It surprises me just how much stuff piles up to mention in these things if I’m not diligent in keeping up.

Two weeks and two days ago was an Ensign Symphony Choir and Orchestra performance. David Archuleta performed with them, and was very talented. The unfortunate part was that the choir director I guess thought that since such a young and hip performer would be accompanying them, the choir should try and exude some of that youth themselves, by being all cool with the snapping and the swaying about. Universally panned in my totally non-scientific poll afterwards.

I’d been picked up at work by a friend, and on the way back I noticed that she’d forgotten to turn off at my office’s exit, and was taking me back home. I figured I’d enjoy the bike ride back the next day to retrieve my car, and reassured her that it was totally fine when she realized her mistake.

And indeed it was awesome. I find it hard to just bike to random places if there’s not a point to the trips. Biking to work, check. Biking with a friend, check. Biking down a nice trail for no reason, meh.

Sunday was Mother’s Day, and I spent that evening at a “My Mother Lives Far Away” game night. Learned some fun new ones.

Tuesday was Institute, which I’m back to attending. I’m finding it easier to catch up with people and find random things to do by attending.

Wednesday was a ward temple night. I’d aimed to attend early Tuesday morning to get my family name all prepped for a session, but the temple’s power had gone out. I thought I’d just go again Wednesday morning, but it turns out that something had gone horribly wrong with the font. The temple is on three-phase power, and one of the phases had gone… out of phase or whatever. There are two electrical systems that control the font: one that keeps the water flowing, and one that shuts the water off when the font is sufficiently full. This latter system was hooked up to the circuit that failed. The former system, that kept the water flowing, continued to run just fine.

Over ten thousand gallons of heated water poured over the font’s edge. “Up to the horns” is a phrase I heard tossed around by a temple worker. Walls were ruined, electrical panels shorted. Our ward would not be doing any baptisms that day.

Fortunately I had a list of names a friend had given me a while back that needed initiatories done, so I busied myself with those during the temple night.

The next day, our team at work had a bit of a celebratory outing to Mox Boarding House. This establishment caters to card- and board-game players, as well as miniature-based games like Warhammer 40k. There’s an attached restaurant, and you can borrow any games you want as long as you’re there.

Friday was my day to feed the missionaries. I don’t normally do it, but I’d been sitting next to them in Elder’s Quorum when they handed me the meal chart, so I couldn’t in good conscience just pass it along. Invited many friends, but it was short notice so only one showed up. The four of us had good conversation over one of Costco’s salmon thingers.

Saturday morning I went out to play mini-golfing with some friends. Might have to hit that up while y’all are here.

That afternoon I had a fellow wardie over to help me tackle some weeds in my back yard. He’s saving up to go on a mission, so I figured I’d employ him rather than paying some service, at least for now.

I’d noticed that one of my plants out front had died due to neglect, and I replaced it with a hydrangea.

That evening was a multi-ward activity. At first it was gonna be a picnic sort of thing just behind the church, but while I was hanging with my former co-chair on the Activities Committee I acted as a consulting party planner and we slowly morphed it into a Book of Mormon war chapter-style thing, “War of the Wards”. Dodgeball where you have to knock down your opponent’s tower, that sort of thing. Ice cream outing afterwards.

The next Sunday evening was a camp fire with s’mores in a friend’s back yard. I was the only guy there, and was sad I hadn’t worn my plaid shirt since I got to be the one to use an axe to chop some wood for the fire.

I don’t believe the FHE and Activities committees coordinate very closely, as Monday evening was another round of dodgeball. It was a very special round of dodgeball, however, as I got to coordinate and recreate the version of dodgeball we played in high school and that I’ve been chasing ever since. Apparently it’s called “elimination“.

On Tuesday I noticed that my hydrangea was doing quite poorly.

This might have had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t watered it since it’d been installed. Charlie Brown’s lament immediately came to mind. I really need to look into good-looking-yet-super-low-maintenance options.

Anyways, a bit of water and the thing perked right up the next day.

I guess I’ll have to start being responsible or whatever.

