tyla which means I have to keep a list in my head and then report them to her when she wakes up. Ha! Visiting a national park somewhat in the middle of the country is a great place to polish off whatever was missed on the drive, but unfortunately Delaware and West Virginia eluded us. The highlight of that game was on our last day in the park as we were driving back to the exit. We had been following a motorcycle with a license plate that we couldn’t quite read. I didn’t want to get too close but when we arrived at one of the few stop signs in the park, we were able to pull up close enough to read that it was from Brazil! Then to top it off, the truck coming the other way had a New Hampshire plate. That was the 48th and final US plate that we saw.
Our days in the park were long. As I mentioned, we started early and most days we got home around 4:30-5pm. The park is enormous so there was a lot of time spent just driving around. I estimate that we averaged around 150 miles per day of driving in the park and about 5-6 miles of walking. I definitely felt like we pushed the border of making good use of our time and wearing ourselves out. We basically did nothing at the rental house except eat, get prepared for the next day, and then sleep. Yet it never felt like we were killing ourselves to see too much stuff.
For food we generally ate oatmeal or eggs at the house and then packed a lunch. Before we leave home, we bought a summer sausage and a block of cheese and that felt like the Widow of Zarapheth from 1 Kings 17 because that summer sausage and cheese somehow fed Tyla and I nearly every day of our trip! Elijah usually had a PB&J or some tuna fish and crackers. We kept a cooler with ice in the back of the truck for the whole trip and it was a great way to have lunch wherever was convenient and always have a good supply of cold water. Before the trip I bought some silicone freezer trays and every night at the rental house, I was able to make enough ice for the cooler that I didn’t have to buy any from the stores in West Yellowstone. But we do have a couple favorite restaurants to recommend too:
Ernie’s Bakery and Deli – We stopped here twice. The first was on our way into the park right when they opened around 7am. They sell boxed lunches which seemed like a brilliant idea! You pick your own sandwich fixings and then they pile in chips, an apple, candy, a drink, and more. We also stopped there for a delicious breakfast as we left town.
TR’s Burgers – The whole restaurant is themed with Teddy Roosevelt trivia and photos which is fun, but the burgers are fantastic! They had a nice selection of craft beer as well and you can choose either outdoor or indoor seating.
We piled all our stuff in the truck, said good bye to our rental house, and took a slightly longer route out of town to avoid the fire activity. We weren’t quite heading home yet though as we had planned a two day stop at Silverwood Theme Park in northern Idaho. It has been on our list for a long time and this seemed like a reasonable time to give it a shot. We almost canceled it though because the forecast was for 97 degree weather both days! I’m glad we didn’t cancel though because amazingly the heat never really bothered us too much. We were able to stay cool enough and not get too worn out from the heat. Silverwood is a decent sized theme park with the main draws being 5 big roller coasters and a large water park. Elijah was determined to do his first looping coaster but unfortunately the entry level looping coaster was closed both days we were there. I did the next most intense one and knew that it was asking a bit much from him to try that (though I loved it. Definitely try out Stunt Pilot!) The water park ended up being the bigger hit for the family and we did most of the rides there. I’m glad we got to do Silverwood but it was a bit of a shock after the peaceful beauty of Yellowstone. We don’t have many pictures since we mostly left our phones in a locker.
I was really looking forward to this trip and it did not disappoint. A road trip to a National Park is almost always a winner for me and I’m thankful that Tyla and Elijah enjoy them too. I know as a kid I wasn’t always the easiest to travel with on that kind of a trip, but now every time Tyla and I discuss what we want to do for our next trip, I always have a National Park on the list of choices.
Along with photos, we were taking some video too, so I edited it together into a montage for us to look back on and smile.
A while back, Mark Rober launch his own satellite on a rocket into space. It has a screen that flips out of the satellite and displays uploaded pictures. Then a camera takes a picture of the screen with earth in the background and voia: space selfie!
He posted an excellent video about the process of building it and there is at least one other video where he talks about the launch.
Everyone can use this service for free spaceselfie.com, but as you can imagine, there is an enormous line of people who have uploaded their pictures. We happen to love the Crunch Labs build boxes and are currently subscribing to them for Elijah so we got to jump towards the front of the line. Here’s our space selfie. In the background you can see the west coast of the US (camera facing south) with Puget Sound in the foreground.
