Here is the first – of hopefully many – stamps in my US passport:

If you are wondering why this is exciting me – the answer is a little complicated.  You see, I only became a US citizen ~10 days ago.  I received my US passport only 5 days ago.  All of which was a little stressful considering I had a business trip to Sweden scheduled for, well, now.

To complicate things further – my air travel was all booked using my (still valid) Australian passport – but as I am travelling in and out of the US I need to use my US passport.  Despite doing all the right paper work – and updating my information everywhere – I was still nervous about this whole process.  And I packed both my passports, just in case some airport had records of my old passport and not my new one.

Or – at least that is the story I told myself.

As I have travelled over the last 24 hours I have become acutely aware of the fact that I just can’t believe that I am now an American and that this all works.  I have gone through multiple immigration points – and have only ever produced my American passport – and have had no problems.  But at each and every point there has been an expectation that the person on the other side of the table would look at the passport and say “No, you can’t be American – where is your real passport?”  It is an irrational thought – but it turns out that it is there none the less.

So here I sit in a Swedish hotel looking at my US passport, with the primary thought in my mind being “It works!”.

I suspect I will continue to travel with both passports as a general best practice – but hopefully over time I will get more comfortable with producing the US passport when asked.

Except when I travel to Australia.  That would be problematic 🙂

Cheers,
Ben

The night before last, Werona saw a Facebook post from Don McCrady showing us that you could easily see Venus and Jupiter in the night sky at this time of year.  After some running around and peering into the dark – we were forced to conclude that either we could not see them from our house, or that it was simply too late and that they had settled below the horizon.

Tonight, after going out for coffee, we spotted the two planets on the drive home.

When we got home, we got both our eldest children out of bed (they had been reading quietly – waiting for us to come and say goodnight) so that they could come and see.  After a bit of pointing and talking we started searching for equipment that would allow us to get a better view.  Eventually – we managed to get a small telescope out of storage and get it setup.

Unfortunately, there was no good view point from our house to look at the planets using a telescope.  To make matters worse – the planets were rapidly setting below the horizon.  With time running out; Werona, I, Isaac and Lizzy (the latter two being in their pajamas) started wondering the neighborhood streets (at 10pm at night!) looking for the perfect place to setup a telescope.

We ended up doing so at the top of our street, about 5 houses away from our home.

While we were busy getting setup – some neighbors who we know came out to see what was happening.  At first they assumed we were looking for one of our cats.  But after some explaining – they decided to come out and join us.  After a short time I had the telescope trained on Venus and everyone (including the neighbors three boys) had a chance to have a look at it.

Fast forward to about 2 hours ago – I was up late tinkering with computers when a power flicker took out two of my main servers, and fried the power supply for my Internet modem.  Bleah.  I started working on putting everything back together – but there was little for me to actually do while I waited for systems to boot and repair themselves.

After a bit of boredom I grabbed my smartphone and the telescope and started wondering the streets again.  A little bit later I managed to grab this:

Not the best picture of the moon that I have ever seen – but pretty darned cool all the same.

Anyway; all my servers are back up and running now – and I am tired.  But it has been a good night.

Cheers,
Ben

Today is Father’s Day – and my darling wife has bought me my very own drill press:

In fact, having spent the last couple of weeks working on perfecting my garage setup – I was rewarded with various tools from everyone in my family.  But the drill press is definitely the thing that I am most excited about.

It came in many pieces – and took a lot of assembly.  The thing that has amused me most about it is this:

This is a warning about the sighting laser on the drill press.  Now, I have no doubt that there is a government requirement that you have this warning on anything that shoots lasers anywhere.  But let me highlight: this laser tells you were the drill will fall.  In other words – if the laser is shining in your eye (or on any part of you) the laser is the least of your concerns.  The drill that is moving at 2800RPM should be a much greater concern to you!

Cheers,
Ben

Yesterday was my regular “Lizzy & Daddy Day” – where we make sure that Liz and I do something for just the two of us.  This time we had decided that we would be going fishing together.

