Bryce Moore's Blog, page 119

When Pellets Attack

[image error]I noted yesterday how busy I’ve been feeling. Imagine the joy I felt, then, when I came home from work yesterday to find two tons of pellets stacked in front of my garage door, blocking my entrance. There was nothing to be done but get to stacking them. Thankfully, Tomas and Denisa were on hand, and we churned through the stack in about a half hour. A few thoughts:

Stacking two tons of pellets is much, much easier than stacking two cord of wood. Or even one cord of wood. A ton of pellets is 50 bags, each of which clock in at 40 pounds. When you divide that up by three people, even two tons is just around 33 bags a person moved. There’s no need for a wheelbarrow, each person can take a bag on every trip, and that stack almost as easily as legos.
We bought the nicer grade of pellets this time, after using the cheaper ones for two years. I loaded them into the stove last night, and I can’t tell any visual difference between the two. Supposedly these burn hotter and create less ash, but I’m skeptical. Not skeptical enough not to try them for a year, but we’ll see. In the end, it was only like an extra $50 a ton, or something like that.
Running a pellet stove is much, much easier than running a wood stove. There’s less maintenance, and less moving the combustibles. You bring in a bag once a day and fill up the hopper. End of story. There’s no mess from having dirt and leaves and pieces of wood tracked all over the place, either. You can set the stove to keep the room at a certain temperature as well, so you automatically use fewer pellets when it’s warmer outside.
Why, then, do we not just switch out our wood stove to a pellet stove? A number of reasons

Pellet stoves need electricity to run. If we want our house to be warm in a power outage, we either need to get a generator, or we need a wood stove. When the power goes out and the pellet stove is running, smoke has a tendency to go into the house. That’s a bad thing, in case you were wondering.
I like the look and feel of a wood stove. A real fire with logs just looks more homey. Plus, the heat feels stronger and more pervasive to me. It’s a much, much bigger flame.
I can’t help thinking wood stoves are cheaper. Pellets are $250 a ton, give or take, and we go through 2.5 tons to keep our addition warm. Wood is like $200 a cord, and we go through around 3 cord to keep the rest of our house warm. I think we’d have to get at least 4 more tons to keep the house going.

In any case, the pellets are in now, and we should be good for the rest of the year. Yay!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Christmas Crazy

[image error]Each year, I forget just how insanely busy the holiday season can be. Maybe some of that is because it gets even busier each year. As my kids grow up, their schedules begin to fill up. When they were little, it was easy to just say “They’ll do anything Denisa and I want to do.” We had complete control over the scheduling and agendas. But as kids get older, they have these things called “expectations.” They want to do things they like, not just whatever you want.

This affects even simple things like getting presents. As kids get older, the things they want get more elaborate, expensive, and particular. Gone are the days when I could just waltz down the toy aisle in the store, grab something off the shelf, and wrap it up when I got home, confident and secure in the knowledge that my kid would think it was the Best Toy Ever. (Well, they’re gone for Tomas. They’re still very much there for MC, thankfully. DC is somewhere in the middle these days . . .)

But that’s not all. Denisa is teaching three writing classes, which is a whole ton of work more than even a typical class. (Writing classes, surprisingly perhaps, mean students do a lot of writing. And when they do that writing, they expect to have it graded. Grading writing involves reading and evaluating writing. And that takes a lot more time than correcting a multiple choice test.)

And I’m the library director now, which means I have more responsibilities at work. It’s the sort of thing that just creeps up on you year after year, and sometimes you don’t notice all these extra obligations until they all come crashing around your head at times when you’re already stretched thin.

Like the holidays.

So if I seem a bit more terse than my usual self, or if I seem otherwise distracted, it’s because I’m trying to keep all these balls in the air, and they each keep getting closer and closer to the falling to the ground before I can grab them and fling them up again. Which is perhaps why when I got an email from the pr department of my church asking me to get ready to “Light the World,” my response was perhaps not as delicate, spiritual, or polite as it ought to have been. (Especially with this whole time of year being connected to honoring the Savior.)

What can I say? I’m like a rubber band. Pretty darn stretchy, until you stretch me too far and I snap.

If you’re feeling like I am, know you’re not alone. Keep on juggling, and good luck with it. I still love this time of year, and I’ll love it even more once the presents are bought and wrapped (and I can get this @$@#! grant application off my plate).

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Book Review: Skyward

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not, as a rule, a cryer. Call me emotionally stunted, call me cold, but tears seldom try to trickle from the corner of my eyes. (I can’t even remember the last time I cried, honestly.) And yet when I got to the climax of Brandon Sanderson’s latest book, I got choked up. No, I didn’t cry, but I got the closest I’ve come in several years at least.

