Our Valentine’s Nailed It Cake Decorating Competition

Watch this video on YouTube Nailed It is a Netflix baking competition where non-professional cake decorators with questionable skills do their best to reproduce fancy and artistic cakes in a short amount of time. The cakes are based on their taste and appearance, both of which are often bad, and the results are often disasterous. For Valentine’s Day, Susan came up with the idea of having our own “Nailed It” cake decorating competition. The day before Valentine’s Day Susan found a picture of this cake online, and recreating it to the best of our ability was the challenge. Just like… (read more)

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Breaking Even on 3D Prints!

There’s a running joke I make every time I 3D print something new. After figuring the cost of the the filament I used (which is usually just a few pennies) I announce the item’s cost and follow it with, “or as Susan would say,” and then I add $600 (the price of the printer) to the total amount. It’s actually kind of a dual-layer joke because Susan never actually says that. I just pretend that she does. Because most of the items I print are relatively small, the cost of the filament I use per print is pretty inconsequential. The… (read more)

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I Have Met the Enemy, and it is LDS Affiliate US

One of my hobbies involves capturing commercials from old VHS tapes and uploading them to YouTube. My YouTube channel is not monetized and I make no money from my actions. I don’t modify the commercials or add watermarks to them. I literally take the commercials exactly as they appeared on television, and upload them to YouTube so that others can enjoy them. As of last weekend I had 444 commercials in my VHS Commercials playlist. If you’re wondering if anyone watches these commercials, they do. This McDonald’s commercial featuring Elvis I uploaded has 57,000 views. This one for CiCi’s Pizza,… (read more)

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Fitbit Says It’s Time for a $300 Rebate!

Back in 2017 I decided to try my hardest to lose some weight. I cut out as many carbs and as much sugar as I could, and started walking a mile a day. I ended up losing close to 50 pounds in 3 months. (I really should do this again.) To assist me in my journey, Susan purchased me a Fitbit smartwatch. I had a lot of complaints with Apple’s first generation iWatch. One of my biggest complaints was that the battery only lasted 18 hours, which meant you had to charge it every single day. You might be thinking… (read more)

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A Farewell to Noodle

We brought Noodle home from the local animal shelter in August of 2019. The vet guessed he was about a year old, although my stock in what our vet thinks and knows at the moment isn’t real high. The vet also gave Noodle a healthy bill of health, which is why we were surprised when three months later he had a stroke and series of seizures that apparently permanently ruptured his ear drum and changed his personality from one of a spry 10-year-old child to that of a sixty-year-old man. The stroke permanently affected his equilibrium, and he spent the… (read more)

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Susan’s Retirement from the FAA

Not all stories are mine to tell, and some are told better over a beer than through a blog, but roughly six months after she applied for early retirement based on a disability, Susan received a phone call Tuesday afternoon informing her that Wednesday would be her last day of work with the FAA. I’ve been to plenty of retirement parties over the past few decades. In fact, just last year Susan and I attended a retirement dinner for a coworker of ours. Roughly forty people came together at a local restaurant to eat, share stories, and toast a guy… (read more)

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You Get What You Pay For (Cheap USB Battery Pack is Cheap)

A few days after Christmas I was chatting with my buddy Sean about the winter storm that was about to sweep the nation. Sean lives just outside of Buffalo, New York and was expecting more than two feet of snow. While charging up all our USB battery packs in case either of us experienced a power outage, the topic of charging devices via solar came up. One thing led to another and within the hour I had found and ordered two of these USB battery packs with built in solar panels from Amazon. These charging packs claim to deliver a… (read more)

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Twisty Little Shelves

Several years ago, my friend Guy Hutchinson mentioned that he had a small set of shelves near the entrance of his mancave. The shelves weren’t large enough to display a large collection of items, and so he used it to display small collections or subsets of collections. He said he had a lot of fun rotating the items he displayed on the shelf. That sounded like a really fun idea to me. I found these fun looking shelves on Amazon and bought them about three years ago. For three years they’ve sat in my closet in the Amazon box they… (read more)

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What I Watched in 2022

For the seventh year in a row, I tracked all the movies, documentaries, and television shows I watched over the past 365 days. Most people use apps or websites for tracking these things, all of which are more elegant solutions than a Google Docs spreadsheet, but here we are. MOVIES In 2022 I watched 103 movies, which is just approximately 2/3 the number I watched in 2021, which was 155. Of those 103, 80 were films and 23 were documentaries. With Covid restrictions lifted and businesses reopening, we spent more time doing things than we had over the past two… (read more)

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Heavy Metal (Chair) Fishing

A few days before Santa came to visit, the winter storm that made its way across the country arrived in Oklahoma. In February of 2021 Oklahoma set records with the coldest 2-day and 3-day periods with averages of -0.1 degrees and 2.1 degrees, but we weren’t far from that last Thursday with single digit temperatures even before factoring in the wind chill. Along with the cold came wind, which promptly removed our pool cover and crumpled it into a ball. To keep the pool’s filter from freezing we run the system year round with the heater turned on; without the… (read more)

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