Our final installation in the series of videos from our Memorial Day family gatherings is from 1995. It looks like this Uncle Dean and Aunt Sandy’s family couldn’t come and apparently we didn’t take out the camera much. Most of the tape was a science show that Ryan and I recorded. We had quite a few different experiments with explanations of the science behind each one. I have mercifully cut most of that out of this quick recap for you.
Continuing our series of Memorial Day memories, 1993 featured cousin Tim bringing his water balloon slignshot and me learning that it’s best not to talk when you’re recording video!
Last week I posted about our family Memorial Day celebrations from 1990, and now I finished editing another one. There are four of these total so I’ll see if I can do one a week. This next one is from 1991 and it was a year when it was warm enough to go swimming. It probably wasn’t very warm, but it was enough for us to enjoy swimming with cousins.
When I was growing up, Memorial Days were a ton of fun. Most of Dad’s side of the family would get together at our house (about 20 people.) Some years it was warm enough to swim while other years we’d have cold and rain, but we would always have fun. For a few of the years, we had a video camera. The footage is far from stellar, but I stumbled on a digitized copy recently and decided to edit it down. Don’t expect a masterpiece, but it brings back fun memories for me as I watch it. There are some more that I’ll get around to editing and posting down the road.
This summer we made another trip back to my parents’ house in Indiana. We spent a lot of time in the pool, playing disc golf, and eating delicious food. We also visited Indiana Dunes National Park and saw my grandpa. I put together a quick video recap of the trip and while it’s not going to win any awards, it’s a fun way to look back on the trip.
Up until our trip to Moab, we had never done a trip that required multiple charges away from home, but we sure put that behind us with this trip. Our total drive was around 2500 miles there and back. The video at the end of this post covers the drive to Moab.
There are a few things that I didn’t cover in the video:
Supercharging is almost irrelevant for daily life. I wrote this whole post and made a video about this because we’ve gone 20,000 miles in our car, and we’ve only used a supercharger a few times. Charging like this is a novel experience for us! I often hear people say, “Oh I can’t get an electric car because there are no chargers around me.” The chargers near you don’t matter. You’ll probably never use a charger within 100 miles of your house because you constantly have a charged car when you wake up (assuming you can charge where you park.) The only time you need a good charger network is if you decide to take your EV on a long road trip, and even then, if you have two cars, you could just drive your gas car. So the “what’s it like to charge an EV?” question is something I thought a lot about before I got the car, and now I hardly think about it at all. My car is always charged and it requires about 5 seconds to plug it in when I get home. It only comes into play when we’re taking a long road trip.
Charing at a supercharger is extremely easy. When we stopped to charge, the car was charging before my family even got out of the car. I’d park, hop out, grab the charger, and plug it in. There’s no fumbling with a credit card or an app. The charger communicates with the car and automatically charges the credit card associated with the car. The car knows how far it needs to charge before you’re ready for the next leg of your trip or you can manually set your own limit.
Very little of the planning that I show in the video is something a normal Tesla driver would do. You could easily complete this trip while being completely oblivious of all the optimizations that I made. When you punch in your destination, the car tells you where to stop and how long to charge at each stop. It will give you many warnings if you try to leave the charger too soon or if something changes en-route and you’re unlikely to make it. This short video from Tesla explains how that works:
I had a data logger recording every datapoint from our car every few seconds and I took some video during each leg of the trip. I put it all together into a video about the trip along with my thoughts about whether I’d do it the same way again. Enjoy!
We’re back from our first trip since COVID hit! We flew out to Indiana for a week in the sun at Dad and Mom’s house. It was a little weird being in the middle of so many people in the airport but I’m glad we went when we did. I think we have a long way to go before we’re really “post pandemic”.
On our first day, we drove up to the Grand Rapids, MI area to see Luke, Rachel, and David’s new home. After that we spent most of our days swimming in the pool or in the yard playing croquet. The temps were in the mid to upper 80s with plenty of humidity (the dew point was 74 one day!) so the water felt great!
I took my drone along on the trip and had fun exploring the area around the house. It was neat to grow up thinking about what it would be like to fly around our house and then actual get to do it.
As always, a big thanks goes to Dad and Mom for hosting us all. It’s a lot of work having that many people in your house!
I hadn’t planned to make a video, but then I thought about how much we enjoy looking back at the older ones so I collected everyone’s footage and put something quick together. It’s not anything super special right now, but I’m sure I’ll be glad I did it down the road.
Three weeks ago, we decided to try a “socially distant group hymn” with church members. The idea isn’t unique, but it felt like a fun way to join together virtually. It was tough to convince people to send me videos of themselves singing, but eventually we had 28 people who participated. Editing it was more of a challenge than I expected as even my beefy new PC had trouble rendering all of those video streams at the same time. But I was able to render out each row by itself and then combine those rows into the final video. We used it in our online service last Sunday and then posted it by itself as well. Enjoy!
