Dinosaur Bear

A Blog about Stuff and Things

9th Anniversary Festivities (Plus a NM Update)

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

[Administrative Note: This is the first post I am writing after a recent slew of back-end updates and changes here at Dinosaur Bear. One part of the update was to change how internal links work on the blog, so if you notice some links on this post (or others) not working correctly, please let me know in the comments for the relevant post! Also, if anything else seems wonky it might just be a work in progress sort of deal as I am playing with a lot of behind-the-scenes gadgets that are either newly installed or new to me.]

So, aside from that phone post, when we last left off SB and I had just departed from our ABQ Adventure with Meem. Prior to that we were in the process of settling into our new home. This post picks up with a bit of an update on our NM lives, as well as celebrates our 9th Anniversary Festivities! I originally intended for this post to come out at the end of the string of posts I have already written (five posts waiting in the hangar as of me writing this), but I ended up producing a lot more content than I anticipated so I’m inserting this one in front of two already written posts for timeliness purposes.

Anyways, as to the continued process of us settling in, we’ve made quite a bit of progress and I think the apartment is pretty much settled at this point! We’ve gotten everything organized and put away and have made all the new acquisitions we’ll need. We even downsized a bit more than we already had, which is something SB and I are really trying to keep doing (which can be difficult when you need to reacquire basic things like a table). Pigsten for his part did not downsize, but he did organize!


In fact he helped me clean his entire rock collection (plus a few seashells) because they needed a good scrubbin’ (especially one, ehm.. slightly radioactive one whose origins will be revealed in a future post!) – and then we placed them all in his brand new Rock Box!


The small wooden box on top is his original box – you can see how much his collection has grown!

Pigsten got a bit dirty while going through his collection – as did Broli. In fact all the Boys had gotten a bit dirty from all our recent traveling, that or they just were messy eaters in all the excitement of new food (*cough* Valentino *cough*).


So, with much ado, all the Boys got a long-overdue bath.


Valentino was, as usual, incredibly excited for bath time (in fact I often think he purposefully gets dirty to expedite the bath process).


Pig was also really chill about it as bath time is a nice zen time for him. However, after the bath is over he gets a little… uh.. excited?


Now, the one boy who always gives us a fit about bathing is – you guessed it – Tristen (if you thought Pigsten or Broli they are easy-peasy).


Tristen “sitting” on the surface of the water rather than bathing.

He bites and roars and claws and thrashes and, eventually, gives in and just lets it happen.


Part of why he hates it so much is because bathing removes his precious “manries” (e.g. dirt, grease, and other manly things) but also because I think he gets cold afterward. The good news on that front is that since the weather has been pretty amazing here the Boys all got to do the majority of their drying outside rather than just sit in front of a fan for hours.


In other Boys-related news, they have continued to amass a large number of online friends and pen-pals, so many in fact that every couple of weeks it seems like they are getting mail!


Valentino showcasing a postcard they got – with Rosita being her typical model self.

They definitely get more good mail than I do that’s for sure. I get bills, information from the bar (I’ll let you guess what kind of bar), and that’s about it. Also bills. On the friends note, the Boys have even made some local friends, such as this T-Rex lamp Tristen found when I was meeting a professional associate for coffee, this is not Tristen’s first T-Rex lamp friend either!


I think Tristen has struggled a bit with the move – not because he doesn’t like it here (in fact he much prefers it here to say… Iceland in winter), but really because he is like me any change makes him anxious. So we’ve been keeping him pretty busy with activities (and also bribes, they work well with that Boy – read on for one such bribe). Despite normally being a “Dad’s boy” he has even ran some errands with SB lately.


Though that might have more to do with Co-Pilot status in Felicia than it does Mom time. Speaking of being odd parents, we recently acquired this year’s Thomas, Thomas V!


Yes its crazy to think about the fact that we’ve had five reincarnations of Thomas now. Thomas has proven to us that he is not limited by the usual aspects of mortality or linear existence. He has been small, had his own security guard, been large, and is now white.


We decided to mix it up with a different style of Thomas this year (and SB didn’t even have to lug him back from Bónus on foot either!) and picked up a white one, or rather the seeds that Thomas I, II, III, and IV implanted in our brains commanded us subconsciously to pick this Thomas to be Thomas V. I hold no illusions of control over the Thomas Empire.


Thomas chillin’ on the balcony.

Oh, you may be wondering about our other plants – you know, the ones that aren’t part of a massive cosmos-devouring Pumpkin God. They are doing well too. The Barley Bros and Bonsai Buddy Jr. are getting along quite nicely in their new spot in the office.


And yes, I open the blinds for them, it’s just that sometimes the sunshine turns the office into an inferno. As proof of their well-being here is a later photo (with open blinds) where you can see how big the Barley Bros are getting.


If you need a primer on what makes two Barley plants in New Mexico somewhat extraordinary then read this post again, that post also mentions the unfortunate “death” of Little Friend. The good news is that our cacti are doing well, especially Little Friend who could really only go up from his “deceased” status.


It’s hard to tell from that photo but he is actively growing! He seems quite at home in New Mexico.

Pancho continues to be huge, Nacho struggled a bit with his repotting and I had to do some surgery on him, same for Quixote (which really surprised us). However, they are all stable now and Pig is doing lots of “cacti yoga” with them to help them heal.


That Pig-healin’ must be seeping into all the plants in the house, because even the office plants seem to benefit from it.


The Barley Bros now dwarf Bonsai Buddy Jr.

Oh, and if you were curious (you weren’t, but that’s an easy way for me to change course), yes – we did buy both the stand and the bench just for the plants. I’m talking like $65 spent on these plants while we eat canned beans. 😀 Priorities dear reader, priorities.

Speaking of expenses, we made another large expense as part of our “settling” process – we got a TV. Yes, aside from Felicia the TV was the biggest expense we’ve had in.. well.. about five years. If you’ve read Dinosaur Bear for a while you’ll know that we parted with our beloved former TV, Philip, prior to leaving Boston. Philip was, in his day, a nice TV. He was a 2008 model but we purchased him in 2009 with the ole’ “Last Year’s Model” discount from Sam’s Club. In fact we purchased him on June 17th at 3:33pm using my Dad and Stepmom’s Business Account at Sam’s Club. Yes, I kept the receipt, Philip was my child. We then put Philip’s MASSIVE box into the back of SB’s Lumina (where it did not fit), tied it up with rope, and then slowly drove back to our apartment while consumed with terror that it would fall out of the car, etc. Philip was 47″ – a big TV for 2009. Philip was also expensive, even with the discount and all the research I had done (and if you know me, you’ll know I do an obsessive amount of research before spending anything above probably $100 – SB says that I sometimes do a little too much research, in fact 😛 ). Some people gave me crap for buying Philip when SB and I made very little money, some people’s opinions didn’t matter. 🙂

Philip was, more importantly, a good TV. He was SB and I’s first big purchase, and aside from getting sick once (a Dr. came and fixed him up – thankfully he was still in warranty), he was a solid performer. Philip was the last of his species to be made in the United States, and we moved him and his big box three times (Philip was also very heavy compared to current-gen TVs). However, when it came time to leave Boston behind we decided we needed to sell Philip for space purposes. Fortunately Philip went to a good home, and while it rained on the day he went to his new home (thankfully I’d kept all his packaging) because even God was sad, we got him on his way with no issues and I honestly got a pretty good price for him.

We had a second smaller TV that my Dad and Stepmom had gotten for us (a first-gen smart TV from Vizio) but we sold that around the same time as Philip. After that we had no TV for about 14 months – and while we didn’t really miss broadcast television that much, we did miss Philip and watching Adventure Time and Jeopardy together. So, with Tristen basically eating us alive over the lack of a TV, I started doing research into current-gen TVs after we’d settled into our apartment. After a lot of research and some bargain hunting and actual haggling (yes, legitimate old-school haggling) that took nearly 25% off the list price, we purchased a new TV.

