Bryce Moore's Blog, page 30

Exploring the Fediverse

I posted a bit ago about my decision to begin backing away from social media, or at least to try and stop relying on it so much from a blog/author standpoint. Since then, I came across an explanation of what’s behind some of the efforts to replace The-Social-Media-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter.

The Fediverse.

I hadn’t really understood the mechanics behind it, and I still don’t, but I have enough of a handle on it now to at least be interested. The best way I’ve heard it described is as follows: If I’ve got a gmail account, and you’ve got a hotmail account (seriously?), we can still email each other. There’s no limitation on me only being able to get emails from people with gmail accounts. Likewise, in the Fediverse, social media platforms share with each other. Imagine if my post on Facebook showed up in your Twitter feed, and you could comment on it with your Twitter handle.

It’s still early days yet, but this is the first new innovation in social media that actually gives me hope for its future, and my future use of it. Enough so that I’ve gone and made an account on Mastodon (one of the largest Fediverse platforms out there at the moment, as I understand. As I’ve tried to use the service, I’ve noticed a number of issues that will need to be overcome to have it get wider use, I believe. First, it’s got a clunky onboarding process. You sign up, and then you have to select a “server,” and that’s confusing enough that I think a bunch of people will give up right there. But even if they don’t, once you’re on, actually finding other people to follow is difficult. There’s no way to scan and see if any of your friends are already on there. From what I gather, you just sort of have to find out if someone’s there on your own, and then add them.

And will this really do away with the issues I’ve got with social media? Well, to answer that, I’d need to specify what my issues are. First, I don’t like all that information being concentrated in one or two companies. Facebook has far too much knowledge of who I am and what I think, and they can sell that knowledge to profit from it. Me no likely. Breaking up social media across a number of different platforms might help solve some of this.

Second, I don’t like the nastiness social media seems to engender. For a long time, I believed the “real life names” on Facebook would stop people from being as big of jerks as they are when they can be anonymous. It turns out that it does stop it, but only to a point. The fact seems to be it’s easier to be mean and say mean things when you don’t have to see the person you’re saying the mean things to. I’m not sure this is a pitfall social media can get around.

But hey, I realize there are often things that happen that don’t go at all the way I think they’ll go. So for now, you can find me at https://mastodon.social/@bmoorebooks

Wanna be Fediverse Friends?

Tomas Update: Week 10 in Trenčín

Ahojte všetci! Back again for another week, another email. Not really a ton happened this week but we will see what I have to write. 

Tuesday we did some cool service at a local place that we help out every now and then, but we ended up getting totally soaked because it was spouting rain so they kept us inside once we came back in. We ended up just watering a lot of the inside plants but we also got a matching set of glasses for the apartment which was a pretty cool bonus. They’re some kind of beer brand based in Žilina by the logo (which has the Žilina clock towers and crest) and they’re the classic .3l/.5l sizes. Now I can size my Kofola glasses exactly like they are at a restaurant so I feel fancy. Besides that, we had studies and some wet street contacting along with magic night with our group. Things got out of hand pretty quickly with the ol’ Mimeoplasm which was fun to watch although we got absolutely shredded. Props to Mišo. 

Wednesday we spent the morning at the Václavovci to help them with yard work, that was actually pretty fun and Sister Václavova fed us well as usual. We mainly weeded a bunch in a few different spots. Then at our English class we actually ended up giving our person Siliva a book of Mormon, we will see how it goes but she was very positive about it. No talk about aliens this time as well, but to be honest I kinda missed it…

Thursday was pretty uneventful, we had to prep the country-side Bible study group we do on zoom because it was our week to teach that. That took quite a bit longer than planned but the discussion about Saul/Paul went well and people seemed to like it. Besides that we also did our weekly planning that day which is where we set goals and plans for the next week so we are organized. That one also takes a while to do so besides what I’ve mentioned that’s about all we did. 

Friday we had a good lesson with our boy Kevin which was fire as usual. We were prepping him for passing the sacrament on Sunday since he just got the priesthood. He was kinda nervous (understandably) but after our lesson seemed a lot more confident. It was also pretty rainy all week and so was Friday. 