It’s that good.

Brandon has always excelled at writing satisfying endings of books. It’s been a strength of his for as long as I can remember, going right back to the days I was in his writing group and hanging out in his basement each week. His beginnings are solid. His middles are fine. His magic systems are awesome, but I really feel that his endings are what set him apart from the crowd. Managing a really satisfying ending is no small feat. Getting your readers to really invest in a character or group of characters so that when it all comes together, it feels right? That’s tough.

Usually, you can see a good ending coming in the distance. “Ah,” you’ll say. “That’s how the author could get the hero out of this mess.” And it’s no shame when that actually happens. But really incredible endings leave you guessing right until the end, and then when it all comes together, you’re stunned that you didn’t see that loophole of a happy ending to begin with.

Skyward is the sort of book that makes me want to go back and rerate other books I’ve rated, just so I have space at the top of the scale for me to give it a better rating than anything else I’ve read this year.

It’s not a literary book. I don’t mean that. Does it hold up against The Handmaid’s Tale, another book I gave a perfect 10/10 to this year? Well, no. But it’s not fighting in the same ring, so you can’t hold that against it. Skyward is a YA Science Fiction book about a girl who dreams of being a pilot, even while her entire society is telling her she can’t be. It’s post apocalyptic. It’s fast moving. And it has flat out the best ending I’ve read in a long time.

I don’t know how I can recommend it any more to you. I don’t think I need to describe the characters and the premise. Pick it up and read it. Give it to your friends as a present. Anyone who’s remotely interested in Sci-Fi would love this, I think.

10/10. Must read.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

View all my reviews

Save Money by Shipping with Paypal

[image error]I’ve had to send a few packages over the last week or two, and I was looking for the cheapest way to ship them. Now that we’re in the holiday season, my gut told me some of you might be in the same boat, so I thought a post on the subject might be helpful to some of you.

My specific goal was sending Magic: The Gathering cards across the country. Since I was selling a large quantity of these cards, I wanted to save as much money on shipping as I could. More money saved there meant more profit for me. Time wasn’t an issue. I didn’t need the cards to get to their destination the next day or anything like that.

Do Magic cards count as Media Mail? If so, then I’d be in luck. But Media Mail is very specific. Books (at least 8 pages), CDs, DVDs, manuscripts, printed music, and the like. No advertising. No comic books (they don’t count, randomly). No letters. No board games. Magic cards don’t count, sadly.

They’re also quite heavy. 1.75 grams per card, give or take. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up quickly. The best vehicle I found for shipping a large number was the flat rate boxes with the USPS. I can fit 7,000 cards into a large one of those, and that weighs over 26 pounds. Cost? $13.65 at the post office. Not ideal, but honestly better than anything else I found.

Except you can save even more by shipping it at a commercial rate. (It lops off 80 cents, or 5.86%, bringing it down to $12.85.) You can do this by shipping it with PayPal. Except PayPal makes it obnoxiously difficult to find out exactly how to do that.

No worries, friends. Just click this link to be taken straight to the spot on PayPal’s site. You log in with your PayPal account, select the shipping address, and then select what kind of shipping you’re going to use. You pay online with whatever method you use to pay PayPal, and then you print off the postage. Tape it to the package, and drop it off at your local post office.

It seemed complicated to me the first time I did it, but now that I’ve done it a few times, it’s much more straightforward. The pain point is just remembering how to get to that PayPal page. I’ve got it bookmarked now, though, so I just pull it up automatically.

You can ship all sorts of things via that link. Media Mail. First class parcel. Anything you ship in a box, I think. I highly recommend it, especially since this way, I can just go to the post office knowing all I need to do is drop something off. (I stress about silly things sometimes. Go figure.) And have I mentioned I’ve now shipped over 17,000 Magic cards off? The bulk of them are cards I bought for 1 tenth of a cent per card, and I’m selling them (after paying for shipping) for 3.55 tenths of a cent per card. That might not sound like much to you, so how about I just say I’m selling them for 3.5 times what I bought them for. That sounds much better, right? And that’s after I took a ton of them out that were worth much more. If I’d just sold them all at this rate, I would have made $255 off a $100 investment.

(Just don’t pay any attention to how much time it’s taken me . . .)

Anyway. Maybe that helps some of you. Happy shipping!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Movie Review: The Christmas Chronicles

[image error]I saw the ads for The Christmas Chronicles pop up in Netflix, and I first dismissed it. Netflix comes out with a lot of different content these days, not all of it of the best quality. A made-for-Netflix movie about Santa Claus seemed like a stretch. I pictured a low budget, bad acting, and a worse story. Yet as I surfed the interwebs, I came across some chatter from folks saying the  movie was actually not just decent, but good.

