Studio711.com – Ben Martens

“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

Want more?

Tyla and I have been part of numerous security breaches over the past couple years. I’m confident that all of our private data is floating around out on websites to be easily purchased for a surprisingly small amount of money. (Seriously, you can buy tens of thousands of credit card numbers for less than the cost of going out to dinner.) A couple months ago, I put a fraud alert on our credit reports. It’s free and it basically adds a note that says that you have to be called before any new credit is opened. That’s a good step, but it only lasts for 90 days and it’s not bulletproof.

I recently took it a step further and put a full credit freeze on our account. Nobody can see our credit report while it is frozen which is an even bigger red flag for creditors to see before they extend a new line of credit. There are plenty of downsides to it though. If we ever need have our credit reports checked (buying a car, signing up for a new cell phone, etc), we have to go through some extra steps to unfreeze the report. And oh yeah there are three credit agencies and oh yeah, two of them charge $10 to toggle the freeze flag.

Before you do anything like this, you should understand all the ramifications by reading the FTC page. Herb Weisbaum, the Consumer Man, has a good article that also talks about some of the other services that the credit agencies are offering that are more convenient (and cheaper) than the full freeze. But read the fine print and understand that you’re probably saving money because they are selling a bunch of your data. That was a deal breaker for me.

If you decide to go through with the full freeze, grab your credit card (remember it will cost you about $21 to do this) and head to these three sites:

Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
TransUnion: https://freeze.transunion.com/
Equifax: https://www.freeze.equifax.com

Each one will give you a pin which you need to keep in a safe place so you can unlock your credit report at some point down the road.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s nice to know that I’m much less likely to have surprise credit cards opened up in my name.

Tyla and I recently finished watching the Indiana Jones trilogy. It was her first time seeing any of them and she at least enjoyed them enough to watch all three. Honestly I’m not sure that I ever saw the entire second movie. I remember watching it on TV as a kid and always shutting it off at the eyeball soup part. The third one is my favorite by far. Sean Connery is an excellent addition to the cast and there are so many memorable scenes.

Logan asked me how well the movies held up. There are definitely some cheesy special effects and some laughable plot moments, but overall, they still seemed good. I’m no movie critic, but there wasn’t much of the incredibly slow pacing that you sometimes find with movies that are a couple decades old.

A fifth Indiana Jones is slated for the summer of 2019. The bar is set very low after the train wreck of a fourth movie. Disney wasn’t in charge for that movie, but they are for this new one so hopefully they do a better job.

Monopoly is back at Safeway (and related grocery stores.) I know it’s a ridiculous game and the odds of winning anything are astronomically low, but for some reason I still find it fun. And last year I did win a reasonable amount of small stuff so why not go for it again.

During the “off season”, I had spent a little time futzing around with a phone application that would read playing pieces and keep track of how you were doing along your futile journey to win prizes. I even thought you could get into a group with friends and digitally pool your playing pieces for a little better chance at winning something. I’m glad I didn’t spend too much time on that because they have improved the app that comes with the game. Not only can you scan the bar codes for the second chance prizes like last year, but now you can also scan a 2D barcode on the back of the playing pieces. It figures out what all four pieces are and keeps track of your progress in the app. You still need to keep the physical playing pieces to redeem your prize, but this automates away a lot of the time consuming part.

I’ll do another post in a couple months and let you know how it turned out this year. If you aren’t playing and want to fuel this silliness, feel free to pass your tokens along to me.

For the past few months, I’ve been getting multiple telemarketing calls per day. Some are legit-ish (the police fundraising, NRA, etc) and others are just blatant violations of the do not call registry from randomized phone numbers. The Truecaller app does help, but it’s not perfect and it’s not as good as having them not call at all. It’s time to try something new.

Lifehacker published an article written by a telemarketer about how to get him to stop calling. Ignoring the calls or hanging up after you realize what it is won’t actually help. The best way to get off the call lists is to be polite and a complete dud of a sale. This article goes into more detail, but the summary is to say “No thank you” to every question and don’t engage in any conversation.