Saturday we headed out to Žilina for our weekly meeting, we got to see some of the new arrivals since transfers were Thursday for some reason this time. Then we went with the Ottos to get a new washer since ours broke one day and we haven’t had a way to wash stuff besides the sink. I can now say I have purchased an appliance in Slovak which I haven’t even done in English yet. We do weird stuff out here. But that went fine, and then that evening we had another lesson with Kevin. 

Sunday was a very nice fast and testimony meeting, a member who had moved to Liverpool visited which was cool, and just overall a good day for church. Our washer, however, which was promised to arrive the next day, did not. We kinda figured because it was a Sunday and basically everything is closed here on Sundays so no worries. 

That brings us to Monday, which was just about the quietest pday I’ve had to date. We figured since the washer was supposed to come wed just stay home, so we did. Never got a call or anything, and I called them this evening to ask about that and they said Tuesday. So we burned a whole day for nothing but it’s kinda okay because it was pouring again so options were low anyways. That’s about all I’ve got though, we didn’t really do too much today. 

Photos link as usual:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/GHgGUxN4X6y5nvio8

Hope you are all well and having gmfun at various camps and such, I know Maine Fiddle Camp is running right now. I’m still doing well out here and loving living in Trenčín! 

S láskou,

Starší Cundick 

New Website is Good to Go

I posted a few weeks ago that I was working on redoing my website. It was a bit of a rocky process, but I’m happy to say that I’m now done with it, more or less. Back when my website was first set up, more than 10 years ago, I paid a friend to do it for me. At the time, one of the big struggles was trying to figure out how to have enough content to make it seem like a real web page. I just had one book that hadn’t even been published yet, and so I was relying way more on talking about potential projects. True, I had the blog, but my blogging skills weren’t quite what they are now. (Go figure. When you spend a ton of time trying to come up with things to say each weekday, you eventually get better at actually saying it. Don’t believe me? How about this post, my second blog post ever? Come on, past Bryce! These days, I could get at least 500 words out of being tired. Without even trying!))

Anyway. Now that I was revising my website, it wasn’t nearly as difficult to flesh the site out. For one thing, I have four books that are professional published (plus Cavern of Babel, of course). For another, my blog is way (way) better than it used to be. So I sat down and just thought about what I wanted to focus the site on. I didn’t need anything earth shattering. Just a good framework for the blog and for people to find out about the books. You’d think that would be a pretty low bar, but even so, it took a while.

I ended up paying for a theme on WordPress. (I used Astra, which has a ton of tutorials about it.) I wanted a newsletter as well, so I paid for a plug-in that’ll do that. I still want to have a store where people can buy signed copies of my books, but that’s not ready yet. However, it turns out when you have enough money from your books to actually pay for things like a business, things are easier. It also helped that WordPress has come a long way from when we were tinkering with it before. It would have been even easier if this were something I did on a regular basis, but I don’t, so that’s that.

Still, all told I’m pretty happy with the site. It’s clean and simple, and it should be easy to update the next time I have a new book coming out. (More on that later . . .) Take a look around. If you see something that’s still being wonky, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it. With my luck, there’ll be a bunch of problems still, but I’d rather know about them than not.

Revisiting Older Disney Animated Movies

Denisa and Daniela have been gone at Young Women’s Camp this week, meaning it’s been me and MC holding the fort down at home. (Well, Ferris has been there too. Mustn’t forget the puppers.) I think MC was kind of less-than enthused about the idea of having three solid days of Dad. Of course, some of that was off set by the fact that she went over to friends’ houses yesterday and the day before, so it was really more like three afternoons of Dad, but still.

Why would she be less than enthused? Well, for one thing, she’s a girl of routines. She likes to have Denisa braid her hair every evening, and it has to be just so. She likes knowing what to expect, and being able to do just that. (I have no idea where she gets any of that, of course. I’m nothing if not the pure soul of spontaneity.) For another, I just have more stuff to do a lot of the time. Those books don’t write themselves, after all, so each day I’ve got to devote a good chunk of time to writing once I get home.

In any case, I wanted to do what I could to make the few days memorable, and I discovered after picking her up from a friend’s on Tuesday that (gasp!) MC hadn’t seen all the classic Disney movies. I mean, I could see (theoretically) having missed out on The Great Mouse Detective. But what about The Jungle Book? The Rescuers? Alice in Wonderland?

Nope. Nope. Nope.

