March was a blur. My days were mostly juggling time between getting work done and having to do something related to the new house. We were able to sync up with my brother-in-law and his wife down in Phoenix for one day while they were visiting friends down in Tucson. House Construction After reminding our builder that our lease is up in May this year, we think he realized time was ticking. We've had a flurry of activity both in and out. We had our hot tub, purchased last summer, finally del…
February has come and gone. It's already a short month, but it seems to have been even shorter this year. But maybe it feels like that because I was a away for a whole week to attend a wedding. Before we get to that, I wanted to chat about something a bit more technical I've been thinking about. My CMS right now is Ghost For years I've been using Ghost CMS, self-hosted, for my personal blog. I still love it, except for one thing, which can be a pain, which is updating the software.…
January's been a month to get back into the groove with work. At least as much as I can while also dealing with the house construction. One thing that was neat. Last year, I was out of town when a better one came through, but we had another aurora borealis appear in the skies above Arizona again. I think I could have gotten a better shot if I had been outside earlier, but this is what I saw once I remembered it was going on. Health Update After a long time of ignoring routine checkups, knowi…
It was well into December by the time I realized I never posted anything for November, so I've got two months worth of updates for 2025's year-end post. Friends of the Forest Award Last year, I volunteered to be on a tech committee for the Friends of the Forest here in Sedona, who help the National Forest Service with projects in the Coconino Forest, including the hiking trail system. My wife and I have volunteered our time as trail ambassadors (tracking trail usage data) and on the graffiti…
Last time I mentioned that my step-dad had passed away, and I was helping my mom out for a bit. I ended up staying there for almost the entire month of October. Out of all that, I guess the biggest thing is that they had a reverse mortgage only in my step-father's name. This gave my mom a few, not so great options. * Buy the house back at its current value. This was about double what they originally paid for it. * Sell the house. For this, she has to have it listed for sale within forty-five…