Category Archives: Music

Integrating WordPress and Mastodon using ActivityPub

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Last year, Automattic (which runs WordPress.com) acquired an ActivityPub plugin for the WordPress CMS/blogging platform. This caught my eye, as Elon’s sabotage of Twitter was continuing apace, finally giving me impetus to switch over to Mastodon and explore it and the other services that interoperate with it through the ActivityPub protocol.

I installed the plugin on a couple of websites I run, and have been delighted to discover several interesting things:

  • ActivityPub makes a better-than-RSS replacement for RSS. Since ActivityPub is a bidirectional protocol, using it to keep up on websites allows commenters to interact with your site without having to visit.
  • The ActivityPub plugin runs quietly alongside your other syndication methods, and doesn’t require any additional care and feeding once it’s set up.
  • The plugin can also publish content types other than weblog posts. I use an event calendar plugin on one of the sites where I use ActivityPub, and have that site configured so that each of those also is published as an ActivityPub item when I post it.
  • The plugin works great out of the box with Mastodon. I haven’t tried it with other ActivityPub clients, but it seems to have enough flexibility around how articles are published to ensure that one could get it working smoothly without much fuss, and has explicit support for many other clients.

Setting Up and Using It

I’ll use my band’s website, www.thehappyout.com, as an example. Here’s what I did:

  • Installed and configure the ActivityPub plugin on my WordPress site.
  • Using my personal Mastodon account, searched for profile @news@www.thehappyout.com and followed it. (Thanks to WebFinger support, searching for www.thehappyout.com also works.)
  • Posts on the website now appear in my Mastodon feed.
  • I can now reply to these posts, just as I would to one that had originated in Mastodon.
  • These replies go through the normal WordPress moderation channels and appear on the website just like any comments would that originated on the site itself.

It’s great to see all of this interoperating so smoothly at this point. Big props to Matthias Pfefferle & Automattic for their investment here!

Open Issues

  • It’s common to link to social media sites with a bunch of icons. I can do that to a Mastodon profile, but haven’t figured out a good way to do so with this approach.
  • When an event is published through this mechanism, the time/date and location are not included in the ActivityPub item. If there’s a way to include this sort of metadata in one’s published feed, I haven’t yet figured it out.
  • How do authors who rely on advertising on-site manage monetization if readers don’t have to visit the site? (This was a question for RSS as well, and I suspect the answers will be similar: include ads in the feed itself, or only include excerpts in the feed so readers are still encouraged to visit the site proper.)

2023 Holiday Update

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Dear Friends,

As the dust settles from this year’s madcap Christmas celebrations, it’s time for us to look back on 2023 and share its high points with all of you with whom we don’t get to spend as much time as we’d like!

Kris invested much time and creative energy at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, where she continues to serve as the Director of Children and Family Ministries. She has organized and coordinated all manner of classes and events, and goes to great lengths to shepherd new families into the community there. Of particular note was the Christmas Pageant, which is based on the French carol “The Friendly Beasts” and which features a wide swath of fauna that visit the holy child in the manger. In addition, by dint of hard work, exercise, and the help of a good PT team, Kris’ ribs have now largely healed from fractures sustained on a trip to a nearby waterpark. We’re very glad to have her once again firing on all cylinders!

Sean continues working on software to help doctors and manages a few folks at Doximity. He’s been playing with The Happy Out, an Irish pub band, for a year and a half now, and has delighted in seeing the band’s regular shows at The Cottage (our new favorite restaurant bar) become a meeting place for family and friends. He’s enjoyed a ton of reading this year (though the “to-read” list somehow always grows faster than the “finished” list), and is also getting close to finishing up a board game he’s been designing (with some excellent input from his monthly gaming group). Current topics of study include AI, game design, urban infrastructure and transit, audio engineering, the feasibility of space colonies, and beekeeping. (Nerd!)

We’ve been grateful for the opportunity to do some traveling this year: a marriage retreat to Galveston, a trip to Indianapolis to visit Kris’ family, a Texas coast romp with Sean’s kids, and a little overnight getaway to Fredericksburg. Kris has also gotten to know more of the Texas Hill country, embarking on several delightful day trips with girlfriends, and we’ve enjoyed several wonderful visits from various friends and family. (Come visit! We love guests and playing tour guide.)

