So my family has been under a Stay At Home type order for 22 days. This has never happened before. The entire world is pretty much shut down. Definitely feels like living in one of those post-apocalyptic movies like I Am Legend. Today we visited my mother-in-law to celebrate her 63rd birthday. We celebrated in the renovated barn on her property that we've affectionately called "The Farm" for over a decade and of course Beth has called it that for decade(s) plural. There are a ton of memories there for our little family and even more for her. I found myself wanting to take pictures of the house, barn, the pond, everything today. The reason of course is because Mary won't live there for too much longer. The maintenance requirements of the property are just too much for her and many other complicated reasons led to the decision to sell the home and move to a more manageable home in a retirement community. I looked at the house from the barn today and I remembered when Lux was a little over a year old and we had pictures taken of our family there. Lux sitting on the tractor, sitting on a bale of hay, playing around the little memorial that had been set up for Beth's grandfather who had died not long before she was born. I took pictures of that place again today as I remembered. Lux didn't like sitting on the hay because she had shorts on and the hay probably hurt the skin on her legs which made her frown in the photo. She is 9 years old today.

We picked up some food from Firebirds to eat for Mary's birthday. It was good, the kids ate some of their chicken tenders and fries but were mostly occupied by the cool walkie-talkies that Mary bought for them. They had a problem at one point in the visit where the walkie-talkies seemed to stop working and Max declared that they were pieces of junk and no good. I scolded him for that and said it was rude to say that because his Grandma had spent a lot of money on those. I explained to him that they were just more complicated because they were not kid toy walkie talkies. I took both from the kids and checked their settings and saw that they were tuned to different channel frequencies. I set them both to the same frequency and again they worked as designed. I handed them back to the kids and explained to them that sometimes complicated things will seem like they are broken if you don't understand how they work and that really these were very good high quality walkie talkies. Then they ran off and happily continued playing with them. For some reason this moment made me feel like a grown-up. It reminded me of times when I was a child and my parents or my aunt, or my uncle, or my grandpa might fix something complicated for me that I thought was broken but really it wasn't. I just didn't understand it at the time. Knowledge, time, experience. How we come to understand these things as we grow older. I turned 38 last week.

Well I need to wrap this up. It is bedtime. I just want to mention one thing about this website. This is all 100% hand-coded HTML like in the old days. Notepad is my editor. Like when I was in high-school. The 90s Web 1.0 look is on purpose. We need to go back to simple things sometimes. Have a good night and thank you for reading.