So last night after work I was a whirlwind. On the way home I stopped at AutoZone for oil change supplies, Lucky’s Market for CBD oil and Dunkin Donuts for a coffee. The first order of business when I got home was throwing my clothes in the washer. The careless DD worker pushed down my coffee lid when handing it to me. The end result was me getting a coffee shower all over my pants.
I then fed Elsa, went out and did my evening chicken chores and then jumped on the tractor. My goal was to mow the part of the yard that I missed due to the monsoon that blew in Sunday afternoon. There was still standing water in some of the areas I needed to mow but I determined I should still be able to plow through them swamp buggy style. After about 45 minutes of mowing the grass was once again evenly manicured.
Once I headed back inside I got two 3D prints started and packed up another 3D EUC stand to be shipped out. It was quite the productive two hours for a Tuesday night.
Today I threw my One Wheel and Meepo in the trunk of the Prius. After work I want to take a little joyride around Sugden park nearby. I think the twisting path that circles the grounds will be a fun course for both devices to roll on.
How many high ranking Trump campaign associates/employees now are convicted felons? I’m losing track. Expected repercussions? None.
So you may recall several times in the past I have dipped my toe into podcasting. If you actually listened to any of them you know they weren’t great. I think it is very tough to do that sort of content solo. However with the advent of the EUC live stream show I am doing with Marty, the idea once again popped into my head that it would make for some good podcast content.
So I extracted the MP4 files from YouTube, converted them to MP3 format and posted a podcast RSS feed pointing to them. I listened back to one of them in the car yesterday and it converts well to an audio only experience. It will be interesting to see how it is received. If you are interested in adding it to your Podcast player simply use this RSS feed – https://eucarmy.com/feed/podcast/
I also got around to recording my 4000 YouTube Subscriber thank you video, something I wanted to do for a week or so. It’s a short, simple video that expresses my gratitude for the support I have been given which has resulted in a 33% increase in subscribers in the last 6 months.
I also shot another quick video talking about my One Wheel being out of commission until a replacement front footpad sensor is sent to me.
Luckily I have a new vehicle rolling into the collection today. My Meepo electric skateboard is supposed to show up today which should be yet another learning experience. I am hoping Cindy and I get to test it out at the school after work.
So once again Florida is in the middle of a red tide nightmare. This happens all the time and is the end result of environmental abuse, lobbyist dollars, and the government officials beholden to those dollars. The Cliff Notes version is Lake Okeechobee in the middle of Florida is hopelessly polluted from fertilizer run off, much of which is from US Sugar operations. In the past water from the lake was able to be naturally filtered as it flowed south through the Everglades.
Well development and US Sugar operations changed all that. The majority of that run off is now artificially routed east and west through two rivers, bypassing that natural filtration system. The end result has been horrid and toxic algae blooms that turn the water, green, then red, and then black with the corpses of dead fish and marine life.
It’s outrageous that this has been allowed to go on for so long but as in most things, lobbyist dollars have the ability to outlast people’s outrage. You can read a full account of the situation here.
So I have been patiently waiting for my KingSong 18L EUC to arrive for several months. The wheel literally was on a slow boat from China until it landed in California late last week. From there it was handed off to FedEx ground for delivery to Southwest Florida. The wheel had a delivery date scheduled for yesterday, August 2nd. As I was tracking it’s progress across the country I was getting excited as I saw it actually had already crossed into Florida on Sunday. Wow, maybe I’ll actually get it a couple days early?? Well things have definitely not gone as I hoped.
After crossing the Florida border, for some reason it took a full day to get to central Florida where it arrived just after midnight, early Tuesday morning. Normally once something hits central Florida we will get it the next day. Well not in this case, the box instead sat in Central Florida until Wednesday evening where it finally got a departure scan at the Orlando distribution center.
When I woke up Thursday morning I expected to see an arrival and departure scan at the Fort Myers facility with a “on truck for delivery” status. Nope, the status had not changed since the previous night, great…. So I went throughout the day checking the status and seeing the same aggravating lack of new information. I held out hope that maybe they just missed a scan somehow and the box was actually on a truck and headed my way. Well of course you can guess that did not happen.