Our progeny are doing well: Emily & Xander are still in San Marcos, fully occupied raising Juniper, our adorable granddaughter. Abi finished up her schooling and launched into her Surgical Technician career in downtown San Antonio, where she’s doing a bang-up job. Savannah is out in San Diego, enjoying her work managing a coffee shop and often providing us excellent reading suggestions. Liam works at a software agency in Dallas, where he’s advanced into increasingly responsible technical leadership roles. Maggie continues to work with her beloved animals at the SA Zoo and bought her first house, leaving us with an empty nest. (That took some getting used to!) We are grateful to see them all continuing to become kind, responsible, frequently hilarious adults, and we treasure the time we get with them.

We continue to revel in our Beacon Hill neighborhood, its mix of Spanish and English speakers, the coffee shops, taquerias, restaurants, and antique stores within an easy stroll, the monthly neighborhood happy hours, the community garden, and all of the creative, artistic, and musical friends we’ve found here. What a joy it is to be in such a lively place and close to our San Antonio family! Kris has found homes for several of the feral cats that we had adopted, leaving us with only three in the backyard currently. (They are, however, often joined by raccoons, possums, and skunks — our unofficial neighborhood mascot.)

We are grateful for your friendship — that precious currency in which we count ourselves remarkably rich. As we look forward to 2024, we wish you every blessing, and hope we’ll have an opportunity to spend time with you.

Peace and all good things,

Kris and Sean

Beagle at the Bar

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Some years ago, I wrote a little jig. During a rehearsal last night, we decided to incorporate it into The Happy Out’s version of “All for me Grog”. As I needed to later communicate it to our fiddle player, I finally got around to writing it out and giving it a title inspired by an experience my wife and I had wandering through the streets of Cong on our honeymoon: “Beagle at the Bar”.

"Beagle at the Bar" melody and chords

PDF Download

The Nuclear Bodhran

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While playing with The Happy Out at the San Antonio Highland Games recently, we were a bit vexed to be utterly drowned out during one of our lilting acapella tunes by the band at the next stage. The musical interlopers in question turned out to be Celtica, a group known not only for their Scandinavian-metal tinged Celtic rock, but also for their fire-belching bagpipes. While we have no aspirations to match them in volume, we were impressed with their visual flair, and decided to see what we could do to step up our own, ideally in ways that would not cause the fire marshal to raise a concerned eyebrow.

On my return home, I immediately launched into a couple hours of feverish research, followed by placing an order from Adafruit, one of my favorite electronics supply houses. A few days later, the shipment arrived, followed closely by some tinkering, prototyping, tea-drinking, assembly, thinking, coding, cursing, disassembly, soldering, and reassembly. Eventually, the smoke billowing from the chimney of my workshop abated and I emerged with v1.0 of The Nuclear Bodhran[^1]!

I was fortunate in this effort that Adafruit had published an article on their site on making the drums in a trap set sound-reactive. I used their parts list, circuit diagram, and code as a starting point for my efforts. However, I made several tweaks to their design that better suited it to my needs:

  • I used a Neopixel strip that emits light to the side, rather than outwards, which allows the LEDs to light the drumhead nicely without obstructing the sound or getting in my way while playing.
  • I added the ability to switch through several different display modes:
    1. All of the LEDs reactively light up green (standard Irish pub gig mode)
    2. All of the LEDs reactively light up in a rainbow pattern (pride parade gig mode)
    3. Irish Flag mode, where the drum is split into three regions that are illuminated in orange, green, and white
  • I used a capacitative switch library to allow me to touch the microcontroller on one of the electrical contacts to change through the modes.
  • I added code to use the built-in LED on the Gemma M0 to display a color to indicate the current mode.
  • I omitted the power switch, as the Gemma M0 has one onboard.