Meet “Phil” 😀


Phil, despite being larger than Philip, weighs way less. Phil is also a smart TV, whereas Philip was not, so we’re still getting used to a TV that we can interface with (Phil uses Android TV and we have Android Phones – so they can make digital babies). I would also be remiss if I didn’t inform you that Phil is fiercely guarded by a one Tristen, T-Rex.


Tristen originally wanted to set Phil up so that the Google Assistant only listened to him, but we vetoed that proposition. Since Phil is a Smart TV and easily links up with our phones and computers, one of the first things we did was “cast” a bunch of photos of the Boys to him and watch YouTube.


During our first big evening with Phil SB went out to Church’s Chicken (much to Tristen’s euphoric jubilation) and we watched YouTube videos of Jenna Marbles’s dogs while enjoying our fried chicken.


We don’t have broadcast TV (i.e. no cable) and we aren’t going to get it. It costs too much and streaming is much more cost-effective for us (I, for one, don’t really watch anything and what SB watches is stuff like YouTube or Netflix). As such we don’t get any sports, etc. but we do have Adventure Time – though we get those on DVDs (not even Blurays, just DVDs – because it’s a cartoon, lol) and we didn’t have a DVD player when we first got Phil (a fact Tristen later used to his bargaining advantage).

Despite our fried chicken TV fest, SB and I haven’t been eating much meat lately and no longer keep any in the house aside from events like Church’s “Ricken” night. That said, despite less meat we’ve honestly branched out our diets more than we had in Iceland (though that was largely due to cost, in fairness) including some yummy frozen watermelon-mint treats SB made us.


It’s also fall, meaning pumpkin-craziness is in the air (something Iceland did not share, in fact SB’s friend had to bring us Pumpkin Spice all the way from the U.S.)


So, in addition to the usual pumpkin stuff (which is  to say coffee, always coffee) SB also made us some pumpkin fudge which had no added sugar and was AMAZINGLY good!


It had a really good texture and was way less sweet than usual fudge (which I find to be too much anymore) and went really well with our pumpkin coffee! 🙂


Fudge + coffee/tea + snuggle-time = a very good night indeed!


The Boys are all big fans of pumpkin anything, though they are generally pretty easy to please, especially in regards to coffee. Lately we’ve been on a big almond creamer kick with our coffee.


Pig loves him some almonds, so he often sneaks extra coffee while his brothers are distracted.


For my part I’ve been celebrating beer that doesn’t cost a small fortune by buying, well, a lot of it. 😀


I’ve picked up more 12 packs in the past couple of months than I had in over a year and a half.


Hamburger bro courtesy of my Pixel 3.

SB has also been exploring some more wine – again because of how much better the prices are here.


And because a lot of alcohol isn’t enough to make you sleepy (lol) we recently picked up some deliciously good “Relax” coffee. Yes, I realize how backward that sounds, but its decaf coffee blended with lavender and chamomile and it is freaking good.


I’ve been trying it with Kava to see if it helps me sleep, and while results have varied, it’s a nice alternative to melatonin (which I have honestly been taking for far too long but at a certain point you just gotta’ sleep). The good news on the sleepy-time front is that Fall has brought with it much cooler (but not cold) temperatures, so we’ve been able to turn off the A/C (except for the very end of October) and enjoy the fresh air (which I tend to sleep better with). Of course Fall isn’t super prevalent here and it doesn’t even begin to compare with Fall in New England. However, as luck would have it we do have one tree out in front of our apartment that does change – and when I say one I mean one, the rests are various succulents and palms.


Interestingly enough, we got to see the tree slowly change from right to left – which was really neat. When it first started it went fast, so fast in fact that SB and I woke up one day were like “Wow, the tree, uh, changed!” After the first 1/3 or so it slowed way down, but it continued to only work from right to left – the left side never moved inward. Pig kept a close eye on the tree as it changed, likely in search of any grubs eating the leaves.


If you look closely you’ll spot a Pig-leg.

Since the Fall weather has been wonderful aside from a couple of rainy days we’ve used the weather as an opportunity to get outdoors. One of the first places we checked out was the Veterans Memorial Park which we had driven by the very first day we arrived here. While the Park is dedicated to New Mexican Veterans broadly, it has a special focus on the Bataan Death March of WWII because of the disproportionate number of New Mexicans who were forced into the march (where ~5,650 to 18,000 prisoners of war died).


The above statue, “Heroes of Bataan” is dedicated to both the U.S. and Filipino soldiers who were part of the march, and the space in front of them features footprints of actual survivors of the march.


What I did not know prior to visiting the park was that New Mexico had the highest per capita prisoner of war rate with the Japanese after the U.S. and Filipino forces surrendered in 1942 (and were subsequently forced into the death march).


They had a sign which shows how many New Mexicans from each county ended up as a POW in the Philippines which gives you a visual idea of just how many there were from a comparatively low population state.


In addition to WWII there are monuments and memorials to essentially every major conflict going all the way back to the Revolutionary War in the park (though obviously New Mexico has no known connections to that war for obvious reasons). One of the most visually noticeable memorials is for Vietnam, largely because of the Bell UH-1 Iroquois  (or as I know them, the “Huey”) they have above the memorial.


You can get right up underneath it, which is really neat (though some asshat vandalized it in 2016, because a surefire way to be a cool person is to vandalize war memorials – fortunately all the damage was fixed).


Pigsten and Broli really liked the park, though Pigsten likes just about anyplace with a lot of rocks.


One of my favorite parts of the park was a stone tablet engraved with “The Battling Bastards of Bataan” by Frank Hewlett – which details the circumstances of Bataan.


We’re the Battling Bastards of Bataan,
No Mama, No Papa, No Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn!

While sad, I found it quite profound.

While the park has been our only real outing (aside from a yet-to-be-released adventure), that hasn’t stopped us from getting excited about one of the best parts of Fall – Halloween!


Halloween decorations designed to lure trick-or-treaters to their doom, or to give them candy, either-or.

Halloween has been a favorite holiday of mine for a long time, but since SB and I’s anniversary occurs at roughly the same time, that just makes it even better! Thomas V (like all his siblings before him) came to live with us in the weeks preceding Halloween and so he was, of course, excited as well.


In fact the last week of October is generally a pretty exciting time around the Taco household – and while SB and I have a long history of not actually getting to spend much time together on our anniversary, this year we did! I think the Boys were pretty excited about that, either that or the fact that they did their civic duty and voted early (or because they bought a lottery ticket, which alas, won us nothing).


Or, perhaps they were just excited because of Halloween treats. Like most people, we don’t restrict our treats to Halloween and instead we trickle them in in advance, kind of like this glorious Mummy Cake Pop!


Or Valentino’s army of zombie gummy bears!


I don’t know if they were really zombies or not, but it fits the theme.

Or maybe it was just because we got even more beer.


Or, perhaps in the case of Pigsten it was because he continued to acquire rocks.


Or, even still, maybe it was because it was bat week!?


Look at that smug, smilin’, silly boi!

Ok the bat week thing was probably mostly me, I love bats. While the good spirits of the Boys may have been the result of many things, I can say for sure that Tristen’s recent bout of blissful joy is the result of his recent acquisition: a Playstation 4.