So last night I called FedEx and asked what was going on. Of course the phone rep is looking at the same information I was and had no explanation when I pointed out the incredibly slow movement of the box once it hit Florida. The best they could do was open up a “tracing case”. I had someone from that department call me up and ask for details about the contents of the box. Again when I asked why this would happen the only guess she came up with was maybe the label came off the package. Yea, thanks, I’m sure that’s it….
I am hoping that the box was not either damaged or stolen but that would be just my luck. I will be rattling some chains at FedEx big time today, you can bet on that.
I expected to be spending last night unboxing and trying out the new wheel. Instead I used a good portion of the evening plowing through my book. When I turned off the light before bed I only had a chapter or two to go. This weekend I hoped to get a ton of KingSong riding/testing in. I may still get a lot of riding in but it may be on my OneWheel instead. Of course there is stuff to do around the house, a variable constant.
I hoped the rain would hold off for one more day so the wet spots would shrink enough that I could quickly mow them down. Instead the house got smashed with rain during the afternoon, putting those plans to rest. I did manage to go out on my One Wheel for a bit after dinner. I just went up and down a side street practicing carving, where you S back and forth while traversing a straight path.
I do a variation of this while riding EUCs but on a One Wheel you engage your lower body much more to accomplish the same thing. There is no doubt at this point that riding a One Wheel offers more of a workout than an EUC. I had a fun three or four mile ride which put me up to a grand total of 32 miles on the odometer.
I, like most of the free world had an open mouth as I reviewed the events that happened at Trump’s meeting with Putin. Using one of Donald’s favorite words, it was incredible. In a nutshell Trump dismissed the universally agreed upon conclusion by all divisions of US intelligence that Russia unlawfully tampered with the 2016 presidential election. He said the Vladimir said he didn’t do it so that was good enough for him, I guess. It was outrageous, embarrassing, insulting, and unfortunately par for the course for the man that has made a mockery of the US worldwide, repeatedly.
Will there be any significant repercussions for him after simply the latest of a countless string of ridiculous statements and actions that have been the keystone of his time in office? Probably not. The pattern is maddening. Trump does/says something that draws intense backlash and harsh words, often from both sides of party lines but the end result is NOTHING happens. It’s a great thing that our president is teaching the young people of today that there is truly no penalty for bad behavior. Grab vaginas, get standing ovations from bigots, have a vocabulary of 13 words, take from the poor to stuff the pockets of the rich, it doesn’t matter. If nobody is willing to take meaningful action, all the “stern criticism” means absolutely zero. I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime and hopefully I never will again.
If you were a Trump voter and still feel good about that decision you aren’t just drinking the Kool Aid, you have an IV drip inserted round the clock.
So I had a rough plan on how my 4th of July was going to go. I wanted to bust ass in the morning getting ALL of the property weed whacked and mowed. The rest of the day would then be available to do fun stuff like practice riding the One Wheel. Unfortunately ever since we got Elsa, fireworks are no longer part of our celebration plans. Leaving her alone while we went to go see fireworks somewhere would be absolutely terrifying for Elsa, as homegrown fireworks in our area would be going off constantly. Just the sound of a single blast is enough to start her shaking in fear.
So anyway after taking care of the chicken maintenance and eating breakfast I headed outside to do battle with the yard. As I was sweating profusely, getting caked with grass clippings, I thought to myself how it has been nice that we are into July and still have not had that awful prolonged standing water that Cindy and I loathe. I worked close to four hours outside until handing off the tractor duties to Cindy who mowed the back half of the yard. When she finished up we both commented on just how awesome everything looked.
When I came inside I had to deal with work stuff. On Tuesday we had a minor disaster when our main data circuit to our remote offices failed, on the second day of our new cloud based back end system. I spent the entire day Tuesday scrambling to come up with workarounds to address it, which I finally did. The circuit was repaired on Wednesday so I had to undo the workarounds I had put in place.
So mid-afternoon I was ready to resume my One Wheel practice outdoors. The only riding I had done was in the main living space which is dangerous for both me and the contents of the house, as I proved later. So just as I was gearing up to go outside it started to rain. Ok, I figured it would be a quick hitting downpour so I ungeared and fired up WoW for a bit. Well instead of letting up a full fledged monsoon blew in. We had horrible, pounding rain with high winds for a couple hours.
