Don’t make money decision based on my ramblings, but somehow I’ve found myself in and around quite a few investment conversations lately so I wanted to share a couple things that have helped me.
When I found Dave Ramsey’s “7 Baby Steps“, it solidified a lot of ideas and thoughts I had around saving for emergencies, getting out of debt, and saving for retirement. He has plenty of books, website material, and podcast episodes about it, but honestly, the list alone is a great guide for us because I didn’t need to be convinced that it made sense.
If I only read one book about investing (and that’s not too far off), I would want it to be “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” by John Bogle. It’s short and it’s simple. He repeatedly lays out statistics to show that buying individual stocks is a gambling hobby. Investing for the long term means buying and holding a total stock market index fund (or ETF) and maybe a total bond fund and a total international fund too. Yes, there will be flashes of success here and there where people beat the market in the short term, but the lasting, winning bet is a low cost index fund that covers the whole market. It’s nearly unbeatable, and it’s super easy.
Ask me in thirty or forty years how it worked out.
At the beginning of summer, I handed Elijah a kids hiking book and asked him to pick out a few ideas. He came up with four. The first one we did was Coal Creek, but this past weekend, we tackled the toughest one: High Rock.
We left the house before 7am on Saturday since there is only space for about a dozen cars at the trailhead. It’s on the south side of Rainier just outside the park. It’s about an hour and 45 minutes to the start of a 10 mile dirt road. Thankfully the dirt road was very smooth and we were able to get down it pretty quickly in the truck. There were quite a few cars there already but we had no trouble parking.
The hike is about 1.6 miles and 1300ft to the top so it’s pretty steep the whole way. The kids hiking book lists it as “moderate for kids” and I think that’s because the bulk of the trail is pretty smooth. There aren’t a lot of rocks and roots to climb over.
The last ~100 feet of elevation is pretty intense for a little kid though. You have to pick your way up a rock face and walk up to the edge of a cliff that falls off hundreds of feet. Up until about a month ago, there was a fire lookout perched up there but they recently had to remove it because of vandalism. (AUGH.) Thankfully they left the wood platform and that made a relatively safe place to hang out to enjoy our snacks and snap photos.
The photos are disappointing though. The enormity of the view can’t be communicated in a photo. There’s just SO MUCH of everything. You can see to the horizon in every direction. You can see straight down the cliff face. You can see Mt. Rainier front and center. It’s incredible!
We had planned to attempt this hike a few weeks ago but canceled because of smoke that was rolling in. I’m glad we did because it sounds like the bugs on the trail have died down since then and we had pretty clear skies and perfect temps.
We didn’t get back home until 3pm and the day took a lot out of us but we were all glad that we did it. It’s one that we’ll remember for a long time!
As I mentioned, the lookout building has been removed. It is being restored by a museum and will hopefully be reinstalled in 2023. That site has some good photos of the lookout and some really interesting history of the lookout too.
I’ll include some photos below but this link should also take you to a quick panorama that I took from the top. If you click all the way into the photo, you can swipe left and right to move around the circle.
The last bit of the hike was a rock face up to the platform.
We could see the parking lot from the top.
On our way out, we spotted the platform from the parking lot.
Over the last year or so, I’ve made a handful of wooden flags and after a bit more learning curve than I expected, I think I finally have it mostly figured out. Some stumbling blocks along the way were:
I did all the math for how wide each strip of wood should be and programmed my CNC accordingly but I forgot to account for the actual size of the union before cutting. It’s never EXACTLY what I had planned so I need to scale that before cutting.
I finally found a couple stain colors that work well. I settled on Varathane classic water based wood stain tinted to Navy Blue and Scarlet by Home Depot. I just bought a quart of each one and I could probably make at least a hundred flags before running out.
Staining first and then scorching with a torch has worked well for me. While I felt weird about adding burn marks to a flag, I like the way it looks and it does a nice job of hiding imperfections.
Gluing up 13 strips of wood makes it easy to bend. Use at least 3 vertical strips on the back to hold the shape. Four is probably better.
To get a nice clean line between the union and the stripes, I pound in a razor blade. It severs the fibers so the stain won’t bleed across and I can stain right up to both sides of the blade without waiting for anything to dry.
I generally try to avoid the knots. They really stand out when burning the wood. It’s fine to have one or two but I’m a little bit strategic about where I put them. I do all the math about how many 1×4, 1×6, 1×8, etc boards I would need so I can adjust my plan based on what boards are available. There is a different amount of waste with each size of board though.
