I think I need to marry a physical therapist. I’ve been attending PT to help get range of motion back after my knee surgery (hasn’t been terribly effective at that, sadface), and I got rudely interrupted by my back doing its usual thing. Made it quite difficult to do most of my usual exercises. The therapist I’ve been working with tried a few things, one of which was to do some kind of deep tissue massage / lower back adjustment. I need to ask him what exactly he did, because for a stretch of time afterwards, my back felt fantastic. In short order it returned to its usual surly self, but I’m imagining what it’d be like to get that kind of treatment on the daily during one of my outages, and it seems divine.

Quite a few things to cover since last I wrote. Ever since I started attending the Seattle ward I’d been scheming on ways to get a big group gathering together at my place. It’s a ways away for most folks so it’d have to be a good sell. Surf-n-turf did the trick. I grilled up some steak, leaning on Mom’s expertise, and I had a friend help grill the fish I caught in Oregon – this was his area of expertise, and it came out excellent.

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The steak turned out a little crispy, but still tasted awesome. The next Saturday I didn’t have anything going on but decided to just grill myself another steak for practice, and this time I managed the heat a bit better.

A couple weeks after the cook-out, I got invited out to a friend’s lake house for Labor Day weekend. It was a really nice time; think Cabin-level service as far as friends being invited over – they were delighted to have us and cook for us.

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The day after we returned, I went out with a friend to a Lindsey Stirling concert. The concert had originally been slated for this time last year, but Covid. This will have been my fifth concert of hers, and I actually think I’m a bit over them now. They had it so loud that either their speakers or my ears could not properly process the signal at that intensity. I think the main reason to go is to enjoy the light show, which was pretty fun. Company was nice though.

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Two days later was a John Legend concert. I did not attend this one though. The sequence of events is this:

• Be me in March 2020. I had just gotten Lindsey Stirling concert tickets and saw John Legend was coming to town too. I like his song All of Me and figure, hey, maybe I’ll get a concert for an actual mainstream artist, that’s a thing people do, right?
  
• Concert is delayed due to Covid.
  
• Get an email reminding me about the upcoming Lindsey Stirling concert. Plan an outing.
  
• Don’t recall getting one about John Legend. Idly wonder if I missed it or if it’s even happening. Look it up and it’s two days after Lindsey Stirling. Cool cool, a week of concerts.
  
• Try and fail to secure a date for the thing with the few people I’d be potentially interested in.
  
• Consider expanding my scope to those I’m just good friends with.
  
• First decide to listen to a bit of the actual album he’ll be performing. One of the potentials turned me down because she didn’t much like John Legend, so I thought it might be good to make sure I like John Legend.
  
• The album is called Big Love and is one sappy love song after another.
  
• I find myself glad I did not secure a date, as it would make for a pretty awkward first date. For the same reason, acquaintances are right out. As would a solo venture, I wasn’t interested in going by myself and being reminded that I’m not dating anyone 🙂
  
• I decide that this concert is for couples and I go ask a couple friends who are dating if they’re fans of John Legend and free on Thursday. They say yes to both and gladly accept the tickets. They have a grand old time, and I get karma points that I hope are redeemable for something cool.

And that’s the saga of that concert. Maybe I’ll try the symphony next time or something.

The puzzle is now back at my place, taking over my table. Slowly coming together, I spend a few minutes each day noodling on it.

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This puzzle is a little bit evil. See for example that edge along the bottom. In this section, no two edge pieces actually connect with each other, so unlike traditional puzzles, you can’t assemble the edge and work inwards. I didn’t realize this when I started; the first thing you do with a puzzle is grab the edge pieces and put them together. When I couldn’t I thought I might’ve been missing some pieces. But now that I grok it, this is fun. Progress is slow, but it’s all part of the experience.

