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The Church is building a new temple in Orem, just a couple miles from our Villa. It’ll be super convenient to go there when we visit Utah. Today we stopped in for the “open house”, where we had the opportunity to walk on a self-guided tour.

We’re excited to attend the next time we’re in the area.

Last week one of Zack’s friends was celebrating a birthday, so Zack treated him to an evening of pinball at a local arcade. Today he talked me and Pepper into stopping by, and we had a grand time. It’s been many years since I last played pinball, but it’s still as fun as I remember. They even had a copy of Addams Family, one of my favorites and a well-known classic.

Here’s a shot of Pepper playing Indiana Jones while Zack tackles a bit of Star Trek.

It’s basically a “nickel arcade” where you can play pinball and video games and air hockey and shoot baskets and all that sort of stuff for a few nickels apiece. I mostly played pinball, where each game cost a quarter, and it seemed like a great deal.

The best part: it’s about a five-minute drive from the Villa. Obviously when we go down to Utah to visit our kids in the future, we’ll always need to hit the arcade.

Today I’m grateful for Thanksgiving. It’s sort of a weird holiday, when you think about it. We celebrate the good things in our lives by absolutely stuffing ourselves with food and then taking the rest of the day to lounge around talking about how full we are. But the point, of course, is to give thanks for those good things and recognize the blessings that are ours. It’s definitely a unique holiday, and even in less-than-ideal circumstances we can all benefit from the introspection Thanksgiving brings.

As our family partook of the traditional meal today, we appreciated the chance to be together. This isn’t a great photo, but hey, that’s us.

For the past few weeks, as I’ve written these #givethanks posts, I’ve had a good time reflecting on some of the little things that make my life so good. I intentionally did not write about people in these posts– I wanted to focus on things that were perhaps a bit more mundane. Through that process, it’s been very clear to me that although each of these things brings some measure of happiness and contentment to my life, it’s the people who really make a difference. My wife, my kids, my parents, my siblings, my family, my friends, and even the strangers who cross my path… all of them have, in one way or another, shaped me into who I am today. I can never truly express the depth of my gratitude to them, and words on a web page hardly do it justice.

Not a day goes by that I don’t say a quiet prayer expressing my gratitude for something and someone. And so, as I wrap up this little series of posts, I’m filled with a warm sense that I’m truly and deeply blessed.

Today I’m grateful for the Villa. It was about two years ago when we first tossed around the idea of buying a townhouse near our kids, so we could visit them more often. College apartments aren’t very good for family gatherings, and we wanted to take advantage of our kids all living in the same area. It seemed ludicrous to buy a second home, but at the same time it was silly to keep bouncing around Airbnb rentals.

So we did it.

Right from the start– even before we’d fully furnished the place– we were having a grand time. We threw a big birthday party for Ollie, featuring three sets of great-grandparents.

Since then we’ve been down there a dozen times, sometimes for a few days, others for a couple of weeks. I never thought I’d be the kind of guy who has a “second home”, but it’s been an incredible blessing to be able to see our kids and really spend time with them.

It was– and continues to be– a fairly significant money pit. But it’s money well spent. For this.

Today I’m grateful for my health. Ironically, as I write this I can feel a cold coming on. It’s been almost a year since I was last sick– I remember it vividly because it was during the Christmas season. Since I get sick so rarely, when I do it seems like it’s a real kick in the pants. I can’t imagine what it would be like to feel crummy all day, every day. At least when I have a cold, I know it’s a passing thing and in a few days I’ll be better.

If I’m being honest, I don’t actually pay all that much attention to my health. I eat and drink whatever I want. I haven’t been to a doctor since I was a kid. I don’t exercise, although I spend plenty of time doing exercise-y things like walking, hiking, swimming, and biking. I find that jumping around in a room while watching a video of other people jumping around just isn’t very engaging. I suppose as I get older, I should make more of an effort to do that, but for most of my life I’ve had plenty of opportunity to just be out doing stuff that keeps me more or less in shape. Hence, I haven’t needed to pay attention to whether I’m getting slower or fatter. I can still fit into clothes I wore in college, which I take as a good sign. I don’t have migraines or asthma or allergies or joint pain… another good sign.

