When I had first heard about Skyward, it seemed interesting, but I ultimately decided not to read it. Brandon Sanderson is an amazing author who has become one of my favorites, and the description of the story was definitely interesting, but when I found out it was YA fiction, I decided to pass. My recent…
Category: Travel
The Ozarks
[This is not about the Netflix series.] All my life, I have lived in the St. Louis area, which is at the northeast corner of the Ozark Plateau. A great deal of my outdoor life takes place in the Ozarks. The Mark Twain National Forest is scattered throughout the Missouri Ozarks. My favorite nearby hiking…
E85
My vacation was fraught with problems, the biggest one being the sudden and massive coolant leak in my truck. That’s fixed, but now I (probably) have a blown head gasket. I wasted days of my vacation on it, and ultimately I had to coax it home despite chronic misfiring. I will end up spending weeks…
Mortise & Tenon Joints
I am building a workbench using mortise & tenon joints. Somehow, this is the first time I’ve attempted to do so, despite owning a mortiser and a tenonning jig for two decades. I’m finding that they are both well suited to fairly flat tenons, one width of the chisel, or up to two if the…
Badlands National Park
Perhaps two decades ago, when I was still married, I was a subscriber to National Geographic Magazine. I occasionally succumbed to other purchases from the National Geographic Society, mostly maps, which were very good, but we once ordered a book of all the national parks in the US. It was a coffee table book, with…
May Updates
I succumbed to temptation and bought a smart watch. It is the Samsung Gear S3 frontier, which is really the first one that caught my eye. It’s gorgeous, full-featured, has good battery life, and integrates well with my phone. After discovering it, I researched many others, but ultimately I came back to this one. I…
The Opposite of “Aerodynamic” is “Bearodynamic”
Montana, I am told, is a place with bears. Brown bears. The big, aggressive kind of bears. Probably not all of Montana, but certainly the national forests and parks in northwestern Montana. There are black bears also, but brown bears are literally a whole other animal: bigger, bolder, less likely to back down, and less…
What the Hell Did I Just Watch?
I just finished watching the last episode of the first season of The OA. Without spoiling anything, it definitely did not leave me with a sense of closure, but it also wasn’t clearly a cliffhanger. I couldn’t even tell from that ending whether there would even be a second season. Fortunately, just twelve hours prior,…
Decembery Stuff
Flannel bed sheets are pretty awesome in the winter, but now there are little fuzz balls everywhere. I finally got my car put back together after having replaced the broken engine valve. I still had to have the catalytic converter replaced, which was damaged by all the unburned fuel that was dumped into it. However,…
Bonneville Salt Flats and Silver Island Mountains
The Bonneville Salt Flats are located on the western edge of Utah along I-80. They are world renowned as the place where land speed records are set, chosen for their natural flatness. I was looking for a place to camp overnight on my camping road trip during June of this year, and this was a…