Archives August 2020

Cindy has been working diligently over the last couple weeks converting the unproductive orchard into a big landscape feature.  I made the suggestion to her that if we added some 4 x 4’s we could hang the sun sail that we have in the shed to provide some shade.  Cindy loved the idea.  On Saturday we bought the wood and cement.  After I got done mowing the grass I jumped right into working on getting the posts mounted.

While I was mowing Cindy had been busy at work with the post hole digger, creating four two foot deep holes to sink the 10 foot long 4×4’s into.  Her doing that made my part of the job much easier.  I hoisted the posts into the holes and then backfilled with dirt and then concrete while Cindy held the post level.  We left the posts set overnight so the concrete could settle.

On Sunday the plan continued to evolve.  To add stability I screwed the base of the posts into the wooden 2×6 border around the orchard.  We then talked about how it would be cool to add cross supports between the two posts on each side to create sort of a pergola look.  We headed back to Lowes for the second time in as many days to get some 2x6x12 lumber.

The weather all weekend was melt your face hot but we just kept plugging away as we both donned our wide brim hats to provide at least some minimal relief.  I got done with my portion of the project about 4:30 Sunday afternoon.  We screwed in some eye hooks and strung up the solar shade.  It looked cool and provided a significant temperature drop when hanging out under there.  I think Cindy may be able to finish up the project this week.

After a weekend full of labor going on an EUC ride isn’t a great idea, at least for me as I was already feeling beat up before stepping on the wheel.  Even small bumps in the road sent bolts of pain into my lower body and back, it honestly was not a fun experience.  The biggest reason I wanted to ride was to test out my new Insta360 camera which shoots everything in a 360 field of view.  I was curious how it would look and how tedious it may be to edit my videos using this style of camera.

The footage came out cool, having the ability to spin the perspective around in whatever direction you desire is very powerful.  Unfortunately that power comes with a price, editing time.  The 17 minute video I made consumed 2-3 hours of editing time.  I had to first load all of the clips into the 360 software to set my camera angles.  Then I had to export all 25 of these clips into flat video files and then reload them into my normal video editor where I combine everything into one video.  To be quite honest, it’s tedious as hell which is what I was afraid of.  I will be researching to see if there is something I can do to reduce that editing time because I just can not be spending that much time to construct a video.  Take a look at the 360 effect below.

The list did not get completely crossed off yet, there are a couple items I will hopefully get to during the week.

Although I had not planned this during the day, when I got home last night I got on the Husqvarna to mow the back part of the property which gets done once a month or so during wet season.  The fact that it was currently not that wet made me eager to take advantage of the situation and get this weekend list item crossed off early. It takes less time to mow the back so I finished up slightly before the sun dropped below the horizon.

As I drove around the perimeter of the yard I was reminded how a number of the fence posts are starting to show pretty significant rot/decay where they meet the ground.  As I mowed I thought about various scenarios to replace them, weighing in the effort/cost with each possible solution.  I need to to do a test run of popping out a rotting post and putting a new one in it’s place to see how arduous it is.  The results of that test will affect my strategy going forward.

Yesterday I had my first dermatologist office visit since the pandemic began.  I was masked for all but 30 seconds of the visit where he cut off two chunks of skin on my back and neck for testing.  They are likely more basal cell cancer but surprisingly he suggested if they test positive he recommended I use the topical cream to dissolve the bad cells instead of his normal template of having me come in to get them scraped/burned.  My only guess was he was trying to cut back on the number of patients requiring office visits which is fine for me but surprising because it equates to less dollars in his pocket.

This weekend will likely follow the standard template of working in high heat and humidity with small breaks in between where hopefully enjoyable things can be enjoyed.

So Hurricane Laura, which was originally forecast to impact Florida instead smashed into the northern gulf overnight.  Having been through several hurricanes now I am familiar with the fear and anxiety a strong hurricane brings before it even arrives, the terrifying sound of 130mph winds battering your property, and the zombie-like state when you finally step outside to see the carnage the storm has left behind.  I’m curious if the storm surge numbers were the crazy 15-20 feet they predicted or not.  Residents of that area have a long road ahead of them.

