Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Commentary

COVID-19: Part 4

I’ve now completed two weeks of working from home and it doesn’t feel like we’re at the halfway point yet. I’m seeing more and more empty shelves from people panic-buying and most of the world is still firmly on the path of exponentially increasing case counts.

But before I talk about any of that, let’s stop and be thankful for a few things:

  1. There is a huge shortage of things like bleach, toilet paper and hand sanitzer. But not only are the local stores not jacking up the prices, they’re keeping their normal sales! I saw a shelf that said “please limit yourself to 2 items” right next to a “Buy 1 Get 1” sign. Capitalism (or price gouging depending on your position) is rampant in the secondary markets, but it’s worth being thankful when you pay $2 for a loaf of bread instead of $200.
  2. As Tyla and I discussed the “crisis” and “emergency”, it dawned on me that I’m sitting on a couch, watching TV on a projector, enjoying a full stomach and a heated house.

That list could go on and on and I think it’s important to regularly enumerate your own reasons to be thankful, especially in this scenario when it’s so easy to focus on the negatives. Keep those reasons to be thankful in mind as we dive into the reality of the situation…

I’ll throw a very uneducated guess out and say that around Tuesday of next week, we’ll cross one million cases world wide (assuming we have enough test kits to prove that.) [UPDATE 3/20: Oops, when I made that estimate, I forgot that China’s cases aren’t growing at the same rate anymore. That means we’d cross 500k around Tuesday and it takes us until the end of the week to get to a million.] This is going to get worse before it gets better. The one page of data that I keep going back to is one compiled by Mark Handley: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ Every country is following the exact same growth rates, and, aside from China and South Korea, nobody looks to be anywhere near having this under control. Buckle up, we’re just getting started.

Locally, it’s hard to get a grasp on how seriously people are taking the social distancing. For example, this photo gallery shows a lot of empty scenes where normally there would be crowds of people. But if you drive around during the day, there are plenty of people on the roads.

As an elder at church, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about what to do with our services and how we can continue to minister to people as our ability to meet is restricted. For now we’re moving to having small devotions with individual families and doing more online. We’re also discussing how this will affect Easter because it feels very unlikely that we’ll be back to normal by April 12.

At home we’re continuing to make changes and lock it down. Tyla is starting to get into a routine doing her best to homeschool Elijah. What a blessing to have a wife who went to college to be a teacher! We’re also blessed to have a supportive school providing us with lots of materials.

Last fall we booked a vacation that we’ve been dreaming of for a long time: Disney Aulani. We spent a long time deciding if we were willing to spend that much on a vacation, but once we pulled the trigger, we were very excited for it. We were scheduled to leave a week from Saturday. Today I canceled the trip. While we are bummed to miss out on this, I’m very thankful that with the exception of the airline, we got 100% of our money back. And the airline changed their “sorry you bought a nonrefundable ticket” policy to give us a credit that can be used through the end of the year. So I’m trying to view it as “Hey, we have a gift card for a free flight to Hawaii and back!”

There are an infinite number of unanswerable questions about what the next couple months will look like. Personally I’m focusing on a lot of prayer, doing the best I can to make sure my family stays healthy both physically and mentally, and making sure we have food to eat. Time spent being anxious is time that would have been better spent praising God and trusting him to care for us.

Philippians 4:4-7 4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

benmartens March 19, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19: Part 3

There were a lot of questions when I wrote the previous post. There are even more now, but we do have some answers mixed in. Will schools close? Yep. All schools in the state are closed until late April and many across the country are closed too. Will more restrictions be put in place? Yep. No gatherings of more than 250 people and if you do have a gathering smaller than that, there are restrictions about how your employees must be trained, the minimum distance between people, etc.

Is this an overreaction? That’s one we don’t have an answer for. At this point I feel like if we’re going to do this, then let’s do it. Let’s learn everything we can to make ourselves smarter for next time, but for now? Let’s lock it down. We don’t know what the right answer is, but I’m guessing we’re less likely to regret shutting things down. All of these dates about how long things will be closed are fuzzy. We just need to see that exponential curve start to flatten.

Humans aren’t great at absorbing the implications of math, especially in two ways that make this a tough problem. First, it’s hard to grasp the speed of exponential growth. Delaying by even a single day can mean thousands of additional people get infected. And since it seems that most symptoms take around five days to appear, we’re much farther up that curve than the numbers show right now.

