Skating And Cookies

Posted on by Jordan

It looks like I am just going to have to accept that winter is here.

This past weekend was full of winter activities, starting here:

Look at all those people lined up! You would almost think we started going to trendy places in town or something…

Well, no actually those are all middle school students and you just can’t see the line of min-vans dropping them off. The question remains, what could everyone be lined up to do?

Ice skate:

The rink wasn’t overly large, but it was outside, and downtown making for a fairly cool atmosphere. An atmosphere lessened by the surprisingly young clientele combined with the unrelenting inappropriate “dance” songs being played by the helpful live DJ.  (Then again maybe I am just getting old /sigh )

Heather and I went out to the skate rink with a few of her friends from work. Our little group had a great time, despite the unexpected atmosphere.

Note that we captured the entire city skyline in that picture 🙂

The next morning, we pulled together some cookie recipes and got the ingredients just in time for a friend of Heather’s to come over and bake with her. Six hours later, they had enough cookies to pass out to our entire building, and then some:

That night, we went out for dinner and wrapped up the night driving around some of the Des Moines hot spots for Christmas lights. I worry that we may be peaking early, but I am starting to feel ready for Christmas.

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights all included knocking on doors here at our building to hand out plates of cookies. We tried a similar thing a few years ago, and didn’t meet with much success. I am happy to report that this year nearly everyone we tried was home, and we met some great neighbors!

-Jordan

Bastion

Posted on by Jordan

I just finished playing through Bastion. I wasn’t exactly on the leading edge of people playing though this game, thanks to my pattern of buying most of my games when they go on sale… all the same it’s somewhat current.

Well, let me back up and give a little context to what I am thinking about.

This week I read and article (which I am unable to find now…) that was talking about how research found that spending money on an experience rather than an item tended to have a larger and more lasting impact on a persons life. The author was using that research to argue for taking classes or going on trips etc.

OK, Back to Bastion… It’s a great ride. The game play is fun, something that should not be taken for granted, but they nailed an atmosphere in ways I haven’t seen done in games for quite a while.

To start with, the game is narrated in a way that responds to events as you play. It may not sound that interesting, but the effect is satisfying. It doesn’t hurt that the narrator has a great voice for the job…

Here is a small example:

There isn’t much to the story, but I found myself always wanting to play one more level just to find out what happened next.

I shouldn’t wander too far into review territory, there are plenty of places online you can go for that kind of thing.

Having finished the game, I couldn’t help but think about the ideas from that article on how experiences stick with you and how that applied. It was an experience that grabbed me, and it felt amazing to close out the story. It would probably be wrong to reach too far ideologically while I am still so excited about the game, but it is interesting to think about what kind of returns I got from my time and money.

-Jordan

November Close Out

Posted on by Jordan

I was going to write a Thanksgiving recap post… and then realized it would basically be a list of food and family.

Lets be honest, I enjoyed both. Probably more than enough food and not enough socializing with family, still Thanksgiving was great.

Other news around here is that our microwave quit working. In a way it’s a milestone, being the first real unexpected expense as homeowners now that we are fully moved. Not really a happy milestone, but a milestone none the less.

In a related note, I am proud to say that we have gone a week without it now, and it hasn’t impacted our meal-planning to any discernible extent. Probably my biggest frustration is that I can’t make a single cup of tea at night very quickly without it.

aaaand I am going to wrap this up before I got off on 1000 different tangents. I forgot how hard it is to write a post when I don’t have a topic and a rough draft in mind when I sit down 🙂

I will close with a picture of Heather and I in a goose blind. It’s probably the closest she will ever be to hunting with me, so It’s worth sharing right?

-Jordan

Bonus link: If you haven’t seen mike Rowe talk about work, watch it

Finished Reading: “The Medieval Machine”

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I spend the weekend entertaining some friends from Kansas City.

We had a great time, but the combination of gloomy fall weather and a general goal of taking it easy meant there aren’t really any stories to tell, nor are there any interesting pictures.

This gives me a great opportunity to lay out a few of my thoughts after reading The Medieval Machine.

It was a pleasant surprise to find how much I learned from this book. Often I find nonfiction a little harder to read. (have I ever mentioned my every-other rotation goal of fiction/nonfiction? It’s been tougher to maintain than I had hoped.) Having established that I enjoyed learning, I really wanted to argue with the author at every turn about his conclusions and implications.

I suppose a quick summary might be helpful. The book covers the major mechanization of the middle ages (also sometimes called the dark ages). As it turns out, that period was full of advancement and progress, mostly around water and wind power. Access to non-manual forms of energy are easy to take for granted, and the book was eye-opening as it described all the tasks powered by falling water, grinding wheat, crushing ore, and conditioning fabrics, to name a few.

