We live just far enough north that sometimes there are hints of the northern lights, but our house is in the middle of the suburbs and there’s so much ambient light that we can barely see the stars, much less the northern lights. However, back on May 10, there was a severe geomagnetic storm and we could see it from our back yard!
I went out around 11pm when it was fully dark and honestly, if I hadn’t known it was there, I would have missed it. It wasn’t intense enough to be immediately obvious and it looked like oddly shaped clouds. But the longer I looked, the more I could see hints of green and purple. Our phone cameras took really nice pictures in “Night Sight” mode which takes multiple exposures and combines them. So while this is nowhere near what it looked like it real life, the pictures look pretty.
I’ve always wondered how fast the aurora moves because so often you see videos of timelapses. It moved fast enough that within a couple minutes, the shape looked very different, but it wasn’t fast enough that I could see a change if I kept staring at one spot.
I would still love to see it from farther north in a more remote area, but this was pretty special for zero effort!
Last year was my first time attending a retreat held by our area churches. I had a great time and instantly signed up for this year’s retreat as soon as they created the sign up form. Unfortunately, this year’s experience was dramatically different!
I decided to make the most of my trip to the Olympic Peninsula so I left earlier in the day so I could play a round of golf at Rainshadow Disc Golf Park. It’s one of the most highly rated courses in Washington and it didn’t disappoint. The holes are very well thought out and there is a lot of elevation change. Many holes have extreme penalties for throwing off the fairway because the fairway ends up being on the ridge of the hill with a steep drop-off on each side. Since I didn’t know the course (and I’m not that good), I mostly just played short throws that would stay in view, and I didn’t concern myself too much with my score. I shot a painful eight over par on the front nine and only one over on the back nine.
After finishing the round, I still had plenty of time, so I checked out the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge. I didn’t feel like paying the entry fee just for 30 minutes of walking around, so I checked out the surrounding county park instead. I’d love to go back with more time to explore though.
Dinner isn’t provided on the first night of the retreat, and I stopped for a quick bite to eat at Jack in the Box. It was so gross when I went in that I should have just turned around, but I felt obligated to buy something since I had already used their restroom. And since it was just me without the family in tow, I didn’t think too much about it. But then the fries tasted really weird. That’s odd. They were so weird that I ended up not eating them all. Strange. But whatever.
When I showed up at the Men’s Retreat, I felt off. I figured it was probably just getting old and not being used to eating a lot of fast food. But as I met up with some of the other guys from our church and walked around, it got worse. By the time the event started, I knew something was wrong.
I’ll save you the biological details but suffice it to say that it became obvious that I had food poisoning. I skipped the evening session, went straight to bed, and laid awake all night with trips to the bathroom (trying very hard not to make any mess in my room!) At 3am, I called it quits, made a beeline for the ferry in my little window of time when I felt ok after a vomit, and got back home. I proceeded to feel worse and worse throughout the day, but I was very thankful to be home and have Tyla to help me out! By Sunday and Monday, I was able to keep some fluids down and slowly build my strength back.
After looking forward to the Men’s Retreat for a full year, it was a complete bust. But hey, there’s always next year right?
I don’t know about other parents, but Tyla and I often chat about ways to help Elijah build confidence. That’s probably what made the “Legends” app catch my attention. It’s a paid app, but that link includes a referral code which currently gets you a free month and we started with a similar code.
The idea is that you sit down with your child (ages 7-11) for about 5-7 minutes every day and go through the next coaching session. The coach is funny and approachable and many of the sessions draw on lessons from celebrities. For example, it might be helpful to know that Kobe Bryant wasn’t always good at basketball, he just worked harder than everyone else. Or it might help to know that Billie Eilish has to deal with anxiety about performing on stage. There are usually quick activities with the lessons like coming up with things you can say to downplay negative self-talk or words you can use to build yourself up.
I don’t know if we’ll continue to subscribe to the service or for how long, but this first free month has been great. I wouldn’t say Elijah necessarily looks forward to it, but he has never once given me the eye roll when I suggest that we do our daily session. That’s saying a lot.
So yes, the app is wonderful and I recommend it, but as a Christian I found myself wishing that there was more to it. It’s the same feeling I get when I listen to any secular self-help/counseling type of content. Jesus is the ultimate source of comfort, confidence, and peace. Without him, you’re grasping at straws. The whole experience made me wish that I had the time and skillset to work with some people in our church body to create something in a similar space but combine it with the Bible.
I use Bing Copilot every day. The more I use it, the more I figure out how I could use it. But I still meet people who say they’ve never tried it, so I’m going to share an example that I think almost everyone runs into.
Let’s say that season 3 of a TV show came out or the latest book in a series, but I consumed the last one over a year ago and only have a vague memory of how it ended. I used to try to carefully find a website that would help me get caught up without spoiling things, but even if I get spoiled once in a while, that’s still too much. Bing Copilot (or ChatGPT or whatever LLM you favor) is a great to use in this situation. I open a prompt and say something like this:
“I’ve read the first five Terminal List books, but I’m about to start book six and I want to be reminded of what happened previously. Recap the first five books with an emphasis on the fifth book but do not tell me anything about the sixth book.”
