Breck Blog 2025

Today we launch… Comments! So I figured I’d take the chance to self indulge and talk about how the blog is built.

The technical approach of this blog has been evolving. For the first few posts, I exported the PDF from the Notion and sent it to a few friends as a text message.

A website seemed nice, so I switched to using Hugo. Every day this past week I’ve been generating the static Hugo files locally, then uploading all of the static files to AWS S3, and then redeploying an AWS Amplify instance (Amazon’s competitor to Mitch’s Static Web Apps) pointing at the S3 location.

At 2300 last night, 11 people were arrested for crimes related to the death of Joe Markham near Harmony Cove. One Anson Hardnasty is currently being held for accidental manslaughter, but in spite of a confession from Hardnasty, the police are choosing to continue holding all parties involved.

“This is the most suspicious group of people I’ve ever seen,” says Police Chief McGarrett. “When we showed up last night, about 6 people were carrying deadly weapons, and one Max Hertnett was laying unconscious next to an unused med kit. People were just walking over him as if they didn’t care. For Max’s sake, it’s a good thing we got there when we did.”

What’s with the blog?

I’ve had a challenging year. A good year in many ways, I got married to an amazing woman. I got to spend a lot of time with my sister, something I won’t be able to do in the future. I got to spend a lot of time with my family and nephews, and today I even got another nephew, Charlie Altonji!

But the weight of Katy’s diagnosis took up a lot of my thoughts this year, and these past 5 months living in Chicago have been challenging, away from the support systems we’ve built in Seattle and out of the normalizing routines we’re used to.

Today we drove 40 mountain pass miles to Leadville, aka Pb, Colorado to buy outdoor gear from a rather exclusive outdoor brand. Was the drive worth it? Inarguably no, as the drive home was 2 hours of hands gripped on the steering wheel driving through slippery roads past snow banked cars. But the matching hoodies we bought are pretty dang sweet.

Melanzana is an outdoor clothing brand with a single shared factory and store front in an out of the way Colorado town. They employ 50 people, making fleece hoodies in “the highest incorporated city in the US.”

Lizzy and I love this annual ski trip, and we hope that it will survive into us all having kids. Lance and Alisa share this dream and have been single handedly making it happen, last year bringing 3 month old Skyler to Utah and this year bringing 15 month old Skyler to Breckenridge.

Baby Skyler, and his parents by extension, haven’t yet had the easiest of ski trips. The first challenge was getting here. Between the flight delay and the terrible road conditions on Loveland pass, Skyler was stuck awake and traveling for almost 12 hours. After a long travel day in, he went to Peak 8 Child Care but caught himself a bad case of the snowsies and has run a fever since.

Every year, Cousin James would fly in and join our annual ski trip for as much time as he could, often taking a bunk bed or a couch for a long weekend. Most of us have probably only spent a month total with James but to be honest it feels like a lot more.

Alex: “He was one of those dudes that you just kind of fall in with, like, you feel like you have history even though you don’t. And he remembered a lot really well. Like he’d ask you about people you talked about a year ago, that he’s never met.”

With 6-9 inches a day, we’ve hit the storm of the year. This snow is so good that we may all catch the snow sickness.

I found Colorado’s Cliff Mass (with less republican politics). His name is also two syllables, Joel Gratz. According to Joel, we’re expecting a short dry spell on Wednesday into the last storm of our trip on Thursday/Friday.

According to Snow totals reported by NOAA station USC00050909 (Breckenridge), at 26 inches since Thursday, we’re nearing records of total snow at Breckenridge for a 5 day window.

With the wee-baby Skyler (AKA SkyRizz, Rizzie, The Rizzler) in attendance this year, we’ve brought our official mean cabin age down to 26, making us all Gen Z on average.

So, given this unprecedented opportunity to become attune with the next generation, I’ve learned some new vocab that I’d like to throw at you while I describe the latest episode of SNL.

At 3 hours long, this episode of SNL was giving Greek orthodox wedding. WHEN!!! It had me so eepy.

Our previous houses