This is obviously very easy to fake, but it’s awesome to look at that and know that it really happened!
We have had other monthly box subscription things, but we love this Crunch Labs box the best. One of my favorite parts is that each box has a ~20 minute video of Mark giving a fun science lesson related to the build. This post isn’t sponsored, but if you subscribe using this link, you’ll get $10 off your first order and we’ll get a store credit too.
The church I attend is part of a national church body called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Why? There are things that are difficult for individual churches to do such as sending out missionaries and training new pastors, teachers, and staff ministers. So we band together to do those kinds of projects as well help keep each other teaching directly what the Bible says. Every two years, the synod holds a convention with delegates from around the country to review our current status and make plans for the future.
This is the 175th anniversary of our synod. It started so small and there were many times where we were on the verge of heading down a bad path, but ultimately, our truth did not bend around popular culture and our beliefs have remained consistent regardless of what is trending.
From that humble beginning we have now spread out around the world. I was on a committee that was focused on gathering information from our mission board so I got extra insight into the amazing work being done around the world. The international Christian community is exploding in places you might expect, but also in places that would shock you. (Some of those places can’t be reported since it would put lives in danger.) Inside the US, we are working to plant 100 new missions within 10 years and also to strengthen/restart 75 of our existing ministries. We’re two years into that plan and it’s going well, but as costs rise, it makes the work more challenging. Regardless of where the missionaries were located, they had incredible stories to share about how the gospel works in individual hearts.
The convention was held in New Ulm, MN at Martin Luther College. That’s the same place Tyla and I have been visiting to work with their leadership on some ideas. It’s a special place because every one of our pastors, teachers, and staff ministers goes through that school and receives the same solid, doctrinal education. (Pastors continue on for another four years at seminary.) It’s fun being there when the students are on campus, but it was also interesting this time to be there with ~400 other delegates. Many extra people came to the opening worship service and it was a treat to hear 800 people singing together. Breaks and meals were full of interesting conversations and when meetings finally ended late in the evenings, there was social time with drinks from Schell’s Brewing. The cool beer was a welcome freshment because it was in the low to mid 90s with extreme humidity. I was so thankful that I skipped the free lodging in the dorms and got a room at a hotel. The AC (and privacy) were very welcome.
It was a little weird being on campus without Tyla, but she and I will be back there in a couple months for another meeting. I did enjoy seeing familiar faces from the campus staff and meeting new ones as well. I got a tour of some of their tech services too and hope to continue that conversation in the future.
It was four very long days but I’m so happy that I could attend. Since we have so many churches and there are so few delegates, it’s a rare opportunity that a church gets to send someone. This could very well have been a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, but the memories of this convention will last that long.
If you want to dive in deeper, all of the materials and live streams are available at https://www.welsconvention.net. A couple of their photos are included below.
I’m thankful for how often we get back to Indiana given how far away we live. Summer is a fun time for us to visit since Dad and Mom have a pool and that is a big hit with the family.
Our trip this year included:
A visit to the South Bend Chocolate Factory where Elijah got to chat with the owner who gave him a free shark tooth from their dinosaur museum.
A walk along the St. Joseph River in the evening to see their light display.
After replacing most of my yard equipment with EGO tools, I had hoped to wait a while to replace my push mower, but that hope didn’t pan out. After 14 years, the deck was finally rusting through and eventually it fell apart while I was mowing.
But after having so many surprise/extra bills this year, I thought this would be a good opportunity to be responsible and also teach Elijah that we can fix stuff instead of throwing it away. I ordered a new deck for about $120. That eventually arrived and Elijah and I headed to the garage for what should have been a simple replacement except… there were a few bolts that were complete unrecognizable lumps of rust. I messed around for a long time trying to figure out how to get them out, etc and by the time I started adding more replacement parts to the bill, it just didn’t make sense anymore.