In the end, it’s just around an hour and a half of my time to check it out. I persuaded the fam we should give it a shot, and we watched it the day after Thanksgiving. It stars Kurt Russell as Santa. How bad could it be?

I think one of the tricks with a movie like this is you’re not quite sure how to approach it when you watch it. It hasn’t had much of a marketing campaign outside of Netflix, so there’s just not that much to go on. In the end, it turns into more of an impulse watch than anything else, which provides a unique opportunity for the film to establish its own rules and expectations as it goes along.

But you’re reading a review of the film, so I can set you up a little better than I was. To really enjoy this movie (and let me say that I actually really enjoyed it when I watched it), I think it helps to understand the rules it’s following. First off, it knows it’s kind of campy. The dialogue, the acting, the plot itself doesn’t really take itself too seriously, and you shouldn’t either. It realizes it’s a Netflix movie, and it plays that up in some ways. But at the same time, it also plays it very straight, if that makes sense.

Kurt Russell really throws himself into the role of Santa. He plays it up and has a blast on screen, which is infectious. So he’s taking the part for what it is, even as the movie itself is admitting it’s still just a Netflix movie. And yet they also clearly spent a whole bunch of money on the special effects for the film. Some of them are random, but they’re all very well done. It’s fun to watch a movie that takes the Santa mythos seriously (more or less) and uses lots of money to splash that on the screen.

In the end, I gave this movie a 7/10, which is at least two points higher than I thought it had a chance of getting when I first heard of it. It was a fun movie I could watch with all my kids. We laughed. We rolled our eyes, and we had a good time. Actually decent Christmas movies don’t come out on a regular basis. I could see watching this one again next year, and I suspect it might even play better the second time around.

If you’re looking for some holiday fun, give this movie a whirl.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Heavy Meta #18: Lori Soucie and “How to Decide What You Want To Be”

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In this episode, Kelly and I sit down with Lori Soucie, who works with students with undeclared majors at the Center for Student Development. We talk about her work, “how did you decide what to be,” and pretty much everything in between. It was a great conversation, and I hope you give it a listen. All of us (hopefully) sooner or later end up in a career we’re happy with, but sometimes the path to that career can be rockier. How can you smooth it out? What are ways of approaching things differently if you just can’t seem to find something that fits?

Lori does a fantastic job helping students navigate this. Give the whole Center for Student Development a looksie. They’re great people doing great things for our students here at UMF.

Right click to download audio file.

Broadway Review: Come From Away

[image error]This year’s annual pilgrimage to New York City was another resounding success. It’s been interesting to keep going back to New York as I notch other cities across the world into my belt. Growing up, NYC was really the only city I knew well at all, and so it’s always been “the city” to me. It’s the place I compare all other cities to.

Denisa was commenting as we were walking through the city (with it’s . . . “unique” smells and sounds) that she’s not a big fan of Manhattan. It made me realize that somehow, I really am. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t want to live there, and it’s surprising to think (since I generally don’t like interacting with strangers), but I somehow really love the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. So much energy and action. New Orleans, Paris, London, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, DC, Salt Lake, Prague, Vienna, and the rest are all wonderful in their own way, but New York remains “the City” for me, stinky smells and all.

In any case, this time we walked over to the Hudson and back, exploring some areas I haven’t been in a while. All in all, we walked around 8 miles, which was a bit longer than I was planning on, but there you go.

We met up with my illustrious agents, who took us out to dinner at Tony’s Di Napoli, which had delicious Italian food. It’s served family style, so you get one entree, and it’s big enough for 2-3 hungry adults. Tasty stuff.

Afterward, we hurried over to our show of the year, which was Come from Away, on recommendation from Joshua. It tells the story of the real life event in Newfoundland, where scores of planes were grounded on 9/11 as the world tried to figure out what was going on. A town of 9,000 people ended up with 7,000 visitors from across the globe for 4 days. The musical goes into the logistics and the social interactions. It’s got fantastic music and a moving story, and Denisa and I both loved it. Very worth your while if you have a chance to see it in person at some point. 9/10, with an extra boost for having just a tremendous live performance. It was one of the best crowds I ever remember seeing a show with. “Electric” doesn’t do it justice.

Here’s a performance from the Tonys. Most of the cast is still the same as this performance, which was a nice surprise, this far into the show’s run:

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Are Bathroom Faucets Supposed to Have Icicles?

