Studio711.com – Ben Martens

LUKE 2

THE BIRTH OF JESUS

¹ In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. ² (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) ³ And everyone went to their own town to register.

⁴ So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. ⁵ He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. ⁶ While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, ⁷ and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

⁸ And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. ⁹ An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. ¹¹ Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

¹³ Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

¹⁴ “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

¹⁵ When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

¹⁶ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. ¹⁷ When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, ¹⁸ and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. ¹⁹ But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. ²⁰ The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

I don’t go much for Black Friday sales, but there was a time that I tried to survive the mob and I realized that story hasn’t appeared on this site before…

I believe it was my junior year of college (Nov 2000) when I decided I wanted to buy a sound system, DVD player and TV for our dorm room. All of it was pretty entry level stuff but it was going to be a major upgrade! I went shopping at Best Buy and figured out what I wanted. The sales guy hinted that there were going to be some big sales on Black Friday so I decided I’d wait and save some money.

Dad kindly waited with me that morning. I don’t remember the specifics but I think we got there around 5am and it was below 20 degrees. We were about 10th or so in line and we waited for hours for the store to open. As the doors open, everyone mobbed the doors and pushed their way in so we probably weren’t the 10th people to get in. Dad and I had a plan so we went directly for the stuff we wanted, grabbed it and reconvened. That maybe took 60 seconds, but the store was already completely full. It took forever (half an hour?) to make it back to the cash registers.

As the cashier rang up my total, I happily said, “How much did I save?” … “Save? Nothing. None of this was on sale.”

Yep, we waited in the freezing cold for hours to save… nothing. The TV and DVD player are long gone, but that sound system has traveled all over the country with me and is currently in our theater room (complete with birdseed and a mouse carcass inside the subwoofer but that’s a story for another day.) I think about that Black Friday regularly when I flip on the sound system. Thank you, Dad, for suffering through that with me and not giving me grief.

Aside from the campus bus service while I was at Purdue, I’ve never lived close to convenient public transport until I moved into our current house. All I have to do is walk up to the stop light and I can hop on the 255 bus that takes me all the way, non-stop, to downtown Seattle. It’s like the bus route was designed for us. It stops at the Kirkland waterfront and the Kirkland train store before making its way across I-90 to Pike Place Market and and Pioneer Square. We don’t use the bus a lot, but wow, that’s a pretty convenient one.

Unfortunately it sounds like that’s going to change when they redesign the bus routes. If you live on the east side, there’s a survey to fill out so you can share your thoughts on the changes.

Thankfully I already have a general ban on going into Seattle and this helps to enforce it.

Seattle is in the midst of some record-breaking bad air quality due to the wildfires in British Columbia, eastern Washington and California. Unless the wind is blowing form the west, it gets smokey in Seattle and an inversion layer traps the smoke down here between the mountains.

There are a couple handy sites for helping to check how bad it is right now and how it’s going to look in the future. The first is the Puget Sound Clean Air site. It shows a short timeline of the particle count in the air.

The second is an experimental forecast from NOAA that predicts where the smoke will be going. Choose your overlay on the top left and then choose the hour of the forecast on the bottom left. (Note that if you slide it all the way to the right it appears to jump back in time.) The forecast only goes out about 24 hours, but, for example, today you can at least have some hope that tomorrow will be a little better.

I found both of these links by reading Cliff Mass’s blog and he has a lot more info about the smoke there as well as an analysis of whether or not there is a trend of these fires getting worse (global warming?!)

I’m currently editing a bunch of photos from our last trip. While we were there, we talked about combining video from everyone’s phone for a little video montage. I’m still working on that, but I thought I’d pass along the three things I asked everyone to do for the video:

1. Shoot at eye level. If you only remember one thing, this is it. Whether you’re doing pictures or video, you’ll get dramatically better results if you are at eye level with your subject.
2. Hold your camera/phone in landscape mode not portrait. This is critical for video but is more of a personal preference for photos. I default to landscape photos and only use portrait when specifically required.
3. Be still. Frame the shot and let the subject move around in it. If you’re moving around following something, it’s almost certainly going to be too uneven and jerky to use in an edit.

Elijah loves Legos. (And yes, I know the plural is technically “Lego” but too bad. This is ‘merica and most people say “Legos”.) We watch JANGBRiCKS YouTube videos daily. I guess all the Legos floating around the house and the videos got to me, because I finally caved to one of my childhood dreams and bought an enormous set.

Lego has a set of modular buildings in their Creator Expert series that are extremely impression. The detail is beyond anything I’ve ever assembled and it seemed like a fun project to work on with Elijah. It was fun to see the look on his face when the 2480-piece Lego Downtown Diner arrived in the mail.

He sat with me for most of the assembly, but a lot of it was too complex. He had fun looking through all the pieces and finding the new ones that we haven’t had before. It took us 6.5 hours to assemble the whole thing.

I thought about taking pictures, but then I realized that it’s exactly the same as the one that everyone else has built. If you want to really dive in, check out the JANGBRiCKS video review. I’ve also posted some photos below.

If you stop by for a visit, remind me to show this to you! We will be leaving this one fully assembled.

“My neighbor brews beer in his garage.” When I say that, people usually have a picture in their head that doesn’t equate to what is really happening. Five houses down from me, Kevin is making some epic beer. He has over a dozen taps in his garage and some fancy brewing equipment. He’s had his license for a little over a year and he’s already won second place at the Washington Beer Awards for his Pink Boots Double IPA. He makes a lot of great beers, but that one is my favorite.

His garage is a very convenient walk from my house and Elijah loves taking bike rides to see “Mr. Kevin”, but now his garage door is closed a lot more frequently. That’s because he has taken a big step and opened his first taproom! It’s located northwest of the Woodinville Costco and we headed there for the grand opening. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it certainly was NOT what we actually witnessed. There were well over 100 people there with live music, a BBQ trailer and tons of people in line for beer. Kevin seemed happily in awe of the turnout.

I’ve been back a couple times since then and he always seems to have a good crowd on hand. In addition to a big variety of beers on tap, he also has some limited food (pizza and pretzel bread) available for sale. I’ll have to see if I can convince Tyla that this is a viable dinner location. Pizza, beer and cornhole? How could she say no?

Congrats to Kevin for an incredible start to his taproom. I wish you all the best and look forward to seeing what the next year brings!

Web: https://goodbrewingco.com
Instagram: @goodbrewingco
Facebook: facebook.com/goodbrewingco

Every year I get sucked into the Monopoly game at Safeway, and most times I finish thinking, “Well that wasn’t at all worth my time.” This year was probably the worst though. Last year was pretty good with the easy ability to collect lots of free movie rentals on Fandango and some gift cards. This year the only thing I got was one gas discount ($0.10/gallon for one fillup), one free Fandango rental and three free donut coupons. They made the free Fandango rentals extremely difficult to acquire and threw in a bunch of ridiculous coupons and discounts that hold no interest for me.

One big positive for this year was that the phone app not only lets you scan in the second chance pieces, but it also keeps track of your Monopoly properties for you. The skeptic would say that I never won anything because their app was “keeping track of my pieces”. Possible but not plausible.

I got a few free item coupons too but those items are always out of stock and is it really worth it to spend time trying to hunt down free packets of gravy?

So this year was a bust, but I’ll probably get suckered in again next year.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.  He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.  Come and see the place where he lay.  Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee.  There you will see him.  Now I have told you.”  Matthew 28:5-7

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