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Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Last week I wrote about our trip to central WA. Part of the fun of those trips for me is the logistics of doing it with an electric vehicle. This one was a particular challenge because there are no superchargers up around the Grand Coulee Dam and it was going to be a long loop. If we left with 90% charge my estimate was that we’d get back with 15%. That’s ok, but it’s about the minimum that I ever shoot for.

While the Tesla itself will do everything it can to avoid you running out of power (as long you tell it where you’re going), my favorite pre-planning tool is A Better Route Planner. I’ve got the knobs tuned really well for our car and I can often predict it as good or better than the car itself at the start of a long drive.

To buy us a little extra cushion, I planned for us to eat a picnic lunch at the Gehrke Windmill Garden which Plug Share said had a handful of free NEMA 14-50 plugs which are good for about 10% battery charge per hour. I haven’t yet made any plans that require one of those random free spots to be functional, but I was happy to try it out and it did indeed work well. We added 6% to our battery while we ate and in the end, we made it back to the supercharger in Moses Lake with 20% so without the 6% charge we would have only been 1% off my pre-trip estimate.

When we do a trip like this, I always travel with our mobile connector and all my various adapters. If we got into a big bind, I would pull into an RV park and ask if I could pay $20 to take a couple dollars of electricity from them. We’ve never needed it, but it’s nice to have that as an option if we ever really got into a bind.

This probably sounds crazy to non-EV people and it would have made me way more nervous before we got into the EV world, but now I just view it as expanding my comfort level. When we first got the car I got nervous when we dropped below 50% charge. Now I’m much happier to play games to optimize our supercharging (15-50% is MUCH faster than 50-85% for example) and I’ll try to arrive at home with 10% or lower so that I can “fill up” with much cheaper electricity at home. Part of the fun of all this for me is knowing that in 10-20 years, this will all sound silly because there will be so many chargers everywhere. Our family goal is to hit every county in Washington. Privately I’m keeping track of which counties we hit in the Tesla versus our gas truck because I think it would be fun to say we hit them all in an EV. Some of the northeast and southeast counties will be quite a challenge!

Bonus fact: The Model Y was already the world’s best-selling vehicle in 2023 and now it is very close to being the best-selling vehicle in the US, already having knocked off the F150 and hot on the heels of the Rav4.

For our big family vacation this year, we chose a cruise to Alaska! Tyla and I did two cruises (cruise 1 post and cruise 2 post) before Elijah was born, but we had saved an Alaskan cruise because it was so easy to do. Sometimes those easy/local things get put off for a long time!

This cruise was on Royal Caribbean’s “Quantum of the Seas” ship. We chose it because our first two cruises were with Royal Caribbean and the related Celebrity cruise line. We knew they had good family programs and Elijah was still within the age limit for their kids club.

We had four stops on this cruise:

• Icy Strait Point, Alaska – This isn’t really a town. It’s a purpose-built cruise port and the small fishing village of Hoonah is nearby. We didn’t schedule an excursion here and just ended up walking along the shore about halfway to the town before returning. The popular activity here is a giant zipline. It was cool to set foot in Alaska for the first time, but the port didn’t wow us. While we were parked in the port, we spotted a few whales!
• Skagway, Alaska – We were excited for this port because it was a bigger town and because we had booked a zipline excursion. (The most popular excursion is a train ride up into the Yukon.) Unfortunately, we never got to stop there! The winds were gusting over 40 knots, and they were blowing the ship around so much that it couldn’t dock safely. The captain tried twice but it didn’t work out so the rest of our itinerary was slightly modified. We were bummed to miss the port but thankful that we booked through the cruise line, so our excursion was immediately refunded.
• Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier – This wasn’t really a stop, but it was a “view from the ship” destination. We drove through the narrow fjord called Endicott Arm. It’s only about a half mile wide so getting a giant cruise ship through there is a bit of a feat. The Dawes glacier is at the end of the fjord and there are an increasing number of icebergs along the way. We were excited to spot seals on one of the icebergs as we went by. We went as far as we could before the icebergs got too thick and then the captain spun the ship around so we could all view it easily.