These are movies I just assume everyone has seen, though clearly I hadn’t been doing a good enough job as a dad, ensuring my kids were exposed to all the Disney movies. So I decided to rectify that at least in part, starting with the three movies mentioned above. It’s been interesting rewatching them.

It was only now that I realized just how recent some of those movies are. As a kid, all Disney movies had come out at basically the same time: “before I was born.” Anything before I was born was equal, more or less. But looking at it now, Snow White came out in 1937. Alice in Wonderland was 1951. The Jungle Book was 1967. Rescuers was 1977. To put that in today’s terms, if the Rescuers had just been released, Jungle Book came out in 2013, and Alice in Wonderland was in 1997.

I hadn’t realized there was such a huge gap between the movies.

Now, the important question: how well did they stand up? I’d say Alice did the best job, mainly because it’s just so flat out bizarre. It defies basic storytelling tropes by focusing on being curiouser and curiouser. The Rescuers was intense. Medusa is a seriously scary villain, and you’ve got her abducting orphans and threatening to drown them while they’re doing child labor? Disney movies played for keeps.

The Jungle Book wasn’t as good as I expected it to be. The pacing was much slower compared to modern movies, and Shere Khan just really isn’t present for most of the movie, making it so the villain is generally absent. This leaves the film without a real driving force for much of it. Of course, the songs are still fantastic, and the animation was great, but the story? MC kept losing interest.

That said, she still enjoyed all three of them, and she looked forward to watching them each evening. I’m now also wondering if I let Tomas and Daniela get through childhood without seeing those movies. It’s somewhat frustrating that Disney+ makes them a bit hard to find. If it were up to me, I’d have a specific landing page on the app, where all the animated movies are listed chronologically. Having such a huge back catalog of films should be a real asset, and I wish they weren’t always shoving the same recent shows and movies in my face. (I recognize, of course, that I might be in the minority with this opinion.)

Oh well. Until Disney+ comes out with something like that, there’s always Wikipedia. (There are 131 officially listed right now. I haven’t seen all of those, either. But come on. Planes: Fire and Rescue is listed there? Now let’s don’t be silly.

Book Review: The Cradle Series, by Will Wight

Several years ago, I came across some chatter online about a great new fantasy series. Cradle, by Will Wight. And would ya know it? At the time, he was literally giving away the first five or six books in the series. Yes, they were self-published, but “free” is a pretty darn compelling selling point, so I downloaded them all and figured I’d read them eventually. They were in some new-fangled genre called “LitRPG,” which basically meant (from what I gathered) that they were like reading a video game. The main character kept leveling up to fight bigger monsters.

Well, here I am, years later, and I’ve now finished the series. It became one of the few books that I’d actively keep an eye out to see when the next book would release. I bought every single additional book as they came out (there are 12 total books in the series), and when it came time to read the last one, I decided I’d really better just reread the entire series so that I could properly enjoy it. That’s 4,683 pages in all, and coming from someone who generally doesn’t reread books these days, that’s saying something.

I love this series.

Now, mind you, this is not high literature. This is a series about a teen who starts off with everything thinking he’s super weak, and ends up with the ability to destroy worlds if he sneezes wrong. Each book focuses on how he becomes more powerful, showcasing him fighting someone or something way more powerful than the last book. My one complaint would be that reading it all at once, it became a bit more repetitive than it felt like when I was reading them six months apart or so. (Kind of like binge watching the Marvel movies. Sooner or later, you get to a saturation point, and that’s not as bad when they’re more spaced out.) But even with that caveat, it was a blast to read them. I would read instead of watching movies or playing games. I would happily stay in bed for a few hours, just to be able to keep going.

One of the reason they’re so good is that Wight does a fantastic job with action scenes. There are a ton of different powers people use in the books, and it feels like he makes new ones up as quickly as Hershey’s pops out Kisses. Flying swords, mystical punches, extra limbs, spitting acid. It goes on and on, and it always felt like something fresh might pop up at any time. Battles weren’t just punch punch kick punch. Instead, Wight would lay out the abilities of the opponents, and then have them duke it out in cool ways. (And yes, at times it felt like Yu-Gi-Oh, where suddenly someone unleashes an even bigger power you didn’t know anything about, but because Wight states in advance that there are always moves you might not know, that doesn’t feel like cheating. It just feels cool.)