Thankfully I was smart enough to order the replacement deck from WalMart so the return was very easy. And doubly thankfully, EGO was having a huge sale on exactly the push mower that I had picked out. I ended up with the LM2130SP. It normally ships with a 7.5Ah battery and a rapid charger and costs $749. But with the sale, I got it for $599 and that included a free 5Ah battery.
I brought it home to mow for the first time and see how many batteries I really needed. I went through the whole routine: edging, string trimming, mowing, and blowing. I did that all with a single 5Ah battery! At this point I had a 2.5, two 5’s, and a 7.5. So I headed back to the store and returned my free 5Ah battery (on the receipt it prorated the savings across the multiple items) and in the end, I got that $749 mower for $386. (All prices are without tax.) A new version of the cheapo gas mower that I was replacing was $350 so I felt like this was a fantastic deal!
I’ve only mowed a couple times with the new mower but I’m happy with it. It is self-propelled though my yard isn’t big enough for that to matter. Plus, this mower is so light! It’s also incredibly quiet to the point where you can easily carry on a conversation with somebody while it’s running. An added benefit that I hadn’t considered was how it doesn’t care what orientation it’s in. With a gas mower, you have to be carefully which way you tip it, but with this one, I just finish mowing, flip it over and blow out the grass. I even saw some people who would fold it up and store it on end in their shed!
I picked this model because theoretically it has more torque than my old mower did. I currently have no concerns about having enough battery power to easily get all my work done on my small yard, but we’ll see how it goes when the grass is really growing quickly and I’m a few days late in mowing.
I’m now at the point where the only gas engines I own are the pressure washer, generator, and truck.
And as for that old gas mower? Elijah and I took the engine as far apart as we could so I could explain the four strokes of the engine, let him feel the valves moving as the crankshaft turned, etc so we did get some education out of it.
I’ve always been intrigued by wood inlays on the CNC. I’ve tried a few times in the past but I could neve get the precision I needed to make it happen. For Christmas, I received a BitSetter for my CNC which lets me change bits in the middle of the job and zero the height of the new bit to exactly the same as the previous one. When doing inlays, you need to first use a regular bit with a flat end to carve out the big areas and then you use a “v bit” to make the angled sides. If those two bits aren’t zeroed exactly the same, you won’t end up with a precise piece. After that you have to cut the plug to fit into it going through the same bit change process.
I chose to use the Martin Luther College logo since Tyla and I have been doing some much work with them and because it seemed like a good medium-detail goal to shoot for. And I’ve been shooting for that goal for months and months. Granted this is very much a start/stop project as I try to find 30 minutes here and there throughout the week or on the weekend to make progress.
I learned so many things along the way. This post would be absurdly long if I wrote it all out in detail but here is a quick summary of the learnings and improvements I made in the process:
Holding the work pieces down is difficult when making coasters. Pretty early on, I made a jig out of MDF that would perfectly hold the coaster but still have finger holes on the outside so I could extract the coaster.
The jig worked well but the coasters would spin so then I started cutting my coaster blanks with a little nub that fit into one of the finger holes so that it wouldn’t spin. I could easily cut that off at the end.
I messed around with different angles of bits: 60, 30, and 11. The sharpest bit didn’t work because the remaining slivers of wood were too fragile. The 60 degree bit was ok, but ultimately I liked the 30 degree best because it let me cut deeper even in areas of fine detail.
To remove any inconsistencies, I would spend time running a program to face each piece before cutting it to make sure it was perfectly level.
You have to glue EVERYTHING when you’re putting the plug into the base. I would use a tiny brush to carefully get glue everywhere on both faces but going fast so the glue didn’t start to set up.
I thought of various ways to remove the extra part of the plug, but eventually I just put it back on the CNC in my jig and let the CNC cut it off.
Glue would inevitably seep into the fibers in the top of the wood so I expanded my cut path just a tiny bit. Since I was make an angled cut, this meant I could remove the top couple hundredths of the coaster to perfectly remove any extra glue marks.
I had about 12 steps to the process of making a single coaster and it took me hours to complete one. And in the end… I could never get it good enough to satisfy me. There were always some little gaps between various parts of the logo. I tried using brown glue to make the gaps less obvious and I tried filling them with superglue and then jamming sawdust into the cracks. The superglue trick got me the closest but it’s still not something I’m proud of. So I did something I rarely do: I gave up on it. For now. Below you can see all of my numerous attempts as well as a solo shot of the closest I could get.