• Juneau, Alaska – Our modified itinerary gave us a full day in Juneau instead of just the afternoon. We got off the ship in the morning and spent a couple of hours walking around the shops near the port. After lunch back on the ship, we got off again for our Jeep excursion. This was basically a 4.5 hour car rental. The Jeep came preprogrammed with waypoints and a related audio guide. The best stop was the Mendenhall Glacier. We stopped at the main visitor center area and did a 2 mile hike out to Nugget Falls. It was pretty rainy all day, but we were prepared, and the Jeep was stocked with extra umbrellas. It also had gold panning equipment, but we only discovered at the very end that the gold panning spot wasn’t in the default waypoint list. We added that to our trip and spent a few quick minutes realizing that understanding the concept of panning for gold is a lot different than remembering how the different tools work in the cold rain while you’re in a hurry to get back to the ship! After returning the Jeep, we had about half an hour before they pulled up the gangway so Tyla and Elijah were kind enough to let me stop into Alaskan Brewing and have a beer.

• Victoria, British Columbia – There’s a US law that says a cruise cannot leave a US port and return to a US port without stopping in another country unless it is registered in the US. That would have huge tax implications for the cruise lines so there’s always at least a token stop in another country. In this case, we arrived in Victoria at 5pm and left at 10pm. Unless you’re eating dinner on shore and exploring in the dark, this isn’t really an ideal stop. We didn’t schedule an excursion but we did get out and walk around. We headed east out of the port along the coast and found ourselves out of the crowd and enjoying sunshine for one of the first times on the trip.

With the skipped Skagway stops and the two ports where we mostly just walked around, a lot of our time was spent on the ship. Thankfully the ship had a ton of things to keep us busy!

• SeaPlex – There was an indoor area on the top decks called the SeaPlex and we spent a lot of time there. Aside from the usual staples of ping pong, foosball, cornhole, etc, they had a big sports are that would change throughout the day. Over the course of the trip we used that area for bumper cars, roller skating, laser tag, soccer, and dodgeball. It was quite impressive and they did a good job of knowing which events needed to have a pre-registration so you didn’t have to wait in line for a long time.

• iFly – There is a chain of indoor skydiving places called “iFly” which is basically a cylinder on top of a giant fan that lets you practice free falling. The ship had one of these too! We pre-paid for an extended session which got us extra instruction and two 1-minute flights. One minute sounds short but it felt plenty long when we were in the tunnel. All three of us did that initial session. Later we discovered that we could also sign up for a single flight for free. I’m glad we did the paid session first because the free one included very little instruction. Tyla was nice enough to stand outside the tunnel and take pictures and video of Elijah and I flying!

• Rock climbing – There was a two-story rock-climbing wall on the side of the ship with a wide variety of routes for different skill levels. The wall was closed most of the time because of wind and rain, but Elijah got to spend about an hour there our last full day on the ship.

• Pools – The ship does have an outdoor pool, but it wasn’t used a lot on this cruise because of the weather. The indoor pool got a lot of use but somehow never seemed overly crowded. Elijah spent a lot of time in there and especially enjoyed it when the water was sloshing around during the rockier days at sea.

• FOOD – My main challenge on a cruise is figuring out how I’m going to be hungry enough for my next meal! The two basic choices for food are the main dining room and the buffet. We chose to eat our breakfasts and lunches in the buffet and then ate dinner in the dining room around 7 or 8pm every night. We chose the “My Time Dining” option which gave us a private table and the option to move our dining times around. We were very lucky to get a window table and the same great waiters every night. They would usually end up encouraging us to order multiple appetizers, entrees, and desserts so that we could sample many different items. Aside from all that great food, there were also endless ice cream cones, pizza, and hot dogs available. There are a lot of specialty restaurants that cost money, but we were more than happy with the included offerings.

• All Access Ship Tour – We paid for a 2.5-hour tour of the boat and got incredible behind the scenes access to backstage of the theater, galley, laundry, engineering, food storage, and even the bridge! They provided little speakers that hung on your ear which made it easy to hear what was going on. It’s amazing to see everything that needs to happen to keep 4000+ guests fed and entertained. There are people working extremely hard for long hours with no days off so that you can enjoy your time napping and overeating.

This cruise was quite different from our previous cruises.

• It was obviously much cooler and wetter than our Caribbean trips.
• In the Caribbean, we barely remember ever feeling the ship move, but the movement was impossible to ignore on this trip when you were walking around or lying in bed. It never bothered us or kept us from doing anything.
• On the first cruises I remember lots of naps and downtime where we would kill an hour or two just reading or staring at the ocean. With an 11-year-old in tow, that didn’t happen as often and we had to spend a lot more time figuring out how to keep him entertained and fill time. I once heard someone say that as a parent, you don’t take vacations, you just play tour guide for your kids. So my love of cruising so I don’t have to worry about logistics didn’t play out this time, but it was still worth it.

