In the summer of 2005, we put our old house on the market at the same time we broke ground on our new house.  After a year on the market, we finally had a decent offer, but it was as a Contract for Deed rather than traditional financing.  Since we were already moved in, and desperate to get relief from double mortgages, we accepted the offer.  

The offer was a 3 year balloon, but with all the uncertainty in the housing market and economy, it has caused a lot of worry about our obligations and dependency on another family’s finances.  

We closed last week, and the money has changed hands today.  The buyer made all her payments on time, and closed the balloon 6 months early.

We’re breathing a huge sigh of relief!  All’s well that ends well, but we wouldn’t do it again if there was any other option available.  It’s a nice way to mark the 3rd anniversary in the new house.

I cut the path with a shovel, mostly to form a path that avoids them shooting into Grandpa and Grandma Godfrey’s driveway.  There’s 15-20′ of elevation, which is saying a lot for our area.

Pictures are from my old Canon G3, not any of Amy’s fast gear, so I had to pre-click the shutter to get them moving.

It has been another good year in northern Minnesota for us.  The bustle of construction projects has died down, and we’ve settled into the routine.   The boys are full time in school now, Micah in 1st grade and Cameron in kindergarten.  Both are thriving and enjoying school, although they often come home ready for some quiet play.  Legos and computer puzzles are frequent destinations.

Amy’s photography work took her to national dog shows in Wyoming, Kentucky, and Oklahoma this year, as well as most weekends during the summer.  This is the first year Ben hasn’t gone on any major road trips to help run the booth.  The business has reached a good steady state, and Amy is able to keep enough fresh products coming that people keep buying new pictures.  

Ben stayed home with the boys, playing outside and keeping up with their activities.  He rationalizes that keeping up with two boys is enough of a project, so no major house projects were completed.  He participated in his first ever organized sports activity, as an assistant coach on the boys’ T-Ball team.  They had fun, but let’s just call it a “growing year.”  Uncle Tyler took them fishing, trying to tell them that Clover Lake is not normal:  Micah’s first fish was a 35″ northern pike, and Cameron’s was an 18″ large mouth bass.

Ben’s work continues to challenge him.  He’s leading a team of nearly a dozen developers in a new document production platform for the company.  He kept a schedule of 2 days every 2 weeks of travel to the main office for meetings.  

The highlight of the travel was a visit to New York City in April.  Amy was able join him for this trip.  Her first trip ever to NYC, she went sightseeing while Ben worked.  We did get out together for dinner and to see the Broadway musical Wicked.  We could even see Times Square from our hotel window!

In August, we travelled with a popup camper to Michigan, mixing an extended visit to Ben’s parents with a couple dog shows along the way.  There wasn’t a single drop of rain in the 12 days of travel, so there were no terrible stories to tell of the first family camping experience.  The only downer was Amy twisted her ankle badly the evening of our last night away.  She’s recovered well, thanks in large part to regular visits to a rolfer/osteopath in Duluth.  

In June, we buried MacKenzie, our 9 year old Great Dane.  She put up a good fight against cancer in her leg, but even at 9 years, she was on the upper limit of life expectency.  The house is a much emptier without her, but we’re holding steady with Zak and Zephyr, both of whom are also aging.  Zephyr was born deaf, but at 12, Zak is losing his hearing, so we’re adapting to a house with deaf dogs.  (The UPS truck will come and go and Zak won’t hear it.)

We encourage you to bookmark or subscribe to this blog for continued updates.   Links to other family members’ blogs are in the sidebar, or you can find Ben and Amy in Facebook.

We hope your holidays are peaceful and happy!

My dad has a moving story to tell about his brother’s life and involvement in gay rights, especially relative to the church.  If you read the post, it’s less about my Dad’s issues with the Lutheran church as it is a testament to the journey Uncle Mitch took during his life.  Before he died of complications from AIDS, Mitch extended a challenge to the family to change their churches’ policies and attitudes towards gays.

I think a key point of the story is that to break down negative attitudes you need to get to know some gay people.  Some folks are forced into awareness through blood relations, others, by accident.  I believe, in hindsight, prior attitudes will just seem like ignorance.

My wish is that people would set aside sexual orientation as a litmus test for friendship, membership, or listening to what a person has to say.  If they would, this whole issue would evaporate as they realize that people that happen to be gay are people first, no better or worse than people than people that disagree with your favorite color.

I’ll probably come back to specific issue of gays in the church, but before then, the first challenge is to be friends outside that powder keg.  Can you separate the doctrine of your church from your openness to friendship outside of church?

To deal with this, I’ve created another blog, entitled “Pragmatic Geek”

I’m renaming this blog from “Boys, Trees & Tech” to simply “Johnson Family.” to reflect more of the family nature of this content.

Please update your RSS feeds as you see fit.

Some older connections are surfacing, given my recent attentions to social networking.  I’ve been searching on old names to see if they can be found, and one of my searches led me to a friend from grad school, Ducky Sherwood.  I subscribed to her blog and lurked for a while.  Then a couple days ago, I was surprised to see my name in one of her posts.

I had lost the link, but part of the context of the her post was about my graduate school project called @ATS:

“An interactive Web-based system with three basic components: a document management system to organize and maintain lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and other documents; a search engine, called AskMe, for searching that information; and the Electronic Hotline, which uses the other two subsystems to automatically propose answers to incoming mail.”

I figure some readers of the blog and my Facebook profile could be interested in some older achievements. There’s even a grainy headshot in there, from my much younger, long-haired days…

The three of us went to game tonight, too, which was much more disappointing.  We left during the 4th quarter, and we were losing 12-45.

Anyway, dinner included some review of Micah’s sight words and letter sounds test.  In the context of all that, I decided to revisit the pronunciations of one Micah’s  mixups, “cinnamon,” which he prounces “cimanin.”

I asked him if he could say the word, and he replied with “Cimanin.”

But I was bothered, since as I started asking him, he started picking his nose.  So I challenged him, “But I bet you can say it right with your finger in your nose!”

After a hearty round of laughter from both kids, I repeated the challenge.  In went the finger, out came the word: “cinnamon.”

“Now try it without the finger in your nose.”

“Cinnamon.”

And there we had it.  Several more repetitions, all without the finger in the nose, and Micah’s got the proper pronunciation.  Then he tried to have me explain how that worked, and we talked a bit about “thinking too hard.”

My methods are unconventional, and I feel no calling to elementary teaching.  I hope I never have to use that trick again, or I’ll risk not being allowed near other kids.