Another aspect that quickly became apparent is how much freedom I take for granted. The book was full of examples where the person who built a new mill was able to force everyone in the region to use it. This compulsion went so far in one case that the local governor sent troops door-to-door confiscating hand mills by sword point, leaving the peasants no way to grind flour except to use the governor’s new mill.

My frustration with the author started in the introduction where he stated with great confidence that there were no innovations left to be had that could significantly impact the course of human progress, and we were doomed to a slow decline… so stated in the year 1970. I may have been so put off by the introduction that I imagined most of my remaining gripes, but I couldn’t help but feel like the author wasn’t sure everything he was describing was actually a good thing. As if he felt that saving millions of man hours grinding wheat was somehow a loss.

In the end, the book made me spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the massive wealth of infrastructure we have, thinking about the impact of virtually unlimited access to information regarding nearly anything, and just marveling at how we got here from there.

Given the amount of thought and reflection it generated I find myself willing to forgive most of my gripes and say the book was a good read… although not one I am likely to read again.

-Jordan

Deer Season 2011

Posted on by Jordan

It is that time of year again.

As with every year, I started preparing by confirming that my rifle was still shooting accurately:

That was at 100 yards, and the squares are an inch across… so I don’t have any excuse to miss this year I suppose.

Although my last post contained pictures of snow, Nebraska wasn’t having that kind of weather over the weekend.

We arrived at the farm with opening morning forecast to be in the mid 60s!

I should go back just a little I suppose, ‘we’ constitutes myself, one f my cousins, and his two boys. The plan was to include another cousin or two, but that didn’t work out this year. As has become the tradition we hunt with a few friends from the area, meaning the total number of hunters is at least six if not ten.

Ok, so not only was the weather too warm, we got to the farm after dark on Friday night. Not ideal when we wanted to have a few portable stands up, and do a tiny amount of scouting before opening morning.  As is often the case, work got in the way of our initial plan. At least it wasn’t my work this time… still unfortunate that it cut into the hunt.

I will skip large portions of not seeing any deer to keep this narrative somewhat interesting. After finding that our initial plan was not great, and knowing that the weather meant the deer were not going to be particularly active until evening, we setup a tree stand and scouted a few good lookout places to position people for the twilight hours in the hopes we would cross paths with something heading out into the fields for a snack.

I should mention that the great spot I used last year wasn’t an option because our only foot bridge across the creek washed out. We talked about improvising a replacement, but were concerned that we would disrupt the deer too much if we were running equipment to erect a new bridge.

When the sun started to set Saturday night, I was positioned in a tree stand overlooking what appeared to be a crossroads of deer trails. About an hour later, that theory was proven correct when about five doe wandered past me and started grazing around the edges of the field to the north of me.

It was awesome to see deer after the disappointing morning, but having them not only walk around but stay around turned out to be kind of a pain because I felt like I couldn’t move at all. I wound up waiting until well after dark to leave, because the deer didn’t wander away until then. From what I could tell, there weren’t any bucks around, but at least I got to see something!

I setup in the same stand that morning and saw…. nothing, … again.

A few of us spent a couple of hours walking through pockets of cover we thought might be a good place to catch a deer sleeping but didn’t discover anything.

At this point nobody in the family group had gotten anything, and with one exception hadn’t even seen anything to be excited about. It was a little distressing, but we were all still hopeful that something would turn up.

I went back to my stand, hoping that it was a better dusk location than dawn. Shortly after I got setup, there was noise clearly indicating that something was slowly working it’s way towards me. The noise was coming from my only blind spot, but it was unmistakeable that something was moving around, and slowly getting closer. Twenty minutes of sitting motionless later and I finally got a look at a squirrel who apparently really liked jumping back and fourth on the ground.

At that point I got kind of frustrated, and got out my phone to send a few texts and see if anyone else was fairing better than I was. The news wasn’t any better from them so I wasn’t feeling like I needed to stay particularly stealthy and stood up to get a better look at the deerless area around me.

Except that just after I did that I heard rustling in the leaves again, and looked over to see a small buck standing directly across from me! I really don’t know how he was able to sneak in so close without my hearing something, but he did. On the other hand he didn’t see me, so I was able to get my rifle up and on him without spooking him. Then I was able to fire once without spooking him. The second shot came quickly after the first, but… there was a delay.

Remember that bridge that washed out? had it been in place I wouldn’t have need to remove my boots and roll up my pant-legs to get this picture:

As you can see, I am basically out of light, and I only had my phone with me. It turns out to be rather difficult to take a you+deer self portrait using my phone, so you will have to live with the picture I got 🙂

The next thing I discovered is that deer float! That was a nice thing to discover because everyone else was still hunting.