With the missed port and the different dynamics of having three people’s wishes to coordinate, I would say that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I booked it, but it turned out differently great. We have a lot of wonderful memories together and we’re all dreaming about doing it again!

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these updates, but I’m still loving the car and looking for excuses to drive it. We have 48,000 miles on it and we’re still on track to meet my goal of having this car cost the same or less over 100k miles than the car we would have purchased instead.

The topic today is a quick one with a big impact. Previously when you opened the app, it would immediately wake up the car. When the car is awake, it consumes a percent or two of battery just sitting there. Ideally it falls back into a very low power sleep mode quickly but sometimes that can take hours to happen. (Side note: why does it take so long? I wish I could push a button and force it into sleep mode.) TeslaMate let me easily see if the car was asleep without waking it up, but a recent change to the Tesla app now does the same thing. If I open the app while the car is asleep, it will stay asleep until I issue it a command.

We try to get back to my parents’ house in Indiana every summer and this year was no exception. Things were almost thrown off by a case of COVID, but then I learned that the CDC has updated their isolation guidelines. Thankfully that all worked out for us and the case was very mild (not even a fever.) It unfortunately did mean that we didn’t see some higher risk family members, but we still had a good time.

Dad and Mom surprised us by installing a new diving board! There was a diving board for all the years I lived there but about 20 years ago, it had to be removed because the rusty base couldn’t be safely held to the concrete anymore. The board was a BIG hit and got a lot of action! I’ve always wondered at what age I’ll do my last backflip and hmm… we might be past that point already. Either that or I need more height to get it done. Each time I tried it, I made it about 3/4 of the way around.

We went swimming every day but we also visited the new South Bend Chocolate Company location, played disc golf, picked berries, played croquet on Elijah’s made-up courses, went to a farmer’s market, and ate a lot of good food. I did edit a bunch of our videos together to remember the event, but don’t expect a cinematic masterpiece.

Thank you Dad and Mom for all the work you do to make our trip easy and enjoyable!

In May, I built my own 36×16 LED panel. The project was a lot of fun to build and taught me a lot, but honestly, I haven’t used it much since then. The original plan had been to build two of them and use them as Christmas decorations, but I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve turned it on. The software side of things was a mess which is a bit ironic given my profession. I had improved on the tutorial by writing my own app that ran on the desktop and communicated directly with the ESP8266 board. The board had very simple firmware which just received a stream of bytes and displayed it. That worked ok and I got a pretty good refresh rate, but the main issue was that after a few minutes, the board would stop updating and I couldn’t figure out why. After a long day of coding for my day job, I could never convince myself to spend time debugging this.

Fast forward to late November when I was watching a video from “The Hook Up” on YouTube about his Christmas light setup. It was at that moment that I realized that most of these Christmas light displays and lots of maker projects run on an LED control package called WLED. It’s free and open source and it’s very customizable. Could it work with my custom matrix?

About an hour later, I had it working, and most of that was me just fumbling around learning things. There was already a version of WLED that was compatible with my ESP8266 board so I loaded it on and instantly had a webserver that I could access from my desktop or phone. The built-in software is fantastic but there is also a big ecosystem of projects built on top of WLED if you want, for example, to display an animated gif on the matrix.

In the last week I’ve had it on more than I did in the previous six months. While it’s too late to build another one to use for the front window for Christmas, it has me thinking about next year.

I’m less and less enamored with politics as time goes on, but it seems unavoidable as we head into presidential election season. Since I know this is a common frustrating for people, I thought I’d share some of the things I do to try and stay sane:

• Beware of people who use name calling. They’re trying to get you on their “team” and create division. Even if you happen to agree that the other person deserves it, it’s not healthy.
• Beware of people who try to play to your emotions to get you to agree with them. Reading a news story or watching a talk show shouldn’t be like getting riled up about sports.
• Beware of people who speak in absolutes or hyperboles. AI isn’t going to kill us all. Their opponent getting elected won’t be the end of the world.
• Remember that even the choice of news sources can be full of bias. Not reporting on a story can be just as bad as taking a slanted view of the topic.
• Think about how concerned you are about telling people what you think about a politician. Imagine if you felt that strongly about sharing Jesus with them. What if for every conversation you had where you shared your political opinions, you also had one where you talked about Jesus? Which conversation is more relevant and important?
• In a world where you want to tell everyone about Jesus, why would you alienate more than half of everyone you meet by telling them about your political opinions or even hinting at them?

