As part of a school thing this week, I needed to find a baby pic of myself. I found the perfect one. Not sure when this was taken, but since David is in it, and he was born in February of 1973, it must be after that.
Baby Pic
Category Archives: Andrew
Final Cabin Tidbits
To round out this trio of cabin posts, I took a few other random pictures of the sorts of things we did at the cabin this weekend: deflating and stowing the dock, touching up some trim paint, adding some non-stick strips to the wooden dock, role-playing games, other dice games, and a marvelous jigsaw puzzle (a gift from Grummy who passed along her love of puzzles to Andrew). We also prepped the well and pump for winter and put the snow shovels up on the covered porch lest they be irretrievable if anyone visits after the place is buried in snow. (We’ve learned that the hard way.)
Lest one think that we live an irredeemably charmed life, I should also mention that we did face a few challenges. For example, although the cool weather meant that there were few bugs outside, the black flies love to hibernate under the cabin roof. When the place warms up, they emerge in droves. Herds of droves. Hordes of herds of droves. We swatted and cursed at them, but our only moderately effective solution was to vacuum them up multiple times per day.
More Construction
The kids got very excited to build a “tree-ish house.” They started by extending a small treehouse that the built last year. This was cool, but took up a lot of prime real estate and interfered with the view from the cabin. After some discussion, they chose a new plot in heretofore unexplored territory. (It’s only about 30 feet west of the prior spot, but it’s screened by trees.) They enlisted Sarah’s professional help, removed the old structure and built a new, improved one. The sounds of hammers and saws filled the woods today.
The first picture below shows them beginning to deconstruct the first draft house. The rest show the new one. (And Piper, of course!)
Cabin Time
We made it up to the cabin for a long weekend. The weather is perfect: highs near 70 and lows just below 50. It’s dog heaven for Piper. The kids are engaged in a construction project. We saw the comet from the dock last night. A jigsaw puzzle is underway and we played a shockingly close game of Farkle. Not a bad way to recharge in the midst of a very busy autumn.
Note that while “GO MOM HQ” sounds like a worthy homage to Sarah, it actually stands for “Griffin, Oliver, Maggie, Olive, and Murray.” (Olive and Murray are two of the kids’ best friends who regularly come up to the cabin with us.)
First Day: 7th and 10th grades
It’s the first day of school at SPA. This is Griffin’s fourth year on campus, and his second year in the upper school. It’s Maggie’s first time, joining the seventh grade. (This is Andrew’s 15th year.)
Wild River Camping
This weekend we joined our friends Ellie and Kelsey and two of their kids at Wild River State Park about an hour from Saint Paul. It was our first time tent camping in years and Piper’s first trip. She was amazingly well-behaved—nervous when we bumped into some horses on the trail, but she never barked.
Father’s Day With Frog and Toad
As a Father’s Day treat, we attended A Year With Frog and Toad at the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis. It was a fantastic performance of the Arnold Lobel classic. If I could have only one children’s author with me on my desert island, it would be Lobel.
AI Assistant
As I was prepping Maggie’s graduation posts for publication, I noticed a new WordPress sidebar called the “AI Assistant.” (It actually comes with Jetpack, a set of add-on tools that help optimize WordPress. Basic tools are free; more advanced usage comes with subscription fees.)
It looks like I initially got 20 “requests” for free. Improving the title or getting feedback on the post take one request each. Generating a featured image costs 10 requests. The feedback is pretty basic, but not entirely useless. It’s a bit like an advanced Grammarly analysis where it checks spelling and grammar but also gives tips on tone and style.
The featured image tool seems like it will be a direct threat to stock art companies. I ran it on my previous post about Maggie’s graduation slideshow. I thought it might create a collage or something from the gallery of images on the page. Nope. Instead, it appears to have generated an image based on an analysis of the title and text. Here’s what it came up with:
Definitely not going to use it. Far too corporate for my style. But I could see someone else using it and could easily see it as a generic graphic on an article about graduation in a print magazine or on-line zine. I can’t imagine how this sort of thing won’t cost real people their jobs.
New Dishwasher
Our new house came with an ancient “dishwasher.” The quotes are intentional because it was really more of a loud dish rinser that couldn’t handle much. There was a sale. Sarah texted me. I said “DO IT NOW.” Or something like that.
We opted to install it ourselves which turned out to be more of an ordeal than expected. But after discovering that the shutoff valve didn’t actually work (fountains of water!) and replacing a bunch of old hardware, we now have a quiet, modern, dishwasher that seems to hold twice as many dishes as our old one. More importantly, it actually cleans them. I find this more satisfying than I should.
Barberry Removal
Sarah has been meaning to tackle some of the invasives in our yard, starting with these two sprawling Japanese Barberry bushes. They came out more easily than expected and opened up a bunch of space near the side deck and sun room.
