With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Hell of a Year

2015 December 26 19:12

At the Cabin over Christmas. Burning paper trash here. I just liked the shot of the burn barrel and the creek.

It's been a hell of a year. As of October, all of the settings of the Back to the Future movies are now in the past. Our "Log In Date" for our adoption portfolio was mid-November, so that's exciting. We're taking Mandarin Chineese (mostly spoken, some written).

Aaaaaaand my father-in-law died a couple of weeks ago. :-( Thus we ended up here longer than expected, and we had (and still have) lots to do. Oy. An ugly transition. Very sad. We're still getting used to it.

So I'm going to try to get posts up that summarize the interesting bits of the year. Here's the one for this trip.



One interesting thing: my wife and I gave this record/CD/tape player/radio to my father-in-law in...it must have been 2002. I tried to play a CD in it, and the drive is jammed. Apparently he used it so much that he wore out the drive mechanism. I'm incredibly gratified.



This is the back of the Explorer about to head back from the memorial service. The cylinder on the right is a 1/6th keg of beer, so that we wouldn't run out when all the people came back to the house. We swapped it in before the night was over. People got a kick out of my walking across the road to the liquor store and bringing the keg back with my funeral clothes on.

And I got some Taurus driving in while running errands; some day driving

and some night driving:

And I got to drive the Explorer a bit. It's fairly new one, so it has the fancy digital dash.

And the climate controls are complicated enough to launch a space ship.



Charging back-up cell phone batteries. The cable is obviously better because it has glowy lights in it. :-D The charger is one of the a great set of Sprint chargers that are both car chargers and wall chargers, and they have lights on them.



My Christmas present to my self is this comically large tap handle. I got this because I'm going to tap the engine block of my VW for an oil filter, and the tap is large enough that it doesn't fit in a normal tap handle. The beer can is for scale.



I was sitting on the couch studying for my Chinese language final. This photo is absolutely not posed; Jasper came, sat down with me, and put the royal paw on my books. I think it's a hilarious pose; it's great that he looks so stern.



I've had a long-term project around the main floor of the house to kind of get my stuff organized in a longer-term way. I like having a working desk that I pile stuff on to work on or sort, but of course that gets piled up. So I cleared out this drawer, so it can be the "to be sorted" or "to be gone through" piles, so it's out of the way. Of course, as is no surprise, Pangur is helping.

All for now. More entries on the year as I get photos edited.