Wednesday evening was spent chilling at a park with a few wardies.

On Friday our site went off to see the new Solo movie. I was super happy about a few of the tie-ins with other Star Wars properties, and the movie wasn’t half bad.

Friday was also soccer day. As they tend to do these days, one of my contacts fell out, but this was a very inopportune time for that to happen. I’d driven in to work, and had a hike to get to afterwards, and I’d need my binocular vision. By a small miracle, I spotted the lens on the turf, washed it off with a water bottle, and it stayed put the rest of the evening.

The hike was to Franklin Falls. I didn’t anticipate it being as late or as wet as it was, and was ill-dressed.

The next morning my phone was at 7% power, hadn’t charged at all that night. I plugged it in a few more times, powered it off, nothing. There’d been quite a bit of mist coming off that waterfall, and I was darn near convinced that my phone had been rendered un-chargeable. But it turns out it charged just fine off my car; just my plug-in charger that had died. Whew.

At 10am I set off with a friend on a bike ride to St. Edwards State Park. I’d always been meaning to go, but had never made time. It was a long up-hill slog, but the ride down made it all worth it.

Chilled at home for an hour, before the same soon-to-be-missionary from last week showed up for some more weeding. We got pretty much everything we could identify as a weed. A professional–the same one that installed the water feature, actually–will be coming by next week to take a look and see what else needs to be done. Pretty sure one of the shrubs in the back corner either had a really bad reaction to the vines that’d been crawling over it for a while, or it’s infested with some kind of parasite plant. Either way it looks weird, and it’ll be good to get someone who knows what they’re doing to advise.

That evening was a game night for a friend’s birthday. The same one featured above, actually. A bit leveled up from a matchstick in a strawberry this time.

In closing, here are a couple of humorous car decals I’ve spotted over the last month.

Love ya!

Two weeks ago on Thursday I began a game that has still not finished. Five of us embarked on a magical journey of hope and wonder, collecting spells and allies in order to defeat our enemies and defend Hogwarts. We started off so young, but by the stroke of midnight we’d graduated from our third year. The Shrieking Shack had very nearly fallen to the Basilisk, but we managed to muster up the firepower to take it down.

I’m describing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. That site tells lies; this game is not winnable in 60 minutes. We’ll have to arrange to meet another time to work through years four to seven. I hear they’re a doozy.

One of our comrades-in-wands required a ride to the event, and I was happy to oblige. I’d heard that he lived on a commune, but hadn’t thought much of it until he offered to show me around when I swung by to grab him. Never one to turn down a cool experience like that, I followed him through the building where he lived, along with others of all sorts. Interesting religious imagery and symbolism everywhere. I was lucky I didn’t see anything in the clothes-optional pool area. While we were off defending Hogwarts we were missing a pagan maypole ritual. Interesting way to live.

Friday at 2pm I got a text from a friend, who’d just picked up a new bike and was looking for a biking buddy for that afternoon. I felt I’d put in enough over-time hours to justify playing hooky, so I shot off early and met her at a park, from which we embarked onto the Cross Kirkland Corridor. Before I moved earlier this year I’d biked the complete path to get myself to work. These days I have to meet up at the trail half-way through, and I miss out on the best parts of it. So it was nice to bike it in its entirety. We hit my office, grabbed some water, then flipped a uie. Had to make it to a dog kennel place to pick up a mutual friend’s husky.

This is what she looked like two months ago:

And here’s her in my car on the way back from the kennel:

My how she’s grown.

Friday night, and most of Saturday, was spent teaching myself Blender. I had some nifty animation ideas for a website we were gonna launch the next week, and thought I’d try my hand at making them. Conceptually pretty simple, but getting Blender to do what I wanted was a Herculean task. It’s basically the Photoshop of 3D graphics. A co-worker remarked to me that Blender is cool and all ’cause they have all these features you can use programmatically, but when it came time to surface them as a UI they were all, whatever, here’s some magic key combos and hidden context menus, have fun.

