Trips

We had two week long trips this year. The first was to New York in September to visit my brother. He had a second child this summer and I wanted to meet him.

We did a lot less touring than we did on our first trip. But we did go to see Roosevelt Island where we did some geocaching, and we had a great dinner at Aquavit.

We also went to San Carlos with our friend Doug in October. We have taken both of our parents, but this was the first time a friend came along. We flew into Phoenix and rented a car. It was a fun trip. We did most of the geocaches in town, took a hike in Nacapule canyon, and spent a lot of time on the beach.

We also went to Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs with friends for an after hours tour. And I went to Grand Junctions for my cousin Brenda’s wedding.

Violin

I’m still not taking violin lessons, but I am still practicing violin. After stopping lessons, I’ve been going back through the Suzuki material, trying to play the pieces with more accuracy and at the correct speed. The first few books went quick, but books 4 and 5 took longer and at the beginning of 2016 I was in the middle of book 5.

I got 354 hours of practice in 2017, so I am falling a bit behind my goal of an hour per day. I’m currently in the middle of book 7. The next song that I will work on is the song that I played for my first violin recital in 2012. That was the first time that I made a recording of myself playing, so I’m looking forward to comparing with my past self. That first recital happened after playing for three years.

In June I bought the Yamaha YEV-105; a five string electric violin. I’m using that as my main practice violin and have been teaching myself viola. That has gone a little better than I expected. I started with the book “From Violin to Viola” and then Suzuki viola book 4. Learning the alto clef wasn’t too bad, and getting used to an extra string (above when playing viola music, and below when playing violin) didn’t take too long either. I’m still not as comfortable in the alto clef as I am in the treble clef.

When I read about learning viola after violin, several people said that the easiest way to play was to pretend that the music is in the treble clef and that you are playing violin in third position. That sounded crazy, but is actually very natural. Unfortunately, you don’t have to learn the alto clef to play like that, and once the viola music has higher positions and/or lots of accidentals, it’s better to know what the notes are.

Touch Games

This was a very productive year for Dark Infinity. We made 13 new games, including 7 board game conversion. We didn’t do any conventions with Mesa Mundi this year, but we did take the table to the Conclave of Gamers here in Denver where we were interviewed by Distract-O-Vision. They made a nice video of us and our table.

In roughly chronological order, we wrote: Terra Mystica, Starship Factory, Card Games(Linko, Karma, Turn the Tide, Oh Hell, Sequence), Concordia, Tzolkin, Castles of Burgundy, Can’t Stop, Qwixx, Spin Mummy, Gem Thieves, Medici, and Age of Discovery.

Other

We continued our tradition of hosting a bi-weekly game night and also enjoyed quite a few off-week game nights hosted by our friends.

My brother’s family came to Colorado for Christmas this year and it was fun to see them and to have our whole family together in Loveland.

Plans

We don’t have any big plans for 2017. Mostly more of the same – making touch table games, violin, etc. We will go to San Carlos again for a longer visit this spring, but we don’t have any other trips planned.

All photos

San Carlos seemed a bit busier than normal. There were more people around and several new buisinesses. We checked in at our favorite restaurants and spent a lot of time on the beach and reading. Our standard breakfast spot, Evie’s, had closed, but the others were still open.

We saw a group of dolphins our first day at the estuary. There were five or more of them and they played in the water near the beach for five or ten minutes. We have seen dolphins in the wild before, but only by taking dolphin viewing boat rides.

Seeing them by chance was strange and cool. We also saw peacocks in our neighborhood at a wedding reception. We thought they were rented for the occasion, but it turns out that family just has them as pets. Which also explains the strange sounds we sometimes hear:

The Very Large Array (as seen in Contact) is pretty neat. I didn’t know that the antennas are mobile and that they have four different configurations that they move between. It is like the zoom lens on a camera: If they put all the antennas close together they can observe a wider chunk of the sky, but if they spread out the antennas, they can get higher resolution images. Because they are using interferometry, having the antennas setup for higher resolution actually renders larger objects invisible. (Here is their description)

We also stopped in Santa Fe and Taos and saw the Rio Grande gorge bridge and the Taos Pueblo.

We arrived Monday afternoon and we went out Tuesday to pick up some groceries and check out the beach. The only sign that a party was coming was the beer tents being set up every other block.

By Wednesday, you could tell that there were more people in town than usual. The beaches were more crowded and there was more traffic.

This is a crowded beach in San Carlos. On a normal day, there would be five to ten people in this picture.

The party started Wednesday night. People were out on the streets walking around, listening to music, drinking and cruising up and down the main strip. Each night the party got bigger with both Friday and Saturday nights being pretty packed. The music kept going till about 4am each night, but by the next morning everyone had disappeared again. By Sunday morning it was over and the town emptied out.

Here are some pictures of the scene Saturday evening and night:

There are normally three beer and liquor stores in town. During the party there were another 20+ beer tents where they were selling cans for 10 pesos (85 cents). The tents were doing a good business even though many people had their own coolers. In front of the three liquor stores, there were dancers to attract customers.

The crowd was dense. There were about three blocks that looked like this. You could walk through by following the line of people headed in your direction, but progress was slow. The crowd was densest near the bands. Some bands were setup in a semi-permanent location and some would just wander and played for tips. There were also cars with big stereos playing music.

There was a gay pride section which was small but attracted a lot of pictures.

In the background, you can see one of the many street vendors selling tacos and hot dogs. There were also vendors selling fresh coconuts, hats, cheap jewelry and light up devil horns:

There are three convenience stores in this part of town. They stayed open, but they only let in a few people at a time. So there were long lines outside each.

The atmosphere was lighthearted and the people were happy. There was a lot of drinking and the police/ambulance/firetrucks where constantly running, but we didn’t see any fights or angry people. There were people collecting trash and a bunch more people collecting aluminum. There was surprisingly little mess in the mornings.

Some of the local businesses stayed open, but many of them closed; and some put up fences around their stores. From what we saw, that was a mistake. The businesses that were open had a lot of customers and we didn’t see anything like vandalism or looting. Even if they had just sold the use of their bathroom (the going rate was 5 pesos) and their parking spaces.

You can find the rest of our pictures here.