Books Reading Rundown It's great to have time to read more! I just did a quick count, and in the 20 months since I stopped working I've read around 35 books, so that's close to two books a month. This post is a summary of a few
photography Cleared for Takeoff At the beginning of February, when I got my drone, I was thinking that we live in an area where I'd have a wide variety of cool places to use it in the mountains. And that's certainly going to be true during the summer, but at
Book Reviews Shop Class as Soulcraft As a guy who is often out in the workshop building things before the sun comes up, I've been meaning to read Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work for a long time. This winter, I finally checked it
Uniquely Stupid Times Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote an article in The Atlantic entitled "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life have been Uniquely Stupid – It's not just a phase." In it, he noted that "something changed in the social universe in the early
Kenya 2025 Into Africa I’m planning to do a few blog posts about our Kenya trip, and this is the first one, briefly covering getting from the US to Kenya. We haven’t actually seen any wildlife yet (unless you count a few monkeys along the road from Nairobi airport to our lodging
Kenya 2025 A day in Nairobi Today we took a driving tour of Nairobi, including the Karen Blixen Museum and a stop at a shopping mall to get a few things. After the museum, we drove to the Kobe Tough bead and leather facility, where we were greeted with some singing and dancing, then watched demonstrations
Kenya 2025 Meeting the Maasai Today felt like the longest day of our trip so far, even more exhausting than the 24 hour travel day from Virginia to Nairobi. So I'll be kind of brief with the words here, but will include many photos. We checked in, had lunch, and then headed out
Kenya 2025 Safari day in Masai Mara Saturday was our only full-day safari of this trip. The other safaris we have planned will be no more than a few hours at a time, but this time we needed to go a long distance to where we could see lions and cheetahs, so we brought box lunches and
Kenya 2025 Lions and leopards on spa day Today we went on a safari from 7:00 to 1:00, then we spent the rest of the day at the hotel. This was our first afternoon/evening with no plans, a chance to recharge before we fly to Amboseli National Park tomorrow, and we spent it at the
Kenya 2025 Arriving in Amboseli Today was about getting from Masai Mara National Reserve, where we've spent the last three nights, to Amboseli National Park, where we'll spend the next two nights. Our guide Willie had driven to Nairobi with most of our luggage yesterday afternoon, and he was on the
Kenya 2025 Elephants of Amboseli Yesterday we went on three different safari outings – sunrise, mid-day, and after dark – and we saw hundreds of elephants. Amboseli has 2500+ elephants in a relatively small area, and around every corner you'll see some. It's often a group of ten or twenty, and sometimes a
Kenya 2025 Safaris dawn to dusk Tuesday was a long day. We left on our first safari at 6:00 in the morning, came back for a late breakfast, then went out again at 10:00, then relaxed at the hotel in the afternoon, then went out for an after-dark safari after 7PM, followed by a
Kenya 2025 Travel to Tsavo Wednesday was mostly a travel day, to get from Ambroseli National Park to Tsavo West National Park. The distance was only about 60 miles, but much of it was on very rough roads, and we stopped at a Masaai village and a Masaai school, so the journey took several hours.
Kenya 2025 King of the Jungle After arriving at Tsavo West National Park on Wednesday afternoon, Thursday was our one full day there before starting for home on Friday. We went on safaris in the morning and afternoon, and also spent several hours sitting on the deck of that bar/restaurant, where we could watch the
Kenya 2025 Heading for Home The final day of our trip was a long one: two days long, to be exact. It was a little over 48 hours from when we woke in in West Tsavo National Park until we went to bed at home in Butte, Montana, including 43 hours of travel time from
Kenya 2025 Kenya trip wrap-up This blog post covers some final thoughts on our trip to Kenya: things we learned, what we liked, what we might do differently if we did it again, and so on. These are just my own thoughts, and I'm no expert, having only been to Kenya twice and
Retirement Washing My Bowl For the holidays this year, we drove from Butte to Berkeley to spend Christmas with Megan's extended family. It was great to see people I haven't seen for a few years, and I enjoyed catching up with Megan's uncle Grant, who has been retired
travel Walking the Moors This is a post that originally appeared on my old website in August 2014. It's one of the posts that was too large or complicated to be migrated to my new blog platform in 2018, and I'm steadily (well, erratically) migrating those old posts manually so
Jamie Samoyed Jamie's Highway When people ask where I'm from, I sometimes answer "I-90," because I've lived my entire life within a few miles of I-90 in Washington, Illinois, and Montana. So it's no surprise that I-90 has played a big role in the lives of
health Time for a new knee My right knee has been a problem for a long time. When I was 19 years old, I fell off a scaffold at a construction project on the Yakama Indian Reservation and tore it up good, resulting in a complicated surgery at the old Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital that left
Restoring Grandpa's chess table My Grandpa Mahugh worked with his hands. He was one of the 10,000 workers who built the Fort Peck Dam, and after the dam was completed in the late 1930s he went to work there as a mechanic. In the 1950s, he moved to Bremerton, Washington to take a
Building a crosscut sled Last week, I mentioned on the Jamie Samoyed's Pack group that I had finished building a crosscut sled. I should have realized that would be confusing, because that's a Facebook group about the lives of our sled dogs. So I've put together this post
Retirement: Year 1 As of this week, I have already been retired for a full year. Time flies! This post is a look back at some of my favorite memories from my first year of not working and focusing on just enjoying life. I was expecting to play more music than I did
Jamie Samoyed George at 6 months As of today, June 7, George is 6 months old! For each of our other dogs, I've done a blog post shortly after their arrival, covering the story of our decision to get a dog and showing lots of cute puppy pictures. With George, that didn't
Jamie Samoyed Jamie Samoyed's Pack As of a few minutes ago, we have rolled out the all-new Jamie Samoyed's Pack page on Facebook. The goal of this change is simple: more fun, less spam! You can find it by searching Facebook Groups for Jamie Samoyed's Pack, or by following this link:
