As we’ve done a few times before, we hopped on the ferry in Edmonds and floated across Puget Sound to have lunch in Kingston. When we’ve done it previously, I’ve thought that it would be kind of neat to have a timelapse of the trip so this time I packed my Go Pro. I had a flexible tripod that I kind of wrapped around the railing and then held it in place with alternating freezing hands. I didn’t do anything too fancy to stabilize or straighten the video, but there’s a lot of fun stuff to see!
Christmas in Indiana
This year we headed back to Indiana for Christmas. The weather forecast looked cool but pretty dry. The weather forecast was wrong.
The trip out was relatively smooth until we hit carnage at Midway. My parents had kindly made the ~2 hour drive (each way!) to pick us up and the traffic was so bad it took them 30-45 minutes to get from the cell phone lot to us. Thankfully we had them pick us up at Arrivals instead of Departures and that saved the wait from being even longer.
We awoke Christmas Eve morning to snow. A white Christmas was in order, but not just a white Christmas, but we had fresh snow every single day until we left! They also set a record for the coldest two weeks in history. Temps were in the single digits during the day. It was frigid but we still had fun playing in the snow and it never kept us completely snowed in.
Given the weather and the temps, we mostly hung around the house, but we got outside for sledding, exploring in the woods, a tour of the South Bend Chocolate Factory tour and church services among other things. It was very nice to relax and watch Elijah interact with Mom, Dad, Luke, Rachel and David.
Our trip to the airport for the flight back was interesting as well. Bad snow was predicted around the time we’d normally be driving to the airport, so instead, we got to the airport 5 hours early so that Dad and Mom could drive back before it got dark. It turned out to be a very good move because, while the trip there was easy, the trip back for them was quite treacherous. Thankfully they made it safely.
A huge thanks goes out to my parents for hosting us again and for all the driving!
Best of YouTube
I started watching William Osman earlier this year. He’s a maker who created his own laser cutter (The Retina Smelter 9000) and has a very comedic style while producing some interesting creations and wearing crazy cat shirts. In a sad twist of events, his house burned down in the California fires. He has documented some of that process on his channel. His most recent video was probably the last one that was filmed before his house burned down and it’s a gem.
Evan and Katelyn are a husband and wife team that make stuff with a lot of different mediums. They are fun to watch and produce projects that aren’t so complex that you have to devote a month to make something similar.
And the last one isn’t a YouTube video. It’s a podcast episode. It’s probably the best explanation I’ve ever heard of blockchain (the tech behind Bitcoin, etc) and how the basic idea could impact your life in ways far beyond weird investments. They intentionally structured the episode to be approachable regardless of your comfort level with technology. Whenever someone has questions about blockchain or BitCoin, this is the single place that I will point them to: https://after-on.com/episodes/017
The Expanse
This summer, I decided to read book 1 of The Expanse series. I’d heard that the TV show was really good, but before watching that, I wanted to read the books.
Honestly I was disappointed by the first book. It started off slow and then I felt like I got tricked. Instead of sci-fi, I thought it was turning into a zombie book. Thankfully it was not. Zombies are dumb.
I only gave the first book 3 out of 5 stars, but it finished really strong so the second book got it’s chance. And boy am I glad I read that one. I was completely hooked and I’ve read all the way up to book 7 which was just released.
The story is set in a believable future where we’ve expanded out to various parts of the solar system. There are a lot of politics that play out between Earth, Mars, and people who have settled out on the asteroid belt and various habitable moons. The physics of space travel make sense. There’s no hyper space or warp drives. And then… well, then spoilers.
I’m almost done with the 7th book and then I think I’ll switch over to watch the TV show. Then I’ll just gobble up TV seasons and new books as they come out. If you enjoy sci-fi at all, I can’t recommend this series enough. I’m hard-pressed to think of another sci-fi series that has captured me like The Expanse has.
Online Personality Tests
I’ve never been a big fan of the online personality tests (e.g. “What kind of tractor/hairdo/sandwich are you?” but they are clearly a fad that won’t go away. And the other day I finally heard a compelling argument explaining why so many of them exist: many of those tests are created to build personality profiles about you and people like you. That stuff feeds into how advertisers target your demographic or even how politicians speak to you. Creepy, right?
There’s no free lunch. If you can’t figure out how a website is making money, you are probably the product.
Best of YouTube
Dude Perfect’s first “All Sports Golf Battle” video was one of their best. They play a hole of golf but the catch is that their golf bags are full of random balls and sticks from various sports. They can only use each type of equipment for one shot. Hilarity ensues. The second time around was just as funny as the first!
Jimmy DIresta is finally starting on his upstate NY dream shop. He hired Kyle from Rural Rennovators (@rrbuildings) to do the work and Kyle created a 15 episode video series about the build. It’s really neat to watch a professional frame and roof something this big in just a couple weeks. I’ll embed the first video below, but you can watch the whole playlist on YouTube.
With the new Star Wars movie coming out, lots of people have Star Wars fever. Nobody does it like Colin Furze though. He built a FULL SIZE tie fighter! If you like this, check out the video explaining how he built it.
Bongo Cajon
I remember Dad telling stories about how he wasn’t allowed to get a drum set when he was growing up. And then when I was growing up, I remember Mom and Rachel telling him to stop drumming his fingers on his desk downstairs because it made too much noise. This poor man deserves a drum!
Steve Ramsey posted a couple videos about making cajons. (Is the plural of that “cajones”?) I chose to make his bongo cajon version. It seemed like a simple project, but as usual, I was amazed at how many ways I found to screw it up. Woodworking really is about starting your project and then figuring out how to fix all the mistakes you make along the way.
It was fun to be able to pick pretty much any wood that I wanted for the main body of the drum. I walked around Crosscut Hardwoods for a while and ended up buying some sapele. That seemed like more fun to work with than the 1/2″ plywood that Steve used in his version. The top required 1/8th plywood and since I didn’t want to pay bunch of money for a full size fancy sheet from Crosscut, I got a really cheap piece from Home Depot instead. It doesn’t have quite the tone to it that I was hoping for, but I think it will still be a fun gift.
Merry Christmas Dad!
Laser Cutter Puzzle
The idea of making a custom puzzle has always intrigued me. I’m partially interested in the computer science problem of generating an random puzzle with an arbitrary size, and I’m also interested in the physical process of making it happen.
That computer science problem has been on my list for a long time, but finally I realized that I shouldn’t block the whole project on getting around to writing that code. It took a lot of searching, but I finally found a good, free online tool: Wolfie’s Puzzle Generator.
The next step was to pick a picture. A good picture has a lot of visual interest so you don’t have huge areas of “blue sky” pieces. I wanted to make this as a Christmas gift for Mom so I also wanted something that meant something to her. I settled on a picture of the Seattle waterfront that I’m pretty sure I took while they were out here visiting. I cropped it down to get rid of most of the boring blue sky.
I printed off a 16×20 version of that at Costco and then used 3M spray adhesive to attach it to a thick art board from the craft store. By the way, at 240dpi, this image was almost exactly 20″ wide with no scaling. The picture looks gorgeously sharp. It’s incredible how good modern digital cameras are!
Then it was off to the laser cutter. I spent a long time messing around with various tapes trying to find one that would help protect the surface from burning but also would peel off easily after being cut. I never succeeded. Maybe my adhesive wasn’t strong enough, but for some reason the tape would always pull off with the picture instead of leaving the picture stuck to the art board.
I settled on doing three light passes to slowly cut through with minimal burning. You can still see some burning around the cuts but the picture hides a lot of it. I wanted to make a 1000 piece puzzle but I only squeezed 260 in there due to the dimensions of the pictures and not wanting to make microscopic puzzle pieces. These were 0.75″ square so they were already pretty small.
I don’t expect this puzzle to hold up to a lot of beating but hopefully it will at least work once! If you want to see a video about this, David Picciuto has a making a laser cutter puzzle.
Fantasy Football – Week 16
As the announcer of the Seahawks/Cowboys game said, “If the Seahawks win this, it will be the worst offensive performance I’ve ever seen from a winning team.” Now clearly he hadn’t seen some of the games early in the season, but yes, the Seahawks offense was a hot mess. And hey, their postseason hopes are still alive by a thin margin.
Of the top four teams in our league, only one team broke 100 and that was Logan. Congrats on another first place trophy! Logan’s third round draft pick, Todd Gurley, really paid off in the playoffs with 88.1 points. Here are the final standings;
1. Logan
2. Ben
3. Luke
4. Austin
5. Andy
6. Dad
7. Tim
8. Jim
At the beginning of the season, I heard that some people might not be too interested in continuing this. I really appreciate everyone keeping their roster full! If you want out, it’s completely fine. Let’s do this as an opt-in situation. If you want to play next year, send me a private message/email/text by the Super Bowl. That will give me plenty of time to fill any empty team slots before the next season starts.
I’ll try to scrounge up some more overall season stats in a week or two, but for now, here are the weekly stats.
| This Week | This Season | All-Time | |
| Highest Team Score | Tim had 133..76 | Logan had 188.80 (Week 15) | Tim 200.51 (2015) |
| Lowest Team Score | Dad had 89.69 | Jim had 60.95 (Week 10) | Andy had 41.29 (2015) |
| Biggest Blowout | Team beat Jim by 36.08 | Luke beat Jim by 74.22 (Week 3) | Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010) |
| Closest Win | Luke beat Austin by 5.52 | Dad beat Jim by 1.86 (Week 15) | Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012) |
| Highest Scoring Player | Todd Gurley had 43.50 points for Logan. | Tom Brady had 45.72 for Luke. (Week 3) | Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015) |
| Longest Active Winning Streak | Logan has a 3 game winning streak | Austin has a 6 game winning streak (Week 13) | Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak |
| Longest Active Losing Streak | Austin and Jim have 3 game losing streaks. | Tim had a 5 game losing streak. (Week 5) | Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011) |
2017 Year In Review
Since you’re reading this on my website, let’s start with the biggest change I’ve made on this site: I quit blogging every day. Around Memorial Day this year, I stopped forcing myself to get a post up every weekday. That ended a streak of nearly 4000 weekdays in a row with a blog post. It has felt a lot more freeing to only write when I have an idea for content instead of scrambling the night before to try and fill an empty spot in the calendar. And while this is a terrible model for driving traffic to a site, my main goal has always been a kind of “life journal” that might store some interesting nuggets in the decades. To that end, I tried to write some longer articles about memories from my childhood. Those felt like some of my better posts from the year: Childhood Christmas Gifts, Baseball Stories, Parental Albums and Sleepwalking Stories.
The biggest change for all of us this year was the loss of Tyla’s mom to breast cancer. Nancy had been battling the cancer for years but it was pretty clear early in the year that we were crossing the point of no return and in the end, it went downhill very quickly. Those weeks and months were full of a wide range of emotions complicated still further by having a four year old in the mix. I found it really difficult to be supportive both to Tyla and Elijah at the same time. For example, many times I felt like the way I could help the most was to get Elijah out of the room/house and give him a normal day, but that meant I wasn’t there to help Tyla. But we all made it through, and because all of us believe that Jesus died for our sins, I know we’ll be reunited in heaven.
I said things declined rapidly. Just the weekend before she died, we were all camping at Cape Disappointment. It’s a beautiful park right along the ocean. I thought it was healthy for Tyla’s family to spend that time together, have time for long talks, and have one last outing with Nancy. Elijah had a lot of fun riding his bike around the campground and sleeping in the tent. Whenever we ask him what he wants to do for vacation next summer, he asks to do that trip again.
At the 2016 Christmas party, Logan mentioned that it was his “man mission” to climb to Camp Muir. The guy he was talking to said, “I’ll go with you!” In the blink of an eye, we had a crew of people ready to hike up there with him. I had been there back in 2010, but it was such a great hike that I knew I wanted to do it again. Half the fun of hiking Camp Muir is all the training hikes you need to do ahead of time! We hit a lot of great trails including: Little Mt. Si, Lime Kiln Trail, Mt. Pilchuck, Lake Melakwa, Mason Lake and Little Bandera Mountain. I had Elijah in my backpack for a lot of those hikes. Next year he’ll be too big and it will be time for him to hoof it himself.
See you in 2018!
Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016