I haven’t talked about the latest case of police violence on here.  To be quite honest the depth of my disgust of what American society has morphed into makes not even want to discuss it.  As everyone else, I saw the video of Blake trying to get into his vehicle while an officer was holding onto his shirt with one hand while having a gun drawn in his other hand.  My assumption was the officer for some reason thought Blake was reaching for a weapon, despite knowing he had multiple armed officers around him.  The end result was not one but seven shots being fired at point blank range into the guys back.

I’m surprised Blake survived but at this point he is paralyzed from the waist down from his injuries.  His shooting sparked a fresh wave of protests that had it’s own disgusting outcome when a 17 year old armed with an AR-15 shot three protestors, killing two of them.

I remember when I was younger thinking about atrocities throughout history and feeling relieved that we as human beings had evolved into more rational, intelligent, accepting, and peaceful individuals for the most part.  The new reality is the de-evolution of American society that has been fostered and cuddled by the most divisive president in US history.  When I try to recall just how many horrible, racist, ignorant, fraudulent, and flat out dangerous situations have come out of the self appointed Stable Genius’s mouth/actions, I lose count quickly.  Every single day he gives us something fresh to be ashamed of.

Last night after work I climbed back on the Echelon bike to do a half hour ride.  The class was designated as a “recovery ride” yet by the end of it I was still a sweaty mess and had burned over 300 calories.  I think I really have found my cardio replacement for running which doesn’t come with the same potential pain penalty in my knees, hips or lower back.

I seem to be in one of those patterns where I can’t find any free time to just sit down and veg out in WoW for awhile.  It feels like other things are always commanding my attention.  Hell as soon as I get up each morning my ritual has become immediately heading into the hobby room to feed the printers and address any issues that could have popped up overnight.  Sometimes as I am eating my breakfast at my desk I am packing up a stand for an order at the same time so I can get it turned around and shipped out asap.  I realize that all of the stuff that commands my attention are decisions I make.  Maybe I am just yearning for less decisions.

For the last few weeks our street has been getting these monster sized metal utility poles which will be replacing the conventional wood poles that are on the other side of the street, I assume.  The wood poles are not all that hurricane resistant as after Irma there were a bunch of poles leaning at steep angles.  Even so, usually massive poles like the new ones are normally relegated to major roadways, not side streets.  I’m not exactly thrilled with their addition from a visual standpoint but if the end result is more stable and reliable power in our area I am ok with it.

We did luck out in one way, we don’t actually have a pole on our property.  Both of our neighbors on either side were not quite as lucky as one of them got poled yesterday and by the time I get home today I expect a matching pole will be erected on the other side.  It’s amazing thinking how much things have changed in our area now.  When I first moved out there in 2001 we couldn’t even get cable TV.  Now the amount of homes off our street have at least doubled with more and more being started every month.

During my adult lifetime there have been somewhere around six presidents.  Obviously I have liked some more than others.  Some of the negative words I have used in the past were unflattering for sure, ignorant, idiotic, puppet, and dishonest were applicable to many of them at one point or another.  However I was thinking to myself that I never would of characterized any of them as a tyrant, not until present day that is.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like tyrant was the perfect word to describe Donald.  For him it is nothing new, if you read accounts of his business dealings throughout his lifetime, the word tyrant would be thrown about generously.  What is sad and surprising is how quickly the boot lickers in the Republican party embraced this lunacy.  I can only hope when karma comes around it smacks them in the face, hard.  Hell even Kelley Ann-Conway is jumping ship, whose lips have super glued to Donald’s rear end this entire time.  I can only hope that more people are seeing the writing on the wall and want to get out of the way before our rotund, big league leader comes crashing to the ground.