We got up early, got everything ready, and headed out.  Once we had been driving for about a minute, Lizzy decided that it was time for the sort of conversation that she could only have with just me in the car.

“Dad, I know this isn’t related to anything we are doing, but…

If ‘i’ is the square root of negative one, what is the square root of ‘i’?”

A lengthy discussion followed that both of us enjoyed. (for the curious – the correct mathematical answer to the question is that the square root of ‘i’ is the square root of ‘i’.  If you need a more detailed explanation – I suggest that you go fishing with me).

Later, when I told Werona about this conversation, she said “Only Lizzy would ask you that!”.  To which I had to explain that only early in the day I had contemplated, on a whim, “If the odds of something happening are 1 in 100, what are the odds of it not actually happening if you try it 100 times?”.  Some short math later showed that the odds of a “1 in 100” event not actually occurring after 100 attempts was 1 in 2.73.

Ah.  Maths….

Cheers,
Ben

For a while now I have been watching my diet, exercising regularly, and all the good stuff.  That said, I have learnt that for my sanity (and the sanity of those around me) there are times when you have to forget about the diet and celebrate the moment.

For me – Easter is one of those times.  For the Easter weekend I do not exercise, I do not track my diet, I just enjoy the occasion…  And eat *lots* of chocolate.

In fact, my Easter chocolate binge has become a tad excessive.  You see, come Monday morning I am back to tracking everything.  So somewhere in my mind I have decided that the best thing to do is to try and eat all of the chocolate I can before the weekend is over.  That way I do not have to balance a large amount of outstanding chocolate with the rest of my diet.  Makes sense?  Right??

Anyway, questionable logic aside, I made a reasonable attempt at “death by chocolate” this year – and when all was said and done I had a small bowl of solid little Easter eggs come Monday morning:

Now, to be clear.  This is a small bowl.  I can hold it in one hand easily.  And these are the smallest little Easter eggs you can get.

So after work I sat and looked at this bowl and thought to myself: “How much exercise would I have to do to be able to eat the whole darned bowl today, and still stay on my diet”.  After a lot of number crunching, the results were depressing (to say the least).

A one hour (60 minute) walk?  Three eggs:

*cough*

A one hour run, covering over 8 kilometers? Ten eggs:

To eat the whole bowl?  You would literally have to run a marathon.  42 kilometers of running (which for me would take about 4 hours, and would probably kill me in the process).

Tonight I opted for the 8 kilometer run and had ten eggs with a coffee afterwards.  But it does make me quite aware of the fact that I ate a staggering amount of chocolate yesterday, and I will probably be paying for that for a couple of days yet…

Cheers,
Ben

Isaac and I are out on a camping trip right now. This was planned weeks ago. But at the beginning of this week, the big question on my mind was: How bad is the rain going to be?
You see, we do get fine days – and even sunny weeks here in Washington. But more often than not, it rains.

That said, the rain is usually light and sporadic. Usually you can ignore it and get on with your life. But when it comes to camping, the impact of the rain is quite notable. Handling rain means that you need a lot more gear and a lot more planning.

At the beginning of the week, the forecast for rain was 40%. At that stage I was debating whether we should take our chances and pack light. By the end of the week, the forecast was 80% and the debate was over. We were going to pack for rain.

We drove to the campsite on a lovely sunny Friday afternoon, and as we setup our large rain shelter, we joked about how all this effort would be wasted if it did not rain. We had a good nights sleep, and when we woke to blue skies, I wondered if maybe we had gotten lucky. But not 10 minutes later the clouds rolled over and the first drops of rain started to fall.

Not to fear.

Being experienced Washington campers meant that our shelter (a large tarp on wooden poles) is quite large. We quickly shuffled everything under cover and proceeded to make breakfast in the dry.

We will probably go for a hike shortly. It is still raining, and we will get wet, but that is all part of living in Washington!

