March 8, 2025

Train Travel DC to RedWing

Train Travel DC to Red Wing

I recently had to take a business trip to DC. For some admitantly silly reasons, I don’t like to fly in February. I was even less motivated to fly due to recent events with FAA firings and planes crashing.

March 2, 2025

Sparks

“Bedtime girls,” mother announces.

Up the steep, dark steps we climb to our bedroom. Ours is the tiny bedroom at the top of the stairs in an old farm house. The ceiling matches the steep angle of the roofline. This is no problem for two little girls, but would cause adults to duck their heads when standing anywhere other than the centerline of the room.

There’s a single window centered under the peak of the ceiling. It is covered inside and out by a thick layer of frost. What little light comes in from outside is diffused and is mostly obscured by the mirror mounted to the child sized dresser.

November 24, 2024

Poll Watching 2024

Poll Watching in Rural Minnesota 2024

I’m writing about my experiences and observations as a volunteer, not about my personal views on how the election turned out or why. That’s something that I will do in a future post.

What Does a Poll Watcher Do?

I volunteered to be a poll watcher (it’s officially called appointed poll challenger in Minnestota) for the DFL (Democratic) party in Minnesota. This was a record year for Democratic campaign volunteering, and the number of volunteers for poll challengers more than doubled any previous year.

September 15, 2024

Small Towns: Redwing Minnesota

Is there anything more hopeful than Main Street

I love walking through the business district of small towns and take a careful look at the buildings. Here in Minnesota, many of these buildings are well over 100 years old, and they were clearly a source of pride to the townspeople that built them.

Take a look at the top of these buildings and you’ll notice masonry details like toothing / dentil courses, artistic stone work, and family names added to the building. These towns built elegant and ornate municipal buildings to host public performances and lectures, and you’ll often find a library building that was funded by Andrew Carnegie.

February 10, 2024

Good Bye Upper Sioux

Land Returning to the Upper Sioux

The soon to be former Minnesota Upper Sioux state park will be transfered back to the Sioux community next week, so we took advantage of the crazy warm weather to visit. We weren’t alone in that thought as there were many people out, on what would normally be lovely spring weather.

The State DNR had already closed the offices in preparation for the transfer. I had a severely pulled calf muscle, so climbing hills was out for me. I went to view the former Agency site, while Jane and Penny took a walk through the back trails.

November 4, 2023

Barcelona

What I Learned While Working in Barcelona for a Week

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. – Mark Twain

I recently had the great pleasure to travel to Barcalona. It was a work trip, and we spent most of our time in the hotel working, but the experience gave me some important perspectives that I’d like to share here.

April 23, 2023

Intentions

Recently I’ve had a lot of things pop up that remind me to continue to set intentions and to follow through on them - and that both steps are required to get results.

The way to achieve anything in life is to value the goal, understand the steps required to reach the goal, and the consistent pursuit of it.

It’s as easy and as difficult as that.

The Rich Life

I was most recently reminded of this when watching How to Get Rich on Netflix. Now, I’m not looking to have a financial fortune, but I am looking to live the life I want, which is really the point of the show.

March 19, 2023

Whats Wrong With That

What’s Wrong With That

This week, I participated with members of my management cohort in a retrospective of a training course we took on sharing feedback. What struck me the most about our discussion was how we took the idea of giving feedback from a one-way communication to one that is more… human.

Giving someone feedback can be tricky. Receiving it can be too. Putting thought into how someone else may feel, and how best to prepare to have a meaningful conversation is at least as important as what you’ve got to say.

February 12, 2023

Its the Simple Things

It’s the Simple Things

The best times don’t cost much money, just a bit of our time.

Think about the best times of your life and I bet they will involve moments with people you love. For me, that’s been time in the kitchen with my mother, grandma, partners, sister, nieces, and nephews. There have been many moments with smiles, laughs, and love. Other moments would be fishing with my father, going to the Dam store with my grandpa or uncles, or just listening to their stories of a rowdy childhod.

January 2, 2023

Learning Docker on the Pi

Learning Project: Securing Remote Access to Home Network

I had a recent need to update the Raspberry Pi running Cloudflare tunnels to the edge of my home and camera networks. I figured I might as well use the opportunity to run services in containers, and get some hands on experience with Docker.

I also figured that I’d run the Pi-hole DNS black hole and ad blocker too.

I anticipated that I’d learn how to:

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