I’m going to give this a shot and see what happens. If it backfires and my phone rings all day, you can laugh when I make another post saying that I’m changing my phone number.

I married Tyla despite the fact that she had never seen Star Wars, Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings. I know, right? She did eventually watch Lord of the Rings with me, and now that Indiana Jones is on Amazon Prime Video, we’ve started watching that trilogy. (Despite what you may have heard, there are only three videos in the series. The fourth one is a myth.) She liked the first one well enough that I think we’ll watch the next two which is good because The Last Crusade” is my favorite.

Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark got me thinking about a bunch of my favorite movies from the 80s. Here is a list of some favorites in no particular order:

• Ernest Goes To Camp. This is my standard answer whenever someone asks for my favorite movie.
• Short Circuit
• Iron Eagle
• Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade
• The Princess Bride
• The Three Amigos
• Top Gun
• Caddyshack
• A Christmas Story
• National Lampoons: Christmas Vacation
• Back to the Future (all of them)
• E.T.
• Field of Dreams

What did I miss?

Bob Clagett is one of my favorite YouTubers and podcasters. Last December, he released his first book called “Making Time“. The book is a collection of thoughts about how he made the transition from 9-5 employee to full time maker while being a husband and dad. As the name implies, the book largely centers around making good use of time and fitting everything into his schedule. It’s a quick read and it has a lot of good insights about how to be a more efficient and effective human.

Along those same lines, I recently read a quote in a book that has really stuck with me: “How you spend your day is how you spend your life.” (It’s not a unique quote to that book but it’s the first time I think I’ve heard it.) This could be interpreted a few ways but it always pops into mind when I’m wasting time on my cell phone or sitting on the couch in the evening instead of creating something in the garage or on the computer. It’s easy to dream big for the future and have lots of great ideas, but if you’re not working on those dreams every day, you’re not going to get there.

On the Making It podcast, Bob said that this year he was going to try to stop wasting time. It’s so simple to say and so hard to do, but I bet we could all find an extra 15 minutes a day to spend in a more valuable way. Those little chunks of time can really add up to some impressive accomplishments!

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.

Our other summer vacations included Memorial Day weekend at Discovery Bay, a week in Indiana, and our long road trip to Fort Peck, MT. Spending 4 out of 6 days on the road with a four year old turned out about as perfectly as it could (aside from the crazy car trouble at 4am as we were trying to leave.) He did fantastic and now it has us thinking about some other road trips that we might take.Between the funeral and the Brandt family reunion, we got to spend a lot of time with Tyla’s extended family. I finally feel like I know most of the kind people who send us Christmas cards every year! It was nice for them all to meet Elijah too.

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.

Hiking Camp Muir with a group that big and vary different schedules means that you randomly pick a date on the calendar and pray for good weather. Thankfully, the weather was PERFECT. The smoke from the wildfires cleared out and we had blue skies and perfect temperatures. I beat my previous time by 40 minute (16%) so I was very happy about that. I didn’t feel nearly as tired the next day either so I’d say our hikes leading up to this one were chosen well. The only downside to the day was that Tim was planning to come with us but he got injured shortly before the hike. So that just means we’ll be doing it again. Tim, let us know when you’re ready and we’ll put it on the calendar!

I continued on with the woodworking hobby, and in the beginning of the year, I made my biggest tool investment yet: a beefy new Grizzly table saw. That continues to be solid purchase in my book and it gets a lot of use. Projects this year included a set of wooden blocks, a plant bench, a Washington bottle cap map, an anniversary photo printed on wood for my parents, piano book shelves, a couple Mother’s Day signs, the Instagram photo frame (my favorite project of the year!), magnetic coasters, laser cut decorations for Elijah’s birthday, a cutting board, a jewelry holder tree, two wood signs carved with a router, a storage closet makeover, a wood semi with two trailers, a marquetry butterfly, and a drum. I feel productive when I read that! Even with all those things checked off the list, my project idea list has grown so I better keep going.

See you in 2018!

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016