Articles

It has now been more than six months since our last foster placement. At the beginning of the year, we made the difficult decision to switch foster agencies. After how long it took to get licensed the first time, the prospect of another delay was discouraging. But I feel confident...

personal foster care

After six weeks together our first foster kiddos were able to return to live with family members while their parent’s case continues to progress. This is great news for the kids as it will allow them to stay connected with their relatives. Throughout this journey, we were relieved to see...

personal foster care parenting

After several weeks, our crash course in parenting has continually thought me new things. There are a lot of parenting lessons I’ve seen played out in other’s homes. But being now being the parent has really brought a lot of those into focus. Gains Our foster care certification process had...

personal foster care parenting

A couple weeks ago, Bekah and I accepted our first foster placement of two young kiddos; a five-year-old boy and a one-year-old girl. They are beautiful kids who love to have fun. They also have been through a lot, both in life and now being separated from their family. We...

foster care personal

I’m excited to announce that after 10 months of the certification process and years of discussion and planning Bekah and I have been licensed by the state of California to serve as foster parents. Since the earliest days of our marriage, we’ve discussed how we could care for children needing...

personal foster care

2020 Trends After a year of international travel that triggered my re-entry into bird watching, 2020 was a much more restrained year. While life events and global lockdowns kept me in the US, I enjoyed refining my birding skills and focusing on more birding from home. As the stress of...

travel birding

On my blog I link to my RSS/Atom feed for the convenience of people who use a feed reader. However, since this is an XML document, clicking on the link could be confusing for web visitors. I had previously looked into adding styles to the XML document to make it...

technology

Carpenters have lots of tools to pick from. Drills, impact drivers, circular saws, and miter saws; each tool may be really good for a specific purpose and a great carpenter will know when to use each one. However, the best carpenter is not necessarily the one who uses the most...

technology

Birding in 2019

travel birding

Wireless charging has been around for a while now but it’s still not ubiquitous. Many people don’t know their phone supports the feature. While it’s not perfect, I think this is an under-utilized feature of modern cell phones. How does it work? Wireless phone chargers uses what is call “Inductive...

technology hardware review

Your team realizes that testing is valuable. Your team creates tests for already completed features. The result was encouraging and your team even found a few bugs hiding in the application. Your team returns to feature development and attempts to add new tests. Features took more time to complete because...

technology

Your software development team released an MVP application into production. The application only had a few features and the codebase is far from perfect, but there are big plans for the future! Your team presses on, adding features and your user base continues to grow. After a few months, cracks...

technology

As a boy, I remember my grandmother telling stories of her and my grandfather’s trip to Italy. The two of them were invited by a sibling to go on the trip with most expenses paid. For some reason, the destination that I remember hearing about most vividly was Venice. I...

travel Italy

Rome is such a massively historic city that I didn’t know what to expect when arriving in modern-day Rome. I’ve read so much about it in the context of ancient history but relatively little about the last couple hundred years. What we encountered was a mix of multiple centuries organically...

travel Italy

After meeting up with my family, we drove to the town of Orvieto a little more than an hour outside of Rome. We stayed in Orvieto because my sister was studying there for a semester of her undergrad and had classes during the week. It may not be top of...

travel Italy