That’s it. A couple seconds later I have the answer. It doesn’t take many experiences like this before you start to realize all the other times you could be using it too!
I believe it’s important to watch where all our money goes so I’ve been through many different apps over the years including Microsoft Money, Quicken, and Mint. Mint lasted me for a long time but it recently closed shop after being bought by Intuit. They claim that they moved the “important” features to Credit Karma but nothing about that was useful to me. So it was time to find a new money tool.
After examining a few, I landed on Monarch Money. I went through the free trial and ended up signing up for a year. (It helped that there’s a half price deal for people coming over from Mint for the first year.) So far so good. I don’t need a lot from a tool like this. I just need it to connect to all my various accounts, update smoothly, and then let me categorize the line items.
Connecting to all the accounts was pretty straightforward. The only hiccup continues to be one investment account through a small company, but they were always a challenge even with Mint.
There was a lot of work initially to map Mint’s categories to Monarch’s categories, but they had a UI for that. Once it was set up, it wasn’t an issue. Categorization seems smoother than Mint. Mint had auto categorization rules but Monarch’s rules just seem to work better.
I could stop there and just share my experience, but if you’ve made it this far, maybe you’re looking for a money app as well. I do have a referral code you can use that gets you a free month and then I think I get a month for free as well.
About a month ago, I pulled the trigger and removed a bunch of “habit” apps from my phone. Instagram, Reddit, and my news app all got uninstalled. I decided I’d go for at least a week and see what happened. The result scared me enough that I’m still on a break from them.
I found that I would unconsciously pull out my phone and tap the screen where Instagram used to be. I purposely left that spot blank just to make the point to myself and I wish I had a way to track how many times I clicked that empty space!
It’s been a month now. Reddit is still uninstalled and so is my news app of choice. I can still access both of those on the web if I choose to, but that one extra step is enough that I rarely go there. (This isn’t going to be a fun 6 months of US news reading anyway so I’m fine skipping that mess.) Instagram did get reinstalled, but I limit myself to viewing it about once per week and I use the obscure UI menus to only look at posts from people I follow and skip all the suggested posts. Doing that in bulk helps me realize which accounts I’m interested in and which ones were just there to keep my feed populated with new stuff so I’ve been able to cut down on what I subscribe to.
This pause also helped me realize that I do like using Instagram stories to throw random content out into the ether to be consumed by anyone who chooses to use it. It feels more friendly than spamming text threads with too much content (which I probably do anyway.) That’s one of the same reasons that I like keeping this blog up too.
For now, I feel better reining things in a bit so that the phone is mostly just a utility that helps me in my life instead of a dopamine producer that I open out of habit. This isn’t the first time I’ve done stuff like this so I know it will creep back in, but at least there are periods of sanity.
You may remember that back in 2022 we spent a few days at a farm in Oregon. Shortly after we left, we booked another trip and this time we intentionally booked it for spring in hopes of seeing baby sheep and goats. Spring of 2023 was booked out so we had to book a year and a half out. I thought the wait might be too much for Tyla, but she made it.
We spent four nights at their cottage and had a blast again! Denny and Kate were the farm managers while we were there last time and unfortunately, they had moved on, but we enjoyed meeting farm owner Scottie and new farm manager TK. The last time we magically had the farm to ourselves but this time the bigger farmhouse had about 10 guests in it, but the farm is plenty big for everyone to spread out.
The goats were all born by the time we got there, but some of them were still very young. They were easily the highlight of the trip. Tyla and Elijah spent hours holding the goats and playing with them. Elijah would even go over to the goat yard by himself sometimes because he couldn’t get enough.
There were a lot of baby lambs already but six more were born on our first night. They give birth on their own without human intervention so it was a bit of a surprise every morning to walk out and see if there were any new babies. We helped tag some of them and castrate one of the boys. There were a lot of good opportunities to talk biology with Elijah!
Going in the spring was quite different than the summer. We traded time in the creek and wandering the property for time with the baby animals. Both were great experiences and we’d be hard pressed to choose which was our favorite. We’ll have to figure it out though because I’m sure we’ll be going back at some point!
Some pictures are included below but you can see more on Instagram @benwmartens.
Every Tesla comes with “Autopilot” which I roughly explain to people as cruise control for steering. It will keep you in your lane, keep you at the speed limit unless traffic slows, etc. In contrast to other car manufacturers, this works on any road in a variety of conditions.
There’s a step up from Autopilot called “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” which expands the capabilities to give you end to end self-driving. It will navigate, obey stop lights and stop signs, change lanes on the highway, etc. All Teslas are capable for this, but you must pay a $12,000 fee to enable it. As you can imagine, very few people are willing to pay that much, so they also offer a $200/month subscription that you can turn on and off. That was almost low enough to get me to try it out on our big road trip, but it was still too much to justify. (As I was working this draft, Tesla lowered the price to $100/month!) So I was happy when Tesla gave all Tesla owners a free month of FSD in April! We’ve put over 40,000 miles on our car without the FSD package so it has been interesting to see the differences.