I’ve read some other LitRPG now, and it’s not all nearly as good as this. (It seems it’s hard to get the feel of actual progression down. Sometimes authors just get bogged in the weeds, with their characters never really feeling like they’re advancing.)

I finished the whole thing in about 40 days, which is super fast compared to my typical reading speed. If you’re looking for a fast, fun, clean read, and you’re into fantasy, then I heartily recommend this entire series. It’s a blast from start to finish, and it has a very satisfying conclusion.

Stepping Back from Social Media

With all the recent ups and downs on different social media platforms (like The-Platform-Formerly-Known-as-Twitter), the writing on the wall has become increasingly clear to me. Using social media as the prime way to send out updates on my blog is becoming more and more problematic. Even Facebook, which has long been my main way of getting the word out, is no longer dependable. Its algorithms choose what people see or don’t see. I’ve seen a real dip in the number of people clicking through to see what I’ve written, and I don’t think it’s because my writing’s become that much worse.

Does this mean I’m going to abandon Facebook altogether? No, but it does mean that I’m trying to transition over to having more people interact directly through my blog, instead of waiting to see posts when the Social Media Gods decide that it’s time to show them.

With this in mind, I’ve made new blog pages more streamlined toward inviting comments. I’ve also added a subscription page on my website. There are two basic options. I’m starting a newsletter focused on just my writing. It’ll go out two to four times a year, and is aimed at people who want to stay up to date on my books. There’ll be coupons (once I get my store up and running), deleted scenes from books, a discussion of what’s coming next, where I’ll be appearing. Stuff like that.

The second subscription option is for my blog. Every Wednesday (if I’ve done this right), subscribers will get an email that includes links to each of my new blog posts, along with the title and the first fifty words or so. This way, people don’t have to rely on an RSS feed. They can just sit back and let the content come to them.

Social media will continue to change. I don’t want to be dependent on any one platform, and the sooner I start making the switch, the better off I’ll be.

Anyway. That’s all the news I’ve got for you today. Happy to answer any questions if you’ve got them. In the meantime, if you’d like to subscribe, please do!

Tomas Update: Week 9 in Trenčín

Ahojte všetci! I did it, two in a row. Hopefully this makes for a pattern. 

Here’s what happened this week:

Tuesday we didn’t do a ton except have two lessons fall through , so a lot of finding that day. Not a whole.ton to say as it wasn’t super successful as usual, but at least both of our bails were nothing personal so it’s okay. 

Wednesday we had a great lesson with our boy Kevin and then had our English class, where our student Sylvia told us all about how she got abducted by aliens one time because she thought about em too much. Hard to keep a straight face there but she is hilarious and was also 100% serious so we kinda had to nod and agree. She also have us advice on who to marry, which I shall not repeat here. She’s definitely old. 

Thursday was a fun one, we went and mowed my grandmother’s lawn and split a bunch of wood for my uncle Miloš. Then Miloš showed us some of his arrowheads, and made one in front of us along with two nails in like 5 minutes total (for the nails). Apparently to be a successful blacksmith in days of yore you had to be able to make two nails a minute so he “is not fast enough.” I thought it was pretty cool and so did Goodare, also he let us keep the nails so that was really cool. And Babka fed us GOOD as well, very good day. 

Friday we headed to Žilina for our last district council of the transfer, it went very well and it’s been a good transfer with everyone. Big changes coming up but I’ll explain more on Saturday. The rest of Friday we spent a bit in Žilina to try and hit the streets 3x as hard, which went well and it was nice to be back in my first area. Then we headed home and studied up for the rest of the day. 

Saturday we had another great lesson with Kevin, he is so caring about others and really truly wants to help them. It’s been wonderful to see. Besides that we also had the transfer call! Both Goodare and I remain in Trenčín (let’s gooooo) and then Wagner is outta here all the way to Liberec which is quite a ways. The rest of the day we also spent running around to the only place to print pictures open on a Saturday at the mall clear on the other side of town because we put together a photo book for Sister Bowers as she is outta here and finishing her mission this Thursday. That was fun, if a little stressful. 

