Halloween is different this year. For one, unlike last year, Louie generally understands what Halloween is. And for two, we skipped the trick-and-treating and settled for driving around to look at other Halloween house decorations.

With the pandemic in full swing, we don’t go out unless we are confident we can stay away from other people — sad as that is.

We have to be creative. Sometimes we just go to a local school parking lot where Louie can ride his bike or kick a ball around.

After coming up on two years of not posting, it’s time to resurrect this site. For at least six months pixelsnwords.com wasn’t even operating due to a technical change relating to hosting that I didn’t follow up on. But I fixed the site today and can start posting again.

It was my birthday yesterday. Usually I have a clear plan of what I want to do for the day, but this year it was a little unscripted.

Kaori had planned a three-hour soba noodle making event for Louie as part of some traditional Japanese New Year preparations. I decided to join them instead of going on a morning hike, which is what I usually do on my birthday. It was just as well because I twisted my back lifting Louie the evening before.

It turns out I wasn’t happy with the video I made yesterday. I didn’t like the black bars across the top making the images smaller. So today I remade the video using Camtasia Studio.