It’s that time of year again – time for my annual blog post, prompted by a birthday. As usual I took the day off for my birthday again and we had a fun day playing, sleeping in, furniture shopping and then going to the temple with family. Thirty-seven was an excellent year. Some highlights, in no particular order:
- We started and finished the basement – kind of a huge deal for us
- We took a road trip to Virginia and Tennessee for the 2016 RaRaRa reunion
- Two of my YouTube videos surpassed one millions views each. Nice. Also started getting sponsorships and free products for YouTube videos, currently around 40,000 subscribers
- Got called to the high council in our stake, which I’m enjoying but also feeling occasionally overwhelmed and under qualified for, but what’s new?
Currently I’m on a bit of a YouTube video kick and enjoying the filming, the creativity and the editing. I feel like I’m able to take things up a notch in their quality so that’s been fun.
The basement was a major beast to complete and had many steps but it involved figuring things out, power tools and building, so it was kind of a happy place. I got tired of it sometimes and I’m sure Katrina did too, but we powered through and knocked it out in about six months, which I think is pretty great. We did everything ourselves except for the carpet and the mud/tape. I learned a lot, screwed up a lot, fixed a lot and I’m really quite happy with how it came out.
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Our road trip was an adventure. We spent a few days driving to Charlotsville, Virginia, where we stayed in an AirBNB apartment and spent a day at Monticello. We all had fun there. For me it’s a bit of a magical place because Jefferson was an impressive architect, inventor, writer and president. From there we headed to Gatlinburg, Tennessee where we spent four and a half days with the Rasmussons of all-over-the-place, America. We stayed in a nice cabin (apparently mansions that are made of 18″ logs are still called cabins) and the 20 cousins all had a great time playing together and hanging out. It was magical in that sense. We did several fun activities and I think everyone had fun. All of my parents’ kids, kids’ spouses and their kids were there except Ben, who was finishing up helicopter training. I feel like I hardly know Ben – I’ve only seen him a handful of times. Anyway, we enjoyed spending time together, talking and relaxing. Generally the reunion wasn’t as satisfying as we had hoped in the sense that we didn’t have enough time to catch up but I’m not sure what we could have done differently. It was still great. We hurried home afterward, driving for about 13 hours the first day and another 16 or so the next day. We were ready to be home. Plus, I had a Donuts.js presentation (front end presentation at work to 50-100 people) to prepare for so that’s what I did.
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Katrina and the kids are great. Katrina’s about ready for summer vacation to be over at this point. Anders is at an age where he’s fun in so many ways but also challenging because he’s careless about things and very much focused on himself. He’s working on a couple of websites for clients – his first paid gigs, which is awesome, but he needs a lot of hand-holding, understandably.
Katrina and I have been training for the Red Rock Relay in October but we just found out it was cancelled due to lack of participants. We’re not sad. Running is hard.
The girls are great. Everyone is healthy and safe – no broken bones, no major incidents.
Here’s to a great thirty-eight.
Rock on. Peace out.