Not just any Playstation 4 either, a Playstation 4 Pro with Red Dead Redemption 2 included (Red Dead Redemption 1 is one of my Top 3 all time favorite games, and so by proxy one of Tristen’s as well). Tristen was so excited about “his” new Playstation that I struggle to properly define it with words. To say he had waited for a Playstation 4 for a long time is not an exaggeration. He has wanted one for about five years now. Yes, despite having had a Playstation 3 from the first day he came to live with us (my PS3 was a beast and lasted from 2006 until I sold in 2017 – it was still working fine when I sold it too) he just had to have the Playstation 4. But he was consistently denied for years. Finally, as a reward for becoming lawlyurs we placed a pre-order for the PS4 Pro RDR2 Bundle while we were in ABQ, a pre-order which Amazon completely screwed up to the point we cancelled it and instead got it from Best Buy (my first purchase from Best Buy in probably 9 years). The upside of that is that because we pre-ordered it we were able to go do a “Midnight Release” (technically at 9pm) on the day before RDR2 actually released – a first in my entire life of gaming. So we got our PS4 Pro and RDR2 before most people could even get RDR2 at all – “manries” as Tristen would say.


As Phil is Sony, and the Playstation 4 Pro is made by Sony, the two of them got on real nice, real quick – in fact they recognized each other before I even powered on the PS4 for the first time, which was kind of freaky.

The one downside is that we found out that our shelf area in our TV stand doesn’t give the PS4 Pro enough fresh air and so it sounded like a jet-engine during 4K gameplay. It was so loud I even opened the Playstation up to make sure the fan was ok (and found out that you can’t go very deep into the PS4 without spending a lot more time than I wanted to).


Turns out the PS4 was just fine, it was just getting hot in the small space. So I changed the setup a bit, got the PS4 a vertical stand, and how it “hides” behind Phil and makes very little noise. So, a new TV and my first console purchase since the Playstation 2 in 2000 (I’ve owned consoles since, but those were gifted to me), plus our new phones, has resulted in quite the technological upgrade around the house in the past month.

Needless to say with all this going on there’s been a good deal of excitement lately (and some frustrating and annoying stuff, but that’s not for this post) – with some side items, such as the Boston Red Sox winning the 2018 Word Series just adding to the fun!


Tristen showing off his Boston pride.

With all that fun we slid into our actual anniversary in high spirits and with comparatively low stress to some previous years. As mentioned, we ALL got to spend time together this year, which was super nice – even our extended “buddy” family (such as our OG Gangsta Bear Friends) came out for our family party.


As part of our anniversary celebration we made a delicious homemade pizza, and may have snacked on some of those remaining zombie gummy bears in the process. 🙂


The real treat, however, was the dark-chocolate-espresso-pumpkin-pie I made. Yes, a dark chocolate, espresso, pumpkin pie.


Tristen, the ever diligent guardian of all things pie and beer.

As is usual for me I didn’t follow any recipe, I just took my own modified pumpkin pie variant (which is much lower in sugar, not flavor) and added in dark chocolate covered espresso beans and some shavings. It turned out very good.


We paired our pizza and pie with an Adventure Time marathon courtesy of the PS4’s disk drive and Phil – a nice treat since we hadn’t been able to watch Adventure Time in over a year! Naturally, despite the kid-friendly nature of pizza, pie, and cartoons we did also partake in ample amounts of adult beverages. While beer was to be expected, SB just so happened to accidentally on purpose have a giant box of wine arrive on our anniversary. 😉


We’d never done any mail-order wine before, but SB had (oddly enough) gotten a wine coupon from an eSATA computer cable I had bought (weird place to find a wine coupon, I know) which meant that the wine was only around $6 a bottle – good by any standards, let alone our budget-minded standards. So that night we had both beer and wine and in a rare event I had even more wine than beer!


While it was a relatively “calm” anniversary for year 9 (especially compared to some past years, which have included such fun events as a car breaking down in the middle of the highway), it was just the kind of anniversary I like: homemade dinner, homemade dessert, SB, the Boys, cartoons, and more alcohol than we can drink! 🙂

The next morning we worked off our pizza, pie, and booze with some time at the gym and some yoga.


We also enjoyed some of the new kinds of a coffee (mushroom based!) that we have been testing out.


Tristen with his morning joe and another postcard!

We continued to munch on the pizza and pie for the next several days (and the booze lasted even longer than that, surprisingly 😛 ). All in all it was a great few weeks in the Taco household. New friends, new electronics, new alcohol, new cartoons, new games, family outings, cleaner Boys (though Tristen wouldn’t agree with that being a good thing), and another year of SB and I’s silliness in the books. 🙂

All of this while Fall continues on around us. And I do love me some Fall, almost as much as I love my family. 😀


The culmination of the tree’s Autumn voyage.

So, there you have it – a decent update on our life in NM and the settling in process as well as a recap of our anniversary/Halloween festivities. While there have been some frustrating things going on in our lives as well, I didn’t want to focus on those in the is post, and instead I wanted to share some of the fun and (little) adventures that we’ve been having. Next week I’ll continue to focus on the “lighter side” with a fun post I’ve been thinking about writing for some time now – so check your inboxes next Monday for another round of Dinosaur Bear.


This isn’t what Fall looked like where I grew up – but I could get used to it. 🙂

Until next time,
-Taco

The Odd Things – A New Phone

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear,

I have a slight interruption to your regularly scheduled series of posts (recently that would be each Monday – a trend which should continue for a few more weeks) for another installment of my long-running, albeit infrequent, series “The Odd Things.” It’s been a good bit of time since the last Odd Things post, but it’s not like there is a time limit on these things. In fact this might also just be the least odd item I’ve posted about in The Odd Things series, at least when compared to say… scissors. This time I want to talk about getting a new phone.

Lots of people get new phones every day – and some people upgrade their phone every single year (or even more frequently than that). While I think our upgrade cycle for phones is quite problematic in and of itself, I also tend to hold onto things in general. As such, you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that I’ve had one smartphone, ever. Further, if not for law school, I probably would have held out on adopting a smartphone even longer than I did. Yes, despite holding two degrees in computer science and being what I would consider at least decently tech-savy, I did not get a smart phone until August of 2014. Prior to that I’d stuck to normal phones, or as SB came to refer to my final non-smartphone, “old people phones.” Though in fairness to her, my last “dumb” phone (Pantech Breeze III) was legitimately marketed toward the elderly. Until my most recent acquisition, I could count the number of cellphones I’d owned on one hand.

So, with 1L looming I decided to make the leap over into smartphone land. I’d been consistently made fun of in both undergrad and law school admission events (because law students are basically high schoolers who are even more narcissistic and undergrads aren’t even worth commenting on), but getting made fun of is scarcely worth dumping money into a thing – at least in my book. However, what did finally make me jump on board the smartphone train was how terrified I was about 1L in general and feeling like I would need the phone. Turns out being terrified of 1L was not without its merits and the phone proved imminently useful (and frustrating until I set boundaries) – though “necessary” was probably a stretch. Either way, my trusty Samsung Galaxy S5 proved to be a very good phone for over 4 years.


That said, with the OEM battery and age it had gotten… very slow in the past few months. Slow enough that sometimes the phone would crash before it could open a single email. More complex apps were often so frustrating to use that I just well, didn’t use them. Further, after over 4 years the battery (which started out very nicely) was getting pretty poor. For a phone that started out lasting me an easy 2, sometimes 3 days, it had gotten to the point where charging it 3 times a day was not unusual. Further, the camera was beginning to grate on me, namely its HORRENDOUS low-light photo quality. Now, the S5 had a good camera overall for its time, but even by 2014 standards it featured a terrible camera in all but spotlight-level lighting conditions. SB had a S6 (which she got after having an S4) and it was far, far better in low-light conditions than my S5 despite being only one generation newer.

Yet, in spite of all that frustration I had resisted upgrading my phone. I had good reasons. Namely cost, phones are stupidly expensive anymore (thanks Apple for starting that trend), and also I was no longer linked to any contract and hadn’t been since 2015. Not having to pay for a phone or be stuck in a carrier contract was quite nice. After leaving our parents’ plans (in a certified blow to our millennial badges) we changed over to low-cost short term plans (which, for the record, are objectively better in Europe). However, once settled in NM, we wanted to get NM numbers. Turns out that anymore most carriers let you import numbers, so we knew we’d be able to port over the NM-based numbers from the no-contract provider we’d been using – so that was nice. However, my phone was slowing to a crawl, SB’s phone’s WiFi was eating it, and we knew we were on borrowed time with at least my phone. So we started looking at the mainstream providers such as AT&T (that we used to be on), Verizon, etc. and quickly determined that the phone contracts are – just like phones – stupidly expensive.