[image error]Before I get the responses, please note that yes, I do realize bathroom faucets should not have icicles. I’m not *quite* that dense. However, this didn’t stop me from having a bathroom freeze so solid, it took hours to get it to thaw.

Allow me to provide a little context.

When I left for Thanksgiving, I debated draining the water to my new bathroom. This was still November, after all. Even if it got below freezing outside now and then, surely inside my house it wouldn’t get that bad. Not in an insulated place, even if the heat was off, right?

Still, I ended up deciding it would be best to drain the pipes just in case. But I really just went through the motions. Turned off the water in a couple spots, drained a couple others. I saw water come out when I drained them, so I didn’t think too much more of it.

While we were away, the windchill at home got to around 10 below Fahrenheit. The temperature itself was about 4 degrees. Our friends keeping an eye on the house texted to note the bathroom had icicles hanging from the faucet and asking if they should do anything about it. Speaking from experience now, that’s a bad feeling to have when you’re 500 miles away. In the end, I told them not to do anything, mainly because if they turned on the heat and there was some sort of a leak going on, I wanted someone there who knew the house well enough to easily turn things off.

When we got home yesterday afternoon, I set about looking into the problem. The good news is that (from the research I did), pipes typically burst when they’re under pressure. As long as there’s space for the water to expand, then it expands, but if there’s a bunch of water pressure pushing it one way, and no space for it to expand, then it bursts the pipes. By draining the pipes as much as I had, I’d given it the space it needed. Good thing, too, since it took hours for the bathroom to thaw. The toilet water (what was left in it after draining) was frozen solid. There was a little stalagtite of water in the shower underneath the shower head. The pipes themselves were frozen through and through.

The water all came back eventually, and I see no drips or water leaking from anywhere so (knock on wood) hopefully we avoided a catastrophe. Next time I’ll be more diligent in my draining. Go figure.

In the mean time, it’s a bit chilly up here. Another foot of snow is forecast for tonight. Thank goodness summer is over.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Thanksgiving Hiatus

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Folks, it’s been a pretty crazy semester. Between revision projects, home renovation, kids’ school activities, and Denisa teaching three classes, I’ve felt like I’ve been holding on for dear life.

So I’m going to take a vacation for Thanksgiving.

Not that I don’t usually take a vacation, but I think I’m really going to just take a step back and take a vacation from pretty much everything. Certainly the blog, and maybe even writing. I just want to clear my head for a bit and see if things can even out some. Otherwise, I just feel like this:

 

Round and round I go, and something tells me I’m never getting those seeds . . .

So have a pleasant holiday. You can catch me on social media some, I expect. I’ll be back after Turkey Day.

When Clicks Begin to Sway Your Content

[image error]Having blogged pretty much every weekday for going on 11 years now, I still haven’t figured out what causes a post to be popular and what causes one to just not get read. Some of this is, no doubt, due to the way I publicize my blog. It goes up on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and that’s about the extent of it. Every now and then I’ll share something on an appropriate sub-Reddit, but for the most part, I just write the entries and let them loose into the wild.

Some of them soar, some of them fall flat on their face. And I can never quite guess which will do what.

Because I want all my writing to succeed, it can be tempting at times to resort to tricks to try and increase those clicks. To write misleading or inflammatory titles. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll use a great title when one comes to me (“Heaven is a BYU Game” was a perfect fit for the article itself), but I won’t push the boundaries too much. “Donald Trump is a Terrorist” would, no doubt, have gotten me way more views than “Stochastic Terrorism,” but at the same time, I felt like that was crossing an important line for me.

My blog isn’t here to make me oodles of money. (Though it does bring in a bit, thanks to my lovely, wonderful, fantastic Patrons. I’ve had a couple leave lately–maybe you’d like to join the ranks and get me back above that $10/month mark? I’m just one $1/month donation away, really.) It’s mainly here for me to have a platform to write about things I care about. To think different issues through, and then share those thoughts with anyone who wants to read them.

I personally feel that one of the reasons our political climate has deteriorated is due to the continued quest of news sites to get clicks, not just present content. I understand why this happens. All it takes is for one site to start resorting to tricks, and it snowballs into a sort of article weapons race, with all the sites doing it to try to woo readers.

After writing posts and watching my statistics, I know full well that an inflammatory title will tickle Facebook’s algorithms far better than a tame one. And it makes sense, since Facebook is driven, ultimately, by clicks. I’d much prefer people to subscribe to my blog and get via email or a feed reader (like Feedly). Because I spend time on each post, and I’d like to think each one’s worth reading, and not just the one that Facebook happened to think would be better for its site that day.

But in the end, I just write the posts and sit back to see what happens.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.