It’s Finally GONE!!!

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I can’t tell you how long I’ve been looking forward to this day.

Actually, I can!

I’ve despised this 30-some-odd foot monstrosity pretty much since we bought this house back in 2012. It drops leaves and acorns like it’s slowly dying on my front lawn, even though it’s definitely not, it’s impossible for me to prune because of how huge it’s gotten, and it’s even started to tear up the sidewalk and our driveway.

If left to its own devices, I have little doubt that before too long this innocent-looking oak tree would’ve displaced the entire house, leaving just one gargantuan behemoth of a tree in the center of our tiny, suburban lot and the family that once lived there forced out onto the area formerly known as our sidewalk before it ripped that whole thing to absolute shreds, too!

Admittedly it actually was pretty impressive to see the crew work. It wasn’t cheap, but these guys rolled up with three trucks and two massive cranes along with an industrial-sized wood chipper that buzzed through 8.5 years of my oak dread like a hot knife through a tree.

I griped a lot about our HOA over the years, but the process was surprisingly easy. I probably spent a week or two getting quotes from various tree removal companies – the one we picked wasn’t the cheapest option, mind you, but I was more confident in these guys than the next quote that was about $300 cheaper and when I watched them work, I knew we’d made the right choice. We didn’t have to get a local permit because the tree was considered a nuisance (tell me about it!) due to the damage its roots were doing, and I think even the HOA had their approval back to me in less than a week!

From the final approval, it took about a month for scheduling to get these guys out, and once they arrived the whole thing was GONE in maybe an hour?!

They still need to come back in a few days to grind out the stump so that we can try to grow grass over the oak tree’s unmarked grave, but all in all I was pretty impressed.

And relieved. We literally just had the AC worked on in our van because acorns were clogging up the pipes and causing water to back up into the system. Just before that, I raked 4-5 bags of leaves myself and then paid somebody who raked another 10 bags out of my tiny, little front yard!

Good riddance – don’t let the wood chipper hit ya where the lumberjack split ya… 😛

Writing Prompt Sundays – Medieval Travel Plans

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Writing Prompt – Where would you fly right now if you could hop in a plane?

Let’s assume that this implies we’re not in the middle of a global pandemic because my travel anxiety is high enough without adding in the threat of communicable disease!

I’ve always wanted to travel to Europe to check out all of the castles of the Middle Ages. I’m not sure the extent to which they let you just randomly wander around – if it’s simply a look at the castle walls or you can actually walk the dungeons and towers and explore all sorts of secret passages that for all I know are based more in movies than reality.

When I was a teenager, we had a camping trip at Northern Michigan’s closest equivalent to a castle and I got to ditch my lowly tent on the grounds for an opportunity to actually sleep inside! I don’t remember a whole lot about it, except that the room we stayed in was made of stone and it definitely felt the part to a 14 year-old who’d always looked up to the likes of Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers as veritable role models…

It does make me wonder with so many castles over there, does looking at them ever get “old” as in, “If you’ve seen one castle, you’ve seen ’em all…” or are there enough varieties and details to explore that it’s like people who tour classic churches or museums where there’s always something new to discover?

I don’t know if it will happen before we retire, but it’s definitely a trip that I’d like to make eventually … and if there’s an opportunity to spend the night inside, well, then that’s just a bonus! 😉

Mini-Games

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Very much on a whim, I found myself ordering one of the Super Mario Bros Game & Watch handhelds.

I honestly wasn’t really swayed last fall when this was released because I didn’t have any of these things as a kid and admittedly most handhelds are just too small for my big hands and old eyes to play for any length of time these days. But then Nintendo just announced that this year they’re releasing a Zelda version – which is easily in my Top 5 favorite games of all-time – and I also happened to find the Mario one on sale, so here we are…

Even though by now I’ve played the original Super Mario Bros on probably half a dozen different platforms (NES, SNES, Wii, WiiU, Switch, Arcade Cab, Computer Emulator), for some reason it still amused me to see that iconic screen in full color on a tiny, 2.5-inch portable screen. And it’s not like I don’t have scads more graphically impressive games on my phone, or that I could carry around literally thousands of games on a 1 TB micro-SD card the size of my thumbnail.