Take Verizon for instance, with two new phones and all their forced fees, we were looking at $150-175 per month for a basic (not unlimited) package. That’s insane compared to what we had been paying in Iceland. Yet, feeling like we didn’t have a whole lot of options we’d factored that into our budget. We were initially set on getting Samsung Galaxy S9 or S9+ phones (given our track record with Samsung phones) but then I got to reading about the Google Pixel line. From there, I also learned that Google has its own cellular service called “Fi.” Fi technically piggybacks on other provider’s networks, but the service itself is through Google and unlike AT&T, Verizon, et al., it is a “pay as you use” service – meaning that for low data users like SB and I, we could end up paying as much as $90-105 less per month for our phones. Fi was also running a “BOGO” event with the Pixel 3s, which was a pretty substantial savings. We didn’t know anyone with a Pixel, let alone anyone using Fi, but we decided to go for it. And so, the person who had used a smartphone for over 4.25 years became one of “those people” who pre-ordered a phone as soon as it was launched during a live event. In fact, SB and I were some of the first mass-market people in the U.S. to get the Pixel 3.


It had been so long since I’d set up a smartphone that SB was a full hour ahead of me during the initial set up. Though in fairness to me I was trying to figure out how to transfer something over from my S5 (in particular an app that was no longer supported – it didn’t end up working, for the record) but in general SB also knows just as much if not more about phones than I do – as she has owned many more of them than I have. 😛


Getting ready to be born’ded as a Taco phone. 

Once I had it all ready to go one of the first things I did with it was take a photo. The Pixel line is known for having a good cameras, and so I was pretty excited to see what the camera could do in comparison to my old S5. The first thing I took a photo of was a massively exciting can of air. Yep.


In fairness it was the closest thing at hand and it was also a good way of looking at how much carpet detail the phone grabbed. Of course, all of the photos here on the blog are compressed by 50% in both quality and dimension, so naturally they aren’t going to look as good as the uncompressed photos do. A better comparison that shines through despite the compression is a “low light” photo. For that I used my trusty models, the Boys.

In this first photo we have Pig and Tristen sitting on a bench in a low light setting.


The photo above is from my old S5. You can tell the photo is grainy and full of shadows. Sure, you can tell what is going on and see detail, but most of the textures are lost. Now, for the same photo in the same lighting conditions, but with the Pixel 3.


I don’t think you need to know much about photography to notice the drastic difference between the two photos. There was no flash used in either photo, for reference.

Here’s another example. This time its Valentino sitting on our couch in the same low-light conditions. Valentino is obviously bright, but our couch is dark brown, so lots of contrast in this photo. Here’s the S5.


You’ll notice that half of Valentino is pretty dark and the couch itself is almost invisible; as if Valentino is sitting in blackness. Now he’s the same photo except with the Pixel 3.


Again you’ll notice a huge difference – and way more detail – for instance I doubt you even noticed that Valentino was wearing a necklace in the first photo. Further, you can see lots of detail in the couch itself, as opposed to just a big black space.

Here’s two side-by-side photos of Valentino a little closer up, I think you’ll be able to guess which comes from which phone.

 
What’s even more crazy is that the “night mode” for the Pixel 3’s camera isn’t even released yet. The mode, officially called “Night Sight,” isn’t due for release via update until later this year. For reference, the S5’s photos in the above photos were using the phone’s “night mode” whereas the Pixel 3 doesn’t have that mode yet, but the photos obviously look far better. That’s a testament to how far phone cameras have come in 4.5 years – and the gap will broaden more once the Pixel 3 gets its “Night Sight” mode.

Of course adopting a brand new – as in, pre-ordering it and getting the first wave of shipment new – does have its downsides. For one, within 2 days I had to contact Google’s support and factory reset my phone. To make matters worse, the factory reset only temporarily fixed the issue (and also caused me to lose about 8 hours of setup time) but the good news is that the glitch – once I understood it – is extremely minor and I honestly wish I hadn’t reset the phone. There have been a few other quirks, but fortunately nothing really wrong (some people have dealt with memory issues, loose speakers, or oddly tinted screens on their Pixels – though essentially every new phone ever released has had some sort of issue in the first [and sometimes second.. or worse] release waves). There have also been some app related quirks given how new the phone is, but those are more on the developer than the phone itself.

While I had a “teeth cutting” period with my Pixel 3, I’m growing more happy with it. SB for her part had less issues, so it’s probably just as much my resistance to change (good or bad) than anything else. Also, this is only my second smartphone ever, so my entire frame of reference was my S5 and not only did I change manufacturers, I also jumped 3 entire Android versions since the S5 had stopped getting updates years ago. Plus, with the low cost of Fi and the BOGO deal, it makes it much easier to force myself to adapt, yea though my Taco brain does so resist it. 😛

Anyways, that’s about it. I got a new phone. I’m oddly melancholic about getting rid of my old phone (something that is definitely not unprecedented for me) and even though I’m going to sell it (and SB’s old phone too) there’s still a part of me that had a lot tied up in the ole’ S5. I think because of when and why I got it, there is a part of me that is a bit more attached to it than I might have otherwise been. The S5 also provided a load of the photos on this blog, probably even more than our DSLR camera, all things considered. So any post between this one and this one almost undoubtedly featured the S5’s photos. I would say that now that I have the Pixel 3 the photo quality will go up, but then again I’ve significantly compressed all the photos here for the past few years to save server space – because Meem told me I was using too much. 😛

Also, I have a few queued posts that I wrote before getting the Pixel 3, so honestly there probably won’t be much of difference for a bit anyways. Regardless, consider this post the changing of the phone guard, even if the actual results are still a ways off. 😊


The new and the old (Pixel 3 on the left with both case and screen protector on, S5 on the right with case and screen protector removed).

Until next time,
-Taco

Westward Bound

by

Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

Well, here we are again – another move. While Dinosaur Bear is much younger than yours truly, it is old enough to have documented several moves in the past few years of my life. While moving is exciting, moving is also challenging. However, I much prefer to write about the fun side of moving – which, for SB and I – one of the most fun parts of moving is the road-trip portion (we’ve had non-road trip moves, but we still like the road-trip part the best). When we were planning our first big-people move of any noteworthy distance we had family help us and used trailers to move our things. While that move was a decent clip (~110 miles) it was also nothing compared to say… 1000 or 3100 miles. Once we hit those distances we knew we needed to be even bigger peoples and do it with a rental truck (since movers were not, are not, and likely never will be within SB and I’s budget) – or airplane. We did a lot of research on U-Haul, Budget, and Penske, as well as secondary options such as the moving cubes and lesser-known rental trucks. However, my grandfather – a former trucker (and engine builder) himself and person whom I generally consider to be the best driver I ever knew – recommended Penske. So we went with Penske. We had been leaning toward Penske – despite them being the most expensive – already, and his recommendation sealed the deal. Turns out it was an extremely good decision. We’ve now driven nearly 4,000 miles in a Penske and the only issue we’ve ever had was a non-issue where the onboard computer temporarily couldn’t read the PSI of a right-rear tire because it was something like 100 degrees outside.

So, with the specter of moving on us once more, there was no consideration – Penske or bust!