I have a bone to pick with some combination of church policy and the Seattle YSA ward leadership. One of my new friends in that ward, who is actually a few months older than me, is the absolute life of the party. Very charismatic, he made sure to introduce me to a ton of faces when I was brand new in the ward. At a recent talent show he and his roommates put on a legendary ‘N Sync number. Verily Cooper from the Alvin Maker books would agree that their apartment has a good thing going on.

So when I hear that today this friend got pulled aside by his bishop and told he needs to move on to a family ward and is no longer welcome at the singles ward, I see that as completely needlessly damaging. Was he hurting anyone by attending the ward? Is this going to help him find someone? (Hint: probably not.) “Thanks for making this ward so welcoming, now scoot along.” I hear that there’s stuff in the works in HQ to try and help these sorts of situations, so we’ll see what they come up with.

You can have activity coordinators all day, but I can attest that there’s no substitute for actually being in a room with your peers. By just chatting I learned that a friend is leaving town this week and as a result we’re gonna have a game night for him this Friday.

In the meantime, I’m wondering how much time until they come for me. My records aren’t in the ward, I’m just “visiting.” Someone may pull me aside one of these weeks though, and ask what’s up. Well, it’s been a good run, a second round that I didn’t expect to get.

Plex now has three new edited films: Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, and Patriot. YouTube decided I might be interested in clips from movies featuring compellingly vile villains. YouTube was right, and I decided to grab the films and edit them down.

I’ve come up with a new technique for removing curse words that’s pretty neat. Normally I’ll just mute the soundtrack entirely for the necessary span. However, I was faced with a quandary, a sequence where a character was repeatedly cursing under their breath while in a scuffle. My usual M.O. was making the scene more distracting than I wanted, with all sound cutting out for small bursts of time, pulling the viewer out of the experience. My solution was to find some sound from a neighboring time range that had no dialogue, featuring just the ambient sound from the scene. I then took a short copy of that sound and laid it on top of wherever I muted to cover a curse word. The result was much more seamless – sounds like the character interrupted himself mid-curse, but otherwise the scene plays the way it was originally intended to sound. This now how I edit down language throughout any part of a movie.

Since Patriot didn’t have any language to deal with I didn’t have to actually watch it in full in order to edit it down, so maybe Dad and I will catch it when he’s up here later this month.

I have enjoyed watching commentators cover grand-master chess games, but sometimes I want to see coverage of more normal-looking chess. Pogchamps is that, and it’s fantastic. Hosted by Chess.com, game streamers and other online personalities take crash courses in chess and then battle it out. Earlier this year, Pogchamps 3 featured Rainn Wilson, who was surprisingly good at chess. Pogchamps 4 just wrapped up, and it featured what I believe is the most hilarious game of chess I’ve ever seen covered. Which, you wouldn’t think that chess could be funny, but you’d be wrong.

Till next time!

I’ve always known that video game addiction is a thing, but I’ve never really been able to relate, until now. As video games go I think it’s pretty harmless, but I’ve noticed that oftentimes I’ll be on a video conference call, looking at everyone’s faces laid out in a grid, and see a chess board dancing behind the scenes.

Last week I returned from a successful fishing trip to Oregon. I highly recommend it and look forward to us AnderMen making the trip.

My transit from Portland to Newport was interrupted by my realizing half-an-hour into the drive that I’d forgotten all of my clothes and toiletries in the rental car lobby. Thank heavens they still had it, would’ve made for a really sad trip.

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A couple days after I got back, I went out with my buddy Kyle (third from left above) to go crabbing at his parents’ place on Orcas Island. Apparently the proper way to cook crab, which they didn’t do in Oregon, is to do so in salt water. Can attest, was much more delicious.

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At the office this last week I noticed they put in some turntables. Can definitely notice an improvement in fidelity. The listening experience is also quite different – as skipping ahead is much more labor-intensive, they promote a sit-and-listen-to-the-whole-album sort of deal. Would be an interesting hobby to get into.

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Been dealing with some drama at work this week, so it was nice to be able to get away from it and go out with some new Seattle friends to Whidbey Island.