The other hunters didn’t find any bucks, and passed on does again. It was nice to have something, even if it wasn’t a real impressive buck.

-Jordan

Snow… /sigh

Posted on by Jordan

I had been toying with the idea of having a commemorative blog post just for the fact that we finally have our garage organized to the point both cars can park in it.

That didn’t end up happening, but this morning we woke up to find a reason to be really happy both cars were inside:

This snow is slushy enough I don’t think there is much risk it will be with us until March, but it still means the effective start of winter and it’s hard to be excited about that prospect right now.

Alright, that’s probably enough whining… 🙂

-Jordan

The Actual Day, And Other Events

Posted on by Jordan

I know, the last post already covered my birthday, so I won’t go into much detail, but there are a few highlights I though should be covered.

It isn’t every day Heather does baking, and I don’t think I have ever devoted much blog space to her endeavors in that arena. Also, Heather doesn’t generally make desserts. Apparently turning 30 is enough of an occasion to warrant making a cake though.

I encountered this cake at a Church function about a year ago, and really liked it. Heather took note, and managed to obtain the recipe from the aforelinked blog. The results were every bit as good as I had remembered!

In passing I should mention that I thought it was cool that the recipe used a technique I sort of stumbled onto a few weeks ago. Because our oven’s “broiler” is just turning the top heating element on continuously, I started throwing the oven to broil for the last minute or two when making pizza to produce a more pronounced browning/crispy/almost burnt appearance like you would see from a restaurant pizza.  The cake uses it to more or less rend the butter and cream out of the coconut, leaving a great crispy texture on the top of the cake.

So, enough about food. What else have we been up to?

Well, Heather has taken family pictures for a substantial number of people. It’s still just a hobby for her, and she seems to really enjoy the process of getting to work with people, and produce something to remember this time with. She is really starting to produce high quality results with the camera.

And me? I am still working with the scouts. Just this past weekend I got to sleep in “Fort Pella” a sort of novelty structure standing on the grounds typically used for summer camp, but accessible to Troops during the off season.

It’s distinct in that whenever the troop has the opportunity to use the fort we don’t setup tents, and instead the boys sleep under the roof sections of the tower.

My role with scouts has changed quite a bit over the past few months. I now work directly with a single patrol of younger scouts, and am responsible for helping to provide the opportunities they need to actually advance in rank. The troop works really hard to stay true to the “boy led” philosophy of Scouting, but I had no idea how much of a balancing act that turns out to be. It’s probably more of a challenge to get all the adults on the same page as to what that means than to actually implement with the boys, but I think we are starting to find a good approach everyone is happy with.

aaand I should stop before this gets too introspective 🙂

Suffice to say that I am enjoying scouts more now that I have a more direct responsibility instead of simply being a warm trained leader body for camp outs.

-Jordan

The Big Day

Posted on by Jordan

So it isn’t actually my birthday yet, but due to a busy calendar Heather and I chose to take a day and celebrate my birthday a little early.

We both took last Friday off of work, with plans to be out and about all day.

Our intent was to start the day off by sleeping in. What actually happened was that we started the day by discovering what the building fire alarms sound like. As luck would have it, we found ourselves standing in the parking lot at 6:30 in the morning meeting some neighbors we hadn’t bumped into yet.

As you may recall from my last post, Heather had to contend with a smoke alarm last weekend. She is starting to think she will never again get the opportunity to sleep past 6AM.

On the bright side, this got us off to an early start.

We started with some amazing french toast Heather made. She has sometimes led people to believe that she cannot cook; it’s not true.

Our first stop after breakfast was Ledges State Park. The park is a beautiful little piece of geology that unfortunately had a lot of flooding last year. Thanks to the current economic realities facing everyone, including the Iowa Department Of   Natural Resources, they haven’t been able to repair the stream crossings, nor clear the silt that now covers parts of the developed area.

Given that we were just there to hike, it didn’t really matter. We only hiked for about an hour, but there was enough vertical change to make our legs star to burn from all the climbing. It’s possible we are just out of shape, but I was surprised how much climbing there was to be had!

After our hike, we headed straight to the train station in Boone. The rides there don’t take you to a new destination per say, but we had heard good things about the Boone Scenic Valley Railroad. We picked up our tickets and ate a sack lunch while waiting for our departure time.

I didn’t remember to take a picture of our car, but it was the perfect way to ride on a warm(ish) fall day. It was a flat-car with railing around it, with two benches running the long way down the center facing out. We had a great view of everything!

The main attraction of the ride is the Des Monies River valley, that we crossed via the Kate Shelley Bridge. It’s a great view, well worth the ride out. We probably missed the peak fall colors by about a week, but I am in no way complaining, it was still a breathtaking view!