I ended up with some decent-looking animations, but we didn’t end up going with them, too flashy. Good learning experience regardless.

Nothing much to report from Sunday to Tuesday. On Wednesday I went out to see Rampage, which was a pretty alright film. On the way back from that I stopped by my erstwhile home teachee’s place to give her a blessing for a health issue.

Thursday was the big day. We’d been leading up to this for quite a while, spending many a late night at the office preparing. That morning at 10am we launched our open-source project, Asylo, with its accompanying blog post (that I heavily edited :)). This project is a framework for writing programs that can run with some pretty neat security properties. The basic idea is this: normally, if Alice own the computer, or has an administrative account on the computer, she has all power. Since Alice is better at running computer hardware than Bob, Alice sells access to her computer. Bob writes the program, and gives it to Alice to run on her computer. Since Alice has all power on her computer, Bob has to blindly trust that Alice isn’t messing with his program or stealing his data. This is basically an incontrovertible fact of life for most computer systems.

But there’s this neat concept called a trusted execution environment that essentially changes the game. On certain types of computers, Bob can write his program such that when it runs on Alice’s computer, the program instructs Alice’s computer to set up a “force field”, and thereafter nothing else on the system has access to the program or the data it’s working with. Even with her administrative account, Alice can’t peek at what the program’s doing, or modify it in any way.

So that’s super cool. But the problem is that these magic force fields aren’t very easy to set up or use. They require very specialized programming knowledge. Our project, Asylo, aims to make it dead simple to write high-level programs that take advantage of these ‘force field’ abilities. It’s still pretty early, but we’ll see where the project goes.

So we launched the website Thursday morning. Spent the rest of that day fielding questions from Hacker News and other outlets. My exhaustion had caught up to me by then, so at 4pm I bailed. I’d become a titch irritable, so I headed home to sleep it off.

At some point this week, can’t remember exactly when, I took care of a couple of pressing car concerns. Finally bothered to get my registration renewed. I thought I’d get something out of my laziness, a couple free months of registration, but no; even though I delayed renewing from February to April, my new sticker still reads as expiring in February. Shucky darn.

I also took my car in for service, where I had to give the sad news to the kindly mechanic that no, I really didn’t want to shell out $400+ to try yet another tack at diagnosing the weird noises that’d been coming out of my engine for several years now. Got some contaminated fluids replaced, but I figure the engine’s lasted this long, if it gives out I might just buy a car that’s less than 15 years old and maybe one that hasn’t been rebuilt.

Saturday morning I went off with the same friend I played hooky with, to go bike to Seattle. A cordoned-off commuter lane on a bridge across Lake Washington meant the ride was a pleasant ~40 minutes or so. We ended up arriving at the other side just in time to watch a rowing competition, followed by a boat parade.

By the time I got back to my place I had about two hours to get some R&R before a leadership session of Stake Conference. So I promptly fell asleep and missed the whole thing. Woke up just in time to make it to our ward’s Cinco de Mayo party, before walking the short distance to the chapel for the adult session. Afterwards I headed to a friend’s house to do some tech support, brain storm for an upcoming ward activity (Gadianton Robbers vs Nephites), and get girl advice. Fun times.

For the main session of Stake Conference, I’d been asked to volunteer as the usher coordinator. So it was my job to get there early, distribute usher pins to the other volunteers, assign areas of responsibility, collect attendance figures, and generally make sure people didn’t get trampled over on their way in. I got to hide behind my badge and be the mean ol’ usher boss-man, getting people to stop saving seats, move to the middle to free up the aisles, etcetera.

Stake Conference adjourned at 12:30, leaving us with a very weird amount of free time left in the day; normally our meetings last until 4pm (though I’m lobbying to change that). So I had a friend over for lunch, then napped and read some more Dune.

Monday was a Monday. On Tuesday I played my usual game of soccer with other employees, but I soccer’d so hard that I sprained my ankle something fierce. It’s been easy to do that ever since I hyper-compressed it in Costa Rica some five years ago. Finished the game though, even delivering the game-winning assist. Got home, kicked up my feet in a recliner to read a bit, then tried standing up and had my feet and knee exclaim oh, no, no that won’t do at all. Limped upstairs, took a bath, took some Advil, then slept the worst of it off. I’ve been limping around ever since, but it gets better each day.