In keeping with the “L” and female themes of our past Penske trucks we went with Lucinda, a fitting name considering that we were headed to the Southwest. If you were wondering about the female thing, we have an entire system in our head-cannon for Penske trucks. First, Penske trucks come in the following sizes: 12′, 16′, 22′ and 26′. We have determined that the size of truck relates to its stage of “growth” (yes growth). Therefore a 12′ is younger than a 16′, a 16′ younger than a 22′, and a 22′ younger than 26′. Penske also offers Semi-Truck rentals, and the Semi-Truck sized Penskes are the “Grandmas” of the bunch. While Penske is nearly synonymous with yellow trucks, they also have less common white trucks. The white Penskes are male, and follow the same size-to-age algorithm. As there was far more yellows than whites, Penske trucks live in a matriarchal society. Thus if you want to empower women, go with Penske. The male Penske trucks are just fine, but Penske trucks are a society of women-haulers, make no mistake.

All of our trucks have been 12′ and yellow, thus they have been “babies” and female. Lucinda was the oldest of our trucks – we think she was about to grow into a 16′ and she was showing signs of her “terrible twelves.” There was nothing wrong with her, but she was a bit “rough around the edges” – a sure sign of a truck about to schlep off its old skin and grow. Lucinda, being near adolescence, also had a fiery spirit and liked to go fast (her cruise control liked to stay on the higher end of whatever you set it at 🙂 ).

Anyways, as we had gathered all our stuff for the first time since.. ever, we knew that the 12′ Penske was going to be tight. We almost went up to the 16′ (as the 16′ is generally the same price as the 12′ since Penske has way more 16’s than 12’s) but decided to stick to what we knew. Subsequently, my organization-loving self put the Tetris abilities of my mind to their full use and we packed Lucinda to the roof and to the door. In the end my mental planning worked and we had less than 1/4″ of clearance – space well used! I didn’t do it alone though. SB helped a lot and Tristen helped by talking about how “manries” it all was.


Penske calculates the minimum amount of time you have to rent a truck for one-way rentals based on the distance between pickup and drop-off. For us it was 7 days this time, so we ended up picking up the Penske a couple of days before leaving and keeping it for a couple of days after we arrived (which ended up being very handy since we had no car). While having a full 1.5 days to load the truck was very nice (big stuff on day 1, boxes, etc. on day 2), it still went by very quickly and before too long the room where we’d been staying at MIL & FIL’s was all but empty!


For reference that mattress is not ours – though FIL tried his best to get us to take it regardless. 🙂

Thus, on a Friday morning we were on our way. While we’d had mostly great weather during out past moving road-trips, this time we had unintentionally timed our move with the inland arrival of Hurricane Florence, which resulted in a lot of rain until we got past the middle of the country.


For their part Lucinda and the Boys didn’t seem to mind, though the long portions of heavier rain made for stressful driving on my part. Our first night was in Gardner, KS and there it rained pretty much all evening and night. The next day we proceeded the long way through Kansas where the trip was still rainy and cloudy, but with a bit less rain than in IN and MO.


Aside from the dreary weather the trip was pretty uneventful – which is something anyone who has driven through the Great Plains is probably well versed with. We had intentionally went with “secondary” routes and had avoided the larger interstate highways precisely so that we’d get more of a true heartland road trip experience. So, the long, long, long portions of nothingness didn’t really bother me (I am actually a big fan of vast open spaces), and thankfully the rain decreased as we continued west. Plus, we got to make lots of stops in small little towns – including one such stop where Tristen met some of Sinclair’s family!


The rain and clouds followed us on and off all the way to Oklahoma.


However, by the time we got to Guymon, OK (where we stayed the second night) the clouds were starting to give way to more consistent bits of blue. That night we checked the weather and knew that we were going to be mostly sunshine bound for the rest of the trip, which made us all excited. The Boys were already excited because they had their own bed, so the prospect of sunshine only made them even more excited and thus difficult to get settled into bed.


As you probably just noticed, Floppsy was with is! Yes, we adopted Floppsy before we moved! Floppsy had lived at MIL & FIL’s the entire time we had known him, and he was such a very good friend of the Boys that he decided he wanted to come live with us. So, with MIL’s permission Floppsy joined our family. Floppsy is a stay-at-home sorta bunny (who loves living in elevated places with friends – which is how he spent a lot of his life, on top of a dresser with comic book figures), so he’ll largely be helping care for our myriad of other stay-at-home buddies, but he is the newest member of the family! This was his first major trip, as up until that point sleepovers at Grandma Meem’s house were about as far as he had ventured. So Floppsy was a bit nervous about such a life change, but the Boys kept him good company!

The next day we woke to clouds, but no rain. Plus, we knew the sun was coming, so we continued westward. Before too long we hit Texas, which made Tristen quite excited. To say he was happy about being in Texas would be a gross understatement.


It was also in Texas where the sun finally decided to destroy the clouds and dominate the sky. I think the temperature shot up about 20-30 degrees over the course of the day.


We weren’t in Texas a (comparatively) long amount of time as we were just skirting through the panhandle, but Texas marked the transition from the cloudy weather we’d left behind to the glorious sunshine that we’d have for the next several days. After a decent drive through the panhandle (where we saw, literally, 100,000+ cows – and I mean literally in the correct, non-millennial, sense of the word) we crossed the border into our new home: New Mexico.


Yes, SB and I are now residents of New Mexico – and have begun the (likely infinite and impossible) task of trying to become “New Mexicans.” 🙂 We had decided that NM was our goal quite some time ago, based in no small part on my own experiences there. Now, NM was also one of the more difficult places we were considering from a job perspective (we moved with zero jobs, and the one job prospect I had that seemed solid turned out to be a bust), but it was the goal and so we went with it!

Because SB and I like to arrive at our new homes early in the morning to maximum truck-unloading time, we did something similar to our move to Boston and stopped an hour or so away from our home for the final night of the road trip.


Tristen also liked our decision to stop because we took him to IHOP. The Boy loves him some restaurants like Cracker Barrel and IHOP and he had been asking for such a place for the entire trip. Actually he’d been asking since before we even left. Fortunately there was a nearby IHOP that we were able to just walk to.


Spot the Pigsten!

Oddly enough, despite the gorgeous weather of the day, the evening brought with it a CRAZY thunderstorm. I’m talking extreme lighting and torrential, street-flooding rain. Of course the storm hit the same time we decided to go to Wal-Mart to get a few things for the next day, but that’s life. Even more funny, in all the time we’ve been here since we haven’t seen a storm as intense as that first night. When we got up the next morning you’d never guess it had poured the night before, the skies were clear blue and the earth was bone dry again.


The final stretch of a moving road-trip is always a bit of an antsy period. For one, with the magical journey of the road-trip nearing its end you have to start processing the fact that you are about to, you know, move. Then you start thinking about all the secondary things such as setting up your new home, establishing new accounts, buying things (double points for when you have no income), not to mention the quickly approaching unloading process. Fortunately, NM offered up some wonderful scenery as we drew closer to our new home.


Lucinda also seemed to be pretty excited, I think she ate more gas per mile during those final mountains than she had at any other point during the trip! 🙂


Luckily for us, our new landlords have a very seamless move-in process and so all the paperwork and administrative stuff was very quick. It didn’t take us long to get the unloading process started and we even met one of our new neighbors who let us borrow a moving dolly. Heck, we got through the unloading process in record time! We once again determined that our mattress (not the box-springs, just the mattress) is the biggest moving PITA of the stuff we had, though new post-move acquisitions such as my desk would be far worse.

So, once we were moved-in we began the slow and steady (and ultimately nearly one month long) process of organizing, cleaning, and acquiring. Part of what made this move’s “settling” process so long was the fact that SB and I had so very little in the way of actual furniture. We had 1 – Office Chair, 1 – Small Bench, 1 – Couch (from a box, lol), 1 – Bed, and 1 – End Table. That was the extent of our furniture for what was to be the largest apartment we’ve ever rented. So, we had to spend a lot of time finding furniture within our budget. Said furniture ended up coming from a myriad of used furniture stores, Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and Office Max (who we no longer recommend). As such, basically all of it had to be assembled. There was so much assembling, in fact, that I got mega blisters even with the nice gloves FIL got me years ago.