The obvious question is: is it worth $12,000? And to that I immediately say “Nope.” It’s certainly more than a party trick, but I cannot fathom paying that much for it in my current situation. I’d probably pay $1000-2000 for it, or I would pay a bit more if the FSD capabilities stayed for future Tesla purchases.
With that said, this works shockingly well. Elijah’s school is 18 miles away and I literally had it drive us from our driveway to the school parking lot without me ever disengaging it. This included a mix of interstate, two lane highway, and side streets in rush hour traffic. This feature is no joke.
Note that they make it clear that you are still responsible for the car. You have to always keep your hand on the wheel and be ready to take over if something is incorrect. Once you’re in the car, it will scream at you and even pull over and stop driving in the extreme case where you really stop paying attention.
It’s not all roses though. While it will get you there safely and legally, it does make some awkward decisions. On our road trip to Oregon, it would change lanes when I would have been more polite and waited for a bigger gap. Or if someone is waiting to pull out of a side street in slow traffic, I might tap the brakes a bit to let them in. Or if the speed of a side street was 35, it might not speed up to 60 on the highway until the end of hte onramp. There are a few tuning options and I found “chill” with “minimal lane changes” to be closest to my driving style. I preferred it to be dumber and let me hint at things like lane changes (by turning on the turn signal.)
The FSD package also includes a couple extra goodies.
Automatic Parking – As you drive through a parking lot, it will see open parking spaces. You can tap one on the screen and it will back into the spot. This does work but sometimes it takes a couple attempts to get in straight. I would expect it to just nail it on the first time, especially in a wide open parking lot.
Smart Summon – Let’s say it’s raining when you come out of the store and you’re debating running to the car. With Smart Summon, you just press a button on your phone and your car will come to you. This only works on private roads and it drives awkwardly slow, but it does work. It’s a bit creepy to see your big investment driving itself with nobody behind the wheel. This one definitely feels like a party trick, but supposedly there is an improved version coming which they call “Actually Smart Summon”.
So yes, this technology is mind-blowing. I have no doubt that this will work flawlessly in the future. But for now, I’m quite content with the default Autopilot capabilities. The price for the full package is very aspirational right now. However, now that the monthly price is $100/month, I’d strongly consider doing that for a long road trip.
Here’s a short demo of it in action in our car. If you get bored with the regular driving part, you can skip towards the end to see the self-parking and the smart summon features in action.
Our final installation in the series of videos from our Memorial Day family gatherings is from 1995. It looks like this Uncle Dean and Aunt Sandy’s family couldn’t come and apparently we didn’t take out the camera much. Most of the tape was a science show that Ryan and I recorded. We had quite a few different experiments with explanations of the science behind each one. I have mercifully cut most of that out of this quick recap for you.
Continuing our series of Memorial Day memories, 1993 featured cousin Tim bringing his water balloon slignshot and me learning that it’s best not to talk when you’re recording video!
PacNW Christian Men’s Retreat 2024
Last year was my first time attending a retreat held by our area churches. I had a great time and instantly signed up for this year’s retreat as soon as they created the sign up form. Unfortunately, this year’s experience was dramatically different!
I decided to make the most of my trip to the Olympic Peninsula so I left earlier in the day so I could play a round of golf at Rainshadow Disc Golf Park. It’s one of the most highly rated courses in Washington and it didn’t disappoint. The holes are very well thought out and there is a lot of elevation change. Many holes have extreme penalties for throwing off the fairway because the fairway ends up being on the ridge of the hill with a steep drop-off on each side. Since I didn’t know the course (and I’m not that good), I mostly just played short throws that would stay in view, and I didn’t concern myself too much with my score. I shot a painful eight over par on the front nine and only one over on the back nine.
After finishing the round, I still had plenty of time, so I checked out the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge. I didn’t feel like paying the entry fee just for 30 minutes of walking around, so I checked out the surrounding county park instead. I’d love to go back with more time to explore though.
Dinner isn’t provided on the first night of the retreat, and I stopped for a quick bite to eat at Jack in the Box. It was so gross when I went in that I should have just turned around, but I felt obligated to buy something since I had already used their restroom. And since it was just me without the family in tow, I didn’t think too much about it. But then the fries tasted really weird. That’s odd. They were so weird that I ended up not eating them all. Strange. But whatever.
When I showed up at the Men’s Retreat, I felt off. I figured it was probably just getting old and not being used to eating a lot of fast food. But as I met up with some of the other guys from our church and walked around, it got worse. By the time the event started, I knew something was wrong.
I’ll save you the biological details but suffice it to say that it became obvious that I had food poisoning. I skipped the evening session, went straight to bed, and laid awake all night with trips to the bathroom (trying very hard not to make any mess in my room!) At 3am, I called it quits, made a beeline for the ferry in my little window of time when I felt ok after a vomit, and got back home. I proceeded to feel worse and worse throughout the day, but I was very thankful to be home and have Tyla to help me out! By Sunday and Monday, I was able to keep some fluids down and slowly build my strength back.
After looking forward to the Men’s Retreat for a full year, it was a complete bust. But hey, there’s always next year right?