The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey October 24, 2025

15 October 2025 - A Very Sad Day

Marcia Lee Bilbrey (née Dykstra) passed away in Augusta, Maine, on October 15, 2025, at 7:20PM after a very short battle with infection and septic shock, with multiple prior health issues contributing. Marcia was born in Zeeland, Michigan to William and Clarice Dykstra on February 15, 1955. She lived and worked in the legal field as a commercial software contracts negotiator in several states across the USA, including Michigan, Texas, Ohio, California, and Maryland. In retirement, she took up machine quilting with a strong passion. In 2021, she moved north to Maine, for a quieter, more rural lifestyle. Over the…

Brian Bilbrey September 23, 2025

23 September 2025

New Phone I'm not one who needs the newest phone every year. I tend to go four to five years between refreshes. The improvements in hardware, and the software that takes advantage of that newer hardware have a much bigger impact over that time scale than the incremental speed/capability bumps that annual phone replacements bring. So this year I traded in my iPhone 13 for a 17. Not a pro, not a pro max, and certainly not an Air. But more storage and much more capable CPU as well as improved battery life make it a worthwhile update for me…

Brian Bilbrey September 21, 2025

21 September 2025

Meteorological Fall While tomorrow is the advent of astronomical Fall, meteorological Fall started on September 1 ... and overnight last night we had our first low temp in the 30's (F). That brings the temps in the house low enough that it was also the first night that our pellet stove kicked on in the wee hours - this is the primary heat source for the main floor of our house: We have backups in the form of baseboard heating driven by a fuel oil furnace, and a small mini-split heat pump mounted on the wall in the living room.

Brian Bilbrey September 18, 2025

18 September 2025

An Apology Y'all. I seriously intended to do more updates this year. As in, many more updates. But for reasons that will become slightly clearer, there's been neither the time nor energy for keeping up appearances. Several of you have dropped me an email or some other form of communication to check in, and I appreciate that from the bottom of my heart. Since May of 2025, Marcia's been beset by several sequential significant health challenges. If she chooses to do so at some future date, there may be more details here or on her site. While things are stable…

Brian Bilbrey June 13, 2025

13 June 2025

Happy Friday the Thirteenth Yeah, it's been a while. Theoretically it is almost summer up here. But Spring was, quite literally, a wash-out. So, so much rain. Good thing for coming out of a drought, good thing for everything being green. But I got the boat out of storage on May 1, with the intention of getting it on the lake ... and it started raining. And kept raining. Water came up enough that even though the dock was in, we had to pull all the dock boards off before they floated away. Eventually they let water out of the…