The second math complication is that humans don’t process probability well. It’s called “neglect of probability“. It’s either not going to happen or it’s definitely going to happen. Will millions of people die from this disease? Will we run out of food? Will toilet paper be the next BitCoin? None of these are 0% or 100%, but treating them as such leads to a lot of irrational behavior.

I’ve completed 7 days of working from home and Elijah will be off of school for six weeks. Sporting seasons are being canceled. Most public events are canceled. Travel is locked down to some other countries. And so we’re back to the most divisive question: too much or not enough?

We have quite a bit of data at our fingertips. We can compare countries who did too little with those who reacted quickly. There are a lot of good articles out there and I specifically recommend one from Tomas Pueyo and another from a group of researchers and foundations. The second one is especially eye opening because their conclusion on March 10 was that this area wasn’t doing enough to stop the spread yet. A lot more measures have been put in place since then so hopefully the predictions have improved, if they were correct to begin with.

On a more micro level, our family is chugging along. It’s a tough situation to plan for. Trips to Costco and Safeway both showed a lot of people stocking up. I’m not sure if there is some secret, delicious recipe for toilet paper, but if you don’t have it now, you’re not going to find it. We’re well-stocked here (including ammo so don’t think about it… kidding… sort of.)

I’m blessed to have a job that allows me to work from home. Our team is adjusting well and I think we’re getting into a productive groove. My only real hangup is that this desk that I built in 2013 has never been the most comfortable thing. I can’t figure out exactly what it is, but a day at this desk leaves my back feeling sore. Since we’re going to have such a long spell of working from home, I ordered an electric base for a standup desk. I use mine a lot at work and it has always felt like too much of a luxury for home, but this situation pushed me over the edge. I saved some money by purchasing only the base. I’ll start with a simple plywood top but eventually I want to put a beautiful walnut top on it.

So we continue to chug along a day at a time. It’s amazing how many conversations I have about this single topic. I find myself wishing for a day where I don’t have to think about it. My hope is that once we get to “peak lockdown”, we’ll hit “peak panic” too and just hang tight for a while.

Psalm 91
1 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
    will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
    my God, in whom I trust.”
benmartens March 14, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19: Part 2

On Friday I woke up to the news that someone in our division had tested positive. The company notified everyone who was likely to have been in close proximity to him. It was in another building so it’s highly unlikely that I crossed paths with him, but it does make the “everyone work from home” recommendation seem like more of an obvious good move.

The first couple days of working from home were less productive than normal, but I think our team is getting settled in. I was asked to collect some best practices and set expectations about how we will interact and stay in our highly-collaborative mode even though we’re separated. Thankfully, collaboration tools have gotten a lot better in recent years, and while there are a lot of things I’d change about Microsoft Teams, it really is an excellent service.

Over the weekend, life continued to be pretty normal. We met up with Tyla’s family on Saturday to celebrate Logan’s birthday and then we went to Pizza Coop for dinner. I wasn’t sure what to expect there, but it felt like a very normal Saturday evening crowd. Church was well-attended on Sunday as well. The grocery stores are well-stocked, and other than news stories and less traffic than normal, there’s very little to indicate that anything odd is going on.

But it’s that normalcy that feels the strangest. Major snowstorms and power outages have a visible component and it’s easy for me to understand what I can do to help keep my family safe. But in this case, it’s a silent virus floating around. Could we do everything as normal and not be affected? Have we already come in contact with it and not caught it? Are we on the brink of exponential growth in the infection rate? None of these things are knowable or measurable. Life goes on except that every time someone coughs, heads snap in their direction and people scoot away.

It remains to be seen whether our current efforts will be effective in stopping the spread of COVID-19, but I’m also interested to see what effect our improved hygiene has on standard illnesses like colds and the flu. Will those numbers be noticeably lower because we’re all washing our hands more often and staying home even when we have a little cough? I’d like to think that improved hygiene will be something we all take away from this, but the reality is that we’ll probably revert to our old ways a few months after this scare is over and we’re on to the election coverage.

benmartens March 9, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19

This blog serves a few purposes, but one of the major ones is being a (public) journal. It’s interesting, for example, to look back at my thoughts right after the planes crashed on September 11. The spread of COVID-19 feels like one of those events that we’ll remember for a long time so it felt worthy of at least one post, but this probably won’t be the last one.

First of all, I feel like me calling it COVID-19 instead of “the coronavirus” is similar to my failed stand on calling drones by their proper name of “quadcopters.”

With that out of the way, let’s talk about how we got to this point. Right around the end of last year, it was becoming clear that something was happening in Wuhan, China. As I traveled to Israel around the end of January, there were a few thousand cases in China, and while I was in Israel, the first case was identified in Everett, WA.

