The Beastwood Files: August 2025

Summer vacation is officially over. The Beastwoods have returned from a week in Portland, Maine and Acadia National Park, which came just a few days after our inaugural camping trip that wasn’t in Granny and Papa’s backyard. Both trips were indeed a success. Kiddo’s back in school and Mom and Dad are back to work. The cat, meanwhile, celebrated her 17th birthday with quite possibly the best gift we could have given her: A quiet, empty house.

Stuff I Wrote

• HealthTech Magazine: SSE Capabilities: What Healthcare Organizations Need to Know
• SearchDataBackup: Enterprise data governance: Frameworks and best practices
• SearchDataBackup: 12 enterprise data backup challenges and how to overcome them
• Custom content for clients in digital health, healthcare data management, mobile device management, and more

Things I Read

I neglected to bring a book on vacation, assuming incorrectly I’d not have the energy to read after bedtime. As my wife likes to say, “We all make choices.” Instead, I treated myself to a few Wikipedia rabbit holes. What did I learn?

• The northernmost point in Maine, Estcourt Station, is basically a sliver of a town in Quebec that was cut off when the international boundary was properly surveyed. The border crossing closes at 5 p.m. on Friday; after that, if you want to go to the “other” side of town before Monday morning, you apparently need to drive on hundreds of miles of gravel logging roads through the North Maine Woods. Plan accordingly.
• Acadia is on Mount Desert Island, which is the second-largest island on the Eastern seaboard (to Long Island). It’s just a big bigger than Martha’s Vineyard, which is in Dukes County, Massachusetts. The county includes the Elizabeth Islands – most of which are owned by the Forbes family.
• The largest park in the Lower 48 is actually a state park, Adirondack Park in upstate New York. It apparently has more than 100 villages inside it, as more than half the park is actually private owned. Most villages lack cellphone coverage. (The park’s actually held up as a good example of public-private partnership for the sake of conservation.)

Adventures in Fatherhood

• To answer a question I posed on LinkedIn, I believe we have determined that Vermont (Ben & Jerry’s) has the best ice cream in Northern New England – or at least the most recognizable. That said, we did find a Friendly’s in South Portland. Everyone in the family enjoyed the nostalgia, though my son was a bit confused about why his sundae had a face.
• Every once in a while, I talk to my son about Very Dad Things to Do. One is turning off all the lights before we leave the house. Another is telling a Dad Story, which is a lot like a Dad Joke in the sense that it’s not very interesting. On this vacation, the Very Dad Thing to Do to which I introduced my son was getting a giant wad of napkins from McDonald’s, putting them in the glove compartment of the car, and then forgetting all about them.
• If you’re ever in Waterville, Maine, and it’s not Monday or Tuesday, stop by the Children’s Discovery Museum. I only learned of its existence while perusing Google Maps from the aforementioned nearby McDonald’s during our 10:15 lunch stop, and we ended up spending two and a half hours there. Highlights included the “pizza oven,” the “rooftop garden,” and the $2 globe stress ball that we may or may not have misplaced since we got home.