When I started playing disc golf towards the end of last summer, I started learning that I was right in the middle of a big surge of interest in the sport. It really spiked when COVID hit and the interest has continued. UDisc is the most popular app for tracking scores and finding courses. They have an annual report about the growth of the sport if you’re interested in stats.

It’s been a big hit in our house because it’s something that all three of us can enjoy, and it’s generally free. UDisc says that 90% of all disc golf courses are free to play. You can get a starter set of three discs for about $30 and I used my starter set for a very long time before buying some specific, fancier discs for $15-20/each.

I’m writing this post because I realized there have only be a couple blog posts that mention disc golf. Considering how much I have been playing, that feels a bit off, so I thought I’d use this post to answer some of the questions I had as I got into it:

Where do you play? There are courses at lots of local parks. UDisc says that 28% of Americans live within 2 miles of a course and 88% are within 10 miles. You can find them by going to https://udisc.com/courses or searching on internet maps. I’m lucky to live near a great course at Blyth Park in Bothell.

It seems intimidating. How do I not look like a moron? This is the biggest thing that held me back from playing. I regret the time I lost worrying about this. Disc golfers are generally super friendly! With so many people joining the sport, you’re probably not the only newbie out there. If you don’t know what to do, find somebody else who is playing and just ask them. Or if you look confused, someone will probably offer to help.

What do you do? When you get to the course, find the first tee. Sometimes there’s a map showing all the holes. Or if you have the UDisc app, it will show you a map of the course with your current location noted. That app is really helpful as you go from hole to hole looking for the next tee. Once you’ve found the first tee (usually some kind of a concrete or dirt pad about 2 feet by 6 feet), throw your first shot. Walk up to your disc, make sure one foot is right behind where your disc landed, and throw your next shot. Eventually you’ll make it to the basket and your disc must end up in the basket. Count your strokes and move on to the next tee.

How long does it take? My local course has 10 holes. (9 and 18 hole courses are the most common but it’s not super rare to have a different number of holes.) I can play a round by myself in 30-40 minutes, but obviously if there’s a lot of traffic on the course that can slow things down a bit.

What is the etiquette? If you’ve ever played traditional ball golf, a lot of etiquette is very similar. Some general guidelines are:

• Wait until the people in front of you are out of range before you throw. Generally this means waiting until they’re done with the hole.
• Yell “Fore!” if your disc is heading toward someone else.
• Whoever is farthest from the hole throws next.
• Play “ready golf” by knowing which disc you’re going to use and being ready to throw when it is your turn.
• Be aware of people throwing on holes near you. Disc golf courses can be tight and it’s easy for errant shots to veer into neighboring holes.

What’s the difference between a disc golf course and a traditional/ball golf course? While both have “tees” and “fairways” and conceptually are similar, the physical appearance can differ in a few ways:

• Disc golf holes are shorter. Most holes will range between 200-350 feet if they are beginner-friendly while long/pro holes can stretch over 1000 feet in some extreme cases.
• Disc golf courses have a lot more variety. Courses might be set in thick woods, an open field, zig zagging across an old golf course, etc.
• Disc golf courses make a lot more use of natural terrain and obstacles and some will even include man-made obstacles like a tall fence stationed at a key point in the middle of the fairway to make the hole more interesting.
• Some disc golf holes include a “mando” (short for “mandatory”) which means that you must go to the right or left of a specific obstacle.
• There’s no “green” for disc golf. There’s an imaginary circle around the basket with a radius of 30 feet and there are slightly special rules in that zone, but generally this isn’t explicitly marked.

Why do my discs always go to the left? Because of the physics of a disc, most discs will curve to the left, especially at the end of their flight. As people get better and can put more speed and spin into the disc, they can have different flight characteristics depending on the disc. As a beginner, I just plan for the curve.

Do discs get lost? Yes. Most people write their name and phone number on the back of the disc and people are pretty good about calling or texting if they find your disc. Thankfully I haven’t lost a disc yet, but I’ve probably spent more time than is reasonable looking for lost discs. Losing a disc isn’t as common as losing a golf ball though which is good because people get more attached to their discs as they learn how each specific disc flies.