When I was a child, I was a big Lego fan.  I used to love creating large and complicated Lego creations.  I have fond memories of sunny weekend afternoons spent in my room creating new inventions.  I created medieval battle scenes, suburban villages, rocket ships and more.

As I grew older, I got interested in Lego Technics and Robotics.

However, by the time I had moved out of my parents home I had pretty much stopped playing with Lego.

A couple of years ago I started to get back into Lego again.  Specifically – I started to get into the new 12+ kits that are available these days.  I started out with a number of the Star Wars Lego kits.  My personal highlight here was the AT ST Walker:

One of the things that I liked most about these kits was the hidden complexity.  It would be very easy to take something like the AT ST walker and just fill the empty space with nothing, or plain bricks.  But that is not what Lego does.  Instead, the entire model is full of interesting details – many of which will only be seen by the person who puts them together.  In the case of the AT ST walker – I can tell you that the inside of the feet is actually quite complicated.  You would never know that from looking at the outside.

Over time I started to fall out of love with the Star Wars Lego kits.  This was primarily because they are mostly ships and vehicles of one kind or another – and once you have four of them on a shelf, the fifth one does not really standout compared to the others.

After Star Wars Lego I started getting into the new town house series that Lego have been doing.  I absolutely love these things!

They are big and complicated, and they are beautiful when on display.  Here is my current Lego street (that sits on a shelf above my computer desk):

On top of this – these houses were designed to be played with.

Let me explain.  My eldest two children have shown a mild to moderate interest in Lego.  They have always admired my Lego – but not really been interested in playing extensively with them.

Kai is different.  He loves Lego, and he loves playing with it.  He often comes and points to something on my shelf and asks if he can play with it.

Given this situation, I have come to have a solid appreciation for how hard it is to break each of my Lego creations, and how easy it is to fix if it is broken.  For example: pre-Kai I would have told you that my AT ST Walker was the best Star Wars Lego model I had.  It is striking and complex.  Unfortunately, it will also break if you look at it really hard.  In comparison my X-Wing fighter is quite robust, and is easy to fix when it breaks.  For these reasons I would recommend the X-Wing over the AT ST Walker any day.

So how do the town houses stack up?  Fantastically.

They are actually designed to come apart at each floor, and reassemble easily.  So if Kai asks to play with one of the houses, I pull it down onto the floor and split it out into the pieces for him:

He can then play with the figurines and have them explore the building.

It is funny.  While I genuinely appreciate the process of creating these buildings, and am happy to have them on display for their pure aesthetic value, it is also great to have someone who can play with them in ways that I won’t.

As a result – I now find my interest in Lego kits changing.  I still love the town house kits, and want to get any that I do not have yet, but I find myself eyeing off some of the vehicle kits – like the large VW Van:

Or the remote control 4×4:

Simply because I know that I would enjoy making them, and Kai would enjoy playing with them

Cheers,
Ben

Kai got a new bicycle for Christmas.  It is nothing fancy – just a little red bike that we got on sale (from Costco I believe).  But Kai loves it.  Not only does he love it – but in his mind it is the fastest bike in the world.

We do not have much flat ground – so we have been taking him to the local park where there is a tennis / basket ball court that he can ride around in circles on.  While he does this he is constantly talking about his bike – with phrases such as:

“I’m going 100 miles per hour!”

“Using turbo rocket boosters!”

“This is the fastest bicycle in the world!”

It is hilarious and wonderful to watch.  Every now and then he will come over and ask if you are impressed by his fast bike – to which you have to agree that yes, it is an amazing bicycle.

Cheers,
Ben

A while ago I posted about how Kai called R2-D2 (in Lego Star Wars) RD-Tee Toe.  Well, lately Werona and I have noticed that occasionally “RD-Tee Toe” becomes “Auntie ‘nita”.  Further more – Kai has started playing Lego Indiana Jones.  Or, as he says “Indian Ana Joe”.

Cheers,
Ben