Remember what I said about how nice it was that we did not have Noah’s Ark type flooding on the property so far this summer? Well you can scratch that. The yard quickly transformed into a bog after the storm. I was glad we got all the mowing done but immediately frustrated that the yard, that looked nearly perfect a few hours prior was now littered with ponds.
So anyway, my only option if I wanted to practice the One Wheel was to do it indoors once again. I felt better and more confident than my initial experience Monday night. In goofy foot stance I didn’t have nearly the same amount of shaking as before and I was able to mount and dismount without holding anything. I had the GoPro running when I was demonstrating my adeptness at dismounting when this happened.
The impact of the wheel against the TV cabinet left a nice black plastic mark on the one door. An earlier incident where the wheel again got away from me put a small crack on the laminate side surface of the island. Obviously I should not be practicing indoors but I really wanted to at least do something to help my learning curve progress. The fall above also took another hunk of skin off, this time on my right ankle. Despite the mishaps I kept plugging away. Before I called it quits I was rolling back and forth from the front door to the the rear slider pretty smoothly. I even managed to do a loop around the kitchen island without grabbing anything for additional support.
So in a strange way I wish the rain would have continued as night arrived. The reason is it would hopefully quell the home fireworks that so many people in our area find so enjoyable. My attitude on fireworks is one of many things that have done a total 180 over the years. I used to think they were incredibly cool and exciting. Now, especially now with how terrified they make Elsa, I look on them with disdain. If I am being honest, I now feel somewhat negatively of people that feel the need to put on their own personal fireworks show because of their lack of thought/concern on how it affects others around them. Unfortunately the house next door was one of these people.
Because of the proximity the noise really scared Elsa, she was huddled under my desk most of the night. I played WoW, the sounds of the game, which she is very used to helped drown out some of the explosions around us. I realized that it was 4th of July, people are going to shoot off fireworks. Complaining about it is like complaining the sky is blue, it’s just the way it is.
However as we laid in bed, sometime after 11 we heard some additional loud fireworks going off next door. I believe there is some sort of noise ordinance that requires loud noises to cease at 11PM. Ordinance or not, common sense should dictate that firing off fireworks that late on a weeknight was out of line, inconsiderate, and irresponsible. The noise not only scared Elsa but shook me from my drifting to sleep stage. Cindy shot up and went outside to see if she she caught them doing it and would verbally warn them for doing so. Fortunately there was no more explosions. If there were, I had already laid out the mental plan for throwing on a pair of shorts, my boots and stomping across the soggy yard and requesting a cessation to the behavior in a undeniably unfriendly manner.
I finally managed to fall asleep and got up this morning feeling groggy, sore, and annoyed, what’s new….
So after I shot the aerial video for the Wear Orange event on Saturday I uploaded the edited footage to the groups Facebook page. In order to make the video easier to share I also uploaded it to my YouTube page so the group could link from there. Well within the first 20 minutes I got a comment on the video referring to “libtards”, so I disabled commenting on the video. When I woke up the following morning I saw the video had a 3-1 dislike to like ratio which was sickening. Do we really live in a world where people DISLIKE movements to curb gun violence?
The Wear Orange movement supports the second amendment. Their goal is sensible gun laws that reduce the threat of gun violence in the US which is at insane levels compared to the rest of modern society across the world. (on average 96 people per day are killed in the US by guns) But all it took was anything with the word “gun” in it to flash trigger dislikes by gun zealots that see ANY attempt to enact reasonable gun laws to the government knocking on their door to take their aresnal. It’s pure lunacy.
I was very disappointed and saddened by the reaction to the video and decided to make it a non-public listing that can still be shared but won’t be listed in the normal video list of my channel. The last thing I have the energy for is circular debates with gun zealots that refuse to acknowledge that reasonable, common sense gun laws are something the majority of people in the US want and support. Unfortunately the lobbyist dollars from organizations like the NRA drown that voice out.
There is a LOT of construction in southwest Florida over the last few years. As you can imagine new housing is what you see the most of but a close second is something you might not realize, storage facilities. There have been an INCREDIBLE amount of high end storage facilities built in the last decade. We are talking air conditioned, indoor storage in structures that look like office buildings. I have to ask myself the question, why?