But hey, I had help! Plus SB assembled almost her entire desk by herself, almost. 😛

However, not all of the organizing/etc. was stressful, one fun part was finally getting to combine my Icelandic beer bottle cap collection with my preexisting Murkan one.


All of these are unique – if I simply collected all of the caps I’d have about 60 tons of caps.

Another fun thing is getting to know your neighborhood. I’m too reclusive to get to know many of my neighbors, though the ones I’ve met here have been nice so far. One of our neighbors has a bunch of cacti on their front porch, so that’s pretty awesome.


We tried to move all our plants outside – thinking we were being good plant parents. Turns out our sensitive indoor plants (even the Three Amigos!) were NOT prepared for the NM sun and they got sunburned! Poor Rosita looked like someone had burnt some of her leaves off with a lighter. Fortunately we noticed it pretty quick and now they are all indoors and have fully recovered. For the record, Little Friend did just fine outside. In truth Little Friend appeared to be thriving, even while his fellow cacti got roasted in the sun. He is one bad mofo, which makes his “death” all the more crazy to me, but he is doing good now!

I’ve also taken to some of the animals in our neighborhood. Of special note are our neighborhood Roadrunner – yes, an actual Roadrunner!


That Roadrunner normally appears in the bushes and road (duh) on one corner of our building. He/she even showed up on our very first day while we were unloading Lucinda! Yay welcome party!

Our other new friend is “Alfred.” Alfred is a little lizard bro who hilariously has one particular spot he likes to soak up the sun in, and generally speaking gives no shits about you walking right next to him.


We see Alfred during portions of the way when he spot is getting the most sun, and he is a bit of a more frequent guest than the Roadrunner (who is probably out thwarting a coyote – which speaking of coyotes, we heard them out in the nearby desert one night, way cool). I have told Alfred that when Meem comes to visit she would love to meet him!

In the larger sense we’ve also been exploring our new town – mostly out of necessity, but hey that’s still exploration!


In addition to more mundane things such as acquiring furniture and consumables, we’ve also spotted a few “would like to try” places, namely Tristen’s self-proclaimed “must have or I will die” restaurant, Church’s Chicken.


Now, we’ve yet to have Church’s Chicken and Tristen is still quite alive, but the way he talks about it he is convinced every day we don’t take him is another day of Hell on Earth. We do have coupons for Church’s though, so I’m sure we’ll get it for him eventually. Another brand we’ve encountered that is new-to-us is Kodiak Cakes, a brand which specializes in pancake and waffles mixes AND – more importantly – not only features a bear on their logo, they donate a portion of their profits to help bears in the wild. As such, it is 100% Valentino approved (and sometimes aggressively required, lol).


On my front, I’ve found a hot-sauce that I really like that is simply called “El Pato” (the duck) and which goes really good with the low-sodium V8s that I just started drinking again.


I’ve also been exploring and revisiting beers – naturally. The one beer I was SUPER excited about was Odell Brewing Co.’s “90 Shilling” – a by most accounts good but unexceptional beer which I hadn’t been able to find for years despite having really liked it the first time I had it.


But, small stuff aside, the first BIG acquisition we made – yes even bigger than fancy beer – was our new car! Again, this is a “new-to-us” acquisition, not an actual new car, I’ll refer you back to the “no-income” bit above. 😛

So a fun fact. SB and I haven’t both owned a car since 2010, and we haven’t own a car at all since 2014. The cars we sold were both 1998s. As we now live in a place where the public transportation is either A) Non-existent or B) Way too limited, we knew we had to get a car again. We were nervous about this not only because of financial reasons, but also because this was our first “on-our-own” big-people car purchase. We also knew we had to get one quick since our rental cars: Felipe (2018 Ford Focus) and then after that, Roger (2018 Chevy Malibu) were quite expensive on a per-day basis. After deciding that the first car would likely be mostly SB’s, she – based in no small part on her time with Felipe – decided she wanted a Ford Focus. The nearest ones we wanted to look at were in Texas, so we drove to Texas for the big day.


Along the way we got very close to Mexico – we even got to see part of the famous/infamous (depending on one’s politics, most likely) border wall.


Mexico – and the hazy visage of a giant phone God hovering above the city below.

After some test drives, a lot of discussing, even more nitpicking, some financial soul-searching, and ultimately a gauge of “prettiness” SB and I (with the final call between two cars going to SB) decided on a 2016 Ford Focus! SB knew off the bat that it was a girl, but it was several days later before her name was revealed: Felicia!


Valentino rocking the driver’s seat in brand-new-to-us Felicia!

Felicia is the newest, nicest car SB and I have ever owned. Going from a 1998 to a 2016 is a heck of a jump: there are many buttons in Felicia that we had to learn via trial-and-error what they did. One of the two salespeople we spoke with was VISIBLY surprised the last car we owned was a 1998, but at least he humored our car ignorance (while trying to sell us the car, of course : ).

After adopting Felicia (adoption is expensive, yo’) our stress levels dropped substantially. Getting a car was – after an apartment – one of the main fiscal/mental hurdles we needed to jump. Sure, a lot of secondary expenses such as furniture and electronics (for instance we have no TV, I still miss Philip) added up, Felicia was the big expense and really the big requirement (you can go through day-to-day life without a TV with no real difficulty, a car – here – not so much). Now, of course we’re almost definitely going to need to get a second car, but the process will be less stressful because we won’t be relying on rental car in the interim, and now we know more about what to expect!

Of course our stress levels may have also just been lower because we had a pool day – Pigsten knows whats up.


One of our neighbors told us you can generally swim through October here – nice!

So, that’s basically the biggest points of our Westward Bound move. We’re now mostly settled, we’ve made a lot of progress on the job front (including some better-than-expected results, and some worse-than-expected results, all at once), and the last thing we don’t have is a TV – though as of me writing this one has been ordered, so hopefully (REALLY hopefully considering the post timeline I have planned) we will have one of those too by the time this actually gets posted. We aren’t going to get cable or satellite, that’s what the interwebs and Smart TVs are for, and frankly we don’t watch enough TV to justify anything like that anyways. The main reason we are getting a TV is to watch Sehrmit videos and also so Tristen doesn’t kill us.

With all that in mind, consider the Taco Household’s HQ to now be the Southwest!


In celebration of that, I have a couple of short NM trips we’ve taken in the blog pipeline to share with you all! I also have a couple of other posts in mind, so hopefully I can keep this writing machine spurt I have going for a bit longer.

Until next time,
-Taco

Midwestern Pit Stop: Part II – Return of the Humidity

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear,

On the heels of my farewell to Iceland post I figured that it would make the most sense to talk about what happened after said farewell. Well, after a year of all that grandeur and exploration SB and I did what any self-respecting person would do and became unemployed and moved back in with our parents (lol). But seriously, that’s what we did. Now, in fairness to us it wasn’t an extended stay and as I write this we are back out into the world on our own and are slightly less unemployed. However, in the immediate transition back to Murka’ we not only returned to our hometown, we went straight back to the parents, though fortunately we did manage to avoid the whole “living in the basement” bit.

The good news is that our return to the US of A started off on the best of notes because we got to go to our all time favorite zoo.


Yes, we were so excited to see this zoo that we stopped there before we even saw most of the family (granted we’d been there just over a month prior, but still). SB and I have a long and storied history with this particular zoo and we were oh-so-excited to have the chance to visit. For the most part it was exactly as we remembered it, though they had made a few changes and expansions over the interim years – although nothing too substantial. The good thing about the zoo is that it is small, and since it hadn’t changed much I still knew exactly where everything would be! While I like the entire zoo, I generally used to start with the wallaby walk-through, so that’s what I did this time too.


I also stopped through the barn to say hello to “Prince Charming” the llama.


