Family
Heartfelt updates about family milestones and everyday moments. From taking Mazie to college and annual visits to the Renaissance Festival to Swedish‑pancake breakfasts and VR outings with the kids, this category celebrates togetherness.
Tomorrow a new chapter begins and we take Mazie to St. Olaf to start her college adventure. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a complicated and wide array of emotions. It is great, exciting, and so hard, tough all at the same time. 😬
Mazie posted her first blog post about her photo walk in Soglio, Switzerland. She has her own micro.blog site for easy publishing. 🎉
She is a fabulous writer so I’m hoping she will share her talents with the world.
Breathe it all in
On the final evening of our Switzerland & Italy trip we slowly walked around the Duomo in Florence and took in the grandeur. We all admired it and Mazie and I “breathed it all in”. It’s a goofy thing we like to do to really take in the scene with a big, deep breath. It started by breathing in the waterfalls in Iceland.
As we were standing there it hit me that this is the last family vacation we’ll take before she goes off to college.
Many new journeys are ahead. But I’d be fine keeping things just as they are too.
Tyler and I were having fun watching the max speed of our train back to Milan. Hit 245 km/h or 152 miles/h. Felt fast! 🚄
Lost Wallet
Update: My wallet was recovered!
Yesterday morning I realized I had lost my wallet. The previous day we had finished our first hike and while waiting for the train in Ardez I gave Tyler some cash so that he could get small ice cream cups for the group from this self-serve stand. That was the last time I saw my wallet.
I realized I didn’t have it when walking to dinner that night, but assumed it was in the room and didn’t think much of it. The next morning I looked for it and started to worry when I didn’t find it right away. Where was it?
I traced my actions and remembered the ice cream. I also remembered that Tyler brought me change back and I put that in my wallet. But i didn’t. I found the change in my pants pocket.
So where did my wallet go? I suspect I set it down by the train station thinking I would put the change in it, then I didn’t. I also was rearranging my backpack at the same time.
Our guides did there best to try and find it. Dave actually took the train back to Ardez the next morning to look for it but no luck, and then hiked back to the group. The hotel called around as well, no luck. By the late afternoon after having looked everywhere multiple times I declared it lost.
I keep all my important numbers and info in 1Password and years ago read a suggestion to tag items with “Wallet” that are in your wallet. That paid off yesterday when I was able to confidently inventory all I needed to deal with.
Net it isn’t too big of a deal. Unfortunately I had a good bit of spending money in it and that is gone. But everything else is in the process of getting replaced now. And having everything on my phone gives a good backup.
My son Tyler has debated blogging for a long time, and today he asked me to set him up. He just wrote his first post. Proud papa!
Mazie's Surprise Carnival
To celebrate Mazie’s 18th birthday and graduating from high school Tammy had a brilliant idea — surprise Mazie with a Carnival! Set up several games to play and earn tickets to put toward prizes, along with three raffles! Ring Toss, Bean Bags, Musical Chairs, Duck Pick, and more. Add to that a giant bouncy house, photo booth, an Ice Cream truck with all the fixings, airbrush tattoos and balloon artist and you have an awesome time for all! The secret held too — Mazie had no idea what was up. We left for a long picnic at Lake Harriet at 4pm and when we returned to a giant SURPRISE at 7pm it was the greatest!
Mazie gave a short recital at B&H Photo Video.
“To be normal you have to be abnormal.” — Tyler
Space Camp
We had a fun weekend at Family Space Camp! 🚀 Our program included runs in the Multi Axis Trainer, the 5D weightlessness trainer. We ran an entire simulation of a Space Shuttle mission where Tyler was EECOM, Mazie PAYCOM, Tammy CAPCOM, and I was FDO. I got to do the countdown to launch. 🤩 We got to see an incredibly impressive planetarium showing as well as a great IMAX experience on the International Space Station. We also learned a bunch about NASA’s Artemis program. And the whole time we got to see a real Saturn V and Saturn IB rocket, as well as a capsule that went into space and a moon rock. And we got great astronaut suits.