From that point, it has continued to spread more throughout China and around the world. While the flu has hospitalized 3-4 times as many people as COVID-19 so far this year, there are two things that make COVID-19 scarier:

  1. The transmission rate appears to be a bit higher than the flu with around 2.2 people catching it for every 1 person who gets it.
  2. The death rate is much higher. COVID-19 is killing around 3.4% of the people who catch it and the flu only kills about 0.1%.

That’s what we know today. One challenge is that new data is arriving all the time as the world’s scientific community joins forces to figure this virus out. The numbers above might be totally wrong because we still don’t have a good idea of how many people have caught it. There are some theories that say 40-70% of people have already been exposed to the virus while others are saying that only a tiny fraction of people have been exposed. Or if we ignore that question, it makes sense that the virus is more fatal to the elderly and immuno-compromised, but why are kids getting infected at an extremely low rate? Is it because there’s something special about the virus? Do they have an immunity? Or are they always so sniffly and coughy that we don’t notice?

If COVID-19 really would take out 2% of the population and if we can’t stop it, that translates to 10s of millions of people dead. That could decrease dramatically if we take drastic measures and quarantine everyone. But every day you do that spreads panic and destroys the economy, so nobody wants to make that call. But if you want it to be effective, it needs to happen early or else it doesn’t help as much. There’s just not enough information to know what is the right decision.

As of Wednesday, the county where we live (King County) recommended that employers make it easy for employees to work from home if possible. My company quickly followed up with an email to all employees in this region asking us to default to working from home for the next three weeks. Our school district also closed for at least the next two weeks. Elijah goes to school farther north so those schools aren’t closed yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that they will follow in this path.

As I mentioned early, we’re the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States so the responses here are the most drastic in the country. The first deaths were literally a few miles from my house. As I drive home, there are news crews reporting in front of the school right across the street from my house.

Thankfully at this point businesses are still open and the supply chain is still flowing. Grocery store shelves are full (as long as you’re not looking for toilet paper or hand sanitizer) and gas stations have plenty of fuel. Driving around feels weird because traffic is so light with many people staying home, but everything else is fairly normal. It’s different from the shortages and quiet that you get when there is a snowstorm or power outage.

We ended up visiting the doctor today for a cough that Elijah’s had for weeks which morphed into a fever yesterday. Thankfully the fever disappeared quickly but the doctor still wanted to check him for pneumonia which can hit kids quickly. Both the nurse and the doctor wore face masks and plastic face shields. The appointment basically just confirmed that Elijah doesn’t have pneumonia or the flu and we can just watch it for a while. Oh and if you’re curious, our doctor is still flying out for a trip on Friday and has no concerns about doing so.

The news is flooded with stories ranging from speculation to useful facts as every website tries to get as much click-bait out there as possible. This is big money. My recommendation is to stick to sources like the CDC and WHO or simple, fact-based info like this handy dashboard from Johns Hopkins. Otherwise it’s easy to get sucked into a vortex of anxiety reading article after article about the unknowns and what-ifs.

I admit to getting sucked into that vortex as I think about how to care for my family through this situation. But the other night after one of those sessions of reading a few too many random articles, I laid in bed listening to the frogs croaking. They have no idea what’s going on, nor would they care if they did. I was reminded of the words of Matthew 6:

25“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

28“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

benmartens March 6, 2020 Commentary

1000 Beers

In early 2013, I signed up for Untappd and rated my first beer in the app: Fat Tire. Since then, I’ve rode the wave of the growing craft beer scene and continued to sample new beers whenever I have the chance. Recently, I tried my 1000th different beer, so I thought I’d share some thoughts and stats from my tour de beer.

Other than the first year when I was just getting into this, I average about one new beer every three days. 2019 was more like 2 every three days as I got closer and closer to the 1000 mark.

December is the month when I try the most new beers which makes sense because I have family members who enjoy craft beer too so we regularly bring new beer to family gatherings.

Dad jumped on the app early on and then Luke joined too. Logan joined later but he’s off to a good start. (Many other friends and family members have joined as well but this chart just shows the top users that I know.)

Ben (blue), Luke (purple), Dad (red), Logan (green)

Untappd has added more and more stops along their scoring slider but I stick to the whole numbers. I devote three values to fairly good beers and only two to the beers I don’t like as much.