Project Reflections

  • I was really pleased with how quickly the lights are able to respond to the sound, tracking very accurately even the super-quick beats one gets when using both ends of the tipper to strike the drum head.
  • The brightness is good — not enough to show well outside, but certainly sufficient for an indoor setting without huge stage lighting, and perfect for the dim corners to which we are most often relegated.
  • This was my first battery-powered electronics project, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the Gemma controller makes it to do: the USB connection powers it when plugged into a computer for programming, and when I plug a LiPo battery into the appropriate terminal, it boots up and starts running the last code I’d loaded into it in less than a second.

I’m quite happy with how this first version turned out. For future versions, I might explore whether there are brighter light strips available, or whether using strips with more LEDs per meter would allow the lighting effects to be seen in a broader range of environments. I’ve also considered changing out the Gemma M0 for a microcontroller that supports wifi and bluetooth so that we could sync up lighting effects on multiple instruments or even have the audience send texts from their phones to change the lighting effects. (There is no end to my nerdiness.)

I’ll be trotting this out for the first time at The Cottage this weekend; looking forward to seeing how it’s received!

Resources to Build Your Own

[^1]: Not actually nuclear. But actually a bodhran.

Poppy’s Traveling Song

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Hey musical nerd-friends! If anybody’s been curious about Poppy’s traveling song from Episode 5 of Rings of Power, I took the time to chart it out this morning, as I wanted to perform it with The Happy Out. Help yourself! Fair use disclaimers apply: not for reproduction, for personal study only, etc.

{title: This Wandering Day}
{key: Bb}
{time: 3/4}

(drone on chord)
[Bb]The sun is fast falling beneath trees of stone
The light in the tower, no longer my home
Past eyes of pale fire, black sand for my bed
I'd trade all I've known for the unknown ahead

[Bb]Call to me, call to me
[Eb]Lands far [Bb]away
For [Bb]I must now wander this [F]wandering day
A[Gm]way I must [Eb]wander this [F]wandering [Bb]day

Of [Bb]drink I have little, and [Eb]food I have [Bb]less
My [F]strength tells me [Gm]no, but the [Eb]path demands yes
My [F]legs are so [Eb]short and the [Bb]way is so [F]long
I've [Gm]no rest nor [Eb]comfort, no [F]comfort but [Bb]song

[Bb]Sing to me, sing to me
[Eb]Lands far [Bb]away
Oh [Bb]rise up and guide me this [F]wandering day
Please [Gm]promise to [Eb]find me this [F]wandering [Bb]day

At [Bb]last comes their answer through [Eb]cold and through [Bb]frost
That [F]not all who [Gm]wonder or [Eb]wander are lost
No [F]matter the [Eb]sorrow, no [Bb]matter the [F]cost
That [Gm]not all who [Eb]wonder or [F]wander are [Bb]lost

Kris & Sean’s Holiday Spectacular Letter (2021 Edition)

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Dear Friends & Family,

As the year winds down, it seems a good time to catch up with those who are dear to us around the country and the world. (If you’re reading this, you made the cut!) Since we can’t possibly sit down for a leisurely meal and visit with everyone we’d like to, we bring you this meager substitute: our 2021 Christmas letter!

After a mostly-locked-down 2020, it has been a delight to be able to be out in the world once more. As folks have gotten vaccinated (3rd time’s the charm!), we’ve been spending more time with family and friends once again. (Particularly startling is seeing the bottom half of people’s faces who we’ve only known from the eyes up!) We’ve visited Kris’ sister Kim in Seattle, had a rich and full time with Kris’ family in Indianapolis, and reveled in several lovely places around Texas with each other and with Sean’s family. Oh, the joy of seeing something other than our own walls once more!

In the latter part of the year, Kris finally gave up her commute to our beloved St. Mark’s community and started as the Director of Children and Family Ministries at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church & School. It is a mere 3.5 miles from our home and also happens to be Sean’s 1st and 2nd-grade alma mater. While learning a new set of traditions and building relationships with a new group of people has been demanding, Kris has received an enthusiastic welcome from the leadership both at the church and the school. She’s also been very involved in our community garden and the local “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” efforts and on our evening walks seems to be known by everyone in our neighborhood!