Fun Fact – Super Mario Bros on the NES was only 40 KB in size!

I think what really makes me smile is that Christopher has gotten a kick out of playing it, even though it’s not nearly as shiny and feature-rich as Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D World that he’s playing right now. Here’s a pic from 2018 of him trying to play, but more or less just running into pits and Goombas…

And yet three years later he can play along with the game that not only introduced his Dad to video games, but also was the predecessor for the Switch games that he loves exploring today!

I’m curious to see if the next one will spark a little interest in the Zelda franchise for him because although he hasn’t had much interest to date, you never know what will catch their eye next! 😉

…either way, I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing through the first dungeon randomly before my eyes start seeing double or my hands cramp up on these tiny, tiny buttons…

Dealing with Death

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This week started as Monday morning I learned that one of my coworkers passed away unexpectedly.

We worked together for something like eight years – nearly half of my career and a quarter of hers – and although she was going to be out on leave for most of the summer for medical reasons, I never could’ve imagined it turning to this.

I guess I’ve been kind of lucky recently because I think the last funeral I went to was my Grandpa’s in 2014 and then my wife’s Grandma a couple of years before that. Even with the global pandemic, I don’t think that I knew of anyone personally who has died from it, and so other than Cleo passing last fall, I’ve been mostly spared from the sorrow that comes from that kind of loss…

Monday was mostly a day of shock for me and I spent the rest of the day working in my office alone with the lights off after sharing what limited news I had with my co-workers.

Tuesday was when I started to feel the sadness seeping in. I’d learned more specifics about what had happened and more people were reaching out to me, which has felt very stressful in a guilty sort of way.

By today I just didn’t really want to interact with anybody, which has been tough because Sara isn’t feeling well and the kids have been a lot to handle today on top of trying to squeeze in a little work here and there because the job doesn’t stop. In fact, it only grows because not only do I have her extra work, but also the work involved with her passing … which I also feel guilty even complaining about because it is my job, but here we are regardless.

Tonight I went swimming after the kids went to bed for all of about ten minutes until a thunderstorm rolled in and called me out of the water. Even though it was a little cold because it rained some today, and it was dark so the only lights were the pool lights, it was nice just to embrace the quiet for a few minutes and try to take a breath and get my bearings around all of it.

I feel like I really haven’t had a chance to grieve yet, per se, because I need to work on an announcement to go out to the whole company about her career, and there are a lot of other unknowns that I still need to talk to HR about because they don’t exactly have a documented process for this sort of thing. Everyone around me has offered to help in any way that they can, but when you’re trying to figure out what it is you’re supposed to do yourself, there’s just not much that others can offer at this point.

Tomorrow I need to talk to her family again and see if they’ve made funeral arrangements, and I need to get a handle on what my own responsibilities in all of this are. Apparently I also have to get access to her email to see if there’s anything we need to keep before IT removes her account, which makes me a little uncomfortable.

And yet through all of the sadness and discomfort, I keep reminding myself that my feelings are nothing like what her husband and daughters are going through right now. I worked with her for 40 hours a week – a good portion of the time remotely where we didn’t even see each other face to face – whereas she was the rock of their family 24/7/365.

I will say that I’ve tried to hug my family a little tighter and appreciate everything around me, despite the chaos, ever since hearing the news. It’s scary to realize that things can change on you just that quickly, and that nothing is guaranteed in life except right here and now.

It reminds me of this eulogy that Richard Hunt gave at Jim Henson’s funeral back in 1990 that I turn to in times when I need a little inspiration…

Writing Prompt Sundays – My Next Five Years…

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Writing Prompt – Write about the goals you’d like to work toward in the next five years.

In five years’ time, I’ll be 46 years old.

The kids will be 12 (6th grade) and 9 (3rd grade).