I made one of Elijah’s school auction and priced it at $100 since that seems pretty consistent with Etsy prices. They have a “buy it now” feature in the auction where you can overpay by 50% and that happened almost immediately.
It’s a fun project and while I like letting the CNC cut the stars for me, there are plenty of templates for painting them on or you could hand cut them with a router or even a chisel.
We’ve gone through a variety of attempts at having a garden over the years. It’s tricky with the lack of sun on our lot, the local wildlife, and our inability to make things grow. In 2019 I made a strawberry planter for the back yard. In 2020, the birds were eating all of the berries so I tried to make a cage around it but it was too bulky.
I had a lot of time to think about how to design a better cage and I think this year finally hit on a winner. While the frame is held to the planter with screws, I could remove about 4 screws and the whole thing would fold flat. I didn’t really want it up all winter because I don’t think it would hold up to snowfall.
The front face is held in place with some hooks I bent out of wire and bird netting covers the whole thing. We’ve seen zero birds in there and we got a lot of strawberries! We’ll never recoup our investment in the planter even ignoring all the time I put into the cage around it, but it’s still enjoyable to grow something and eat it. The picture below shows the front face pulled off and leaned against the cage.
One of our go-to family adventures is taking the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston, having lunch, and then coming back. We can easily walk onto the ferry so there’s no need to plan ahead or worry about the lines. I’ve shared this with quite a few people individually and realized that I should just have it on my website so I don’t have to hunt for the info every time. So if you’re looking for you own fun lunch, here’s what we’ve learned.
You can park close to the Edmonds terminal, but you have to pay ~$15. If you look at a map, find 6th street. If you park east of 6th street, there is no fee and no time limit. West of that you are limited to 3 hours. You MIGHT make it back in three hours but I don’t like to have that hanging over my head. We’re rule followers so we just park east of 6th and make the ~5-10 minute walk to the ferry.
Walking on the ferry is $8 for adults and $4 for kids. You can buy the tickets right in the terminal but to buy the kids tickets you have to go to the actual ticket booth and not the automated kiosks.
The ferry ride is 30 minutes.
When you get off the ferry, start walking straight up the hill. There are a number of good places to stop:
The Kingston Ale House – This is a table-service restaurant with lots of craft beer on tap.
J’aime les Crepes – You could probably eat a full lunch here but we’ve only gotten crepes and ice cream to go. There’s no real indoor seating.
Mora Iced Creamery – Delicious hipster ice cream.
The Grub Hut – This is a bit farther up the hill but we really liked it! You order at the counter and then go sit down. They had a lot of options on the menu.
There are a lot of other places within walking distance and that strip of restaurants does change. Yelp is your friend.
There’s no ticket booth on the way back. You travel east for free.
If you end up with a bit of a wait for the next ferry back to Edmonds, there is a big grassy park right by the terminal and sometimes they have a little farmers market/craft fair. There’s often a farmers market on the Edmonds side too.
The whole trip usually takes us 4-5 hours including the drive to/from Edmonds.
We get a couple local newspapers and every once in a while I flip through them. A recent article called “Where’s Sara? Bike & Hike Carbon River Road” in Northshore News caught me eye. You can read the article for the full description but basically there’s a road into Mt. Rainier National Park on the northwest side that was washed out in 2006. There was a campground at the end of the road so it’s still popular with bikers and hikers.
There are a lot of things to explore off of the road, but I thought that just making it to the end and back (12 miles roundtrip) would be a big challenge for Elijah. So a couple weekends ago, all three of us set off on the adventure to give it a shot!
The road gets progressively less road-like over the length and there are a few spots where the river has totally washed the road away but it’s never difficult to see where the trail picks up on the other side. The ride out to the campground ended up being pretty tough but we all made it. We locked our bikes up and took a short hike to Ipsut Falls. It was a gorgeous place for lunch and we had the whole place to ourselves aside from about 5 minutes of overlap with another family.
The ride back was significantly easier! Since we were following the river downstream, the road had a slight downward slope that let us coast a large portion of the way.
I was really proud of Tyla and Elijah for powering through and getting all the way to the payoff at the end! Hopefully we can go back some day and explore some more of the sights off of the road.
Rewind to March 2020. We had just entered lockdown. As a church leader, I was scrambling to figure out how to do services online. We didn’t know what was happening (like we have any idea now!) I remember sitting down as a family and watching a video from Time of Grace called “God’s Got This!”
During that, Pastor Mike talked about reminding ourselves that God is here. He’s right here with us guiding us and protecting us, whether there’s a pandemic or not. After that video, we sat down as a family and made “God is here” signs. We taped those signs to the wall in our kitchen and they stayed up until very recently.