Since my left knee got injured running two months ago I have mentally crossed that off the list of viable cardio activities for myself for the foreseeable future.  I have been using Cindy’s Echelon cycling bike a few times to get my cardio in and I like it more than I expected.  When paired with the app which allows you to do both recorded and live rides lead by a trainer I find myself pushing myself to levels near my exertion level while running.  I also like the element of the live scoreboard which ranks your overall watt output to other people that have done the same ride.  Despite my overall lack of cycling experience I almost always manage to get myself into the top 20% of riders.

On Saturday I knocked out a good chunk of the to do list before setting up to do another live stream at a very odd time, 3PM.  The time selection was intentional as I was streaming with Ulf who lives in Germany which is six hours ahead of us on the clock.  He has a broad technical knowledge of EUCs and I was talking about streaming with him way back in 2018 but we never got our schedules coordinated.  The two hour plus stream went well, people really seemed to enjoy having a more technical viewpoint on the stream.

After the live stream I was right back outside, this time modifying the chicken perch in reaction to us losing ANOTHER hen from a fall off the perch.  At this point we lost three or four hens this way, they lose their balance for some reason and break their neck during the fall.  When I was thinking about these scenarios, every time it occurred the hens were on the left edge of the perch, where the small round dowel is, that we now know is not well suited for chicken perching.

The first thing I did was rip the round dowels from either side of the perch.  On the one side I put a 2×4 with the wide side up to give them a nice flat surface to perch on.  On the other side I left the 2×4 which is on it’s side so it would be smaller if the hens preferred it but still flat so they could maintain balance easier.  The other change was I added two more 2x 4 to fill in space between the perches .  When we watched the video from Dot’s fall she lost balance on the round dowel and then fell back towards the middle of the perch.  When she fell it looked like her head hit one of the perches on the way down which likely broke her neck.  With the additional cross supports a chicken should not be able to fall through that spot which hopefully will prevent a similar scenario from happening again.

Saturday night Cindy and I watched Official Secrets, our latest Netflix rental.  It was a true story regarding the deception and arm twisting the US participated in to try to get the UN Security Council to approve a war resolution against Iraq.  It reinforced my already firm opinion of just how dark and slimy our government can be behind the curtain. We both found the movie very interesting, B+.

Around noon on Saturday Cindy and I did something we had not done for a long, long time, conventional brick and mortar shopping.  I wanted to hit the Jockey outlet at Miromar to refresh my undergarments which were getting pretty beat up.  Cindy needed some stuff too.  We even ate lunch there, albeit at the Subway at the food court.  Of course we wore our masks the entire time outside of eating but it wasn’t a big deal.  Cindy and I both commented how it felt nice to do something we had not done since Covid 19 became a household word.

I had been contacted maybe a month ago by one of my YouTube channel subscribers.  He was from the Philly area and was coming to Marco on vacation with his family.  He had asked me if I would be willing to go ride with him and his 9 year old son when they got here.  He emailed me Saturday night that they had arrived and we worked out that I would meet them down in Marco about 4PM.

I arrived a little before they did so I rolled around on my One Wheel until they showed up.  I parked in the Publix shopping center, my normal launch point for Marco rides.  I was quite surprised when I saw the Publix was no longer there, just a big fenced off construction area.  They evidently knocked down the building to build a new, modern Publix since I was last there, crazy.  I also noticed the old Burger King that was an out parcel in the same shopping center was now nothing but an empty patch of grass.

Igor’s son’s name was Landon who is only nine years old.  He and his dad only started learning EUCs back in May.  When I pulled out my MSX and 16X Landon was able to ride each of them stupidly easy, the gift of youth.  We rode around the mostly empty parking lot for awhile before heading onto a few of the small hilly regions nearby.  Igor really liked the MSX and I expect him to be buying one soon.  His family moved to the US in 1989 from the former USSR which I thought was interesting.

Landon was was a really cool little kid.  He even has a YouTube channel which I posted in the description of the video I made to hopefully get a few subscribers thrown his way.  I think they really had a good time which made me feel good in return.

When I got back Cindy was babysitting DJ for a bit which was a nice treat for me.  I always enjoy having the little guy around.

