December 18, 2025

Happy Holidays 2025!

Another year has sped by. Jill and I now have a high school freshman and junior, although most of the time we find ourselves home alone as our kids both dance 7 days a week and we rarely see them. It reminds us of 20 years ago when we had nothing better to do with our time except work on projects, though I find myself less eager to take on such huge projects again. 🙂

I did, however, get a little crazy and designed and installed my own solar system this summer. Nobody creates their own engineering and structural schematics, gets them all approved, and then installs the system themselves, but doing so was an interesting challenge and orders of magnitude cheaper. Phase 1 is complete, and plans for phase 2 are approved and I’ll get that installed early in the spring. Because there was so much interest from the city and the engineering firm that certified my plans, I will publish all of my steps and plans in an effort to help others do the same.

While I was busy in the basement and on the roof, the rest of the family stayed crazy busy with all the things. Both kids dance at two studios, have joined the competition team at one of the studios, dance on the Ames HS Dance Team, and dance in the Nutcracker. On top of that, there’s 4H, choir, school clubs, babysitting, AP and ACT test prep, homework and class projects.

Despite all of that, we still managed to play a masterful job of vacation Tetris this year in order to work a number of different trips. We managed trips to Tahiti (for my mom’s 75th birthday), New Orleans & Mississippi, Boston & Maine, and the cabin with the kid’s friends. Whew, it’ll be really hard to top this year.