On the heels of my recent evaluation of my goals and accomplishments, my wife isn’t completely happy with what we got done so far this year. In fact, we had a conversation about selling everything to free us from the obligations of maintaining a home. I of course am pretty tepid about the idea preferring to see what we can do with what we have where we are at.
Today, I am talking about some my mindset issues and how I got to where I am. But it is not just problems, I look a what I want to do and ways to approach them. Hopefully, it is a good way to compromise with everyone.
End Your Programming Routine: I am within three years of having an empty nest and life changing thoughts. I am inclined to sit tight until that point, but who really knows what will happen in the meantime. I am open to consider change but what I really don’t want is moving for change sake and then moving again a few years later when the kids decide ultimately what they do.
Alone on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, I take some time to reflect on being a father and spending family time together. We spent most of our weekend at the beach as and extended family to honor my wife’s father. As promised in the podcast, the picture below is the view from our rented beach house. Pretty nice to have a full oceanfront view.
At the time that I recorded this, the weekend had just started (for me). It turned out to be a beautiful weekend and the worst days weather wise were in the past. You couldn’t ask for much better weather on the Oregon Coast.
End Your Programming Routine: For me, it is probably best to have some sort of outline before podcasting. As I listened to this for editing, I realized that I spent the most time talking about father’s imparting information to their children and less so on family time. Nevertheless, both are covered and I think that the entire podcast still contains useful information and transition context.
Back in March 2020, I ordered a root beer extract bottle. I was thinking as a family we would make root beer for something to do while we were in quarantine. It was one of those things that we never quite got around to. I think it came shortly before Sergio was to leave, after that my work on the apartment was going to get hot and heavy.
At some point, I do have some interest in making real root beer, not out of an extract bottle. I have done some investigation into this but I thought this was a good starting point. The way this works is that you add dry ice to the liquid for carbonation. That has been the long lag on actually doing this project.
My son that is half vegan and half vegetarian orders food from Thrive. They send dry ice with the frozen or liquids requiring refrigeration. So, I seized the opportunity when the order came yesterday. My son and I quickly mixed up the root beer.
You need to have some volume available in the pitcher because this gets violent when the dry ice hits the liquid. After the dry ice was gone, it was ready. It tasted good, a little too sweet for me, so maybe back off on the sugar next time. It was also a little flat unless you took a big gulp.
Finally, if you are not going to drink this all in one setting, you may want to add more dry ice when you pour again (like the next day). But, the good news of dry ice is that it doesn’t dilute or effect the volume because the temperature is too warm to keep it liquid.
Recipe:
2 1/2 cups Sugar
2 tbs root beer extract
3 qts water
3/4 pound dry ice
End Your Programming Routine: After sampling, we made root beer floats for desert. It was kind a fun thing to do and we will probably do this once a month until the extract is gone. It is something really easy to do with young kids and it is definitely unique.
This is new. It has been a long time since we have lived significantly apart from close relatives. We are on a big family road-trip from Oregon to Texas so that we can spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s mother. Our family has done some long trips, but we rented a van and we are also going with my sister-in-law’s family.
When you start to look at the economics of the situation, nine tickets costs roughly $3600. We plan on spending half by hot switching drivers and bee lining to Texas. Granted, we will lose time but this is an adventure. We may never do this again but it is something to try.
There are definitely risks. Weather and crossing the Rockies leave uncertainty in the trip. Looking at the weather mid-last week, it was looking clear for the shortest direction, due southeast. The actual decision for the travel route was decided right before we left. We travelled the Southwest route which was nice because I had never been on that particular freeway.
Being new at my job, I barely have any time off. So, I plan to working a couple of days as well. It kind of sucks, but the real point of the trip is to provide the family with an adventure. I have stubbed out a couple articles for the week, so we will see if I can keep it up this week.
This is the culmination of a difficult fall. My in-laws originally went to Texas in the early summer to seek treatment for my mother-in-law. Between my father-in-law dying and my wife trying to maintain a job and manage treatment at the same time, hopefully this is a celebration of a new season. Because her prognosis is not positive, this may be our last Thanksgiving and so we are pulling out the stops to make it happen.