5. Excellent beer. Search this out!
4. Great beer. Pick this anytime without regret.
3. Good beer. I would pay money to drink this.
2. Meh. If you hand me this, I’ll drink it but I won’t pay money for it.
1. If you had me this beer, I’ll decline.
0. Gross. I’ll pour this out.

Only a few beers have ever gotten a 0. One is Bud Light Lime and another is some disgusting jalapeno beer that I had at the beer festival. I couldn’t even get through my taster of it.

Overall my ratings follow a pretty normal distribution, skewed slightly toward the higher end which makes sense because I generally drink beers that I think I’ll like.

I started off enjoying mostly ambers and ESBs, but I’ve developed a strong taste for IPAs. Those dominate my fridge these days with New England style IPAs being my absolute favorite. Here is a breakdown of the different styles of beer (where I’ve had at least 10 of them) and the average rating for each one. Inside each category, I generally find both a 1 and a 5. It’s possible to make any style terrible or great.

StyleCountAverage Rating
IPA5463.46
Extra Special123.42
Blonde Ale173.29
Pale Ale1053.27
Pale Wheat Ale142.98
Pilsner322.91
Red Ale482.78
Lager572.19
Stout132.15

My average ratings have increased slightly over the years as I hone in more on the types that I enjoy.

Some people seem a bit skeptical when I rate a beer but countless times I’ve rated a beer and then looked it up to find that I’ve already had the beer… and I gave it the same rating years earlier. The first 100 ratings might be a little wonky as I figured it out, but since then I think I’ve been very consistent.

Finally, let’s look at my favorite and least favorite breweries. For this list I filtered to places where I’ve tried at least 5 different beers. Kevin has the well-deserved top spot!

BreweryAverage RatingCount
GBC – The Good Brewing Company4.3437
Full Sail Brewing Company3.888
Sumerian Brewing Co.3.758
Firestone Walker Brewing Company3.7113
Hop Valley Brewing Company3.6411
Georgetown Brewing Company3.577
10 Barrel Brewing Company3.5019
Lagunitas Brewing Company3.5010
Founders Brewing Co.3.508
Fish Brewing Company3.506

And here are the breweries that consistently make beer that I don’t like:

BreweryAverage RatingCount
Pyramid Breweries2.4212
Elysian Brewing2.1811
BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse2.147
Blue Moon Brewing Company2.086
Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams)2.0525

This has been an unexpectedly fun hobby. I keep saying that once I get to X different beers, I’m going to stop and just start ordering the ones I love. Maybe I’ll slow down a bit but I really enjoy trying new beers. Cheers!

benmartens February 19, 2020 Commentary

Fantasy Football 2019 – Season Wrapup

It felt like the Seahawks played a pretty solid game in Philadelphia and they were almost certainly helped out by in-game injuries to key Eagles players. Next week they’ll have an even tougher opponent in Lambeau, but according to the projections, neither of those teams have a great shot at beating the 49ers. Over in the AFC it’s looking like the Ravens will be Super Bowl bound, but it’s the NFL and anything can happen… unless it really is all rigged in which case only the scripted story can happen.

I looked through the stats from this year and found it interesting that Tim dominated the league while only making about a half does changes to his team! I made a lot more transactions (2nd most behind Logan) and got the most points in the league from my signings after the daft:

  • Tim had 2027.1 points from his draft team
  • Ben got 856.51 from post draft acquisitions

After dominating the league last year, Mahomes was solid again this year with 339.04 points but Lamar Jackson crushed everyone with 487.68 which is a whopping 74.48 more than second place! However, that second place scorer is Christian McCaffrey and it’s rare that we get anything other than a QB in our top spots. To find the next non-QB, you have to go down to Michael Thomas in 15th with 300.10 points. You can find the full list here.

Here is wall of glory for our league. Congratulations to Tim for not only taking his first victory, but making his first appearance in the top 3 since 2014 when he finished 3rd. And honorable mention goes to Tyler who has been in the championship game both years in the league!

1st Place2nd Place3rd Place
2019Beer-meKrazy KanuckGoat Ropers
2018RAAAWWWRRRRR!!!Krazy KanuckGoat Ropers
2017Goat RopersKool Aid KidHelmetheads
2016Goat RoperscmdLimeRAAAWWWRRRRR!!!
2015cmdLimeGoat RopersKool Aid Kid
2014cmdLimeTheMountainsBeer-me
2013Goat RopersRAAAWWWRRRRR!!!EndOverEnd
2012Kool Aid KidGoat RopersRAAAWWWRRRRR!!!
2011RAAAWWWRRRRR!!!We Like SportzKool Aid Kid
2010HelmetheadsThe ShockersKool Aid Kid
2009HelmetheadsEnd Over EndiSetty
2008Kool Aid KidTimoteoThe Mountains
2007The MountainsKool Aid KidHelmetheads

And finally, I pulled the full finishing order for every year and calculated some stats for each manager. It’s a little goofy with some people who joined the league for a year or two and left but I’ll leave them in there.