If I continue at the same job that I have today, I’ll have been with them for 22 years!

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about goals near and far, so I’m honestly not sure if most of them are much of a surprise…

  • I’d like to continue working towards taking better care of my health. This is probably the most important one – for obvious reasons.
  • I’d like to have built and moved into our dream house, so here’s hoping that real estate and construction costs have dropped considerably before then!
  • I’d like to go on some fun adventures with our family once COVID-19 is finally behind us, including travels out of state and possibly even under the sea… 😉
  • I’d like to explore some new avenues with my writing, and also continue adding more books to my bookshelf – both digitally and in person.
  • In general, I’d like my life to be less stressful and more within my control so that I can better focus on the things that are really important to me.

I actually think that every one of these are pretty reasonable goals for a five-year period if I’m able to practice what I’ve learned lately about making small, impactful changes over time. None of these are things that I’d expect to solve over a single year, but five years gives a person a lot of time to work with as long as you’re actually willing to put in the work.

And I’m not saying that by 46 I want to own a theme park or write The Great American Novel, though the money from the latter would be nice for funding that dream house of mine!

My goals are really to be more or less of healthy, reasonably wealthy, and just wise enough to fill a few tombs with my thoughts for my own amusement. With enough time and inspiration, how hard could that be?!

A Good and Bleh Week…

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The last couple of weeks have been a little – how can I put it politely? – needlessly stressful.

But instead of grumbling about all of that nonsense, I thought I’d share some fun stuff instead!

Snorkeling & Diving Fun
Tonight the kids and I literally spent something like two hours in the pool after Sara went to work and aside from the usual tantrums about sharing toys and bumping each other and whatnot, we all had a lot of fun! I had ordered some sticks to dive for that ended up being so neat I’m going to get some more of them and David, Christopher, and I had a blast diving down to fetch them from the bottom of the pool along with toy cars and dinosaurs and anything else that we could find.

It’s honestly the first time that I’ve ever been able to surface dive – I guess the new mask and snorkel made something click, so I’m definitely looking forward to more practice. And it was quite the workout, too!

Meet Ollie!
It’s been a couple of weeks now, but we also got a new dog!

I’ll admit that I didn’t necessarily think we were ready, however I know that Sara has really been yearning for one since Cleo passed last fall and she happened upon someone on Facebook who had to get rid of theirs, so the next thing we knew she made a little road trip out into the country and came back with this pretty Australian Cattle Dog that we ended up naming Ollie.

For being less than a year old, he’s surprisingly well behaved and we’re really hoping to avoid some of the bad habits that Cleo was known for – so far he hasn’t really stolen food from the kids, his barking is much more subdued, and he even listens when I tell him to stay if I open the door! Plus, he’s pretty cuddly and the kids instantly fell in love with him (well, Matthew took a day to adjust), so it’s nice having another furry member of the family again. 🙂

The Colors of Pride
I enjoy Pride Month. I like seeing all of the rainbow stuff everywhere and people celebrating who they are, and I’ll always believe that equality is an important fight that we forever need to stay vigilant about. So needless to say, I scooped this new Lego set up as soon as it was released on 6/1 and it finally arrived yesterday, so after everyone else went to bed I took the opportunity to take a break from life drama and just enjoyed putting this colorful piece together while I was watching some old YouTube videos.

This is such a cool set – I really just love how bright and vibrant the colors turned out. It was like I was putting together a Crayola box!

New Writing!!!
Both of these were very much unexpected, but this week I found myself a bit inspired to write so in addition to starting my redesign of this site, I also ended up writing a new humor column and a new essay!

…which is significant when you consider that my last posts for both of those were something like nine months ago… 😯

Granted, I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go from here at this point. I’d like to think that maybe this summer will feature some more of both of these projects, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself at this point. That said, I did really enjoy putting both of them together and I’ve been saying the last couple of weeks that I needed a change of pace creatively, so we’ll see! 😉

How to Lose a Customer, in Two Acts…

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Act 1 – Sprinkler Repair Guy

We’ve only worked with him a couple of times, but it was a no brainer to give him a call when our sprinklers weren’t working because A) he helped us before, and B) literally everyone in town recommends him.