Whenever I get a call from Cindy during my drive into work my first reaction is always, what’s wrong?   So when the phone lit up in the car today my assumption was it wasn’t good news.  Unfortunately I was right.  Cindy walked into the coop this morning to find another chicken dead on the floor, it was Dot, one of the two white Delaware hens we got in our last batch of chicks a couple years ago.  I have not been able to review the coop video yet but we are assuming she fell somehow and broke her neck when she hit the ground.  We have now had several hens apparently die in a similar manner and it is very frustrating.

When we first saw this happen I dramatically reduced the height of the perch but even after doing that we still have had birds fall and die.  One issue we have is under the perch we have rubber mats which make it easy to clean daily.  Most perches have some sort of material under them like wood shavings which you change every week maybe, a much messier and smellier solution.  The negative is a rubber mat provides no cushion if a bird falls.

However as I did some Googling this morning I have discovered something I never knew, despite owning chickens for well over 5 years at this point.  Chickens typically sleep flat footed and don’t grasp a conventional rounded perch, instead they just would sort of balance on it.  This revelation all of a sudden made a lot of sense.  The hens have always seemed to favor the back of the perch where there is wider flat surface as well as the sides which are made of 2×4.  Dot was found in the middle of the floor, where the conventional smaller, rounded perches are. I am somewhat angry at myself for not finding this out earlier.  This weekend I will be doing a perch overhaul which may include lowering it further but definitely covering all of the rounded perches with flat wood that is easy for the hens to rest on.  We are now down to 5 birds, it’s crazy.

So all of sudden yesterday news of a potential storm threat popped up in our area.  At this point the thing is still only a tropical depression but the cone of uncertainty projections were all that was needed to get people’s attention.  The “good” news is strength-wise it currently isn’t projected to be a monster.  Also the projected path has consistently been shifting westward, now off of Florida’s west coast as of this morning.  However if I have learned anything from living in Florida the last 20 years, it is that hurricane forecasting is a fuzzy science, at best.

To make matters worse there is another tropical system towards Mexico that has the possibility of reaching hurricane strength by the time it impacts Texas/Louisiana.  The idea of having TWO hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time is an extreme, terrible rarity.

Of course my weekend plans are going to need to be malleable based on how the storm predictions progress.  Regardless of path I don’t see it as being a board up level of storm for us but there still would be a TON of things that would need to be secured/put away for safety.  Chicken perch rework will be high on the to do list as well.

I headed over to the school after work to see if I would have any more luck trying to learn the Leiftech skateboard.  Unfortunately I didn’t have time last night to edit the video of the session because it was funny to be sure.  I managed to stay on the board a little bit, my longest ride was maybe 100 feet but most rides were much shorter than that resulting in me bailing off the board once I lost my balance.  I remember similar feelings of “I’ll never figure this out” when I first started trying to learn EUCs and again when I started trying to learn to ride them backwards.  The fact that I did eventually get it through perseverance makes me think that with enough time I could get the hang of this board.

However there is another factor at this point in my life, the rash of physical issues I have  been having recently, in this instance my left knee and lower back.  Running off the board after bailing just does not feel good, at all.  Last night my lower back was making all sorts of crunching noises in protest.  It’s rather depressing.  I plan to rotate and reverse the wheels and tighten the trucks to see if it helps at all.  Part of the issue with this chronic state of injury is it makes me very quick to bail off the board the second I feel even the littlest loss of control which is going to make the learning curve even steeper than it already is.  I’ll give it another session or two of practice but if don’t see any notable progress I’ll just return the board and accept the sense of failure, something that doesn’t sit well with me.

I have been deluged with an absolutely ridiculous amount of emails asking for money for the two presidential campaigns.  I guess since I have donated a couple times to Bernie I got put on the list as a good target to squeeze for more.  Hey of course I want Biden to win by default but hitting me up for money multiple times EACH day is just flat out annoying.  I need to start a massive unsubscription campaign to these various email lists.   Don’t make me regret donating in the past, you make the prospect of getting future donations from me very slim.

