19 January 2025

Malachi proposed to his girlfriend, Erica, on Friday night. This makes Malachi the first of the boys to get engaged and marks the beginning of a new era for Abe and his friends.

This is a photo of Abe from earlier in the week, scouting locations for Malachi's proposal.

Brandan has maintained a compost bin outside for many years, but Becky has resisted composting kitchen scraps. Mainly she objected to taking up counter space, having a messy compost pail, or cleaning a compost pail so it doesn't smell bad. Recently we found a composting garbage can that is the perfect solution for both of us. It took a couple of months to ship and finally arrived this week. On the outside it looks like a typical garbage can.

On the inside, it has a metal pail with two powerful grinders. We can put almost all of our food waste in here, including pomegranate skins, avocado pits, banana peels. If we ate chicken, we could even put the bones in here. The can heats up while grinders mash the food into tiny pieces. The heat dries out the food scraps. The can also has a charcoal filter to absorb smells. Brandan set the composter to run at night for convenience, but it's not loud when it is working so we could run it during the day. In a week of composting, our scraps never reached the fill line. Brandan emptied the contents into our compost bin outside on Saturday.

Brandan downloaded an app from his phone he can use to adjust the cycle. It became obvious that we are now being tracked by a garbage can when we got this email from the manufacturer. Paranoia aside, composting is now our new shared hobby.

It's almost the end of the semester at school, which means lots of math tests and a surprising amount of student artwork decorating the tests. Becky loves this illustration of brute force.

And this full color illustration of a truck.

Brandan and Becky hiked the Rail Trail and Ponderosa Snag Trail in Forest Park on Saturday.

It was a grey January morning looking down the canyon...

...but we could see blue skies in the other direction up the canyon. It was a nice reminder that even if we can't see the sun, the sun is still up there, above the fog.