Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Status Report: My First Winter at Home in 10+ Years

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I summarize how it started and how it’s going for my first winter at home in more than 10 years.

It’s December 18, 2024 and I’m typing this at home while sitting at my desk at a desktop computer. Outside is approximately 8 inches of snow that has fallen in the past three days. My driveway is plowed, my vehicles are tucked into the garage. My house is warm. The sun is out, trying to break through the low clouds between my perch about 800 feet above the Columbia River and city of Wenatchee. It is a gorgeous day and is likely to become even nicer as the sun continues to rise — although for me, it’ll never clear the 500+ foot ridge just south of my home.

I’m chomping at the bit, ready to turn my 2-3 week planned trip to Arizona into a 5 week camping adventure. After all, I do still have my truck camper. I may as well use it.

On Being Home

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love my home. I love its simple comfort, privacy, quiet, spacious garage, and, above all, its views. (I’ve always been fond of a good view and I don’t think I’ll get a better one anywhere else.) I have everything here that I want and need — or almost (more in a moment) — and after spending 17 of the past 24 months traveling, it’s great to be settled in somewhere.

At least I think it is. I’m so used to being on my boat that it actually feels weird to have luxuries like a washer/dryer, dishwasher, enormous (well, okay, just normal sized) refrigerator, and soaking tub where I can immerse 90% of my body in hot water for as long as I like.

One of the things I admit that I am struggling with is the sameness of every day. My pups and I have revised our routine for our surroundings and that’s fine, but what’s weird is that we wake up in the same place every day. When I’m traveling, every day doesn’t just have the potential to be different. It is different. Here, I have to work on adding variety to my days. And I’ll admit that sometimes I just don’t bother.

The Plan: A Winter at Home

The original plan was to spend the whole winter at home. Period.

I have lots to do. Not only did I have to clean the boat and prep it for a season as a charter boat in the San Juan Islands, but I had a lot of catching up to do on my Great Loop blog and the video channel I’m trying to build. I could spend eight hours every day working on these things and still not catch up by the end of February.

Not only that, but I’m exploring more creative options. In addition to getting back into my jewelry shop to build inventory for the upcoming season, I’ve begun dabbling in paper arts, including bookbinding and the production of decorative papers. I find these things challenging while being a good creative outlet.

So that was the plan: work on the things I need and want to get done.

But the Gray! And the Snow!

Right around the time we changed the clocks, I remembered why I go usually south every winter. It gets dark early here. When it gets dark, my brain tells my body that it’s time for bed. It’s increasingly difficult to stay up until at least 9 PM.

And then there’s the gray. The Wenatchee Valley has inversions in the winter time that fill the valley with clouds. Sometimes I’m above the clouds, sometimes I’m below the clouds, and sometimes I’m in the clouds. So I look out the windows and I see a lot of gray. I’d estimate 4-5 days out of every 7.

This is very difficult for someone who lived in Arizona for 15 years where the sun shines so often that you wish for a gray day.

Of course, on other days here you get a day like today, when the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the world looks like a winter wonderland. On days like this, I feel like sitting in a window seat with a book and a cup of hot cocoa, glancing up at the amazing, ever-changing vista every time I turn a page.

Gorgeous Day
How’s this for a gorgeous day and amazing view? Come join me for a cup of hot cocoa looking out the windows.

Dave Shovels
With 8 inches of snow in about 48 hours, “shoveling” requires some heavy equipment. Here, my neighbor Dave is digging a pathway for my Jeep to get in and out of the garage.

And the snow is definitely a thing.

I like snow. I think it’s pretty. But the problem is that it makes it difficult to do anything or go anywhere outside. The problem is only made worse by the fact that the snow slides off my roof to block my garage doors, thus trapping my vehicles inside until I — or someone else — breaks them free.

A Year Ago Today
There’s a nice private beach a short drive from where my dad lived.

Last year on this date, I was walking on a beach near my dad’s house in Florida, feeling the sand between my toes while my pups chased each other near the surf. Only a few days later, I’d be heading south a in my boat to New Year’s Eve with a friend at Key West. The year before, I was heading east on the Gulf ICW to spend Christmas week at Orange Beach, Alabama. The year before that, I was camped out in the desert in Arizona, hiking, exploring, and enjoying star-filled skies every night. Ditto for most of the years before that.

Lately, I’m constantly trying to remind myself why I’m here this year.

The New Plan

The new plan is to load up my truck camper and head south sometime around Christmas Day. I’m going to visit a bunch of friends in Wickenburg, Quartzsite, Phoenix, Tucson, and Sierra Vista. I’ll hit the big Pow Wow rock show to replenish my supply of certain stones I use in jewelry making. And I’m going to start my search for a new winter home in the Tucson area. — more on that in another post.

My usual winter house-sitter, John, is thrilled. He loves it here in the winter. He thought he’d be stuck spending more time with family, but is already packing his truck in preparation for coming back here. I’m sure my barn cat, Rover, will be thrilled, too. I know John spoils the hell out of him when I’m gone. (Maybe this time he’ll take Rover with him when he leaves.)

But John won’t have too much time here. My goal is to be back by the end of January. I want to go to the Seattle Boat Show at month-end and I need to get my boat to the other side of the mountains for some maintenance work before it’s launched in March. There’s a lot to do.

There’s always a lot to do. And I like it that way.

Taking Notes … in Scrivener

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I get tired of looking up the same things up over and over again and do something about it — with a software tool that I already have.

