This past fall (autumn of 2022), I released my first ever computer game — created for the Crow River Winery’s Corn Maze.

Interested parties can check it out at cr2022.cornmaze.us. However, there isn’t much to do since the game is designed to be played on the actual corn maze. As it’s winter now, the maze is currently closed. Originally I’d planned to create a video explaining how the game works, but as with many aspects of the first iteration of this app, there simply wasn’t enough time.

I’ve missed this post for a couple of years, which is too bad, I need to write more on my blog. I’ve got a whole bunch of draft posts, maybe this year I actually finish them.

Also, in case this is not clear, these are the best books that I managed to read in 2022. I’m sure there are more interesting lists of the best books that came out in 2022.

Matt Gray

A friend of mine, Matt Gray passed away recently. I worked with him for almost 10 years at Clockwork. I have heard many people say that Matt was one of the smartest, kindest, and thoughtful people they knew. I can vouch for all of that.

I learned a lot from Matt. We were basically the same age but for whatever reason he was way ahead of me, when it came to a lot of “professional” skills. And someone I “looked up to”… metaphorically.

This year we’re taking a break from making a Christmas playlist… if ever there was a year to break the norm, amiright?! We fully intend to pick back up this annual tradition in the future but we’ve made 10 playlists with almost 11 hours of Christmas music. So this year, we’ve done our best to put them all together so you can listen all of it (or at least as much as your preferred music streaming service has licensed). We’re enjoying it at the house this year as we log a bit of extra time around the house. We hope you enjoy it, too.

2020 Family Pictures

We don’t post much on social media, for a whole lot of reasons, but we do take a lot of pictures. And, well, 2020 sure is a year to remember! Hahaha… sigh. And despite setting aside a lot of plans, ideals, and normals, all the silver linings and graces of this year are not lost on us. We’re grateful for the ways pandemic days, an unplanned 2.5 months without daycare, and all the time we’ve gotten around home/in our neighborhood have deepened our family rhythms.

Do we promise that all these movies are good? Nope. There’s a bunch we haven’t seen yet… plus you need to bear in mind that our three year old is the litmus for whether a movie makes the cut or not. BUT we made this list for ourselves this year, so we figured we’d share in case an extra movie or two makes sense within your December family rhythms, too. And anything we should add to our list?

I managed to read 1 more book in 2019 than I did in 2018 and I didn’t wait until May to write about them. I feel pretty good about that. But one book different is basically the margin of error with book you start in 1 year and end is the second. It’s interesting look at my GoodReads “My Year in Books”. They give a page count (which is a little strange given I usually listen to audio book, but it’s probably roughly accurate). I have an annual reading habit of about 15-20 books and about 7,000 to 10,000 pages.

Here is the 10th Christmas playlist. I made the first one by myself. Erin’s helped me with all the rest. And I’ll share a few photos from the year while I’m at it.

This year’s CD felt like a bit more of a struggle. We could not find a lot of good Christmas music that came out this year. So we ended up turning to some older songs.

This post is a lot later than I would have liked, but I’ve held off writing it until I had a chance to finish migrating my blog to a new platform (more on that later). I’m glad I can do it now, on the new setup.

2018 was a slightly lighter year for books, only 19. Goodreads now has a feature where you can see your “Stats”. It’s pretty cool. Looks like my best year (since I started keeping track around about 2011 was 2013 with a whopping 30 books.)

The 8th Christmas playlist is also the biggest, clocking in at 77 minutes. Why so much music, you ask? Well, we (mostly Erin) found a lot of good raw material this year. Several of the albums that showed up on this years playlist will probably show up again on future playlists.

We realize that CD players are things that most people only have in their cars now a days and we want people to be able to enjoy this music however is convenient. There are links to buy the songs, in the playlist below. You can also listen to the playlist at the following places (note, that most streaming services only have some of the songs):