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On the home front, my roof is finally getting replaced. The thing’s an original, so it’ll be good to have that taken care of.

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Today I attended the Seattle ward, then wandered a bit around UW campus. Found a nice place to sit and play some chess, won after they invited a fork of their king and bishop in the endgame.

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Very glad Washington has been able to make what progress it has against Covid, as things have gotten relatively back to normal here. Generally no masks required, and we got to have an actual Fourth of July celebration.

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The neighborhood HOA arranged to bring someone by to pressure-wash the walkways, and anyone’s driveway if they wanted to shell out. I have a pressure washer and decided to just give it a go myself. I’m glad I had the experience, but it would definitely be worth the $70 to get a professional to do it.

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I had tried to pitch a trip to Bainbridge Island to a couple friend groups, no takers. I decided to heck with it, I’ll go myself. Had a great dinner and short walk around town.

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Later that week I embarked on a trip back to the Cabin, by way of Marcia & Kenton’s place. Thought I’d pop over to chill with Hayden and Mom, bum a ride over to the cabin while I was at it. I think I’ve decided that I’ll want to make that little excursion at least once every couple of years.

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The original plan was to fly back to Washington, but I decided to change things up and drive back with Mom and spend a week in Utah with the folks. Awesome time. Listened to an audiobook recommended by Hayden on the road, which I ended up getting a copy of in Park City.

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While I was in Utah I put the finishing touches on a letter to the ACC regarding that business with the easement I mentioned in my last post. Ran the thing by Uncle Steve to get some legal perspective and he said it was ship shape. I’ve since heard back from the ACC and they’re not super enthusiastic about letting this one slide. Which is an understatement. Thankfully it looks like most of the board is on the side of a peaceful resolution that doesn’t require tearing anything up, so hopefully this can be resolved amicably, though it’s very possible the ACC chair will resign in protest; feelings are that strong here. We’ll see.

I got back to Washington on Sunday night, and shipped out for Young Men’s camp on Monday night. I’d volunteered to stay a couple days, till Wednesday evening, at which point my bishop would relieve me of duty. As it turned out though, by the time he arrived, both of the young men from our ward had gone home due to health issues. So, as it happened, we both left Wednesday night.

Young Men’s camp was awesome though. They had this core of young men who were assigned as “Camp Council”, in charge of leading out on things like greeting the youth as they showed up on their first day, running scripture study, and making prayer assignments, among other duties. It was really cool to see a priest from our ward who was normally very reserved get very charismatic for the meet-and-greet portion. I was chatting with him later that day and he was like, “Yeah that really took it out of me, I need to recharge my batteries.”

At camp I ran into an old co-worker who I used to go recruiting with at BYU, who since left Google. Also met the surgeon who operated on my knee. Never saw him without a mask so I didn’t know it was him until someone referred to him by name and I was all, “oh wow I know that guy.” So, pretty cool time.

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If it wasn’t for the rough sleeping arrangements and the meetings I had lined up the rest of the week I would’ve seriously considered staying through the end of camp.

This weekend has turned out really great. A friend from my old singles ward has started going to a Seattle ward, as Sammamish Valley was trending quite young. She invited me to some activities with members from the Seattle ward, and I ended up going to church there this morning, then wandering a Seattle park afterwards. Remains to be seen how I might juggle things with my current ward but it was a really good time.

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(Not pictured in the shot cause I left the water early to fly the drone.)

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Will end with a couple of new artwork additions, both procured in Colorado: the first a generous donation from Jane, the second something I picked up in Boulder.

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You’ll notice the lighting is a bit dim on the second shot. If we zoom in a bit…

The smart switch on the right has failed. It emits a clicking noise every second, and fails to respond to any commands, physical or over-the-air, to turn the dining room lights on. I’ve already ordered a replacement, but let this be a cautionary tale about putting microprocessors every which place.