The Family That Crafts Together

What started out as an impulsive addition to my son’s list of Christmas presents, has morphed into an addictive and all-consuming passion for crafting.  I’m of course talking about the insanely popular video game for the PC called Minecraft.  I must admit I didn’t fully grasp what the game was all about before I bought it. But after watching my son play it for a couple of hours (while I read the wiki and gave him pointers), I realized why the virtual world of the game is so compelling. I started having flashbacks to my college days, and the countless hours wasted in “deathmatches” in the early days of games like Doom and Duke Nukem.

But despite the similarities of its deliberately crude bitmaps, which give the graphics an odd retro feel, Minecraft is so much more than a first-person shooter. (In fact, we have chosen to play with the monsters turned off, and the game is no less compelling.) At its core, the game celebrates the creative rather than the destructive, and being able to easily mine the raw materials, and carry large quantities around with you, inspires no end of creativity. Want to build a castle on top of a mountain? That feat can be accomplished in an hour or two. And then it’s time to move onto the next challenge.

It is also, dare I say it, educational. It is a lesson in engineering, chemistry, and economics, disguised as a game. There are also some valuable moral lessons hidden there. For example, when my son decided he would loot one of the neighboring villages, and attack its inhabitants, the consequential hit to his own individual popularity meant that he could not trade with them when he later discovered that there were things he needed.

After just a few hours of solitary gameplay, I decided to up the ante a bit, and set up my own server so the two of us could play in a world that we could shape together. This is where the real addiction begins, as we collaborate on certain tasks, like planting a garden or raising livestock, while at the same time choosing our own projects to tackle, periodically sharing our progress with each other.

After a couple of days, a new rule emerged at the dinner table: no talk of Minecraft. Our incessant discussions of what we accomplished “in the mines” each day were leaving little sister (and mommy) feeling left out, and it wasn’t long before I was cobbling another PC together from spare parts, so the entire family could join in the fun.

Our daughter is just starting to read, and hasn’t had a need to write. Until now. We have been amazed at how well she is able to string together sentences when using the chat function to talk to rest of us playing in the next room or downstairs.

So, in the end, while this new hobby can be a bit obsessive at times, it does provide some unique opportunities for learning, and bonding as a family.

 Merry Christmas 2013

This is our eighth annual Pipes Family Christmas card! Can you believe it? We let the kids take over this year, and they want to wish you the merriest of Christmases and the happiest of New Years!

 Great Britain

We just got back from two weeks in Great Britain. We took a Trafalgar tour that took us from London, through southern England, northern Wales, the Lake District, and finally to Edinburgh, Scotland. We saw some amazing sights and some truly beautiful scenery. The weather was perfect and the people we met on tour were great. It was an awesome trip. Here is a short video showing some of the highlights. I also have a number of pictures in my photo album.

 Birthday Girl Grabs Magic Ticket

There’s only one magic ticket swirling around in the booth — and it’s worth 1,000 tickets — but Josie made it look easy, snatching it within seconds. She was so thrilled, and just as surprised as the rest of us!

 More Basement Woodworking

Earlier this year, I started building a cabinet in my basement on the wall opposite my new bar. As usual, I used Sketchup to draw up my plans, and I neglected to post these at the outset of the project. Sketchup is a powerful tool, and fairly easy to learn. Using it to create models of things you want to build is a great way to save time and money. If you take care to make precise measurements when you draw your model, you can use it to figure out the cost of materials, and later as a blueprint to verify your measurements are accurate. I am currently working on some new plans for a major project in 2013 — stay tuned for more on that.

I did post a couple of photos back in June when the cabinet was nearing completion, but I had to take a break for a few months to work on other things. Its main purpose was to replace the hideous drywall box the previous owners had built to hide the water meter on the wall. It now serves as some extra storage space, and a decorative place for Sir-Drinks-A-Lot to stand. I am happy to announce that the cabinet is now complete!

 Merry Christmas 2012

We hope you enjoy the seventh annual Pipes Family Christmas card! As we celebrate “The Year of the Chicken”, we all want to wish you the merriest of Christmases and a very happy New Year!

 CCD Barcode Scanner

Are you tired of spending hours manually entering book titles into your own personal database? (Well, okay, if you’re not a home-schooler, maybe you’re not, but work with me here.) If you’re like us, you spend a lot of time going to the library to pick out book for your kids, and, let’s say for the purposes of this discussion, you also spend a lot of time keeping track of the books they read in some sort of database. What if you could just scan the books, like they do in the library, and have them magically appear in your own database? Well now you can!

For about $20, and the time it takes you to download a spreadsheet, you can automate this entire process and free up your time for things you really want to do, like reading my blog! First, crank up that Prime membership and order this barcode scanner from Amazon. There are scanners that sell for hundreds of dollars, but you don’t necessarily need to spend that much. This scanner works very well, although you might find it a bit challenging to configure. You will get hours of entertainment trying to read the user’s manual (written in chinglish), but all you really need to change is the default interface to USB, and enable ISBN scanning.

Next, you will need to create a free account at ISBNdb.com, which is a database of virtually every book in the universe. Once you have your account set up, you will need to generate an access key. Once you have a key, write it down. You will need it in the next step.

Finally, download my spreadsheet containing a macro that I wrote that will take an ISBN as input (either from the barcode scanner or manually entered) and then automatically query the ISBNdb.com site and automatically fill in the book title and author. Enter your access key in the spreadsheet and start scanning! It couldn’t be easier!

Now if we could just get the library to deliver.

 Garden Irrigation Project

In late April, we had a pretty impressive hailstorm, which led to us getting a new roof and new gutters. The timing was somewhat fortunate, however, since I had already started putting together a system for catching rainwater that we could use on our garden. I found a 300-gallon plastic tote on Craigslist for $100, and had the gutter company reroute the gutters on the back of the house and combined three downspouts into one that drains into the tank. I really had no idea how long it would take to fill up, and I was astonished at our first hard rain when it took less than an hour for it to fill to overflowing. Now I wish I had bought more than one.

The next phase was intended to avoid the hassle of dragging a hose out to the garden to water it everyday. So instead I buried a “perma-hose” consisting of one hundred feet of 3/4″ PVC pipe from the house to the garden, with splitters on both ends. At the house, short pieces of hose connect both the rain tank and the faucet, so we can easily switch between them depending on whether or not the rain tank is empty. At the other end, another splitter means we can leave the soaker hose in the garden attached all the time, and still have an open faucet for watering our other plants. Because our yard slopes away from the house, the garden is about six feet below the level of the tank, so we have a pretty good head of pressure — not bad for only being gravity-fed.

Stay tuned for the final phase, which is to hook up a 55-gallon rain barrel on the upper patio that we can use to water our herb garden and some other potted plants.

 Bird Versus Bird

I’ve mentioned before how much we like all of the wildlife we see on our property, but yesterday it was the source of some dismay as we watched this Cooper’s hawk try to make our chickens into a breakfast buffet. It is times like these that I am glad I used hardware cloth on the coop. As they say, chicken wire keeps chickens in, but doesn’t keep predators out.

 The Boys of Summer

Two years ago, I took Noah to his first baseball game, and now he is playing coach-pitch himself. Here’s a quick video of a hit he got in his last game of the season. Dixie took some good photos too. We’re very proud of our little slugger.