Sunday went well, a good church meeting and then we helped the Valničkovci change a tire and had lunch with the Václavoci (sviečková which was super super good) and talked for a while. Then we made our way back home and studied up for the day, made indian food, and that’s about it. A nice chill day. 

Monday we got up and headed out to Bojnice, a castle that was built a lot later than most in a VERY ornate fashion.  It’s gorgeous, but was definitely not built for war at all. Very flashy and reminded me more of like France or Italy strangely enough. But it was super nice and definitely worth the trip out there (it is really awkwardly situated bus/train wise). Now we are heading back so I figured I’d write. 

Other stuff this week is I am finally back on the Fellowship grind, and have read like 60 pages this week and it gets easier every day. Right now I am just after the attack on Weathertop and finding anywhere between 3 and 20 words I don’t know per page, down from 30. I am loving it and I should maybe check out getting a library card, it’s a great thing to do when I have time or am studying Slovak. 

Okay, hope you’re all well and enjoying whatever is going on wherever you are. I’m happy to be staying in Trenčín and excited for the future! Who knows what will happen. 

Pictures as usual: 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/GHgGUxN4X6y5nvio8

S láskou,

Starší Cundick 

Adventures in Service: Cleaning Up the Vermont Flood

There are a few basic ground rules to how I generally operate. First, I’m not what you’d call a manual laborer. At least, that’s not something that plays to my strengths. You need something organized? Some sort of tech problem ironed out? Someone to bounce ideas off of to come up with a solution to a tricky problem? I think I’ve got something to offer. You want someone to haul sand or mud around? I don’t think anyone would likely put me at the top of the list. (I suppose it depends who else is on the list, right? Would I fall in above or below PeeWee Herman? The jury’s still out.)

Second, I really don’t like getting dirty. Call me fastidious. Call me anal. A dirty Bryce is an uncomfortable Bryce. (Clutter doesn’t count as dirt, for those of you playing along at home.) I’m not someone who showers more than once a day, but if I get something on me, I want it off. Now.

Finally, I hate (hate) getting wet. Think of me like a mogwai, and we’ll be just fine.

So perhaps it would surprise some to hear that I spent my weekend down in Vermont, mucking out cellars, shoveling sand, and picking up water-logged trash in open fields. Under normal circumstances, I’d be surprised myself. However, back on July 10th, areas of Vermont saw extreme flooding. The kind of flooding you usually see on the news, somewhere far away from you. I thought how horrible that would be, and then promptly proceeded to do nothing else about it.

Until a call for help came from church leaders supervising the area. They’d already had a bunch of members working for weeks to try and alleviate some of the suffering the floods caused, but there was still tons of work to be done. Our stake (group of churches in the area) was challenged to put together a group to come down and pitch in for a weekend.

I immediately felt like I needed to go.

Not because I was strong armed into anything. Despite what you might read in some corners of the interwebs, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never done much in the way of strong arming, in my experience. No, we were asked and encouraged, in the form of a single message that was read across the pulpit in every congregation last Sunday. But I’ve always seen these kind of disasters happen half a country away from me. I’ve never really felt or thought I could do something to help other than to send a check to organizations in the area. Here at last was a chance to actually go and do something real. I didn’t want to miss it.

Denisa, Daniela, and I woke up at 5am on Saturday morning and headed off. (MC stayed with a friend. She’d debated going, but ultimately felt like she should stay home. A good call, it turned out, as she got sick while we were away, so it was much better for her to be warm and home.) We drove 3 hours to Montpelier, VT. Around 70 of us showed up, all told, and we were split into work groups to go around and tackle a number of projects that had been lined up for us ahead of time.

First up for us was cleaning up a community farm. It was around the size of a football field. Perhaps a bit larger. In happier times, the farm raised crops to donate to food banks or other people in need. The flood had put it all 8 feet underwater, killing all the crops. It had also washed in a bunch of trash from a neighboring dump, along with a good dose of raw sewage. A few homeless encampments had been on the site, as well. Most of the open fields were dry on the surface, but they were a muddy, sloshy mess underneath. We picked up trash and stacked wood that had been scattered all over. There was nothing about this that was glamorous. When they outlined what they needed help with, I thought we’d be able to work there for both days straight and still not get everything done. 40 of us showed up, and we finished all of it in around 5 hours, give or take. (I seriously underestimated how much 40 people can get done if they’re all focused on working.)