He was sporting a nice, “freshly trimmed” look and seemed to be in good spirits. SB and Prince Charming have had tumultuous relationship in the past, though they seemed to be on good terms this time around. One of the best parts of the zoo is the petting zoo area, where you are sure to be swarmed by “kids” (the good kind of kids, as in, the non-human ones) and their mommas!


We also checked out all the other exhibits, as I am very methodical in how I circumnavigate this zoo. 🙂

Of course while the zoo was fun, it didn’t change the fact that we were loaded down with suitcases and backpacks and needed to get down to FIL and MIL’s house to not only sort our belongings from Iceland, but also the belongings we’d left behind before moving to Iceland. We’d partially done that prior to leaving, back during our first Midwestern Pitstop, but we had been very time-crunched then (and quite honestly mentally overloaded) so we revisited things again. Now that process took a long time, but we managed to schlep off a lot of stuff we didn’t need all while only adding a couple of a new things (mostly things from Meem, who was moving to The Golden State right about the same time we got back). While going through literally everything you own with a fine-tooth comb and getting rid of things your monkey brain tries so desperately to convince you that you still need is emotionally – and sometimes physically – difficult, it is also a good opportunity to simply revisit what you actually possess. For example, I got to recap some of my most favorite beers from Iceland, so favorite in fact that I bothered to transport the bottles 3,100 miles.


Similarly, Pigsten got to categorize some of our older rocks and seashells – some of which date to unknown periods in my old childhood and thus far predate Pigsten’s New Mexico/Colorado arrival.


Pigsten showcasing his secret shrine, which is of course in a top secret location.

Pigsten and Broli also got to meet some “new” (to them) pint-sized friends, such as the now ubiquitous “Little Man” who soon embarked on his own cross-country adventure with Meem as well as a few tiny Dino pals!


In fact, the Boys made quite a few new friends while we were home. For instance, as parting of the “cleaning out” phase I gathered up all my Nutcrackers and cleaned them up. The Boys were pretty excited to meet all of them.


We also uncovered some friends who had been in hibernation for a bit, including SB’s squirrel slippers – Sebastien & Serendipity!


These two squirrels date from way back in SB and I’s relationship and they were one of the earliest stuffed animal friends we adopted! In addition to our plushie friends, we also got to catch back up with our plant friends: Little Friend, Bonsai Buddy Jr., and the Three Amigos (Pancho, Nacho, and Quixote).


Now you’ll probably notice that Little Friend looks very short and ehm… very bad in that photo (here is when he was last on the blog), that’s because he is well, dead. Yeah, it brings me legitimate sadness to share that Little Friend died while we were abroad in Iceland. Having since had a chance to exam him and his roots, I believe he was kept in too cold of an area, went dormant, and was subsequently over-watered and died of root rot, the accounting of the way he died also supports this hypothesis. This made SB and I very sad as Little Friend is the oldest of all our plant buddies and even predates Tristen by 4 years. He was purchased by my Dad and Stepmom as an apartment warming present for SB and I over a decade ago. He had been our “Christmas Cactus” ever since he was just a little bitty guy.


He eventually grew to the point that he was nearly 7″ tall, and then got trimmed, and then grew again, only to be trimmed again. He was a hardy fellow, and didn’t always have an easy life, what with being repeatedly trimmed and even caught in a moving truck door once. But he was ever present. Thus, the absence of Little Friend – despite him “only” being a plant – is a big absence in SB and I’s life.

So, as is likely unsurprising, SB and I held a “funeral” for him at my Dad’s farm, where we buried him in a ceremony where all of his own little friends were present. Little Friend, ever the prankster/poker, even got the apparent last laugh as I got poison ivy while finding a suitable spot for him.


We even put up a little marker for him.

Yet not all is lost. If you’ve read the blog for a good while, you’ll remember that Little Friend once spawned himself into smaller Little Friends. Most of those spawns are still alive and kicking, so, a piece of one such spawn (in particular BIL’s) was replanted to begin a new Little Friend for us.


As you can see he is still quite small, and has no “branches,” but he is alive, well, and growing. Further, while it is a “new” Little Friend, this one is genetically the same plant as “old” Little Friend, thus we’ve decided not to rename him and just keep him as Little Friend, as it’s really just an off-shoot of original Little Friend. So, while we are a bit sad that we didn’t get to keep the core, original Little Friend, we are also happy that we have a part of him to start anew with (plus this smaller version of him was way easier to move).

The Boys took Little Friend’s death a bit hard, but it helped that their good friend Floppsy was there to keep them company through the hard times.


The Boys were already a bit on-edge from the move (Tristen especially always struggles with moves), and Pig was really missing Bónus.. as you can see.


However, we did keep not only that empty oat biscuit box (lol) but also all of our Bónus reusable shopping bags, not that Pig would have let us get rid of them anyways. 🙂 In fact its kind of funny that despite getting rid of a lot of stuff, we kept an empty biscuit box, haha. But we did still get rid of, donate, or sell a lot of our things regardless. This ranged from kitchen items we just didn’t need anymore, to books, to sleeping bags from the 1980s (seriously), and even some of SB’s old dresses, such as the one she wore to our reception!


I also passed on an item that may or may not have been used in some criminal pursuits to Daryl 1. 😛


As mentioned though, we weren’t the only ones getting ready for a big transition – Meem was getting ready to move herself. A lot of the first week or two we were home was spent helping Meem wrap things up, and, as anyone who has moved after so long will tell you – you’re probably going to need/want help. Meem was fortunate to have lots of said help, and before too long she was all packed up for her own trip westward (via Route 66 no less!). She was not alone though, for in addition to the aforementioned Little Man and dino bros, Sinclair and Mr. Bear were there to help her navigate!


Meem was understandably struggling a bit, not just because of the move, but because she was selling her house. I think selling a home is usually an emotional thing, but Meem had special circumstances with “House” that I think made it even more difficult. House was a nice house, a good house, and most importantly, our house. While I think I’ve been “gone” long enough to not have a super close bond with House, it is very weird to think of Meem and House as two separate things now. As of this posting, I am pretty sure House has been sold, or at the very least is in the closing process. That’s an odd thought, to not be able to go back to House anymore – at least without being arrested. Interestingly enough, after Meem left SB and I had a few more things we needed to do at House, so we were actually there after Meem had begun her journey. That felt even more weird, having House without a Meem in it, but I think it also helped me say goodbye in my own way.


After taking care of a last few things over the next few days, we took the few items Meem was nice enough to give us (and there was more I would have taken had we had space, lol) and closed the door for the last time. Before we left I turned and took one last photo.


Saying goodbye to “House.”

I think part of why I didn’t super struggle to say goodbye to House is because “Home” is where the Meem is, and Meem was no longer there. “House” was, as said, a happy place – but it was just a place. The memories made there will follow us, and that place will, in time, be replaced by a new one. It is the people who make the home, not the structure.

After Meem was on her way and House was ready to enter the market we returned to our own moving/life endeavors. Some of which were critically important (housing, etc.) and others were more of a side-quest, such as repairing my old Lego Sopwith Camel (the 3451 version, not the newer 10226 variant) that I’d had since 2001.


Before getting stored at MIL & FIL’s while we were in Iceland it had sat in Meem’s garage for over a decade and had not only accumulated a lot of dust, the stickers had dry-rotted. Meem and her Google-fu found someone in Australia just as we left for Iceland who had the stickers and ordered them for me, and then the rest was just a lot of cleaning (from soap to lighter fluid) and gluing. I ended up gluing the base frame of the plane because in the year it had been at MIL & FIL’s it got broke into several pieces (it was a fragile thing) and so I was tired of having to rebuild the thing. Some pieces were much easier to fix and glue than others.


Eventually though I got her all fixed up and looking good as new! Pigsten and Broli were the first to test her out.