SeasonsWin %Avg RankWorst RankBest RankPlayoff %
Micah10.862.00221.00
Logan100.613.30710.70
Tyler20.612.00221.00
Ben130.593.46810.85
Ryan10.578.00880.00
Austin60.543.83810.67
Tim130.514.62810.54
Andy120.494.33710.42
Luke130.494.77910.46
Dad130.455.54820.38
Jim110.414.91810.36
Nick20.395.00550.00
Ed30.346.67850.33
Kyle40.326.751030.25

I hope to see you all back next year! But if you want out, please let me know as soon as you can because I’ll want to find a replacement.

benmartens January 9, 2020 Commentary

2019 Year In Review

I feel like I start these off every year by talking about how fast the year went. I still think back to those days in my early 20s when I lived alone and would actually get bored sometimes on the weekends. I can’t remember the last time I was bored. There’s a never ending list to keep me going.

However, since I realize that going full speed all the time isn’t great, I have made a conscious effort to spend more time sitting at the piano every day. Not only is it learning a skill but it’s very relaxing and enjoyable. I’m so thankful that back in 2007, I bought a digital piano (Korg C303) instead of an acoustic one. While it’s not a perfect replacement, there’s no way I could have played so much this year without the ability to plug in headphones. My biggest accomplishment on the piano was learning how to play the first movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto. It was far from concert perfection, but given how far out of my reach it was, I was happy to get it polished to the point that I did.

Elijah started taking lessons too. A piano teacher comes to his school and pull kids out of class for 30 minutes each week for a private lesson. It’s extremely convenient and Elijah is really taking to it well. As with most kids, it’s still difficult to get him to practice every day, but I think he’s having more fun now that he sees the results and can play a few Christmas songs. For his first recital he played Away in the Manger and it went great. I’ll play it with him as a duet in church on Sunday as well.

If you had asked me a year and a half ago where Elijah was going to first grade, I would have said Woodmoor. It’s less than a half mile walk for the two schools that Elijah would use through 7th grade. The proximity to the schools was one of the factors in us buying this house. It’s incredibly convenient and most of our neighbors go there. But… last fall on the marriage retreat, a Pastor suggested that we check out the Missouri synod school up in Lake Stevens. I didn’t even realize there was one and that’s probably because it’s a solid 30-40 minute drive from our house. Elijah repeatedly told us “I want to go to a school where they teach me about Jesus.” After visiting the school and praying a lot about it, we decided to give it a try, and we sure are glad we did! The drive has been even harder than we thought it would be but Tyla is doing a wonderful job with that. She’s also able to volunteer at the school with things like art class, field trips and class parties. So even though we’re probably the family who lives the farthest away, we are feeling like we’re getting connected with their community.

This was the first year that Elijah really started playing organized sports. I thought I’d sign him up for tee ball and was surprised to find out that I had missed that by two years! He went straight into the machine-pitch baseball league. As one of the youngest players on the team, it was a struggle for him to figure out hitting and stay focused, but he loved seeing his teammates regularly and forming a bond with them. He decided he wanted to try it again this year so we’ll see how season #2 goes. This fall he has been in a basketball league too. It’s a fantastic program that is run like a basketball camp that meets once a week in the evenings for 1.5 hours. So the time commitment is much lower than baseball, but he’s constantly learning instead of sitting around during a game wondering if he’ll get the ball or get off the bench. I wish we could find a program like that for every sport that he likes!

Work has been busy for me but also rewarding. There are two patent applications sitting at the patent office right now with my name on them. I met with a lawyer and drew up a patent this spring and then in the fall I was added to the list of names on a patent for a project that I worked on a couple years ago. It will be fun to see if either of those get accepted in a few years.

Tyla and I both lost a grandparent this year. Tyla’s grandma on her mom’s side and my grandma on my dad’s side both passed away. We were thankful that both had a strong faith in Jesus as their Savior so we know we’ll see them in heaven, and we were also thankful that we were able to travel (alone) for the funerals. We were each able to catch up with our respective families.