To me, the main reason someone would need additional storage is if they were in between living situations. Maybe they had a house and are temporarily living in a condo or an apartment. For instance when I lived up north, we sold the townhouse almost a year before moving to Florida. We spent that time living at my mom’s and all of our stuff went into a storage facility up there.
I have to wonder how so many people have such a need for additional storage in this area. The first thing that comes to mind is it’s just a byproduct of rampant consumerism that plagues modern society. People just have stuff, so much so that their living space can not accommodate it all. To me the simple answer would be to have less things. If the items can afford to be in storage for months or years at a time there is a good chance you don’t really need them.
You would be hard pressed to travel a mile and not run into a storage building. I doubt this trend will ever end but it’s fun to complain about regardless. That’s what old men do anyway, right?
So the Eagles are all over the headlines today but not for anything they are doing on the field. As is tradition the Super Bowl winning team was invited to the White House to meet with Donald. Well it appears that the President is not well liked by members of the team, so much so that I heard that less than 5 players planned to actually attend. Rather than suffer the embarrassment of a skeleton crew, the president called off the ceremony and in typical fashion lashed out on Twitter, following his normal routine of throwing out half truths along with outright lies. The president wrongly made this about standing for the national anthem, which all Eagles players did last season.
“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow. They disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country,” Trump said in a statement.
So is Donald now saying Eagles players don’t respect and honor the military because they don’t want to shake a hand of a president they don’t respect? As usual there is a disconnection of logic in Donald’s thinking where the number one priority is somehow spinning it into a positive for himself, regardless of how much mud he has rolled around in.
I think it is cool that the team for the most part is doing it different, just like they did all last season. The easy choice would have been to just not make waves and put on a song and dance for the press and Don at the White House. Instead they decided to stand by their morals and beliefs, choosing to not participate in the three ring circus which is now going on in Washington DC. Bravo.
Yesterday a pile of metal showed up in the front yard, the new roofing material had arrived! The work is scheduled to begin next week but if the timeline I was told is true, the metal won’t actually be secured to the roof for at least a couple weeks due to inspections having to be done by the county once the old roofing is stripped and the new underlayment is put down. Either way it’s exciting to finally be taking the first steps to “untarping” our home.
I have been dealing with a situation that in some ways reminds me of my prosecution by the National Park Service via YouTube for flying a drone in Yellowstone a few years back. I can’t say much else but rest assured I will have plenty to say in the future about it.
Last night I was doing some 3D printing, including this ornate sugar skull model. I printed it on the AnyCubic i3 Mega which has become the favorite of the five printers I own. It just works and I love the control panel as well as the build surface which holds prints on tight when warm but allows them to pop off effortlessly when cool.
So I read that the military parade that Donald so badly wants, you know the type you see in North Korea and Russia, is actually going to happen. It just seems like such a monumental waste of time, money and resources to serve no practical purpose other than stroking Donald’s immense ego.
There is a reason there hasn’t been a military parade in something like 25 years, they make no sense. Of course not making sense is a staple of this administration so I guess maybe, this makes sense? F it.
Ok before I start recanting the nasty details of my first ever colonoscopy let me say upfront that combining a colonscopy prep routine while you are in the middle of battling an unpleasant cold is not recommended. Even now, 6 hours clear of the procedure I feel terrible with no energy and chills.
So the first part of the prep on Thursday has to do with what you are consuming which is basically liquid items with some jello mixed in. I thought the food restriction would be a real PIA but maybe because of my cold, I didn’t really miss it. In fact I only ate about half of what Cindy packed for me. Maybe the other reason is vegetable broth is very bland and unappealing.
So I was feeling pretty rotten most of the day, mostly from the cold. I wound up leaving the office a couple hours early so I could be in misery at home. When I got home I still didn’t eat anything else, I just had no appetite. Cindy was teaching a class Thursday night so I got to initiate the consumption of my first dose of Suprep by myself which was a good thing.
You take the contents of the bottle and pour it into a cup. You then fill the cup to a 16 ounce fill line with water. After you get it down you have to consume another 32 ounces of water within an hour.