He’s here for maybe half an hour and everything is back up and running, or so I think, but after I pay him and he leaves, I run through the system again and notice that there are two heads that still aren’t working.

I try to call him back, but no answer, so I text and ask if he can swing back by to fix the other two heads.

Highly recommended sprinkler repair guy finally responds and says, “Give me a call in a few weeks and I’ll fit you in.”

No. No, I won’t. You didn’t finish the job I just paid you to do. You were great at most of the work that you did, but after this I’ll never contact you again.

Act 2 – In-Home Therapists

It’s no secret that we’ve hired several people over the years to help the kids with behaviors stemming from their autism. For the most part, both of them have been pretty successful with the therapy, however every now and then we find ourselves working with someone who just doesn’t quite click.

Right now we’re not clicking because apparently some of the therapists have complained that our house is “an untherapeutic environment” for them to provide their services.

We’ve been with this company for two years now and paid them enough money to buy this house that they’re not happy in, but instead of trying to work with us through these issues, they’re basically threatening to quit because our house isn’t clean enough for them.

And that’s fine.

If they’re not comfortable working in my home, then I don’t want them working here, either, and there are plenty of other providers for us to shop around to if we need to find someone less judgmental and more understanding of a family trying to raise kids with special needs.

I feel like if that’s literally your job, you should already be pretty compassionate in that department, but I digress.

Finale

The morale of today’s rant is simple – never stop appreciating your customers, even if you’re really busy and even if you’re really frustrated with them because customers are a lot easier to lose than they are to find.

Snorkeling with the Boys

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The last couple of weeks, I’ve really been yearning to try snorkeling again.

The weather is finally warm enough for us to start using the pool, so recently I dug out my very old snorkel and was letting Christopher and David play around with it until I eventually broke down and bought each of them their own mask and snorkel set, along with a much less aged version for myself.

They’ve had theirs for a few days now, but today was the first day that I got to try mine out and I’ve got to say that it was even more fun than I had expected it was going to be!

Personally, I have a very love/hate relationship with the water. I enjoy it in theory, however I’m not the best swimmer and my anxiety kicks in when I’m in over my head … which is ironic in a way when you consider the couple of years that I was into scuba diving in my late teens! Nonetheless, I’d really like to get to a point where I’m more comfortable because I think as the kids get older we could have a lot of fun diving as a family, but if I’m going to take everyone out in the open water where I’m even more responsible for them, I know that I need to up my swimming game considerably…

Plus, not for nothing but these kids have all been taking swim lessons now for basically their entire lives! We started them in water babies classes at our local school as soon as they were old enough … six weeks, maybe?! … so seeing as Christopher for one is almost out of classes he’s been doing so well, I know that he’d love the adventure as long as his good, old dad can keep up! 😉

But today was a lot of fun – I threw on my mask and snorkel and just experimented a bit here and there while the kids were otherwise occupied, and even just did some bobbing around while I waited for Matthew to circle around in between diving into the pool. I also tried some diving myself, which is a surprisingly good workout I think because unlike the kids who are short enough to kick their way to the bottom, I found myself pretty much limited to just using my arms. 😯

I’m looking forward to doing it a lot more this summer, to the point where I just ordered some weighted sticks to practice diving for off of Amazon to use in between hunting for toys and whatnot that end up in our pool everyday! I don’t want to put the cart before the horse or anything, but maybe after a bit we’ll try packing up the crew and going to a beach where the kids can try swimming in salt water for a change.

Not sure how I feel about crowds vs COVID yet, but it’s something to shoot for and I think if I could take Christopher and David somewhere relatively tame where they could see a few actual fish out in the wild, it would be a HUGE DEAL for them and might even make it easier for them to slow down a little on future snorkeling expeditions!