How do you end up with four ladies, one guy with a gimp leg, and a cat, all trying to sneak through a construction fence at 10pm without being spotted? Here’s how.

Due to my valiant tech support efforts, I’d been invited over to dinner on Wednesday. Spaghetti, mmm boy. While watching a movie one of the girls got a text from her future father-in-law–who’d just been by to deliver something for the upcoming wedding–stating that cops were swarming the complex. A couple of us wanted to investigate, and this turned into the entire apartment taking a field trip around the block, along with the resident cat, having been properly harnessed and leashed. Turned out it was just some domestic disturbance thing.

Behind the complex lay a delightful forest area, with meandering trails and a charming creek flowing through. I’d heard that there’d been some construction back there, and inquired as to how it was coming along. Apparently it had turned into an absolute travesty. Thus our brief excursion turned into a bit of a field trip to see the new forest digs. Mind you that night had entirely fallen at this point.

And boy what a travesty it was. They’d put down fence along a narrow walkway through the forest, and spread a deep layer of wood chips along the ground. It was essentially a dog park. There had been an intriguing spiral pattern of rocks laid down on the ground, which had been swept away to make room for a wood-chip-blanketed clearing.

We navigated the neutered paths until we made it back into nature. Then it was up onto a sterile steel walkway which overshadowed the old walking trail that used to run right alongside the creek. We followed that until we ended up in a construction zone, where jungle gym equipment was being installed. We could see the main road from here, but it was fenced off, to keep trespassers out.

Rather than head back through the forest trail, we found a section of the fence-line that was high enough off the ground that we could squeeze through it, all incriminating-like. Then we just followed the road back around the long way. My leg was quite happy to be done with that little adventure, as was the cat who had definitely not signed up for all that.

Aaand that’s it for this one, till next time!

A quick overview of the last week-and-a-half:

Princess Diaries: For reasons too mundane to get into I found myself having to “make it up to” a few friends by hosting a chick flick night, ended up being Princess Diaries. I remember liking it a lot more back in the day. And the people for whom I’d put everything together left early, leaving a few friends and I who had to sit through the last third of a movie that I doubt any of us would’ve wanted to finish, but such is life.

A Quiet Place: Two Saturdays ago I met up with some friends to see the latest horror flick, starring Jim from The Office. For half of us it was our first time, while half were going for round two. I’d be more than happy to go for a round two myself some time; awesome movie with an awesome monster design.

After the film I puttered around Bellevue Square, eventually ending up in an Amazon Bookstore. Read a chapter of Ender’s Game, dithered for an egregious amount of time, then plunked down some cash for Way of Kings and Dune. Now that I have a proper bookshelf I’m slowly building up a collection of all my favorite books. One of the worst things about being graduated is not having access to BYU’s library anymore. Floor five, aisle PZ was where it was at; most of my favorite series were housed there.

Battleship on steroids: A month or two prior, a friend’s boyfriend had brought a game called Captain Sonar to a ward game night, and it was a total blast. Two teams of four face off, each commanding a submarine in real-time, trying to find and sink the enemy. By real-time I mean each team’s captain is shouting directions to their crew, firing missiles and deploying mines and sensor packages, all while the enemy team is doing the same; no turn-by-turn business here.

So I had a group over to play it. Afterwards I narrated a game of Forbidden Desert. It’s a collaborative survival game; the entire group is working together to escape a desert that’s rapidly being overtaken by a storm. If anyone on the team dies, the game ends and everyone loses.

Greatest Showman: My first ward-wide event was hosting movie-night for FHE. Had a good crowd, and as I later learned my neighbor didn’t hear a thing.