So, despite a profound lack of attention to it, my health is actually pretty great. I should give some credit to genetics: Mom and Dad are both getting on in years but still vigorous and healthy. I hope I’m in the same shape they are when I hit that age. For now, I’ll continue to be grateful for each day I wake up, healthy and strong.

Now if I can just get rid of this pesky sniffle…

Today I’m grateful for Lego. I firmly believe Lego is the greatest toy ever. Not only does it open up a world of imaginative possibilities, it teaches creativity and design and even engineering. It encourages kids to experiment and invent. Nowadays there are a thousand different Lego sets, many of which are branded by famous media properties: Harry Potter and Star Wars and everything in between. Back in my day, we had “town Lego” and “space Lego” and “castle Lego” and that was it. Thom and I spent endless hours building things– always careful not to mix up our respective pieces, of course. Every Christmas, we got to choose something from the JCPenney catalog for Grandma to buy us. Thom and I invariably picked Lego sets, and Grandma delivered every time.

Unfortunately I can’t find any pictures of myself with Lego, but I searched the archives and found a few of my kids. Here’s a very early shot of Alex and Kyra playing with their toys, and in the background are a bunch of the huge plastic block (not actually Lego), as well as some smaller Duplo and Lego. It looks like Kyra is building a Lego tower.

At some point I gave the kids my own Lego, stored away since college. Their creations weren’t always impressive, but they had fun.

Lego started branching out into new lines of toys, including Bionicle and Ninjago and the start of the Hollywood branding. Alex and Zack both liked Bionicles.

For fifteen years, our basement carpet was always covered with Lego. It was the only area of the house we didn’t require the kids to pick up each night, and Lego has a way of filling all available space in a room. But I didn’t mind, because it meant the kids were exercising their creativity and playing together.

So kids these days can have their Minecraft (which is arguably a similar creative building exercise), but I’ll take Lego any day.

Today I’m grateful for photography. Maybe that’s a strange thing to say, but my photography hobby has been a source of inspiration and joy for a long, long time. It all started on my sixteenth birthday, when I opened a brand-new Pentax K1000:

An SLR camera! That’s what the professionals use!

I took a lot of pictures with that guy, most of which are quite unremarkable. Time passed, and when the digital camera revolution began, I jumped on board and picked up a Sony Mavica. It used floppy disks for storage, and each disk held maybe eight photos (at the highest resolution). That meant I had to carry around a little box of disks, but I figured it wasn’t that much different than carrying around rolls of film.

Camera technology advanced rapidly, and I soon found myself with a Panasonic Lumix.

This camera actually looked like an SLR, and took some decent shots. Then one day I won a raffle or something– I don’t entirely remember– and received a free Sony Cybershot camera. I can’t find a product shot online, but I remember it was about the size of a few packs of gum and had a sliding cover. When open, it looked something like this:

The cool thing about this camera was it was so small it just fit in your pocket. Imagine having a phone in your pocket all the time! What a time to be alive. Because of that, I had it with me all the time and my photography habit really took off. But it wasn’t actually a great camera; only the size was great. As I began to get more “serious” about photography, I turned to Canon and picked up a PowerShot 100.

About the size of a deck of cards, this camera was also very compact and found a place in my pocket pretty often. Thom and I were deep into our tradition of annual backpacking trips, and he suggested I consider buying a camera that produced raw images. Unlike the standard JPEG files every camera produces, raw photos can be manipulated after the fact because they store “raw” (hence the name) pixel data from the sensor. I really liked my PowerShot, so when I found that Canon made a model that output raw images, I bought it. Confusingly, it was also called a PowerShot.

These small cameras were fantastic for carrying around, but by this time cell phones were rapidly catching up in their capabilities. I could use my phone to take the same sorts of photos my little PowerShot was producing, and wouldn’t have to carry two devices. If I wanted to really step up my game, I’d need to move back into SLR territory. Well, technically DSLR, for digital SLR. My friend Brian happened to be in the process of upgrading his kit, so he offered to sell me his DSLR for a song. I started shooting with a Nikon D90.