I then realized that I had no place for the plane, so it now resides in my Dad’s garage, where it will proceed to regain all its dust – but where it will be piloted by none other than Snoopy himself!

The Sopwith Camel wasn’t the only thing that got fixed up as (aside from Little Friend) we cleaned up and repotted our other plant buddies as well. We started with the Three Amigos who had definitely outgrown their second pot.


I had to wear two pairs of gloves at the same time because a certain someone *cough* Quixote *couch* is a little arsehole and will poke the ever-loving Hades out of you.


We put them in a much larger pot – especially compared to their original pot from my Dad which was tiny and square.


That should hold them for awhile. Next up was an offshoot of Quixote that MIL wanted for herself (God save her), he was – as to be expected – displeased with me moving him out of his red solo cup despite his new home being so much nicer.


I think he ended up looking quite nice, for the little arse he is.


We’ll call him Quixote Dos. After that was Bonsai Buddy Jr., who was desperately in need of a new pot as he had never been repotted at all since he came to live with us after his Padre died in the Great Gnat War of 13′.


Bonsai Buddy Jr. was just a little bit root-bound.


But, we gave him the TLC he so needed and even helped clean up and declutter his roots for him.


He looks very nice in his new, much larger, pot. In fact all the repotted plants look much better and happier now!


If you were wondering where Pig was during all of this – since he tends to want to eat the plants (especially our Icelandic plants) – he was inside. We kept him there for everyone’s safety. Turns out Pig got pretty fascinated by a Preying Mantis and didn’t care much about what we were doing anyways.


In other plant news, while Little Friend’s original self had died, we did get newborns!


They’ve actually grown quite a bit since that photo (and yes the one on the right is there, just still very small in that photo!) but those are two bonafide barley plants! Not only that, they are Guinness barley plants, all the way from St. James’s Gate in Dublin. We had been holding onto three barley seeds (shhhhh) since we visited the brewery way back in December of last year, and I had grabbed them mostly as a novelty thing as we proceeded through the tour (you could hold/smell the seeds at one point and I ehm.. took three). I took one for myself, my Dad, and FIL. I never expected them to grow and honestly hadn’t even thought of it, but sure enough as soon as I gave one to my Dad he planted it and by God it grew! So the next day I planted mine, and then later (after it was temporarily lost and almost vacuumed – but thankfully SB found it) I planted FIL’s as well. The two you see above are mine (left) and FIL’s (right). So yes, we now have three Guinness barley plants growing, you never know what you’ll encounter on Dinosaur Bear it would seem! I’ll share more about the progress of the “Barley Bros” in a later post.

In addition to all the moving craziness we did have some nice down-time with the family, such as many a beer nights with FIL or a few “cabin days” with my Dad, Stepmom, and Daryl 2 down at the river.


While my hometown is, well, incredibly small – it’s also big enough that you can still “get away” from it and go to much more relaxing places. My Dad happens to have a cabin in such a place, so we spent a couple afternoons and evenings out there, doing, you know, Midwest stuff like dousing tennis balls in lighter fluid and catching them on fire.


I am sure this is how my fellow Harvard alumni spend their weekends.

But, more than anything, we just chilled and relaxed. It was a nice getaway from all the moving-related stress and uncertainty.


We also got to see all of our core family on Labor Day, which was really nice. MIL and FIL just recently pompified their house, so its very nice for gatherings now. I made a “S’Mores Cake” for which I followed absolutely zero recipes or guidance.


Yet it still turned out really, really good – their words, not mine (but I think it was good too!). Plus it was totally calorie free, always a plus.


After Labor Day it wasn’t too much longer before SB and I headed to the nearest city of any size and picked up a vehicle which is probably quite familiar to you if you’ve followed this blog for a bit: The Penske.


For each of our substantial domestic moves we have relied on Penske trucks – and have had absolutely no issues and highly recommend them. Our first truck was Lillian (Lily for short), our second was Lucy, and the truck above, our third, was Lucinda. Lucinda was the “oldest” of our three Penske trucks, and she was a bit of a wild stallion. I’ll cover our adventure with Lucinda more in the next post.

For now, that brings us to the substantive end of our second Midwestern Pitstop. It was good to see the family, good to get some things done, and even better to finally gather all our belongings up (as I am sure MIL & FIL also appreciate since we had dumped it all on them 😛 ). We did not like things such as the humidity, the stress of having no idea what was next, and also the humidity – BUT it was still a great pit stop between two big stages of our life and we are very thankful we had a place to stay during that time. 🙂

Plus, despite our time well, really all over the place, we are still Midwesterners at heart – and while we don’t live there anymore, there is always something special about coming home.


Until next time,
-Taco

End of the 2018 Summer Hiatus

by

Greetings and welcome (back) to Dinosaur Bear!

It’s been a while since my last post, nearly 3 months in fact! Taking a hiatus from blogging isn’t unprecedented or unusual for me, sometimes I just get burnt out and other times I simply have too much going on to spend much time on what is essentially an e-journal. Looking back to 2017, it looks like October saw the end of a hiatus last year as well – though that one was a little shorter than this one. Perhaps I just don’t have as much of a push to blog during the summer, or perhaps more accurately, I just get a lot more busy during the summer. 🙂

Who knows. Either way, consider this a “return” to blogging – 2018 edition – as I’ve been working on a slew of posts over the past week or so. Given the amount of time between this post and the last post its no stretch to say that a lot has been going on over these past three months. Everything from extended vacations, to (multiple) moves, to professional advancement, to road-trips. I hope to share a good deal of that in my upcoming posts, so you can look for those to start appearing soon.

The one thing I always forget upon a “return” to blogging is just how time consuming these posts are. Yes, I wholly admit that much of that is self-inflicted. For instance as of my writing this post I’ve written around 608,000 words on this blog (wow) and even on a per-post breakdown that still equates to a lot of time. Much of this extends from my excessive and long-winded approach to personal writing, but I write that way here because its nice to not feel like I’m constrained by artificial concision and if no one ever reads a single one of these posts but me then the blog will have served its purpose regardless! However, to my defense, a lot of what I cover delves into historical events – and so I like to give them a proper amount of a research and writing (others, not so much). Then, if you add in lots of photos (even more in my post-compression days), you’ve got a lot of time spent on a single post. Either way, I enjoy it enough to keep doing it obviously – I just sometimes need a break – especially since when last I checked my various pleas for multi-million dollar sponsorships over the years have fell on deaf ears.

I am not entirely sure the order in which I will ultimately decide to release these posts that I have been working on, but as you can(‘t) tell from my cryptic organizational system, I do have a lot of content either prepared or being prepared.


You can look for the first of these substantive posts to start launching next Monday. I will probably follow my usual pattern of releasing one post per week, though there might be outliers (one way or another). It will of course involve a bit of catching up, but time is weird (and strange) and as such I wouldn’t be too concerned about chronology, especially since I didn’t necessarily write them in the order that they will ultimately be released in. 🙂

In the meantime, if by some extreme unlikelihood you feel like you just cannot fathom waiting a few more days for Dinosaur Bear content, then I might suggest that you revisit my New Mexico Mega Post Series (Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3) as there is quite a bit of reading there – some of which is about to became a bit more relevant to Dinosaur Bear.


Until next time,
-Taco

[Administrative Note: If you are subscribed to Dinosaur Bear and use a Gmail account, there is a good chance these posts will be sent to your SPAM folder. I have reported the posts as “Not Spam” to Gmail countless times, but it still seems to revert to SPAM after a period of inactivity. As such, be sure to check your SPAM folder and to set the Dinosaur Bear email as a known or protected sender. I unfortunately have no control over what Gmail flags as SPAM, so at this point its on a per-user basis to fix the issue by flagging the post notification emails as Not-Spam. Other providers such as Hotmail/Outlook/Yahoo/ISP-based/etc. do not appear to be effected by the issue, it’s largely restricted to Gmail accounts.]

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