HOA shenanigans: Thus far I’d been able to count on three fingers the number of neighbors I’d met. That all changed on Tuesday last week when I attended my first-ever HOA meeting. It was an informational meeting, to discuss the impending necessity of hiring a community management firm to take care of some pressing issues. Got to introduce myself to people, and afterwards I was invited along with a group of five out to a local restaurant/bar. Super chill people, though there are some definite characters in the neighborhood.

Drunk with power: Or maybe it was just exhaustion. In any case. On Wednesday I pulled my first all-nighter since I worked on my graduate thesis, and for no good reason. I’d been faced with a problem at work, and had arrived at a plan of action. However, I spent Wednesday learning just how painful it’d be to implement my selected solution. A stroke of inspiration hit me as I arrived home, and I dove into coding. At around 2:30am I’d solved the half of the problem I’d thought I could solve with my new approach, but then I realized that using the same approach I could solve the rest of it in short order! 7am rolled around and I was grateful, since it meant my genius co-worker would’ve arrived at work by then and I could ping him with some lingering questions. At 9am my solution was complete. It was an ugly, abominable union of multiple programming languages, but by Jove it worked, and it was far cleaner than what I’d been anticipating having to do.

By this time I’d been working roughly 24 hours straight. I picked the wrong day to have an obsessive need to stay up all night, having an interview scheduled for 2:30pm that afternoon. So I grabbed a couple hours’ sleep before heading in to work. As I stumbled around corners and tables at lunch I found myself pondering, this must be what being drunk feels like.

All for nought: The next day, Friday, I was getting early feedback on my heinous perversion of a solution, and a co-worker said he’d seen a code-sample that he’d thought did what I was aiming to do. I told him to send it my way, as I’d looked at many code samples, and I’d tell him why what he’d found wouldn’t help my situation.

So of course the sample he gave me was code I’d somehow glossed over, that solved the problem in such an elegant way as to make me want to throw out the mess of code I’d written Wednesday night to Thursday morning. I immediately set to building out a solution that leveraged this new hotness.

A brief intermission: I was interrupted by the need to head out on a date that evening. Went out to Feed Co., a nice little burger joint in Redmond, that served great sweet potato fries and was adept at putting together a lettuce-wrap.

On the way back we decided to stop by the stake center and try and catch the end of a program the youth of the stake were putting on, a play based on the Book of Mormon. They’d been prepping in earnest for a couple months, though I later learned that the entire effort had been in the works for over a year.

We arrived just after the close of the play, but there were still plenty of people milling about. And that set!

I had no idea the ceiling was outfitted to hold up rigging like that. They really went all out, though I wouldn’t find out till the next day just how much out they’d went.

I returned from the date and proceeded to metaphorically bang my head against a wall; the solution I’d been pursuing was presenting frustratingly-vague errors, and I was forced to resort to tedious trial-and-error experimentation to track down the combination of factors that triggered a failure. I was forced to call it quits at 2am; wasn’t gonna give this thing another all-nighter.

Regroup for the counterstrike: As I was heading to bed I formulated a couple plans of attack that I hoped would at least yield better error messages than what I was getting. In the morning I got a chance to try them out, and whooped for joy when I was finally being told precisely what the system thought was going wrong.

R&R: Once again I had to leave my efforts by the wayside and head out with a friend to a matinee showing of that very same youth production, dubbed Built on the Rock.

It was incredible. On the order of a couple-hundred youth, all in impeccable costume. Some fantastic talents on display, including some kata, gymnastics, even an aerial silk routine. Great musical numbers. Pneumatic special effects. High-school-theater-caliber lighting design.

Once more into the fray: After the show I headed back home and put the final nail in the coffin of this work problem. Huzzah. Watching those error-free activity log messages tick past just made everything else worth it. Spent a while organizing my work into several smaller well-contained changes, all prepped for being sent out for review on Monday. I stacked them so I’d be able to send all of them out at once, just for theatrics’ sake.

Plants have feelings too: Spent the rest of the afternoon out in the back, weeding. I’d really let it go, partly out of laziness but partly out of fear that I’d be unable to determine what should stay and what should go, and cause inadvertent damage. Enough growth had happened, though, that I could confidently identify the worst offenders. Hacked-n-slashed my way around, building up a nice pile of greens.