From there, we helped move some water for a Methodist church that was working on providing aid, and then we heard of a shoe store in downtown Barre that had mud in the basement. 20 of us went over there, only to discover that “mud in the basement” was an understatement. We got to work shoveling muck into buckets and passing the buckets up the basement stairs and out the back door. It took two and a half hours of absolutely filthy work, but we got them cleared out.

We drove down to a church-owned campground 45 minutes south and stayed there for the night. I’d planned on walking around and chatting with other people, but honestly I was so exhausted, I collapsed in a heap and went to sleep.

Sunday, we worked in smaller groups, tackling two main projects. The first was a simple basement muck out that seemed spotless to start with, in comparison to the shoe store. The second was ripping off a broken staircase and shoveling sand in to fill the hole it left, at the house of a woman right on a stream. The flood had deposited a ton of sand all over her yard, and we worked on clearing as much of it away as we could. (Sand is heavy, people. Did you know that?)

When we got back on Sunday evening, I was very grateful for a hot shower and clean sheets, and the fact that my basement was as dry as I’d left it. (It’s a crawlspace. “Dry” is a relative term.) It was hard, difficult work. I’m still aching all over from everything we did. But I’m very happy to have gone. I don’t remember the last time I did something that felt that needed and appreciated. I’ve done service projects in the local area, but there’s a huge difference between “raking up leaves at the local park” and the stuff we were doing down in Vermont. When we left, I knew how much work there was still to be done in the area. A big part of the job is finding it. Our group talked to a couple of people who just flat out refused any help at all. (Or in some cases, any help from our church, specifically.) I understand the desire to be self-sufficient, but having seen just how much work goes into cleaning up even a basic flooded basement, I would encourage anyone to just swallow their pride and accept the help.

And there was plenty of help being offered. Communities and other churches all had projects of their own going, three weeks on. Businesses were donating lunches to volunteers. Many people waved and thanked us as they drove or walked by. It was very refreshing to see (for the most part) people put aside any differences they might have for a while, and focus on just helping.

In any case, it was an experience I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful for the kick in the pants it took for me to realize I could actually drive down and do something.

2023 Vacation Report: Jet Skis for Dummies

If you’re anything like me, you’ve never been on a jet ski. A Sea-doo. A Waverunner. I mean, I’m so clueless, I’m not even sure what you’re supposed to call one of the things. Whatever. You haven’t been on one before. If you’ve been on a lake, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ve seen them zipping up and down across the water. If you’re like me (and the main reason you ever go to a lake is to fish or maaaaaybe go kayaking or canoeing), you might have thought, “I wish those dunderheads would go away.”

But imagine a world where you could actually ride on one of those jetsearunners? If one were presented to you at a lake, like Excalibur except without the sharp edges? You can’t tell me you wouldn’t give one a shot.

Well, I gave one a shot, at least. The fam and I headed up to Bear Lake for a mini-family reunion, and my dad rented a wavedooski. (I think that’s what I’ll call them from now on. It’s got a certain ring to it.) So here I am now to talk about both Bear Lake (where I’d never been before) and wavedooskis.

First, Bear Lake. It was much larger than I expected, first off. Even coming from the east, that looked like an honest to goodness lake. Great job, Utah and Idaho! But more importantly, it’s a lake that’s famous for (wait for it): milkshakes. Now we’re cooking with gas. (Actually, we’re not. You don’t cook milkshakes, and anyone who tries to is milkshaking wrong. Fact.) Well, the lake’s famous for raspberries, but the raspberries are famous for shakes, or something like that.

Unimportant. Milkshakes! Huzzah!

As for the lake itself, you drive right onto the sandy beach on the north end of the lake. In Idaho, which was handy for getting another state into my trip. There were a lot of people there. More crowded than the beaches at Maine, but the water was warmer, right?

WRONG!

The water was warm for the first bit as you walked into it, where the sun could heat it up, but once you were in much further, you turned into a popsicle. This was actually good, because it meant that after you swam for about five minutes, you couldn’t feel the rest of your body.

When I compare being at a lake to being at a beach, I’m afraid the beach wins hands down. There are waves and wildlife, which are both big draws for me, and the tide brings interesting things to look at. However, I had a wavedooski. That had to count for something, right?