Switching to a “real” camera felt pretty good. I lugged this thing around on hiking trips, and started figuring out how to do more than traditional point-and-shoot. I suddenly felt like I could be creative with my photography, rather than just capturing a scene. By now, Thom had given up on traditional analog photography and was shooting with various Canon EOS gear, and he gave me some recommendations. I spent some serious coin and picked up a Canon 5D Mark 4.

This camera changed my world. My hobby was now officially serious, and I started buying lenses and filters and tripods. I learned about aperture and shutter speed and ISO. I stopped using “automatic” mode and set my control dial permanently to “M” for manual. That gave me a ton of creative liberty, and I figured out how to make pictures look the way I wanted. I coined the term kameraspielen, which is German for “playing with a camera”, because I found that I could just play with this thing and do all sorts of creative magic. I started using Darktable to process my photos. It was so much fun!

This trusty 5D saw a lot of use– tens of thousands of photographs. Then came the mirrorless revolution, when all the major manufacturers started making cameras without mirrors, and I was tempted to switch out my gear. I held off for a few years, but finally caved and traded in my 5D for a Canon R6.

Although it’s not radically different than the 5D, it has some additional features I like. It’s quieter and a little lighter. I’ve had it for about a year now, and along the way I picked up a few more lenses. I’ve learned some new techniques in my post-processing workflow, and I’ve continued experimenting.

I think one of the things I really enjoy about this hobby is the opportunity to just take a gazillion pictures and figure out for myself what works. What do I like in my photos? What captures the scene best? Although I feel like some of my work is pretty good, I recognize it’s far from being something I could sell. So I do it just for the joy of doing it, not because I’m hoping to convince someone to buy it so I can make a buck. Hobbies like that are the best.

Today I’m grateful for Mom’s cookies. Of course everyone loves cookies, but there’s always something special about the ones Mom makes.

We’re visiting as part of a little pre-Thanksgiving trip, and as always, Mom has made a bunch of different cookies for the family.

These are brownies and scotcheroos… I’ve already eaten the caramel cookies, which are my favorites. Lately Mom has taken to cutting them into bite-sized pieces (well, two bites maybe) and that’s a fun way to put together a little sampler platter with a bunch of different cookies. You don’t feel like such a glutton for taking six cookies at a time.

In a larger sense, I can honestly say that some of my favorite foods are the ones I ate growing up. I suspect that’s the case for most people, but as someone who’s sort of a picky eater, I’m definitely picky in favor of what my Mom makes. While growing up, my siblings and I were tasked with making dinner once a week (when we were old enough), and that was a good system to teach us how to cook and be ready when we eventually moved away from home. Pepper and I did the same with our kids, and although all of us occasionally fall back to the old standbys like mac and cheese, overall it’s been good to know something about cooking. Thanks, Mom!

Today I’m grateful for my car. Well, my cars to be exact. I’ve had the good fortune to have some really great rides over the years. I’m not really much of a “car guy”, meaning I don’t buy or drive cars because they’re cool or fancy or popular. They’re not a status symbol; they’re just a way for me to get from one place to another. And hopefully I can crank my music while I’m doing so.

It started back in 1993 when I bought my first car: a 1982 Nissan 200SX. I saw an ad on a campus bulletin board (back when they were physical bulletin boards, rather than online forums). Some Turkish exchange student was heading back home, and wanted to unload his car. It seemed like a good deal, so I paid $1,200 and enjoyed my first set of wheels.

This photo was taken about two weeks later, after I’d crashed into a highway barrier and destroyed the left side of the car. Also, the clutch had burned out a few days before, costing me $600 at a little repair shop in the middle of rural Tennessee (we were on a spring break road trip). Despite a rough start, I loved that car.

Two years later, I started my first job out of college. My little Nissan had brought me to Colorado, but died upon arrival when the emergency brake locked up and the car wouldn’t move. Flush with cash from my first “real” job, I took out a $12,000 loan and bought a 1995 Saturn SL1:

It looked black but was actually a pretty shade of dark blue. Saturn was an up-and-coming brand, and you’d see them everywhere. They were fairly cheap but well-made, and it served me well for a few years. Then some kid pulled out in front of me while I was driving 50mph, and the Saturn was no more. I took the insurance money (which was strangely more than I’d paid for the car) and dropped $14,000 on… another Saturn.