Stepped back to take stock of my efforts. I’ve never been very good at weeding. Can’t seem to focus on one section of ground at once, instead flitting between attention zones until things look more-or-less reasonable. I was just about to finish rationalizing to myself that what remained wasn’t worth attacking, when I noticed something odd going on with a bush up near the fence corner. As I approached I realized it wasn’t one plant, but two. Vines growing out of a stump had somehow taken hold of a nearby tree thing and encrusted it in tendrils, bending it much too far over. In fact one rather large branch had been sheared clean off from the pull of the vines.

Weeding had been a chore before, but now it became a mission, to save this tree. As I worked to free it, cutting the vines at various points, I began to empathize with those that decide to be talkative with their plants. So sorry, I thought to the tree, that I let this go on too long without noticing. Shan’t let it happen again.

Chapel rave: Sacrament Meeting on Sunday was a special event, where the (several-more-than-usual) speakers were invited to share their favorite hymn, followed by the speaker, the choir, or the congregation singing it, depending on how good the speaker was or how familiar the hymn. Half-way through the program one of the tall chandeliers’ fluorescent bulb began faintly strobing. Not enough to notice if it wasn’t in your field of view, but too noticeable to focus on anything else with it in your field of view. So I spent the rest of the meeting with my head bowed in reverence.

Changing the rules: It was my turn to teach Gospel Doctrine that day. My lesson was to begin with Joseph’s interpretation of the baker’s and butler’s dreams in prison, and proceed through to his reunification with his family.

Of late, the crowd that attends Gospel Doctrine has been of the less-talkative bunch. Really hard to get good discussion out of the class. After spending so much mental energy on work this week, I didn’t feel like dealing with that, so I pulled a Kobayashi Maru. Wheeled a TV in from the library, gave a brief overview of the dreams and interpretations, then let Living Scriptures do the teaching for the rest of the lesson. And boy was it a hit. Had some fun humor sprinkled throughout an effective explanation of what I would’ve struggled to get across.

That evening I went to a friend’s birthday pajama-pancake game-night. Ran another game of Forbidden Desert, but this time the group lost twice in a row. Gee dang.

And that catches us up to today, which I started by sending off my plethora of changes, and spent the rest of the day ferrying them through code reviews. Haven’t felt this productive in a long time. A shame I won’t have this problem to deal with anymore now that it’s been tackled; grown kinda attached to working on it, in a weird way.

It’s warm enough now that I’m back on my bike. My old route to work, before I moved, had very little elevation change. My new one, however, is, like, not that. The central feature of my route is the part where I hop off my bike and push it up like a hundred stair steps. Thankfully there’s raw earth along the side that I can wheel it up, while I push on up the staircase. Then it’s more-or-less smooth sailing into work.

This evening I read the final pages of Oathbringer, the latest Sanderson novel. I think I picked up the book in January, but held off on starting it until the end of March, for precisely the reason I’m feeling a tad out of sorts now: it’s gonna be so long until I can read more.

I used to be a strong opponent to Netflix’s content distribution strategy, where they just dump a whole series’ worth of content out at once. I’ve always thought it kind of ruined the shared experience of discovery; unless you carefully coordinate your viewing patterns with someone and avoid Internet spoilers, you won’t be able to spend time theorizing and anticipating what happens next, like you can with traditionally serialized shows.

However, reading Oathbringer made me sympathetic to those who prefer that distribution model. I couldn’t imagine how frustrating it’d be to only be able to read one chapter a week.

I bought Way of Kings in case I felt like re-reading it after Oathbringer, which I’ve never done since finishing it the first time. I may do that yet, but I just lent it to a friend yesterday, so I think my next book–if I don’t branch out to something I haven’t read yet–is gonna be a re-read of Dune. I highly recommend it y’all, it’s like the Lord of the Rings of sci-fi.

(Don’t worry Hayden, I’ll retrieve Way of Kings before I made my way down to the Cabin this summer 🙂 )