As we took those signs down, I decided to make a more permanent version. I used the cedar circle leftover from the fire pit project. I drew some words, cut them out of 1/4 MDF on my CNC, painted them, and glued them on.
I’ve been bad about completing projects, posting them to Instagram (@martenswoodworks) and then never posting most info here. So this project was completed back in May, but I thought it deserved a post.
We have always talked about whether we want to get a fire pit for the back yard, and when I was offered a nice Firegear burner, I decided to go for it. I built the simplest stand for it that I could imagine. I used tongue and groove cedar boards because that’s what was available and I glued them on to 1/4″ plywood. I cut the center hole out on the CNC partly for practice and partly because I thought I might use the wood for something else later.
The main trick was finding room for all the hoses underneath and mounting the key/valve piece. I put threaded feet into the bottom of each leg so that the wood wouldn’t directly contact the ground and so that I could make quick adjustments if it was wobbly. The final step was finishing it and I used fence stain in my spray gun for more practice with that sprayer.
Building a fire pit out of wood is probably not the smartest idea, but I’ve checked the wood temperature after running it for 15-20 minutes and it’s only around 140 degrees. Do I recommend it? Nope. But it will probably work for us.
We’ve only used it a couple times. Tyla and Elijah have attempted to roast marshmallows with some success. Hopefully we’ll get a little more use out of it when the weather cools off, but even if we don’t, I made it to fit under the bench in the back yard so it’s out of the way.
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.
By this point you’ve seen all the stories about the Pacific Northwest heat wave that is finishing up, but I wanted to record some of it here for the future.
It ramped up on Friday and hammered us Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Cliff Mass had lots of great blog posts, but I’ll copy a bit from his June 25 post to explain what led to our heat wave:
Ingredient One: An unusually strong area of high pressure aloft over our region (known as an upper-level ridge), associated with sinking air and unusually warm temperatures.
At the surface, this feature is associated with high pressure to the east of the Cascade crest, which tends to produce weak offshore (easterly) flow. Such easterly flow keeps the cooling influence of the Pacific Ocean away…
Ingredient Two: An Approaching Trough of Low Pressure That Creates Strong Easterly/Downslope Flow over the Western Slopes of the Cascades…
The air will start off warm, with origins from the desert southwest, but will warm further as it descends the Cascades into western Washington. Why warm more? Because the air will be compressed as it descends into western Washington.
To put this in context, Seattle has only had three days over 100 degrees in the past 100 years. Most of the daily records for this time of year are around 90. Any day over 80 gets people talking about how hot it is and only 44% of people have air conditioning.
The old all-time record for heat in Seattle was 103. Seattle broke it’s record on Sunday and then immediately broke it again on Monday, finally topping out at 108!
That high of 108 in Seattle means that Seattle has now been hotter than cities like Miami, Atlanta, Washington DC, Indianapolis, Orlando, or Chicago!
Portland hit 116 and in terms of the ~50 biggest cities in the country, that is third on the list behind only Phoenix (126) and Las Vegas (117).
The previous maximum low temperature was in the low 70s, but Seattle never got below 80 on Saturday night and spent every minute of Monday at 80 degrees or above!
The eastern side of the state had two places hit 118, tying the record.
Forks hit 110 which is 45 degrees over their normal temperature for this time of year!
The cool down on Monday evening was incredible as well. It went from ~110 to under 70 in less than 12 hours. Forks recorded a 28 degree drop in one hour!
Here in Woodinville, it’s hard to get an exact, calibrated measurement but based on the official sensors closest to us, I’m confident that we hit at least 108 or 109. The city about 2 miles to the west (Bothell) of us recorded 110 and the city about 6 miles west of us (Lake Forest Park) hit 111. We were very thankful for our air conditioning and it did a good job keeping up, topping out at 80 degrees on Monday before pulling it back down to 76 where we have it set.
Every few hours over the weekend, I went out to read the kWh usage off my electric meter. My Thermostat (Ecobee) records the usage per second and I store all that info in a database. So I was able to combine all that info together and build up a little model to estimate how much it costs when my air conditioner is running. It comes out to around $0.30/hour. (It’s about $0.08/hour with no air conditioner.) When the temp is in the mid 80s, the AC will kick on around noon or 1 and run until 10 or 11 at night. On a day like that we’d spend around $3 to have the AC on. I don’t think that’s going to change anything about how I use it, but it’s something I’ve always wondered about!
Tuesday was “only” around 90 and the rest of the week will be in the low 80s. That’s still above normal but I don’t think there will be a lot of complaints.