Sean started working for Doximity in April, writing software to help doctors do their jobs better and more easily. The company is remote-first, and Sean has greatly enjoyed the ability to ply his trade from wherever he likes, be it the coffee shops and breakfast taco joints near our house or a relative’s home halfway across the country. He’s also begun getting back into performing, joining the San Antonio Choral Society this summer and recently playing out with a band for the first time in several years (at a bar that had a pig-in-residence named “Minnie Pearl”).

Our kids are all doing interesting things in the world: 

  • After working at the zoo for a couple of years, Maggie earned a promotion to full Zookeeper and adores (most of) the animals she gets to work with there. She continues to make steady headway on her degree and her project turning an old airport bus into a tiny home on wheels. (She’s officially the handiest person at our house now!)
  • Liam graduated from UT Dallas in May with a Software Engineering degree and is now working for a company there while saving up for planned travel adventures next year. He and Sean enjoyed a week-long graduation road trip together through the American Southwest, culminating in an 18-mile rim-to-river-and-back hike at the Grand Canyon during which they both thought they might die. 
  • Abigail is nearly done with her biology degree and has embarked on a Surgical Technician program here in San Antonio, which she is loving. (“Dad! I got to help with 2 C-Sections yesterday! It was SO COOL!”) She and her beau Christian are renovating a house downtown together. 
  • Savannah is in San Diego, enjoying the West coast life while doing great work as manager of a Cava restaurant and making steady headway on her Psychology degree.
  • Emily is having a grand time doing the most important job there is — being Mom to her daughter Juniper, who joined the world in February. She and Xander (who heads up the city of Kyle’s design and branding efforts) still hang their hats in San Marcos, so we still have good reason to go up for visits regularly!

Other notable events: surviving the Texas Snowpocalypse (40° indoors with no power for 12 hours at a stretch), playing music together, ushering for theater under the stars at the SA Botanical Gardens, a delightful long beach weekend with all the Texas kids, lots of care and feeding of the feral cats that call our yard home, getting to drive an Indy 500 pace car, enjoying dozens of butterflies and hummingbirds in our front yard pollinator garden, gently tiptoeing past the baby skunk who lived on our front porch for several days, finally finding a good habañero and carrot salsa recipe, nearly stepping on an alligator near the coast, playing lots of board games in person and online, petting kangaroos, and playing Pickleball for the first time.

As 2021 winds down, we wish you the peace of the Christmas season (well, the post-shopping portion of it) and every blessing for the year to come. And if you ever find yourself down our way, please stop on in — we’d dearly love to have time with you!

Warmly and sincerely,

Kris & Sean

Setting Up Live Streaming For Facebook

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My lovely bride and I shared a few songs on Facebook Live last night to ring out 2020. The setup ended up being complex enough that I thought I’d document it here for anyone (including my future self) who might find it useful. Here’s a quick diagram of the flow:

And a few details:

  • The mic was a large diaphragm condenser (AT2020) that our friend Brian graciously lent us. It worked really well for picking up the sound from our singing and instruments in a fairly large space. I also fed my guitar in directly, which allowed me to get a little more low-end from that instrument and to process its signal independently of everything else going on in the room.
  • The audio interface was a little 2 channel Behringer (UMC202HD), which was solid and sounded great. More channels would have been useful, however, to be able to feed Kris’ guitar into the system directly as well and conceivably add a mic.
  • MainStage is fantastically fun and flexible, though it has a little bit of a learning curve. I used it to compress, EQ, and mix the incoming signals, as well as to provide the reverb for the pennywhistle piece. (Thanks to my son Liam for buying a copy!)
  • I used the MIDI controller (an AKAI MPKmini) only to turn on and off the reverb, though it can also easily drive virtual instruments, trigger loops, adjust patch parameters, etc. in MainStage.
  • Blackhole is a nice little audio driver that allows you to pass audio from one program to another on a Mac. In this case, I just used it to allow MainStage to send a signal to OBS.
  • For the video, I determined that the camera on an iPhone does a much nicer job capturing clean video than the Facetime camera that’s built into the Mac, so I used a program called EpocCam that allows one to use the phone camera as a webcam.
  • OBS is a software package that’s widely used for real time streaming. I’d originally not planned to use it, but when we did some tests beforehand, the video quality using Facebook’s built-in tools with the camera signal was terrible — super-compressed with a lot of nasty artifacts. OBS allowed me to pre-compress the video signal before sending it up to Facebook, which resulted in a much nicer image and far more modest bandwidth requirements.
  • Seriously, don’t use Facebook’s “camera” option for live streaming.
  • Finally, we used Facebook Live with a streaming key to share the video into a Facebook Live event. This was great from a standpoint of getting the word out to our friends, but the video was still fairly stuttery and unreliable at points. (The audio seemed rock-solid though, which was great. If you need to compromise on something when streaming, choppy audio is much worse than sub-par video.) OBS seemed to be cranking the stream out at a reliable framerate, so I’m pretty sure the video issues were on Facebook’s side.