My memory for little facts and figures is something I can neither understand or explain. I can tell you the phone number for the house I grew up in (and left in 1977), as well as phone numbers for my grandparents’ homes and even my aunt — all of whom have been dead for more than 20 years now. (Heck, my dad’s parents died in the 1980s!) But, for the life of me, I can’t remember the pixel dimensions of a YouTube video thumbnail, which is a piece of information I need every time I publish a video on YouTube.

Little things like this haunt me. I found myself looking up the same information, over and over. It was a frustrating waste of time, especially when I didn’t have a way to look it up. In case you’re wondering, the Internet isn’t always available when you’re on a boat in a remote area of British Columbia. (And yes, I’d have a Starlink by now if I did’t think Elon Musk was such a shithead. By I digress and I definitely don’t want to discuss the Space Karen here.)

So I started taking notes.

It didn’t go very well. The problem is, I took notes on paper. Notebook paper, usually. But I didn’t always take notes in the same notebook and I’d sometimes misplace notebooks with notes. And I travel a lot and usually forget to take the notebooks with me. So I start new notebooks. And even if I did stick with a notebook for more than a week, the notes weren’t organized in any way. It was just a mess.

And then I thought about my To Do software, which exists on my computer, my phone, and my tablet. I can add an item to my to do list or consult the list or check off a completed item pretty much anywhere I was because I always had at least one of those devices at hand. The app on each device shared the same databases and automatically synced. Clearly, I needed something like that for note-taking.

I know Apple has a Notes app, but I’ve never been able to get it to sync between all my Apple devices. But there was one app I already had on all the devices and it was already sharing one database: Scrivener.

Scrivener is supposed to be a writing app. People on social media who write books (or want to write books) rave about it. They rave so loud and frequently, that I’ve tried using it to write books. I’ve tried at least three times with three different versions of the app. And I’ve failed as many times as I’ve tried.

The trouble is, I’ve been using Microsoft Word since 1989. I have written all kinds of things with it, including entire books and the scripts for video courses about it. I know Word (and Excel, for that matter) better than almost any other software I use. Scrivener does things Scrivener’s way. I do thing Word’s way. I just couldn’t be bothered learning enough about Scrivener’s way to use Scrivener to write books. Why learn to use a new tool when the old tool is working fine?

I could, however, use it to take notes.

My memory issue extends to the work I do as a silversmith. When I make items such as earrings and bracelets for sale, I need to have consistency in the way they are produced. I don’t make one of each earring design. I make dozens. And I don’t make them all the same day. The only way to ensure that I was making them the same way every time I made a batch — given my crappy memory for details — was to create what I called a “Recipe Book” for my jewelry.

Years ago, I created a Scrivener file, which lives in a Dropbox folder. (Dropbox is a cloud computing storage service where I put things I want to be able to access from all of my devices.) The Mac OS and iOS versions of Scrivener all have access to this file. I created folders for the type of item, such as Findings, Earrings, Bracelets. And then subfolders inside each of those folders such as the Sheet Metal, Wire Earrings, and Bead Earrings folders inside the Earrings folder. And then actual pages inside the appropriate folder. Each page listed the “ingredients” — materials, supplies, and tools — and steps for making one specific item.

Jewelry Recipes Example
Here’s one of the pages in my Jewelry Recipes file, which has expanded over the years to include descriptions of the stones I use in my work as well as boilerplate text I use in online shop listings.

This works like a charm, provided that I create page for each item. For example, my Split Bar Dangle earrings page describes the earrings, shows a picture of them, and lists all the materials, supplies, and tools I need to make them. That’s how I know that I need 3 inches of 1/4 inch wide 24 or 26 gauge fine silver bezel wire (among other things) for each pair. I don’t have to guess what I used last time I made them or measure a pair I might still have in inventory. I have the recipe and I can follow it, step by step, with the same ingredients.

What if I created another file that just had miscellaneous notes in it? Organized onto pages and maybe with folders to keep things easy to find?

It seemed like a no-brainer, so that’s what I did.

This is a life-changing (for me) productivity hack. Not only am I using it to note down the dumb things I find myself looking up online (and elsewhere) over and over again, but I’ve also begun using it as a place to keep notes for projects I’m working on.

For example, I’m currently preparing to get my boat on a charter program next season and I need to take care of some upgrades. As I do research and get answers from knowledgeable people on the TugNuts forums and elsewhere, I copy and paste the info into a page in my Notebook. When I need the info, it’s right there.

Notebook page example
Here’s my note page for the upgrades I need to complete on my boat this winter. Everything is right where I need it.

So sure, Scrivener might be “the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and more.” (Per Literature and Latte’s marketing material for Scrivener. But it also makes a damn good notebook app, keeping your data anywhere you need it.

Now if only I could stop buying empty notebooks…

Another Clouds Time-Lapse

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With clouds in the valley before dawn, I set up a time-lapse camera to capture the cloud movement throughout the morning.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely love time-lapse movies. They make it possible for us to see movement that is normally too slow to perceive.

On October 31, 2024, there were thick clouds in the valley below my home. I know from experience that our winter thermal inversions can put on a good cloud show and those inversions are happening earlier and earlier every year. I set up a GoPro in Hyperlapse mode and let it run all day. Here’s the first few hours of the cloud show, sped up with the hyperlapse as well as a 400% increase in speed in video editing. The result is a smooth, high-speed look at what the clouds did that morning.

Enjoy!