What are some good sources for learning? I subscribe to quite a few disc golf channels on YouTube. Here are three of my favorites. All of these have a lot of videos so click on their playlists section to zero in on content that interests you.

• Robbie C Disc Golf – Robbie has a lot of beginner friendly videos and always focuses on mechanics that are helpful to average players.
• Overthrow Disc Golf – Josh was a full time professional tennis coach before switching primarily to teach disc golf. He is excellent at breaking down body mechanics into simple steps.
• Foundation Disc Golf – Foundation is mainly an online store that sells discs, but they have a fun YouTube channel as well. There is a ton of content of them playing rounds with various tweaks to the rules (like only using the worst selling discs in their store, playing doubles but taking the worst shot, etc.)
• JomezPro – Over the past few months, Elijah and I have started watching the final round of the touring pro tournament series. JomezPro posts very nicely produced coverage of the rounds 12-24 hours after they finish. It’s wild to see what the pros can do and it’s interesting to get to know the various players in the game.

Can you be a professional? I guess I answered this with the JomezPro recommendation above, but one of the most interesting parts about disc golf for me is that anybody can be ranked on the same charts as people who get paid to play the game. If you join the PDGA for $50/year, as soon as you play in a sanctioned tournament, you’ll be assigned a rating. Your rating goes up and down every time you play in a sanctioned tournament so you can directly compare your skill level against the pros. On the PDGA website, you can see how much money everyone makes in tournaments. As a local player, you’d be doing very well to make a couple hundred bucks a year. The highest level pros would do well to make $100,000/year from tournaments, but they are likely to have additional sponsorships that make them more than that. Estimates are that the highest paid pros may be making around $500,000/year but that’s a guess.

It’s a deep rabbit hole, but you can easily play casually and have lots of fun. According to my UDisc app, I’ve already played 19 rounds this year (39 last year). With the longer days and drier weather, I’m able to head to the park quickly after Elijah goes to bed to play a round in the evenings. It’s a relaxing way to get away from the computer screen for a while and get some fresh air. I’m more than happy to play a round with you if you live near me and are interested!

A huge percentage of our mail is junk… or it was. This is the point where I’d normally hit you with some stats about how much junk mail we get per day, and honestly, I did start collecting it at one point. Normally collecting data about random things is fun, but even data can’t make junk mail fun. So even though I didn’t count the junk mail rate, I did throw it all into a box for a month or two, and then I signed up for PaperKarma.

This isn’t sponsored, but the idea of PaperKarma is that it helps you unsubscribe from junk mail. You take a picture of the junk mail with your phone to help it search for the company that sent it, you tell it the exact addressee for the junk mail, and then they go off to tell the company to stop sending you mail.

I was skeptical at first but we signed up for a six month subscription for $16. Since I had a big backlog of junk mail, I was able to enter in a lot of mail right away. Again, I don’t have data, but we get WAY less junk mail than we used to. Some still sneaks through, but I know I’ll never be rid of it all and just reducing it has made me happier.

The only real nitpick I have with the service is that the photo of the junk mail seems pretty pointless because it rarely works. I end up typing in the name of the company so why include the photo step?

I plan to let our subscription lapse for a while and see how long it takes to build back up, but I won’t hesitate too long to resubscribe for a bit to beat back the flood.

As I change some of my volunteer activities, I’m setting myself up to spend more time talking to people who disagree with me. This can be healthy, but it’s also a challenge. I’ve been thinking about specific behaviors I want to keep in mind while I have those conversations. What’s missing? What’s wrong? How different would our world be if everyone approached discussions with this mindset?

1. Ask lots of questions. If someone’s argument seems absurd, I probably don’t understand what they’re trying to say or what led them to this viewpoint. Asking questions helps us walk back to common ground to find where we diverge so we can have a productive discussion.
2. Assume that everyone is logical, rational, and fact-driven even when they have a completely opposite viewpoint. It might not always be true, but it’s a healthy place to start.
3. Rhetoric is a red flag. If someone is using name calling or inflammatory language in their argument, resist the urge to join in or fight back. Call out the rhetoric and ask questions about the root issues.
4. Don’t use metaphors and similes to make a point. If someone disagrees with me, they’re going to pick apart my comparison instead of focusing on the point I’m trying to make. Facts and data are a much stronger argument.
5. Always be willing to change my mind when presented with enough evidence. Don’t engage with people who are unwilling to do the same.
6. When presented with evidence, don’t trust secondary sources that don’t link to the original material. (I’m very happy to see that Elijah is already learning this in school.) Related to this, use a neutral news source, but also pull content on a topic from multiple sources on both sides of the issue to understand where there is disagreement.

