3 posts tagged with "homestead"

Travel​

We started the month already on the road on our trip to Yellowstone National Park. Along the way, we had a mechanical failure with our rental van that resulted in getting a replacement, but the trip continued.

We saw more corn and soybeans than I thought possible driving through Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. We stopped at the Corn Palace in South Dakota, which was corny in a good way, and visited multiple national parks and monuments along the way.

In Idaho, we went caving at Craters of the Moon, discovered Arco which is the first city in the world to be powered by atomic energy and visited the Idaho Potato Museum. Because apparently seeing endless fields of crops wasn't enough, we needed museums dedicated to them too.

We also got to celebrate our daughter's birthday while camping. Birthday dinner was a big NY strip steak from one of our new favorite grocery stores we discovered on the trip, Grocery Outlet.

We made our way through Oregon and California and saw some absolutely massive trees, then found a diamond in the rough at Middlegate Station in Nevada. We slept out on the salt flats in Utah and drove through the incredible scenery of Colorado.

Later, we made it to Wisconsin, where we were able to visit and help some missionary friends. On the final stretch home, we stopped to visit family and made a trip to the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

After thousands of miles, countless sights, a broken rental van, and a whole lot of time on the road, we finally turned in the rental and were very happy to be home.

Naturally, we celebrated with sushi.

That was September.

Ministry​

I had another opportunity to speak at Camp Good News this month.

Family and Homestead​

The kids started back to school this month. We homeschool, so that meant getting everyone back into the school routine while also preparing for our trip at the end of the month.

We spent quite a bit of time packing and getting everything ready to travel.

Around the homestead, we harvested another large batch of onions and took care of a number of repairs that had been piling up.

Work​

This month we started building a new video game called One More Cast as a family project. I am handling the programming, my wife is helping with the artwork, and the kids have become the game testers.

We only had about 14 days of actual development time before leaving on our trip, but managed to get the game into a demoable state. There is still plenty left to do, including adding more fish and building out the tech tree.

We also ran into a particularly nasty crash that took a while to track down. It ended up being related to hardware acceleration in GTK/WebKit. I finally tracked down and worked around the problem while we were on the road after leaving at the end of the month.

Ministry​

This month my daughter's girls group had the opportunity to sing. It was good to be there and support her.

I returned to serving with LAM Ministries, helping distribute food to families in our community.

Our house has been a revolving door this month. We've hosted several friends and family members, and there always seemed to be someone stopping by.

I also had the opportunity to help two neighbors. One needed security cameras installed around their store, and another had been hacked. I spent time helping recover accounts, secure computers, and work through the process of getting their digital life back together.

Homestead​

We started letting our chickens free range this month. So far they have done well, and we haven't lost many to predators.

We also harvested a large crop of onions. Between our garden and the vegetables my parents have been growing, we didn't need to buy vegetables during June. Nearly everything we ate came from our property or from my parents' garden.

Work​

Helping recover a compromised Windows system led me to begin building a Windows Incident Response toolkit. The goal is to make evidence collection more consistent and reduce the amount of repetitive work during an investigation.

I also spent time learning Godot's anchor and layout system while overhauling the game's menus. Along the way, I created a large amount of new artwork for the project.