Date tonight!

I'm going on a date tonight with Minna. WITHOUT KIDS! We'er probably going to go to Jackson Diner again since last time we went with the kids.

Minna's cake

I made Minna a cake for her birthday. Recipe here.


I had a little extra left over so I made a really small cake using two ramekins. Then frosted in on an upside down ramekin.

My Siblings

The two who started it all...

My 4th trip to Utah within two months

Included working... But also this:


I was also able to meet up with some friends for a sort of Ricks College reunion for some excellent reminiscing. Rick, Jon, Barf, Tony. It had been too long.

Last night's flight

Last night was crazy. I flew from JFK to SLC, but the headwinds were so strong the plane needed a fuel stop in Denver. We landed in Denver, taxied, fueled and the pilot announces there is a fault that occured during taxi, now they are working on that. We're not even at a gate, just a fueling station I guess. It's like a long road trip in a car and stopping for gas everyone gets up, stretches. I'm close to the front and I can see the captain on his cell phone and he keeps flipping switches. They power down the aircraft, to reset the system so no lights are on. But people's faces glow from cell phone screens. People are talking to each other more.

Personally this makes my trip here nearly moot, I'll probably miss most of the video taping I'm supposed to do. But, I'm not really bothered. I'm just tired and bored. A girl behind me who talks in a really loud voice normally continues to talk on the phone about all this. I can hear her above everyone else. And everyone else is doing the same thing.

Lights start turning off and on. There are chimes every 20 seconds or so. Finally, the Captain says that they are unable to fix the fault so we'll taxi to the gate and they'll be putting us up in a hotel for the night and we'll be off to SLC in the morning. Everyone groans.

We taxi to the gate and someone from Denver gets on and tells us how we'll get shuttled to the hotel. Then the pilot gets on and says that while taxiing the fault indicator turned off. They perform some system test and he says we're flying to SLC tonight. Nice. And off we went. We probably spent 2 hours in Denver.

I ended up getting to my hotel at about 4:30am. I'm tired.

In Utah this week

I was in Salt Lake City, Utah for a day this week. Normally they give me a regular car but this time they gave me a Mustang convertible. So for lunch I took it for a drive up the canyon.

Target Practice

I went with to scout camp for one night last week. They had a leadership shooting competition.


me shooting a .22 rifle

The rules for this competition were to shoot at the point of the V without actually touching any of the v. If your bullet touches the V that bullet is disqualified.

3 bullets were perfect around the point of the v. One was on the v and one was way out.

Not bad. As we all handed our targets into the judges I could see that I had really good chances of winning. Alas, I did not win. But since blogs are narcissistic I thought I'd show how well I think I did.

Rock rolling in Rhode Island

Summer, I'm so glad you are here, and you ARE here.

So far summer has been amazing.

We went camping.
We went to DC.

We went to the Pacific Northwest. My highlights are

1 Getting there: On the day we wanted to leave, I was taking care of church business that morning and got a flat tire... I was actually trying to get all my tasks done for Youth Conference so I could leave a day early, apparently I was supposed to stay.


So the day after we wanted to go, the flights were full. Finally waiting at the gate, one seat was available so Minna went to Seattle. The last one on the plane, she walked down the jetbridge and looked back at me holding Hannah and Jane's hands as they closed the doors. Anyway we ended up going to Portland, Oregon with no luggage (it went with Minna). We stayed with some friends (Wyatt and Britany), and went to church with them the next day. Hannah and Jane didn't have any church clothes. Oh well they'll just look out of place.

But amazingly at the last second before we walked out the door Hannah found some aprons, who knows where??, that worked as wrap skirts for the girls. They weren't perfect but they were better than shorts.

2 The Beach: What can I say. This is why we went.

It was wonderfully relaxing and easy going. The weather didn't really cooperate for flying kites so much but we were IN the Cannon Beach parade.

3 The Cape Mears Lighthouse: Lighthouses are just fun especially when they let you go to the top. But I wanted a nice kite aerial photo. I disregarded the nearby kite-eating trees, and 30 seconds into flying my kite. CHOMP, the tree took a bite of my kite. I was so embarrassed. A grown adult flying a kite next to a tree.

Well, what did you expect!? So I didn't want to lose this kite, it was kind of expensive. So I climbed the tree and pulled and yanked but in the end I had to cut the line.

The awesome part is that I was victorious over the tree, and I got an awesome wound.

4 Helping Minna back to NYC: My trip eventually ended and I went back to NY only to return to Seattle in a marathon flight weekend to go pick them up and fly back to NYC. This quick trip included a jaunt into Seattle to see our friends Tysha and Jacob. And a date with Minna at Lake Stevens, with a funny trip through the "Chicken Drive Through".


That's it then we came home.

This weekend: Harry Potter on Long Island!

Went to DC a while ago

I wanted to post some awesome photos of the trip.

Four-wheel'n, Lincoln Monument, Washington Monument, and the Smithsonian

The Statue of Liberty

We went to the Statue of Liberty yesterday.

It's a good thing we bought our "reserve" tickets online. We arrived at the dock only to find a line where the end couldn't be found. We walked up to the area that said reserve tickets and walked right through the metal detectors. Then onto our boat. Had we waited in line we probably would have waited about two hours. It was so awesome to not have to wait in line.



When we got on the island the girls got settled and I got in line for the monument. Just over an hour later I was climbing the steps to see inside Lady Liberty.

The inside is pretty cool. They have some pretty cool glass windows that allow you to see the inner structure of the statue.




This photos proves I was there.

The weather has been much better

I had a most enjoyable ride home from work the other day.