I fall flat on these very often, especially when the person I’m talking to is emotional and not following a similar approach, but maybe writing these things down will help me keep them in mind more often.

After two years that were defined by COVID and its aftermath, it was nice to have a year where we could setting into a more sustainable routine. Don’t get me wrong, COVID still played a major part of 2022. It’s one of the top five killers, but we’re learning how to fine tune our behaviors so we can live life while protecting it at the same time.

The first part of the year started off with a bang as we un-paused our Hawaii trip which had been planned for the week everything shut down in March 2020. We thoroughly enjoyed our time in the warm sunshine by playing on the beach, hiking Diamondhead Crater, visiting the zoo, and sampling lots of delicious food. It did feel a little odd to take our big family vacation so early in the year, but the rest of the year didn’t disappoint.

We kept up our monthly family adventures with day trips like the ferry to Kingston, Deception Pass State Park, Leavenworth with Luke and David, hiking to old train tunnels, Birch Bay State Park, Tiny Hearts Homestead, Barclay Lake (with Dad and Mom before the forest fire!), Dege Peak at Mt. Rainier, and Kayak Point.

We had two nice camping trips. One was to Seaquest State Park near Mt. St. Helens with Tyla’s family. It’s interesting to go back there every few years and see how much has changed at the eruption site. The second trip was to San Juan Campground. These were first come-first served rustic camp sites right on the North Fork of the Skykomish River with the Scherschels and Neumanns. Elijah has always asked to go camping where we can’t see anyone else, and this came pretty close to meeting that criterion.

Even though we went to Hawaii, if you ask us about our favorite trip this year, we’d probably all say it was our visit to Leaping Lamb Farm. This was a bonus trip that Tyla picked for Tyla’s 40th birthday celebration. Farm managers Denny and Kate were magnificently friendly, and it was a fulfilling to see Elijah helping with the farm chores and roaming the farm on his own.

This was also the year our family got into disc golf. I’ve always been curious about the sport, but I’ve also been too intimidated to try it out myself. Tyla and Elijah gave me a starter set of discs for Father’s Day and that eventually encouraged me to do some YouTube learning and get out to a course. I was hooked! I love that it’s friendly, approachable, free, and something the whole family can enjoy together outside. According to my UDisc app, I played 428 holes the majority of those were with Elijah. Part of the fun of learning new things is experiencing the rapid improvement as you progress from total newbie to bumbling beginner. By the end of summer, I had even played in my first tournament!

Work continues to go well. The vast majority of my organization still works from home and while there are people who go in for a few days a week, only a small percentage of employees show up every day. I pretty much only go in when there is free food for a social gathering. Otherwise, I very much prefer working from home. While it’s relatively unimportant compared to other work I do, the highlight of my work year was probably the US Government officially awarding me a patent. It’s fun to know that, at least according to the patent office, I’ve invented something brand new and it will be recorded forever.

It’s beyond cliche, but I’m really noticing how quickly life goes by. A week at work seems like nothing when I look back on it, and even the months fly by if I have something fun to look forward to next month. I suppose it’s a good way to breeze through the mundane parts of life, but it’s also an encouragement to live in the moment. If I don’t appreciate each day, the fast forwarding can keep accelerating until all I’m doing is looking forward to huge life events. (Queue the reference to Adam Sandler in the movie “Click.”)

Along with the increased pace of live comes more thoughts about how quickly my life will be over. Maybe this is also cliche for someone in their early 40s. I’ve always thought that eventually we’d move out into the country for a place with more land, but if we wait until Elijah is done with high school so we don’t have to care as much about school districts, then how long will we live in that house before we need to move back closer to town/doctors/help/etc? Regardless of all these earthly decisions, whenever the end of this life comes, I have heaven waiting for me through faith in Jesus’s saving death and resurrection. I think Paul’s words to the Philippians sum this all up nicely:

¹² Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. ¹³ Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:12-14

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021