Blog

amateur-radio ham-radio

First POTA Experience

Having recently returned to the ham radio fold after over a decade of being off the air, I was surprised to discover how popular [Parks on the Air](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_on_the_Air) has...

coding datascience

Solving Mike Treit's Interview Problem

Using PySpark on Azure Databricks to find common integers between two 50GB binary files - a pragmatic approach to Mike Treit's favorite interview question.

food paella

Treit / Dreewes Paella Mixta

We made this paella on a warm summer evening with friends to celebrate life and watch the Perseid meteor shower. Unfortunately clouds drifted in and obscured the meteors, but the...

amateur-radio ham-radio

Getting Back on the Air

I was granted my ham radio license (KC7AVA) back in January of 1994, and spent many pleasurable hours on the air making contacts with other amateur radio operators around the US...

Randy’s Napoletana Pizza

We’ve made a lot of homemade pizza, but this simple version won raves from the whole family. The dough recipe comes from Peter Reinhart’s great book on pizza, “American Pie” while...

Roast Turkey and Gravy

Here is my original Turkey and Gravy recipe, from November 13, 2003. I made this recipe for Thanksgiving a couple years ago when we had our friends Mandi and Phil over; it was far...

Thanksgiving 2009 Game Plan

Only one week until Thanksgiving, so now is the time to get a plan in place that will set us up for some flawless gustatory execution! Below is the proposed plan, subject to...

Fourth of July Creek Hike

April 17th was my much anticipated first hike of the season. I picked my friend Jose up at 6:00 AM and we headed east over Stevens Pass, both of us wondering how our bodies would...

A Geocaching Misadventure

I woke the girls up at 5:30 AM with plans for a nice hike to a cache named Panorama that is supposed to offer a grand view of the Monroe area. On a clear day you can see Seattle...

Geocaching

For Christmas Mike very generously gave me a Garmin Nuvi GPS receiver so I can stop getting lost whenever I try and drive anywhere. I’d heard of geocaching, where you try and...

Fun in the snow

The snow really started coming down in earnest last night, and we awoke to a true winter wonderland. I measured 11 inches this morning and the snow kept falling throughout the day...

Family Vacation Day 2: a Hike in the Rain

We started our family summer vacation yesterday, which was mostly spent organizing ourselves for the week and wrapping up some house projects. Today we decided to switch into full...

Summer Evening

It’s so nice that summer has finally arrived and we can enjoy evenings outside in the fresh air. Liam and I played several games of Schoko-Hexe this evening, a German card game...

Play time

Charlotte and Lucy are growing up and really starting to enjoy play time. It’s so fun to watch them beginning to interact with each other more and more!

Eye splice

I had some success trying to make an eye splice this evening. Earlier in the day I picked up some rope and cheap plastic fids at the hardware store to play around with. Tonight I...

Sailing to Horsehead Bay

Yesterday morning Mike tooks us out on Der Dom for a nice little day sail. We left Fox Island at around 11:00 and motored out to the Tacoma Narrows. We hoisted sail but there was...