We took a long summer vacation this year that started all the way out in Maine with a return to Camp Ticawa! We are so thankful to the Abendroths for letting us invade their family time and making us feel so welcome. Elijah fit right in with all the kids and we had a wonderful time. After spending about a week there, we flew to Indiana for a week with my family. So we went from spending lots of time in the lake to spending lots of time in the pool! This trip was extra special as we flew Don out to spend a few days with us as a retirement present for him.

I feel like I haven’t done as many woodworking projects this year, but it’s still a good-sized list: custom thermostat plate, Washington ornaments, mobile strawberry tower, Ticawa sign, loft for Elijah’s bed, Modern Rogue sign, name puzzle, and spaceship. I purchased a CNC machine right around the end of last year and I got a lot more comfortable with it over the year. I have a never-ending list of ideas that i want to try on that machine! Right now I’m working on my hardest project yet which is a dresser out of walnut and cherry. The plans come from Marc Spanguolo in the Wood Whisperer Guild. The plans come with hours of detailed videos showing every step so I’m just plodding along and learning a lot of new woodworking skills. It feels kind of similar to learning that Bach piece on the piano in that this is way over my head but I think if I just keep at it, I’ll be proud of it in the end.

After being the trustee (property maintenance) at church for 7 of the previous 8 years, this year I switched to being an elder. My responsibilities are assisting Pastor with his duties and ensuring that he stays true to the teachings of God’s Word. In addition to the regular monthly council meetings, Pastor has been meeting with the elders twice a month to study through the Grace Abounds book by Daniel Deutschlander. If you already share my faith or if you’re curious to learn more about it, you’d be hard pressed to find a more thorough and pleasant to read explanation than this book.

The final thing I’ll mention from this year is that you may have noticed a decreased presence from me on this site and on social media. I’m getting more and more “itchy” when I think about all the information that our family puts out in the internet. So I made quite a few changes:

  • I unfollowed literally everyone on Facebook (unfollowed, not unfriended.) I no longer feel the urge to check Facebook 5 times a day to see if there is anything new there. When I want to see what someone is up to, I type in their name and go look at their page.
  • I deleted almost all of my comments, likes, photos and posts from Facebook. It would probably have been easier to delete my account but I still find it useful for messaging and events.
  • I’ve been archiving many of my old Instagram posts. That’s a slow process because it’s very manual. The Facebook change was faster because there are some plugins for Chrome that help automate it.
  • I flipped my Instagram account to private and dropped the random followers that I don’t know. My woodworking account is still public though.
  • I post a lot less to Instagram too. I use the Stories feature for random stuff because it disappears in 24 hours and I try to think of the photos that I post as more of a portfolio of pictures or events that I think are extra special.
  • I set almost every pre-2014 post on this site to private. They still exist so if you’re looking for something specific, I can quickly find it and flip it back to public. I’ll probably keep doing that and decreasing the amount of archive that I leave public.

In the past I’ve felt like it was fun to have such a detailed digital record of my life, but now it feels dirty to know how many companies are collecting all that info and using it for their own gain. I’m still a digital packrat at home, but I’m starting to circle the wagons a bit in public.

So now we’re on the verge of 2020… the year I turn the big four oh. I’m thankful for everything that God has provided in 2019 and look forward to seeing how he blesses and challenges us in 2020!

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

benmartens December 31, 2019 Commentary, Family

Merry Christmas

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.

benmartens December 25, 2019 Commentary

Ned Forrester’s Namesake

We watch a lot of Dude Perfect in this house. We’ve been through the entire back catalog and we’re going through the Nickelodeon show on Hulu now. One of our favorite characters is when Tyler plays Ned Forrester. It seemed like some random name so I never thought twice about it until the other night when they showed an exterior shot of their old office. Look at what is next door… Ed Forster, State Farm rep!

benmartens December 2, 2019 Commentary

Campus Update

If you live in the area and haven’t driven through the Microsoft campus recently, take a little time to drive down 156th and prepare for a shock. An enormous chunk of the main campus is now a giant hole. There is a main project page that shows the overall project vision, but a few weeks ago, they also published an aerial time lapse showing the demolition. It’s hard to get a real sense of the progress from street level so it’s neat to see this from the sky.

It’s going to take years for this to complete but it’s not for lack of effort. There are a constant stream of trucks going in and out. Click that link above for the full story because it has some very interesting stats at the bottom. When we walk around campus, I like to see how many dump truck loads of dirt people think are being removed. That article says it was around 1 million cubic yards which comes out to something like 60,000 truck loads!

benmartens October 18, 2019 Commentary