So before I took my first swig I smelled the solution and it didn’t seem that bad, sort of resembling cough medicine. I didn’t expect this to be a huge deal so I set my cup by my PC and continued playing WoW. Well when I took the first sip I instantly started gagging, despite trying to hold my breath. It was so bad. It doesn’t taste at all as it smells, the worst part of it being the strong saltiness you get smacked in the face with. All of a sudden I realized this was going to be more difficult that I anticipated.
It probably took me about 10 minutes to choke it down, disgusting sip after sip. I could not believe just how bad it tasted, likely the worst tasting thing that has ever been in my mouth. After finishing the last of it I wasted no time drinking the additional water, I was desperately trying to erase the Suprep taste from my mouth.
So the fireworks began in roughly a half hour. They went on forever with me not finishing up my last bathroom trip until after 9:30. Cindy tried to console me as much as she could but I was just miserable and exhausted. I laid on the love seat most of the night like I was in a coma. I just had no energy at all. The idea of setting the alarm at 5AM to do another round of Suprep was on my mind heavily. It was much worse anxiety this time because I knew just how awful it was.
I fell asleep pretty quickly but then found myself awake around 2AM for some reason, it took me around an hour to fall back asleep, contributing to the exhaustion I was already feeling. When the alarm went off I didn’t waste much time, knowing the prep needed to be completed sooner rather than later. I decided to pull the GoPro out so the world could see the joy of choking down Suprep. I hoped I could shotgun it faster this time to end the misery but it still took at least a half dozen, gag filled swallows until I got it down. It was simply miserable.
So when I finally got the last swallow down I quickly drank the additional water to rinse out the taste as much as possible. Just like last night, about 30 minutes later the bathroom trips began but they eventually turned into nothing but clear yellow fluid. The force and amount of substance that Suprep causes again was something I never had experienced before. While I was waiting for it to flow through my body I again passed out on the sofas, feeling unable to do anything that required me to be upright. I spent the time watching the US gold medal curling match that I had on the DVR. To be honest, even now, punching in this blog entry feels like a lot of work. I would rather be laying down. Chills and exhaustion cut me off at the knees.
So again the bathroom trips lingered longer than I hoped. I even had to do one more pitstop and the endo center. Cindy drove me there and it was a good thing. I reclined in the passenger seat with my eyes closed most of the time. Once we got to the office I was surrounded by people that almost exclusively looked two decades older than me. I just wanted it all to be over with. Even though I knew I was in the home stretch I just felt too lousy to care.
So they took me back to the staging area. I stripped naked and put on the covers next to nothing hospital gown. As I got my IV inserted, the nurse was trying to engage me in conversations but I was too tired to say much more than a few words. I laid there with my eyes closed until the the anesthesia nurse came in. She rolled me back to the procedure room where loud rock n roll was playing. My endo doctor is a very laid back, and cool dude.
So I was instructed to lay on my left side. Once the sleep juice started flowing I was out in what felt like less than 30 seconds. The next thing I remembered was a nurse talking to me in the recovery room and Cindy walking towards me, looking relieved. It felt good to be awake. I was not thrilled however when the nurse said they did cut out a polyp but that isn’t that unusual. When the doc showed up the picture was a little less great. He said the polyp was half decent in size and this is exactly why proactive screenings are a great idea. They have to send out the polyp for testing but he said that I really should be looking at getting a colonoscopy every three years instead of the ten that is normal if they find nothing. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all based on what I just had been through but hey I’m ok for now.
After the procedure Cindy took me to Burgerfi, a place I never checked out. I had a veggie quinoa burger that was great. It felt good to get some real food in my system. I felt like I was pepping up while eating but once we got home I was back to feeling simply exhausted. I laid in bed and closed my eyes for a couple hours. Like I said, even now I just feel wasted. I am hoping a solid night of sleep will begin to lift this fog of illness and food deprivation. It’s weird, even after eating lunch I have no appetite, I’ve just been drinking water all afternoon.
So there you have it, I survived the colonoscopy. I hope my test results are favorable because having to repeat that process three times a decade would suck, badly.
I hope my energy level returns so we can have a psuedo normal weekend. Right now any chore that pops into my head gets immediately dismissed as requiring too much energy.
