Dang! It's been a whole year since I last posted... time feels like it's flying by faster and faster (I always say that, but it's still true)! Here's a quick rundown of some highlights from the last year:

When last I left you, I had built a couch bed upstairs. Little did I realize that the final step, adding drawers, would be as difficult as the rest of the project combined! They're not perfect, but not bad for my first cabinetry experiment!

I had previously posted about installing "french cleats" in my garage as a modular shelving/storage system... well I decided to install some upstairs too, in our kid's loft space... best of all I made a custom cleat to go on the back of our TV so it can hang off the wall. The long-term idea is to have a hand-made entertainment center that hangs off the cleats too and all the wires/wall plugs 100% hidden. I had to do some re-locating/re-wiring of some stuff in the wall to prep for this and it was kinda scary. I also learned how to patch up all the holes in the drywall afterward... 😅

This last year had unprecedented rainfall in CA, so the wildflower blooming season was especially impressive. We found a good place to go see the "super bloom."

In October we took a trip to Porto, Portugal to go see the newest Axe Throwing venue we're opening. As you may remember I developed a "game system" for the projected axe throwing targets. We saw lots of sites and I even pretended to "help" at the under-construction store!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d_Re_uIMP1E

A couple news outlets ran pieces on the club in Lisbon, Portugal:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YeG1uosFUnQ

My son DM'd a pretty epic round of Dungeons & Dragons that we played on Sunday nights for a while:

@Luis and I reunited for the Flash Forward Game Jam to continue our expansion of the "Portal Defenders" AU with a game genre I've been wanting to mess around with for a while: Basketball!

Sports games are a tough nut to crack... I feel like we captured a lot of the fun of NBA Jam, with some interesting twists and turns (especially with environmental hazards), and it gave me a chance to prove out my Ruffle Plugin for game controllers. There are some things I'd def do differently if we were to revisit this kind of game again, but it was a pretty fun experimental excursion! I recommend playing with a friend and 2 gamepads if you can manage it!

Play Portal Defenders: Fast Break here:

Oh, and we won the FF Jam! Wooooo!

In other game-related news, I've got 4 games in the Newgrounds "Legendary Games" section. I must admit, this makes me feel pretty good! Thank you so much @TomFulp for your continued support over the... decades?!!!??

The olive tree we planted a couple years ago had a huge harvest of olives... unfortunately we got to processing them late and most of them were wasted ☹️:

We inherited a GIANT box of Lego from a friend. One of my sons noticed that, on the TV show "Lego Masters" they have all their bricks organized by color... thus was born about 6 days worth of 6 people "color sorting" our Lego collection... this was some EXTREMELY TEDIOUS work, but the end result was pretty impressive:

My daughter is moving out of the house to go to college. Yep, the same daughter that voiced Chibi Knight and Super Chibi Knight. Kinda hard to believe she's that grown up. She's into writing, performing, mixing, and recording music and will be, eventually, going into an "Audio Engineering" program for her higher education. I'm proud of her for sharing her creativity and talents with the world! Here's her latest Bandcamp album:

https://bellefrog.bandcamp.com/album/lullaby-skies

And some of her music here on NG:

We took a trip down to El Paso to visit my Mother and on the way back stopped at the Grand Canyon. It's one of the few things I've seen that really lives up to the hype. It took my breath away!

We had some Portuguese friends out to the US for a business meeting and took them out for a "true American experience" ... shooting 25 lbs. of "Tannerite" (an explosive for rifle target shooting)... it was INSANE:

Last, but not least, the same people I've been helping with the Axe Club decided to start a business here in the US... a lawn care/landscaping business called "eLawns" - https://elawns.green The idea is that everything is 100% battery powered, even the vehicles we drive.

I'm helping with the branding/marketing and website/back-office software. Hopefully something good comes of it!

Here's our website intro vid I helped create:

I'm sure I missed a bunch of stuff, but this will have to do for now. I'll try not to go another year without an update!

--Nick

P.S.

I'm currently reading "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson... pretty EPIC so far!

Fitness wise, I have a long row to hoe, but I've been enjoying tennis... unfortunately I rolled my ankle this morning pretty bad... sucks to have a setback, but hoping to be back on the court soon.