Once across the bridge we had a brief stop for reasons that were not completely clear, but it made a nice spot to lean out and snap this:

The train was by no means full up there, but there was a good turn out for a Friday afternoon.

From here the rest of the day was less notable, although no less enjoyable. That being said I don’t want to stretch this post out any more than I already have.

-Jordan

Somehow Fall Snuck Up On Us

Posted on by Jordan

It has been another full weekend, for Heather and I.

I started off camping with the scouts, on a trip that included a bike ride

As you can see we brought a lot of bikes along.

The ride was along the trails north of Des Moines. The same trails that lead up to the bridge we rode over back at the beginning of summer. The only thing was, we rode past red trees, and through piles of leaves blowing along the trail. We were lucky in that the weather was great! It was cold over night, but by the time we had bikes going on the trail it was a wonderful fall day.

I suppose talking about a beautiful ride, and the wonderful colors would be more interesting with a picture or two. The problem is all the bikes you saw in that picture were being operated by scouts… not to say they were getting into trouble, but I wanted to keep an eye on things.

That and the fact that all I had was my phone. It’s a workable camera, but phones aren’t suppose to go on camp outs. Adults get to bend those rules, but the boys complain to no end about their oppression when they see you get your phone out and they realize they can’t.

I left camp early because I was doing sound at church. It was probably a good thing I came home when I did though, because the smoke alarm at the top of our fancy vaulted ceiling had decided it had problems and started beeping earlier that day. Heather was about ready to loose it by the time I got there. It did provide an opportunity to use the big step ladder we bought shortly after taking possession of our new place… although I can think of scenarios were we would have used the ladder for some great purpose that don’t also involve Heather having dangerously high blood pressure… Maybe next time it will just be burned out light bulb.

Sunday we had a few friends over to carve pumpkins!

… yeah pumpkins… I didn’t really think it was time for those ether, but apparently it is.

My artistic vision was somewhat hampered by my absolute lack of manual dexterity or and artistic skill, so imagine the one I am holding looks sleepy. When you consider that the face on mine tilts down and sort of leans… and then add a little imagination it’s a pretty good pumpkin I think.

Oh, on a somewhat related note, I discovered that if you make pumpkin bread, but leave out the pumpkin, the resulting product will be a rather dry spice-bread. Stop by the break room at work tomorrow you might get to try some, its not bad… but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

-Jordan

Western Nebraska Week Recap

Posted on by Jordan

I always find that when I try to cover something as big as a week away from work it’s an overwhelming thing to try and post about.

So I will just hit a few highlights:

First it was great to just spend time with my family. The fact that we had plenty of work to do was nice too, it made the start of the week feel really productive.

The other highlight was getting to share so many things from my life with Heather that she hadn’t ever seen or done before.

Heather was a really good sport with everything, despite the fact that she was able to attract every bug within five miles of wherever we happened to be.

Things Heather did with me:

  • Rode in the tractor while I was moving dirt
  • Paddled around in a canoe on a lake that I camped at lots as a scout
  • Went geocaching (not a childhood activity for me, but got us out on a hike and we found plenty of bugs)
  • Hiked around the farm taking pictures of things
  • Floated down the Medicine Creek with me in a canoe

I should expand on that last point. As you can see from the picture it was cool enough to be comfortable wearing a sweatshirt. Still ok weather to be on the water as long as you stay dry.

The trip marked only the second time Heather had been in a canoe, and the first time on moving water. I really should have been giving more instruction during the lazy areas as we started out. I had somewhat naively hoped that there wouldn’t be any downed trees blocking our path.

On the other hand, I did make sure Heather packed an extra change of dry clothes before we headed out that morning.

As you can probably guess, we didn’t make through our little trip dry. After a few close calls with tree branches we finally met one that was going to be really unpleasant to get past. There are a number of things I should have done at this point. One, I could have aggressively back-paddled to get some space between us and the tree, then landed at shore letting Heather out. Two I could have  jumped into the water and guided the boat to shore by walking in the water. Three I could have told Heather to lay down the the bow of the boat so the trees wouldn’t hit her.

Instead I only sort of explained that she should get down, and tried to get us lined up on the spot I figured we could plow through.

What happened next wasn’t so surprising: Heather didn’t realize I was planning to ram into the tree and got caught off balance, falling into the middle of the boat(on the upstream side). I wasn’t going fast enough to actually plow through the tree, and we were instantly swept crosswise of the current, and the canoe rolled.

Did I mention Heather was a really good sport about everything I wanted her to try this week? Because she got dumped into some very cold, very brown muddy water and managed to laugh about it!

We completed the res of the trip without much excitement, but I think I ruined my chance of instilling a love of canoes and or the Medicine into my wife. 🙂

-Jordan