On the whole, we were very happy with how this setup worked out. Having so many moving parts felt like a precarious house of cards, but all of the components worked reliably. And with the flexibility that OBS and MainStage bring, it would be straightforward to add multiple camera angles, do more sophisticated audio processing, or switch to a different streaming service to raise our production standards in the future. One potential limitation would be the processing power of the Mac running the show, but as is, this setup didn’t ask more than about 20% CPU of the 2019 16″ MacBook Pro that we were using. (And the new Apple Silicon will provide substantially more headroom for this sort of processing.)

Lastly, here are a few photos of the production rig. As with so many things, it’s a lot messier in real life than in a flowchart!

Crested Hens Chart

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After we were having some trouble with the chart we had for it at rehearsal tonight, I worked out a new chart for the beautiful Gilles Chabenat tune Crested Hens. Grab the chart right here if you’d like to add it to your songbook.

The Electrics: A Long-Winded Story in Three Acts

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Act I: 2007

If it weren’t for Ben Mengden, I’d probably never hear any new music. Though I play with various musicians fairly often, I don’t actually turn on the radio and listen to new stuff very frequently at all. (I listened to nothing but The Beatles for about nine months in high school.) Fortunately, I have a few comrades who have both good taste and enthusiasm for sharing, Ben foremost among them.

On a Stupid Guy Trip about 10 years back, several of us were traveling from central Texas to Santa Fe. The drive was long, and we had ample opportunity to visit, to stop and pose with a giant roadrunner sculpture (thanks Stockton!), to play various games in dubious taste, to eat three pounds of beef jerky, and to dig deep into Ben’s CD collection.

“I’ve got a few bands you need to hear!” Ben exclaimed as he led us on a tour through his current listening. Among them were two that I immediately became a fan of: Bright Eyes’ “Balance Beam” instantly caught my attention with Conor’s breaking, nearly out-of-control vocals and the subtle ostinato of the hammered dulcimer — an instrument one almost never hears in popular music — woven subtly into the mix. 

The other was The Electrics.

I’d started playing some traditional Irish with Robert Leahey and Steve Johnson several years previous, with some later encouragement from Brandi Midkiff. Robert and I even went so far as to build some our own pennywhistles out of PVC pipe and wooden dowels. (My hideously ugly low E was still in service until very recently.) But The Electrics took those traditional sounds and added electric guitars, drums, and a whole load of energy and enthusiasm. They were my first introduction to Irish rock, and I loved it. I forced the other passengers to listen to the entirety of their “Livin’ It Up When I Die” album twice more on the trip, and then Ben, ever a generous soul (or possibly wanting to avoid yet another listening session), gave me the disc to take with me. I wore it out.

Act II: 2017

Kris and I got married at the end of April and decided that, since her dear friends Beki Hemingway and Randy Kerkman were living in Wexford, and because it’s a beautiful place to which neither of us had even been, we would go to Ireland for our honeymoon. We took two weeks to tour the Emerald Isle, visiting the Giant’s Causeway, enjoying Guinness and Bulmer’s, seeing the ravages of The Troubles in Belfast, listening to traditional music, flying hawks in Cong, befriending sheep, and hiking through an enchanted forest adjacent to Ashford Castle.

We spent the first days of the trip, however, in Wexford with Randy & Beki. One evening as we were returning from a day trip, Beki asked “Should be stop by and see Sammy and Kylie? They’re married friends of ours, musical missionaries who perform together as a couple. They’re terrific people, and great musicians. You guys should meet them!” A few quick texts verified that they were at home and up for company, so we stopped by.