We had two consecutive days without driving rain so I figured I better get my ass out on the mower last night to get already high grass knocked down.  Although I didn’t have to mow across any standing water areas I did roll across very soft and wet ground at times which left my brand new tractor looking pretty cruddy.  I asked Cindy if she would mind hosing the Husqvarna down today.  It’s getting more and more difficult to knock out mowing during a weeknight as the amount of daylight is steadily decreasing.  I was relying purely on the headlights for the last 15 minutes or so.

I haven’t watched one second of the virtual DNC.  Some may say I should be since my goal like the majority of Americans is to ensure that the most inept president of my lifetime is not rewarded with a second term. However it isn’t like I need further convincing.  I’m not thrilled that democrats propped up Joe Biden, weekend at Bernie’s style, as their candidate but hey it’s better than the alternative.  At least if Joe kicks the bucket or officially loses his marbles Kamela Harris could slide in there and be more than competent.  Hell anyone with a vocabulary bigger than 13 words would be a fantastically, big league step up.

So that weird contraption you see to the left is a Leiftech board which is now known as Summerboard.  A person I talk to at the gym had this sitting around not being used and said I was welcome to give it a try since I have so many other PEVs already.  If you look quickly you may think it is just another electric skateboard, which I have had two of already.  Upon closer observation you will see there are actually two more wheels under the board, wtf?

Those hidden wheels are actually the propulsion system for the board and they are able to spin a full 360 degrees.  The normal skateboard trucks/wheels are used for steering and if you are good, braking.  The board is advertised as being the closest thing you can get to snowboarding on dry land and watching videos of skilled riders you can see why.  They appear to slide around turns and can even do crazy shit like a 360 while riding.

I have been checking these boards out for 2-3 years.  I have always thought it would be awesome if I was able to learn to ride that adeptly.  Unfortunately the very high price of the hardware just did not make it feasible to take a chance on buying something I wasn’t sure if I could even ride.  When I was offered up a chance to test out this style of PEV with no strings attached, even if it is an older and rather beat up version of the Summerboard, I was excited.

Last night I tried the board out for the first time in the driveway and it was an eye opener.  The goal is to be able to keep your weight normally balanced on the two center drive wheels, only dipping onto the outside wheels as needed.  I found this difficult.  Hell I found just getting the board started difficult as you are supposed to kick start it before jumping on.  The reason for this is you want the swivel drive wheels to be both pointing in the proper direction before applying power.  My brain and legs were not synched up well and I struggled to do even this basic skill.

I was able to slowly go up and down the driveway in short bursts, lacking anything resembling control.  A few times I “caught an edge” meaning the toe side wheels got leaned onto when they shouldn’t have, immediately sending me running off the board.  I hoped my nearly 5 years of experience with various types of PEVs would have given me a head start on the board but I was clearly at step one.  Right now it feels like a pretty high mountain for me to climb to get comfortable on the board but I will give it a solid try.  The next session will occur in the wide open school parking lot.

Yesterday afternoon Katie dropped off the Prius.  It was driving fine but the ABS, VSC and BRAKE warning lights were all illuminated. On Sunday before she left I quickly threw my code reader on the car but was unable to clear those lights.  I did a quick Google search and found this is another weird Prius thing (there are a lot of them).  It could indicate a real problem but it also could be a phantom code.  The technique used to clear it involves a paper clip.

I had to crawl into the foot well awkwardly and jump together two pins of the ODBII connector.  Once doing that you turn the car on and pump the brake 8 times, doing this combination of things throws the car into some special diagnostic mode.  Once the three brake related lights start to flash you turn the car off, remove the paper clip jumper and turn the car back on.  After following these steps the lights were off and the 10 mile test drive I took afterward went fine.  The Prius has been a hell of a workhorse with 236,000 miles plus on the odometer but man it also is one of the weirdest cars I have ever worked on.

Speaking of fixing stuff, this morning I was relegated to a Pop Tarts breakfast instead of my normal egg/toast/oj deal because I spent 25 minutes in the hobby room fixing a 3D printer problem.  At times my life feels like one big troubleshooting session.