I am going to write more about this evolving situation, but not now. It is real, it is raw and it is personal. While everyone has the right to manage their own affairs and control information as they see fit, it doesn’t mean that those decisions don’t have a billiard ball effect. One person may be at peace with the situation while others may have different feelings. It may ultimately be your decision and your outcome but those decisions have consequences. We all have a responsibility to handle them in an appropriate fashion even if we perceive them as ‘not what we would do’ particularly when we are observers. That is so difficult.
Most of the post was written before the trip. I am in Houston now and I will summarize some lessons learned next week. I already have all of the posts for this week planned out since it was a holiday week and we were on the road I wanted to get a jumpstart on everything.
End Your Programming Routine: The kids are out of school all week, it is a holiday week so why not? Even though we have done similar things, my sister-in-laws family has not.
After arriving last night at 1 AM, there are definitely things I learned about our choices that I will share. For now, going to enjoy a little warmer weather and hopefully get a chance to see some new sights and enjoy some family time this week.
This was my view when I woke up yesterday morning. You are looking at Mt. Thielson in central Oregon. As I said on Friday, I was going fishing last weekend with my family. Because of Covid, because of everything that went on this summer, because of some philosophical differences I have with my wife, this was the first and probably only family campout of the year.
Nearly everything was perfect, nearly. The only thing that wasn’t great was the fishing but it was OK in that we caught some fish. The weather was in the mid-seventies, the lows were above the freezing. The wind was light and the company was nice.
A little bit about my philosophical differences with my wife. We both enjoyed camping when we met. It is just that her idea was a camp ground that required showers and bathrooms with running water. I would say that I am not entirely opposed to that concept but there are so many beautiful and new experiences that we could do that are limited by that criteria. Over the years our necessities grew as well and required a trailer or second vehicle to haul everything that I get burned out just packing.
I suspect that at some point, there will be an RV in our future. With that, there are definitely more creature comforts and hopefully less packing to get out the door. I would also like an RV from the standpoint that it makes it easier to enjoy some of these places like I was this weekend without the constraints of running water required.
My goal this time was to be light and agile. I did bring some extra stuff like my hunting pack (just in case) and camp chairs (and the dog which was easier than finding someone to watch her). We only brought no cook or freeze dried meals which made cleanup easier and cooking faster, so we could spend more time fishing.
You can see my biggest freshwater fish I think that I have ever caught. I measured it at 16″. That is on the dinner menu tonight. That was the only fish I caught. Unfortunately, my son didn’t catch a fish. I think all told, our party caught around twelve in the duration of the trip from Thursday to Sunday. Not great when you consider the limit of (5×3)4 + (2*5)2 = 80 possible. But hey, I said my favorite kind of fishing was the one I was doing, and that is the truth.
End Your Programming Routine: As I said on Friday, I have passed up too many opportunities to spend time with my family because I have been ‘too busy’. I suspect that if I was not a single parent and not blocked it on the calendar, I probably would have found an excuse to miss this one as well. I am very happy that I made the effort to make part of the trip even though it was a lot of work. I hope that I can get my act together so that this will happen again in the future.
It has been quite a while since I have had one. Of course a lot of it was the lack of having a weekend (or job). Then with all of the social restrictions over the last year we just didn’t get a chance to have one. We made up for it.
It was kind of a belated family gathering because we didn’t get together for Christmas. We all had different things going on and just couldn’t quite swing it to make it work. My sister was the one that suggested we get together for a trip and that is what we did.
We spent the weekend at the house my brother-in-law’s family has owned since the 1940s. It seems like this area is a well known secret as we only a mile or so from Bill Gates’ and the Nordstroms’ homes. This is the water of ultimately the Pacific Ocean, in Washington. My mind is blown. I could never imagine anything like this on the Oregon coastline.
We left Thursday as soon as the my kids got home from the last day of school, around 1:30p and got back Sunday night at 10:15p . I am in full on hangover as we still have to unpack from our trip and get ready for softball tonight.
End Your Programming Routine: Welcome to summer; this is how things have gone in recent years. There is a lot more coming. I am going to try and recover for a couple of hours.