P.S. I might need to splurge on a camera that can go underwater – that might be kind of fun. Even with the new frameless mask and dry snorkel that I picked up for myself, I’m already being reminded at just how expensive this hobby can be…

A fresh coat of paint…

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When was the last time I changed the theme up around this blog, anyways???

Apparently it was back in 2011 when I migrated everything over from LiveJournal, if you can believe that…

A lot has changed since then – my word count here is roughly 2.5x higher than it was a decade ago, and more notably most of those projects that I used to advertise at the top of my site have pretty much gone defunct. 😯

I’ve also kind of been in the mood for something different creatively, so I thought why not start with a little facelift here and see where it takes me? That old design, while colorful, was built long before responsive design was a thing, so I acknowledge that it didn’t always look so great on mobile devices.

Do you realize that here in the 21st century, there are people who only have mobile devices as their means to access this Information Superhighway of ours?! Wild!

Anywho, I still have some pruning and spackling to do around here before everything is the way that I want it, but with any luck the end result is that I’ll be writing a bit more than I have been in the past … and then we’ll just have to see where it goes from there. I’ve got a couple of random ideas for things I might experiment with, though I don’t want to go taking on more than I can chew right out of the gate.

Still, even just looking at my family life there’s a lot that I haven’t documented in words lately that I wish I had, so one way or another I hope that this spurs some new creativity and I can come up with something that I’ll be happy to look back on in another 10 or so years from now… 😛

In the meantime, just this evening I posted a new essay for Scott’s Guide to Life – this is a piece that I actually started putting together a couple of years ago, but had stalled out on until something negative happened today that inspired me to try and flip it into something positive.

This in particular is a series that I’d really like to do more with because I thought that it would be fun to eventually collect a bunch of these essays into a print book or two, so we’ll see…

When Your Best ISN’T Good Enough…

We’re Going on a Dragon Quest…

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…gonna do some grinding.

…lots and lots of grinding…

…I hope I don’t fall asleep!

The last time I played this game, I’ll admit that it got boring pretty quick. It was groundbreaking back in 1990, but needless to say RPGs have come a long way since then and grinding as your primary storyline doesn’t take long to get old.

Now that said, this time around I ended up finding the first in the Dragon Quest series on the Switch because they happened to be running a sale where the first three games together were under $10, so late one night last week after the kids were in bed I decided to give it a go. Lucky for me, apparently back in 2014 this got ported to iOS and that upgraded version is what eventually made it to modern consoles, so as you can already see the graphics are much better, and it felt like the XP and leveling got tweaked a little because the grind wasn’t nearly as tedious as it was in the past.

I even got Christopher mildly curious as he watched me play for a bit here and there between his own games, so I let him take a few rounds and (luckily!) I was in a place where all of the monsters were pretty easy to kill and he could just attack without having to worry about healing and doing anything else!

It turned out that the playthrough wasn’t really that bad this time around and after about an extra half hour of grinding tonight, I was able to take out the Dragonlord and call it a day. I think it worked well for me this time because surprisingly the simple playthrough made it something that I could casually play while watching the kids do something else or even a bit in the car while I waited for Christopher at swim class.

I haven’t really played much for mobile games in a while because these old eyes of mine can’t handle the tiny screens and even on my phone, there’s not really room for controls without taking up half of the real estate on the screen. But the Switch seems to be a good option that I’ve wanted to see for a long time – full-size buttons and a BIG screen, your usual library of console games, and it’s just as easy to dock it to the TV to play on the couch with a controller when you’re not out and about, which is honestly most of the time for me.

I’m actually kind of looking forward to digging into DQ2 & 3 now that I’ve got the first one behind me, albeit with copious use of this walkthrough because I’m just here to enjoy the game, not solve puzzles these days! I’m not sure how much of the Dragon Quest series is available on the Switch to date, but I’d love to slowly work my way through and eventually get back to DQ8, which I played through on the PS2 while my wife was in nursing school and thoroughly enjoyed!

So watch out, slimes – this grind has only just begun… 😉