Category: Life

  • Share to Enjoy

    Ever notice how natural it is, when you see something beautiful or amazing, to want to share it with someone else? For me, I’m a “sky guy”. My favourite time of day comes at sunset, when the sky transforms into an explosion of colour. Then, as the earth falls slowly to sleep, there’s the “blue…

  • Happy Halloween

    Happy Halloween

    Apparently Halloween this year has been brought to the Manke residence by Disney and Rovio… Hope you enjoy an evening of fun, family, friends and neighbours! We’ll be spending the evening helping fill kids’ loot bags, and hoping Olivia keeps her costume on long enough to knock on some doors along our street (then trying…

  • Always the Right Answer

    Always the Right Answer

    Back in spring we took a day trip to the beach during our vacation in Holland. Maybe we were caught off guard at the 30-degree weather in May, or maybe we didn’t realize that Holland had some sweet beaches, but we came seriously unprepared. No swim suits or towels. Of course, Olivia made a beeline…

  • Show and Tell and the Critic

    Show and Tell and the Critic

    Today I had a chance to update some of the recent work on my site. Looking back, it’s been a really busy summer, but a lot of fun. At Golden West I’m part of a great Online crew that’s been able to take on more responsibility in the company and work on some cool projects…

  • The Genius of Working Less

    The Genius of Working Less

    The story goes (as told by Dan Miller, quoting this book), that while Leonardo da Vinci was painting The Last Supper, he would spend many long days painting atop his scaffold, then would disappear for several days without warning. The prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, who’d hired da Vinci, tried to convince the painter…

  • The Onions Need Space

    The Onions Need Space

    It made enough sense this spring. We bought one of those little trays that holds about 30 tiny onion plants. When we planted them in our garden we figured, Why not plant them all? It was more like planting a strip of grass than individual onion plants, but we figured it would work itself out.…

  • Anatomy of the Potato

    Anatomy of the Potato

    I dug up the first of the potato plants in our garden today. I can recall helping my parents dig up potatoes as a kid, but don’t remember it being so much fun! You pull this nasty-looking plant out of the ground and start digging. All of a sudden you come across these big pinkish-purple…

  • Different Beach

    Different Beach

    While we were camping a couple weeks ago we decided to go take Olivia to a different beach than the one we’d been playing at earlier in the day. She got all excited about the adventure and eagerly got into the boat to visit this distant place, which was essentially just on the other side…

  • Butter Scraped

    Butter Scraped

    You probably know the feeling?

  • The Voice on the Radio

    The Voice on the Radio

    A few weeks ago there was a tornado warning in our area. We’re fortunate enough to live in an area where tornadoes are rare, so it was a weird feeling to stare at the sky wondering if the menacing storm clouds might bring more than rain and lightning. As the storm and the eery silence…