Hannah made me lunch

The other day as I was making packing my lunch for work. Hannah came in and said, "Here daddy, I have your lunch." It came complete with a cooling rack and everything.

I said, "Ok, thank you, please put it in my bag for me." And she did. So when I got to work, I had this delicious sandwich for lunch.


She takes such good care of me. Or at least I'm sure she will when I'm old.

Rokkaku kite

The smaller versions are actually for kite fighting. But if you build them big and change up the bridle they are quite stable.



I wasn't able to hook a camera to it on this day. Sadly it was just too windy for a kite this big. It gave me a workout just holding it. The next day of course there was zero wind.

I was just happy that it would fly, and that the day was so awesome, and that we got out of the house, and that the girls enjoyed the day.

The kite is done

It actually is bigger than it looks here.

Kite spars

Getting the kites spars ready. The kite being 8 ft tall needs three separate sections to make up the spine of the kite. I have a graphite ferrule that I cut from a longer rod, that I've glued into a couple of the spars.



Epoxy, that stuff's crazy strong.

My kite

It's big.


It takes up the entire living room floor.

You can see my mother-in-law's knees on the couch, for scale. I've finished sewing the pieces together, and adding reinforcement for the spars. I still have to sew on the pockets and a few other details.

Ham Radio

I got my ham radio license a while back. My call sign is KC2UJK. Tonight was my first night talking on the radio. Kinda fun. I'm amazed how clear I could hear and talk to people miles away. I was only talking to these guys around the city, but I wouldn't have been able to do that with a regular walkie-talkie. I was using a Yaesu FT-60 HT with a repeater.

Jane bringing home the flowers

We are trying hard to make sure we don't focus on the new baby so much that we forget about Hannah and Jane.

I took Jane to the florist and bought her and Hannah a flower each. Jane was a sight to see carrying flowers taller than she was. Of course she didn't want to look at it, she wanted to play with it. The flower barely made it through the day. There were little white pedals all over the house. Hannah was a little more conservative with hers, and kept it mostly in a vase.

Another day Hannah was up real early. I didn't want to wake everyone up so we went to Dunkin' Donuts and had a dount each for breakfast. When we got home she was bouncing off the walls from the sugar high.

A new kite

I'm building an 8 ft tall kite. I'll be lifting a camera with this kite. More soon.

Baby Girl

Minna already posted the story.

It's different, natural, weird, fun, tiring. We'll see if she continues to be so easy and calm. But I'm happy to report that after one day home she seems to be pretty easy to take care of.

For every newborn I meet, see, or help bring into the world. It always blows my mind how small they are. Even at 8lbs 4oz she's bigger than a lot of babies, but still so small.

Some people have said that she is "precious". Which is code for congratulations on your ugly baby. No worries. A camera can never capture the feeling of seeing a newborn, the size, the smell, the tiny cry, the little feet, the rooting. Not all newborns are cute, but I think my baby is.

I have three girls. I'm so outnumbered, soooo out numbered.

My time in the simulator

I went to Orlando on business. While there I had the chance to fly in a flight simulator. It was the real deal simulating an Airbus 320.

It may have been a simulation but it was so amazingly real. It blew my mind as soon as we started taxiing. I just couldn't believe how real it felt.

I started by taxiing out to the runway. Hitting a few runway lights on the way. If you could have watched me it would have been like watching someone learning to drive a clutch for the first time.

Take off was easy. The bigger the airplane, the easier they are to fly. Landing, is a different story.

After avoiding other airplanes programmed to come right at me, the first thing we did is fly under the Verrazano Narrows bridge. I flew it so low, too low. I accidentally skipped on the water a bit. This would have caused millions of dollars in damages to the aircraft.

I made it under the bridge and then went for my first landing. I did ok on the approach but never really pulled up just before touching down. Actually that's somewhat of an understatement I died on my first landing. The simulator lurches and makes a loud sound and the screen turns red and everything turns quiet.

After resetting, I did a couple V1 take-offs which means that one engine fails at the most critical point during take-off, this means you don't have runway enough to reject the take-off, and you have to continue to take-off. Getting up to speed, the engine fails the airplane starts to veer sharply off the runway and you have to correct for that, using the foot pedals, then take-off. The first time I pretty much cleared out any lights and signage on the side of the runway, but with the help of the instructor I was still able to take-off. The next two times were much better.

I successfully landed twice (very hard landings).

After I was done my equilibrium was all out of whack. I had a headache, was a little dizzy for the rest of the night. It was totally worth it.

Interesting to me

I find fun interesting stuff on the internet. I find things that I think other people would find funny. But instead of forwarding emails to people I'll just put it on my tumblelog.

Please view things here: http://dandyer.tumblr.com

I like it cause it is easy, minimalist, and I don't have to put any effort into the writing.

You can subscribe like a blog. If you don't find it interesting, oh well.

Dinner tonight with Minna

...was delicious. We ate at Cabana. I had delicious Mahi-Mahi. She had shredded skirt steak.

Got published!

Darren from Digital Photography School has just published an article I wrote, yeehaw!

Check it out here.

Stock trading

I've been playing in the stock market recently. It's been quite a ride. I started with 10 million fake dollars and now I have about 8.5, and they are still fake dollars. I haven't really been doing very well. Anyone can trade fake dollars. You should try it too.

You can see my portfolio here.

It's really been more of a guessing game and listening to what other people in the community are doing. I've won some, and lost more. I'm glad it's not real money but I wish I had that kind of money to trade with.

How I love racquetball

I have never played as much as when I played at Utah State. I hadn't played in probably two years when I started again with Alex. We're playing almost once a week, and it is great.

I love racquetball.

Chris Cottam

The first friend I had when I moved to Reno at age 13. He hasn't changed one bit.