This year we had a February 29th. It’s nice to have an extra day 🙂

Yesterday was Jack’s wrestling sectionals in Vandalia. Jack and his teammates rode the bus down there Friday night as the school paid for the team to stay in hotels. Otherwise they would have had to leave at like 5AM Saturday. The wife, Elsa and I went to Springfield Friday night and picked up Laina. Then we went to Scheels so I could charge the car up to 98% while we at at Casa Real, whose apparently specialize in the finest Indian-Mexican dining around.

We got to the hotel with 67% battery remaining. This was good because it meant that we wouldn’t have to drive 30 miles out of the way to Effingham to charge there to get home. They’re building a charging station in Vandalia as I type but it wasn’t ready yet. I decided to leave Sentry on all night. We woke up and the battery was 63%, which is normal drain.

We were fearing for the worst for the hotel stay. It only had about 2 stars for review. One reviewer mentioned bed bugs. And there were going to be five of us staying on two queen beds. But luckily the beds were clean and comfortable. It was probably the best $80 I spent on a hotel stay.

Jack and I got up and ate breakfast with the team. Then they took off for the school. The family and I then went to get coffee and made our way to the school too.

Jack ended up falling just shy of making it to state. He lost his first match, had a bye for the second round, then won by forfeit. Then he wrestled a kid from Roxanne who had just won his last match 16-3. It didn’t look good for the first two rounds as Jack was on his stomach the whole time, trying to avoid being flipped over. This continued late into the third round. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Jack was able to flip the kid over and lay on top of him. Then the ref slapped the mat, signaling the pin, and us in the crowd went crazy! It was truly one of my happiest moments for Jack. He showed a lot of heart to be able to come back and win. And Jack was always gracious in defeat and victory. There was one kid we saw who threw a fit after winning, slapping away his opponent’s handshake and then yelling at the ref.

Jack lost his next match, for fourth place (alternate to State). He made so much progress and matured so much over the year. I’m so proud of him. We all are so proud of him.

The 3D printing continues unabated. It turned out to be more fun then I imagined. I turned our school’s Tiger logo into a 3D file. The lady who created the flat file sent me the vector file in .ai format. I was able to use Inkspace to export it as .svg. Then I exported that into Blender and started the long task of grouping all the vector meshes by color. Then I extruded the meshes to create depth. Since the printer only prints one color at a time I had to layer the different colors on top of each other. It took a long time to do but it was fun to have a little project like this that I could throw myself into. I was in the flow on Saturday night. Elsa stayed up with me until 1AM, playing her computer game. We listened to David Sanborn smooth jazz all night. It was fun! I was really proud of seeing the file come together because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do it in the first place. I also printed a bigfoot for RT, a shark for Robyn, and a Cardinals logo for building Nick’s nameplate.