We pulled up, piled out, and knocked. Sammy immediately answered the door and gave us the warmest welcome imaginable, introducing us to Kylie and regaling us with tales of Ireland and sharing his store of Plopp, the unfortunately-named but delicious Swedish candy. After about thirty minutes of spirited conversation, in the midst of telling us about some of the work that he and Kylie are doing together, Sammy mentioned in passing “my old band.” Wanting to be an engaged guest, I politely asked when the next pause in the conversation came, “What was your old band?”

“The Electrics.”

“WHAT?!?”

“The Electrics. Have you heard of us?”

“You’re freaking KIDDING me. I LOVE The Electrics. You guys were my introduction to Irish rock, and my gateway drug to The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, and that whole Boston Celtic punk scene. Holy Plopp, that’s fantastic!”

I fanboyed continuously at Sammy for about 5 minutes, after which he very graciously wiped off my enthusiastic spittle and gave us, not only the remaining Plopp, but also the CDs of the The Electrics that I didn’t already have and a thumb drive with all of his and Kylie’s music. The discs were a delight, and became the soundtrack for the rest of our honeymoon, both because of the kindness and generosity they represented, and because they’re some darn fine tunes.

Act III: 2018

A few months ago, back in Texas, I saw that Randy had posted on Facebook: “Just finished co-writing a worship song with Sammy, and I’m pretty excited about it.” Because I’m a believer in the “show, don’t tell” principle of writing, and because I like to give Randy a hard time, I responded with something like “MP3s or it didn’t happen!”

Randy, very appropriately, ignored my jibe. But Sammy messaged me privately and said “Here’s the rough draft we worked on. Pretty jazzed about it!” I gave it a listen, and really dug it. “Great stuff!” I responded with a few details about the things I appreciated about the music and the songwriting. I wrapped up with “Hey, if you need a pennywhistle track, let me know!” (This was, of course, one of those situations where you actually mean it, but realize you’re being a bit pushy and obnoxious and pass it off as a bit of a joke to give the other person a graceful way out.)

Sammy, being a frightfully decent human being, responded with a diplomatic “Well, Tim from The Electrics is coming to record all of the Celtic instruments in a few weeks, but you can have a go if you want.” (Bear in mind that at this point, Sammy and I have never played together, so the possibly imaginary subtext I read here was “Ok, fanboy, settle down and let the grownups do their thing.”)

But I was still excited about the prospect, so I pulled out my Blu mic, stuck it on a stand in my closet among all of the clothes on their hangers to get the driest signal I could (science!), fired up Garage Band, and threw down a few whistle tracks, doing several takes to get them as polished as I was able. I had a grand time working out the parts and recording them, so figured even if Sammy wasn’t keen on them at all, it was still time well spent. 

A couple days later, I got a note back from Sammy. “Hey, there’s some good stuff in here. I think we might be able to use this!” (Possibly imaginary subtext: “Well, maybe you’re not a complete ninny fanboy! Well, not _just_ a complete ninny fanboy!”)

We went through another iteration or two as the song got rewritten a bit, but finally wrapped up that exchange with Sammy telling me “This is great stuff. You’re an honorary Electric!”

My forwarding address for several days was Cloud Nine. Not only had I gotten to meet one my major musical influences, but now through a phenomenally serendipitous series of events had actually gotten to collaborate on a musical project with him from across the ocean. What a treat!

So, if you’re curious about this track, go check out Sammy’s kickstarter for the upcoming 2 disc project Worship Like a Celt. He’s brought a large collection of musicians together to explore the ancient Celtic influence on spirituality and worship. Sammy’s been working terrifically hard to make this a really solid project (as have Kylie, Beki, and Randy), and I’m excited to finally hear the finished product. 

And if you’re ever an hour south of Dublin, you might stop by and say hello. Just don’t forget the Plopp.

Kids’ Day Out: 2011(ish) Edition

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Each Summer, while the kids are out of school, I arrange a full day out with each of them. Sometimes that means taking a day off of work; on other occasions we squeeze it in on a Saturday. Regardless of when it is, it’s one of the things I look forward to a ton each year (and seems to be a highlight for the young people too).