Yeah, the four-door sedan felt like a “big” car after my Nissan, so it was great to fall back to another two-door car. This was a 1997 SC2, complete with a “sports bra” which ostensibly protected the paint from bug splatters. Although it was small, the fold-down rear seats gave it quite a bit of cargo space. I loved the tinted windows and motorized sunroof.

The years passed, and it was starting to show some age. In 2010 I spent $15,000 on a 2008 Honda Civic EXL to replace it.

(You can see the Saturn parked on the street in the background, ready for someone to notice my Craigslist ad.) The Civic was, again, a two-door car with tinted windows and fold-down seats and a powered sunroof. It was an absolute dream. It was my fourth manual-transmission car, and I loved driving a stick shift. The car was small and zippy and just fun to drive.

Upon moving to Montana, the Civic struggled with our driveway. The front-wheel drive and low curb weight meant it had trouble climbing the steep, slippery gravel. Since our Honda CR-V handled the driveway like a champ, we decided a car with all-wheel drive would be a smarter option. I sold the Civic to Zack, and we bought a Tesla Model 3.

Although it’s not a stick shift and doesn’t have a sunroof (although the entire top of the car is glass), it’s a beast. Like all electric cars, the acceleration is staggering. It takes a little time to get used to the touchscreen interface, and driving without using brakes, but once you do it’s hard to go back to a sluggish old internal-combustion vehicle. Tesla has a fabulous network of charging stations around the country, and despite the naysayers, I’ve never had trouble getting charged… even on road trips covering thousands of miles.

The reason I was thinking about my cars today is that Alex texted me this photo just now.

He’d driven the Tesla to the airport to drop us off, and back at home he misjudged the distance to the side of the garage as he was backing in. He sheared off the mirror and put a huge scratch in the door. He felt terrible about it, but I reassured him that as long as he wasn’t hurt, cars can be fixed.

So, five cars in thirty years. And since Zack still has my Civic, he lets me drive it now and then just to remind myself how awesome stick shift can be. All five of these cars were fun in their own way, and I have great memories of them all.

Today I’m grateful for plumbing. It’s really kind of a love-hate thing. We have a new sink, and the pipes beneath the old sink are no longer in the right place. After reinstalling the garbage disposal, I fidgeted with the drain piping to see what I’d need to do. There were two gaps: one just beneath the sink, and another below the t-joint.

Although the gaps are only about an inch in both cases, it’s enough that I’ll need new pipes. I went to Home Depot and picked up a few parts, then came back. Upon returning to the house, I realized I’d forgotten my plumber’s putty at the checkout stand. Back to Home Depot, where someone had set the putty aside at the checkout. I grabbed it and drove back home. Once there I realized I needed another fitting, because the one I’d bought wasn’t quite the right type. And a hacksaw to cut the pipes to the right length. Sigh. Back to Home Depot a third time. This time, though, I had what I needed, and everything came together as planned.

Everything drains well, and we can enjoy our new sink.

So doing plumbing work is a horrid thing, and it always seems like I have to fit and re-fit the pipes until I get things lined up right. Oh, and it’s inevitable that plumbing work has to be done in a cramped space. Crouching beneath the sink is frustrating. But frankly it’s not actually that complicated, so it’s not worth paying a professional plumber $200 an hour to crouch under the sink and fit pipes. I end up doing it myself, and I cuss under my breath whenever I’m faced with plumbing work.

But plumbing itself is actually pretty wonderful. When the pipes are all working and hidden beneath sinks and behind walls, it’s magical how all the water gets where it needs to go. Our showers are warm, our dishwasher and washing machine clean things, our faucets all run, and our toilets all flush. It’s a good example of how our modern world is filled with conveniences that we hardly even notice (until they break, that is). Today’s example is plumbing, but the same applies for everything from electricity to transportation to computers. I’m grateful for all the things that make our lives easier, more comfortable, more efficient.