But I didn’t totally give up. I decided to scale back my dreams and instead of inlaying one type of wood into another, I would pour tinted epoxy resin into the logo that I had carved out. Despite being the first time I had ever worked with epoxy, this was almost an instant success! Not only did it look amazing but it also took me only about a third of the time (except for the 24 hours of cure time.)
There were still learnings to go through with the epoxy like dealing with bubbles that come to the surface as it cures, figuring out how the walnut soaks up extra epoxy around the logo pocket, keeping sawdust out as it cures, etc, but those were much simpler and I’m very happy with the result. I was even able to switch the logo and get a decent coaster on my first attempt.
After working on this so long, I’m kind of stuck in this mindset so I think I’m going to make a bigger jig and try to batch some of these out. They will make nice gifts and I’m sure I’ll experiment with other woods and other logos. I’m also interested to try doing a multi color pour. That would involve cutting part of the logo, pouring a color, cutting another part of the logo, pouring another color, etc. It feels a little silly to spend so much of my year on this one project, but I’ll keep going as long as I’m enjoying it.
For many years, we have gone on a summer camping trip with Tyla’s family and the tradition continued this year. I don’t think most of us had heard of Ike Kinswa State Park before but we decided to give it a shot. It’s located northwest of Mt. St. Helens and southwest of Mt. Rainier.
We arrived on a Saturday and left on a Tuesday to try to avoid some traffic, and the traffic part worked well but it made booking difficult. State parks book up extremely quickly so you need to jump online right at 7am, 9 months in advance of the first day of your trip. Since our trip started Saturday, that meant that all the Thursday and Friday campers got first dibs. Thankfully we still found a couple pretty nice sites close together.
The park itself was nice. It sits on a reservoir behind one of two dams on the Cowlitz River. We spent Sunday driving around to explore the dams and play disc golf. On Monday we went up to Paradise Visitor Center on the south side of Rainer. Some of us took a short (but steep) hike up to Alta Vista. The trail almost had too much snow for us to make it but we did get to the top of the crest. The weather was perfectly clear and it was fun to point out the hikers going up to Camp Muir. I would love to do that hike with Elijah sometime.
All in all, it was a great trip. I dont’ know that we’ve had many trips with nicer weather. It was in the low to mid 80s during the day and cool enough at night to sleep easily. Thanks to Don and crew for getting the camper ready for this one trip each year and then putting it away again! It makes it a lot easier to do all the cooking and cleaning from the trailer.
Now we have a couple months before it’s time to figure out where to go next year…
When we bought this house, I purchased a simple push mower and a multi-head motor with string trimmer, edger, and blower attachments. That setup has served me well for 14 years and while they were showing their age, I didn’t have a strong reason to upgrade, and yet, here I am with new electric tools.
It all started when a friend who sells this stuff helped me get started with the EGO multi-head system. I ended up with the string trimmer, edger, and hedge trimmer attachments as well as a blower and an extra 5Ah battery to go with the 2.5 Ah battery that came with the multi-head unit. The gas mower remains for now, but I will eventually replace it with an EGO push mower.
The switchover to battery had been imminent anyway. My old motor was leaking more gas than it consumed and I knew I wouldn’t put the time into fixing it when I wanted to switch to battery powered tools anyway. As an added bonus, the blower is now easy enough for Elijah to use and he thinks it is fun so things stay much cleaner! I admit that these tools are also more fun for me to use too so I’m doing a better job of keeping up with all the edging and trimming around our yard.
It took a little thinking about where I was going to fit these tools in my limited shed space since they hang a bit differently than my previous tools. I was happy to find a robust 3D printing community around the EGO tools so I was able to print a holder for the main unit along with holders for the batteries and blower.
These tools still aren’t cheap but it’s helpful that the major investment of the battery can be shared among all the tools. I’m also excited by the inverters that they sell, especially the 3000w model. I hope that some day they will come out with a 240v inverter which I could use instead of our gas generator to power our house for short bursts of time and then save the gas generator for multi-day outages.