The first few minutes on a wavedooski are a blast. Accelerating across the top of the water is a rush. I tried some other things, like jumping off the wake of other boats, but there wasn’t too much in the way of wakes out there on the lake. So after those first few minutes, it boiled down to this:

When you got bored going really fast in one direction, you could switch things up by going really fast in another direction.

Oh, and did I mention the warning on the wavedooski that I only saw once I was finished riding it for the day? “WEAR PROTECTIVE CLOTHING. Severe internal injuries can occur if water is forced into body cavities as a result of falling into water or being near jet thrust nozzle. Normal swimwear does not adequately protect against forceful water entry into the rectum or vagina.”

I’m sorry, but any device that makes me wear special clothing or risk my rectum is a device that I’m a little reluctant to just jump on top of to go voomping across a lake.

So will I ever buy a wetsuit so I can wavedooski to my heart’s content? Doubtful. It was fun for a day, but I think that’s about all I’ve got in me. (And hey! I don’t have any water in me. So that’s a plus. Yay for not falling off the wavedooski.)

2023 Vacation Report: The Grand Canyon

There was a time in my life where I saw myself as a bit of a camper. (Probably because I camped a bit.) I suppose if that’s the bar, then I still am a very little bit of a camper, but I’m certainly not someone who treks off into the wilderness on a month long adventure. Or even a week long adventure. Maybe a few days, every other year? Give or take?

And as for hiking, again, I once hiked on a sporadic basis. (As I’m looking back on all of this, I’m realizing I camped and hiked and did all sorts of outdoorsy things when I used to fly out to Utah each summer as a kid. On this road trip, I remembered a lot of what I’d used to do. My daughters were both really wanting to go on horse rides. I casually mentioned that we’d had a horse at our family cabin, and two jaws dropped. I’ve been around horses enough to feel comfortable with them, and enough to not look at riding a horse as something that’s particularly exciting. Seeing it through my kids’ eyes, I realized how much I took that for granted.)

This is all just to explain how significant it is that when I went to the Grand Canyon, I actually thought it would be nice to go on a hike down into it. Camp at the bottom. Explore.

Not that we did any of that, mind you. But it takes a lot these days to make me think of planning a vacation like that. The Grand Canyon was just that impressive.

I visited it before, when I was a teenager. Honestly, I don’t remember that much of it. I remember it was a long drive, and . . . it was a big canyon. What can I say? Seeing different parts of the country didn’t have as big of an impact on teen-Bryce as the latest Gameboy games had.

This time, I knew that we’d just be at the canyon for a day, and that was a day that would include driving. So I decided to splurge and stay right at the canyon rim itself. The Kachina Lodge had the most reasonable rate, though I also paid more for a partial canyon view. In the end, I was very happy with the decision. For one thing, we’d hit some bad traffic on our way into the canyon, so we were even shorter on time than we thought we’d be. I’d read that the rooms were kind of tired, and that they didn’t have A/C, but I found both of those to be false. Our room was snug, but fine, and the A/C most definitely worked. (Though it gets cold enough at night that they don’t really have to work too hard.) The worst thing about the stay was the parking, which was jam packed.

We were on the first floor, so the view of the canyon was about what you’d see standing twenty feet away from the rim. Still plenty impressive. I really wanted to see the sunset from the canyon, and so all my attention was focused on at least salvaging that, after our traffic delay. Things worked perfectly for that, thankfully. We got to our hotel, then walked along the canyon rim trail until we came to a point with a good view, and just sat and enjoyed the sights. The sky was clear, with just enough clouds to make the sunset that much prettier.

That night, we walked out of the hotel again, to see the canyon at night and see if we could see some good stars. It was cloudy by then, though, so that was a scratch. In the morning, Denisa woke up before everyone else and went for a walk by herself in the other direction on the rim trail. Then the rest of us joined her for a while before heading out on the next part of our trip.

The convenience of Kachina was worth the price. It made that short stay still feel like we’d had a Grand Canyon experience, even if it was a small one. We saw people taking mules down into the canyon, and like I said: it made me think that would be a very fun trip. Will I ever get back there to do it? Doubtful. There are just too many places in the world I’d like to see. But the Grand Canyon is definitely worth more than a quick visit. (Surprise, surprise.)