I am sure that people that read this topic are frequently disappointed that this weekly segment has been week on the ‘Mall Ninja’ or even the hardcore gear scale. That is not really my intent, I do want to get more into gear and gadgets when I have a little more time to plan. But, it illustrates a point that far more important than a whizzbang, zombie laser is skills and objectives. Surf around YouTube and you can find people that make art or musical instruments with a machete. You can find people that dig a pool out of the ground with sticks and materials found around the site.
It is likely the case that with thirty other tools, that instrument could look 100% better or maybe last twice as long. The point remains that 90% of the objective is knowledge and desire and the remaining ten percent is the rest. We tend to get stuck in the ten percent and lose track of what we can do versus what we are able to do.
Growing up pre-internet, I got interested in building furniture. At that time, the only real consistent and available information that I was aware of was the ‘New Yankee Workshop‘. It definitely taught one approach to woodworking but I noticed a theme. Being sponsored by Delta/Porter-Cable, some of the projects were built to showcase specific tools rather than the tools complimenting the work. Of course, knowing nothing I thought it was the only way something could be accomplished. That lead to some dubious purchases early on.
One Christmas, I received a book called ‘The Encyclopedia of Woodworking’. When I first started reading through the pages I was really out of sorts and shocked because Norm didn’t do anything like what was being presented. The majority of the book was working with hand tools, saws, planes and chisels in the traditional way. My eyes were open to the possibility that there could be more than one way to do something.
Stay with me people… not every post is home improvement or woodworking related, I painting the background first. Back to ‘Tacticool’. The reason to do any of these things, have gear, etc is to have something to protect or worth using the gear for. Why would you want to bother searching for holsters and belts and making sure that your shirt doesn’t ride up if nothing could ever happen. It is a lot of extra hassle.
If you don’t have a family or friends or a desire for a better future, then preparing and training and learning is all a Red Dawn type fantasy. So, my last week was the usual marathon of birthdays and family gatherings (more about that some other time). Added to that was grieving for the loss of my wife’s uncle and the funeral preparations. I unplugged to be there where I was needed most.
Protecting what is important in your life is rarely guarding it with menace and force. It is being attentive to the needs of your spouse, children, friends and extended family first. It is imperative that those relationships are nurtured otherwise you will end up wiping down your rifles and counting ammunition alone. I am encouraging a change in mindset to define what is important and what it takes to keep those things safe. We will get to gear and firearms soon.
I also have another camping trip scheduled for next week but one way or another, my future is going to change. I will finish this project I am working on. I will intensify my efforts to refine what I have started here as well as put out more effort on job search. I will also spend time building my relationships, sometimes at the exclusion of other things.
The reason I was gone was that we were ‘bugging out’. This is our first camping trip in several years. One of the reasons is that I drag my feet when it comes to camping is that my wife and I differ on how and what to do. She tends to only want to go to large parks with showers and such which drives me nuts. I have more solitude at home. Another reason is that, I really prefer a minimalist gear experience, but for the family is a day’s worth of prep on both sides to get all the stuff together.
Nevertheless, we went Monday through Thursday with some friends to a more primative and smaller campground in the middle of the week. It was mostly young families, pretty quiet. But let us get back to the subject at hand, bugging out.
Bugging out is a prepper term for leaving your primary residence on short notice. It would be the opposite of bugging in which is sheltering in place with minimal outside contact (kind of like what we have been doing since March). Depending on the length of the journey, you are ‘living off the land’ as you move to get to your final destination.
Why the heck would you bug out? Well some good reasons would be localized flooding for instance Hurricane Katrina or more likely in our case wildfires or you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a daily BLM riot. When the option to leave is better than the option to stay, you would bug out.
Now is a good interlude to inject some reality into the mall ninja line of thought. ‘I’ll just go into the back woods and take what I want. All I need is a rifle and knife.’ First, you are going to be competing with all the other idiots that think this way. Second, during the whole time, I saw nothing larger than a chipmunk so if you don’t have skill and knowledge of the area your chances of success are quite slim.