This year, the first adventure was with Liam. Thanks to Kevin Huffaker, a friend of mine from the university who is not only an amazing polymath but also a tremendously generous guy, we were able to start our day with a SCUBA primer. Neither Liam nor I had ever been before. We both love being in the water, and found the experience utterly delightful. While the river was running low and water conditions turned cloudy pretty quickly as people upstream swam around, we had a great time learning how to control our buoyancy and seeing a bit of the river from a new vantage point.

From there, we treated Kevin to lunch at Valentino’s, Liam’s favorite pizza place in San Marcos, and then caught the then-current Harry Potter movie. A trip to the Blazer Tag center up in Austin was next, where he and I emerged 1st and 2nd in our game with 30 other people. (All those video games do pay off!) The center in Austin is one of the best arenas I’ve been to, and was a ton of fun. We finished off the day with a visit to the Nazi Pirate at Peter Pan mini golf, where I was able to salvage a bit of my honor after the thumping Liam gave me at laser tag.

Next up was my day out with Maggie. She loves nothing more than to be in the water, so Schlitterbahn has been the natural destination for us for many years. Repeatedly voted best waterpark in the country, it’s only 20 minutes away from our house, and is a much more agreeable experience than many amusement parks these days. (Free parking, bring your own picnic, and new stuff every year.) We were a bit disappointed to see that Family Blaster, a ride that uses high-powered jets of water to shoot a raft containing up to 6 people up a hill, had been retired, but we did spend a delightful day climbing on floating crocodiles, navigating our tubes down 20-minute long tube chutes, and slipping down slides. We even invented a word game while we were waiting in line that’s become a standard in-car activity for our family.

I took Abigail out next. Our first stop was Tacodeli, a vegetarian-friendly taco joint that’s both delicious and a quintessentially Austin experience. After that, we wandered Barton Creek mall for a bit, and then went to see Cowboys & Aliens, which I’d been looking forward to since seeing the first preview. Our next stop was Mozart’s, a wonderful coffee shop on the banks of Town Lake. We got tasty beverages, I introduced Abby to cannoli (one of my favorite treats), and we both pulled out guitars and played and sang together down by the water while the turtles looked on appreciatively. When our fingers tired, we moved on to Pinballz (the best arcade I’ve ever visited) and played Addams Family, Twilight Zone, and other pinball classics. Our last stop for the day was at the Alamo Drafthouse for Abby’s first Master Pancake Theater show: Twilight! She was a fan of the books, and had been disappointed by the first movie, so I figured a lampooning would be the ideal way to enjoy the second. She agreed.

In addition to the goal of simply having a grand time, I also set Abby and I the task of both taking lots of photos along the way, and picking out our favorites along the way to edit and post on Facebook as a record of our day together. Here are the 8 shots we deemed best.

Unfortunately, I had a dreadful time coordinating Emily’s and my calendars, but in March of the next year, we finally managed to find a day we both had open. After hearing of Liam’s mini-adventure, Emily was keen to try SCUBA as well, so we rounded up Kevin again and my friend Jason and set off for a larger-scale run: near the headwaters of the San Marcos River down to the whitewater course at the other end of town. Since we’d finally had some rain after a tremendous drought, the water was running clear and fast, and we had beautiful visibility as we swam under waterfalls, through valleys of endangered Texas Wild Rice, and past a variety of water creatures. Emily filled a bag with treasures she found in the water, and I reveled in the opportunity to see the river as we never had before.

After our swim, we regrouped at the house while eating big Subway sandwiches, and then Emily and I went north for her first Master Pancake Theater show: Back to the Future. The lads did a terrific job with it, and we had a great time eating, drinking, and laughing our heads off. We even got the surprise treat of getting to overhear some of a Young the Giant show as we walked past — a favorite of Emily’s that she hadn’t even known was playing that night.

I had a terrific time getting to enjoy each of our kiddos individually, and treat them to some unique experiences they all enjoyed. Thanks, squirrels, for the great time. Now, let’s get cracking and plan this year’s adventures!