Camping is a good way to test your gear, skills and mettle. I have really tried to make my life easier by creating containers with dedicated gear so that it is an easier preparation to go. The problem is the stuff seems to grow more and more. Some of the stuff in the back of the photo we didn’t even use, like the generator (nor did we really need). It is kind of nice to have nearly a full kitchen without having to steal from the kitchen.
The way our cache has grown is over the years, if we needed something on the trip, we added it to stay with the camping gear. It is the little things that are probably the most helpful such as tin foil (for our hats), zip lock bags for leftovers and cooking utensils. Sometimes old cookware got rotated out the kitchen and into the the camping pile. We had an amount of basic spices that stay with the gear like onion, garlic, salt and pepper which is nice to not have to remember such things.
It can also be good to work on your improvising skills and not have everything you need. Cooking over a fire is a good example where often it is an exercise in doing with what you have on hand be it cooking surfaces or utensils. I cant say that we had everything we wanted on this trip. Had we been alone and not with another family, we would have done a few things differently but it worked out.
This year, it is particularly difficult. More people are ‘staycationing’ or staying close to home. I read that records are being set for boat sales this year, supporting that trend. The large parks always fill up fast and reservations usually need to be made in the spring time for summer weekends. But, I think that if you get off the beaten path a bit or are willing to travel a few hours, camping can be done on short notice.
Life is so busy for me right now. I have a significant deadline to get this house livable in two weeks. I am feeling major pressure to find a suitable replacement job. I have a desire to build a lifestyle income and I have other personal interests that I would like to complete.
That said, I took last night off. I have been working from the moment I wake up until nearly bedtime since early March, every day. I took Mother’s Day off and I took the Saturday of Memorial weekend off.
I love what I am doing, I am seriously considering making a go of construction or handyman work. I also have a really hard time turning things off. Even as I sat around the fire, I had to weigh the pressure of my project versus the guilt of my presence. But, I decided to push that all aside.
It was a beautiful evening. We started a fire and popped popcorn over it. The kids roasted marshmallows and made smores. I drank a beer and enjoyed the warmth of the fire as well as sitting down doing nothing for an hour.
I have been accused of being around, but not present. I don’t know if that is something that will ever change, but it is something that can make a conscious effort to be aware of. I am ready to be done with this project. Everyday, all day for months is starting to get old when you want the freedom to do something else at times. So, back to work for me.
We took this week to have a stay-cation being that it was supposed to be Spring Break. Our plans were to meet up with another family and spend the week on the coast for some rest and relaxation. That changed first with them coming down with suspected Covid-19 and then the state lockdown.
Next week, we are instituting a much more rigid schedule that will include personal development (self paced learning, reading, art/music, etc.) time, earlier bedtimes and wakeup times. This will be in place until we get word that life will be returning to normal – hopefully April 28.
I am sure everyone that is enduring this period seriously is finding aspects of the quarantine challenging. I am a person that treasures my alone time and personal space, that has been hard to find. But I am also a person that thinks family time is valuable. Here are some of the ways that we have been enjoying the time together.
Puzzles an games for hours
Puzzles – This 1000 piece puzzle pictured above took us three solid days to complete. This is a staple activity for our vacation time. It allows everyone to participate and interact for long periods of time
Games – I went back in the waaaay back machine to dig out old role playing games (from the 1980s!), build characters and adventure. We also have played Monopoly, poker and Mind Trap.
Family movies at night – We have been working our way through the Twilight Series and in honor of Kenny Rogers we watched ‘The Gambler’ the other night.
Swap Day – The kids were the parents and the parents were the kids. They planned and executed all of the meals as well as led the entertainment decisions for the day.
Cooking- We have been making comfort foods. We have been doing the activity with different family members and involving them in different aspects. A lot more baking and deserts have been made recently.
Create parody video – We wrote, acted, filmed and edited a video that was a lot of laughs. We are still in the editing phase, but should be up on YouTube shortly.
Make-over time – Not really, but my wife has been bugging me to shave my head for years. So I did, to see what it would look like.
I have to say that a lot of these things I would normally not want to spend time doing. But it seems as though forcing the issue has made something like Monopoly enjoyable. As we head into next week, hopefully it will be an empowering time teaching the kids that they don’t need school to learn and find interest in pursuing their personal projects.
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