Archives November 2020

So Eta continued to be a pain in the ass for us yesterday.  After hooking around in the gulf not only did it briefly intensify to a cat 1 hurricane, it also drifted more east, closer to us.  The east side of a hurricane is always the wetter and windier side of things.  Looking at the forecast on Dark Sky I saw outside of a brief 1-2 hour window in the morning it was likely to be raining all day.  I viewed that as my opportunity to get my greatly reduced tree trimming task done.  The guy I am paying to do the rest was supposed to show up yesterday but didn’t because of the storms which wasn’t unexpected.  What moron trims trees during a tropical storm? This moron.

In total I trimmed 15 trees.  Of those about half of them required me to use the ladder.  Instead of using my battery powered sawz-all I went old school and used the loppers for all of the trimming.  Because of the precipitation I thought using an electric power tool may not be a great idea.  It was not pleasant as you can imagine.  Working on a wet ladder while gusty wind is buffeting you is a little dangerous.  I also almost got the Tacoma stuck by the back fill pit.

I backed down towards the pit as I always would, not accounting for how wet the ground was.  When I tried to pull out I only got a couple inches until the tires started to spin.  I did a few gentle rocking maneuvers to try to free myself to no avail.  I didn’t go nuts gunning the motor as digging a wet muddy gully would have only made it worse.  I was thinking I may have to do the walk of shame to the neighbor to ask him to pull me out but I decided to try one more thing.

In the shed I founds good sized piece of 1/2″ plywood.  I lugged it out back and put it behind the tire that was spinning.  I couldn’t move forward at all so I thought if I rolled back onto the wood and then got some traction and momentum I could break free.  Imagine my surprise when my plan actually worked.  I triumphantly returned to pick up more branches, happy in that moment that my stubbornness and resourcefulness served me well. In total I worked a little more than three hours on the project, a far cry from the 8-9 hours it can take when doing everything.  I decided to take the last two days of this already fragmented week off so I would be around for whenever the tree trimmer gets here.

So the Trump denial show continues on.  All of the cast of characters that have been licking his boots all along are scared to tell it like is, fearing retribution from the Trumpers that they are now beholden to.  It’s really insane.  The ability of the man to mind control such a large portion of American society is indeed terrifying.  I swear if he told people the best way to water plants was with Gatorade, they would accept it, blindly. Idiocracy  fans will need no explanation.  Of course the more he denies, the more he pouts, the more he sues, the more he insists in living in a self created reality, the funnier it is going to be when he leaves.  Of course what is not funny is the damage he can do on the way out the door.

I forgot to document my anger when I was doing my normal Sunday bill paying session over the weekend.  I had received my property tax bills for the two vacant lots I own at about a 90% loss compared to what I paid for them in 2003.   Every year I get reminded of the worst investment of my life when I pay the property taxes, luckily the amount is small, around $100 each.  Well when I looked at this years bills I did a double take, the total for the two lots was over $500??!!  WTF.

So I start doing some digging and look over the bill details.  There is a new $162 assessment on each bill for the Lehigh Acres fire district.  I did some searching and discovered that in August the Lehigh Acres commissioners passed this “simplified” (their term) fire assessment as compared to a normal millage rate.  This was pitched as a good thing for residents as people that live there could potentially pay less for their fire assessment while the majority of lot owners in Lehigh Acres, the ones that are vacant, pay much, much more.  This really pissed me off.

I did some digging and found the email addresses for the fire district and commissioners.  I sent them all the following email.

I was shocked when I realized my 2020 property tax bill for 2 vacant lots has increased over 500% from last year, courtesy of the new one size fits all assessment levied by your fire district. While I understand the need to adequately fund the fire services, this is a blatant and honestly disgusting money grab that I was not notified about prior to it being voted upon. For the district to do this in the middle of the world struggling to make ends meet due to the pandemic makes it even more egregious in my opinion. To pay $250 in property taxes on a lot that is valued at $4000 is insane. I would appreciate it if you could direct me to where these assessments can be disputed formally. I am really disappointed in the morality on display here. Anyone involved in this decision should be ashamed of themselves. There could have been a reasonable middle ground solution instead of shoving the responsibility mostly on top of the backs of vacant lot owners.

One person from the fire district did respond, basically directing me to a web page that talks about how great the “simplified” rate is, if you happen to live there.  The idea that the fire district was able to get away with this really irritates me.  If they went with a traditional millage rate set up my taxes would have went up $25 or so, ok that would be fine.  However they opted to choose a rate almost six times higher than that.  There are roughly 130,000 lots in Lehigh Acres, only about a third of them have a house on them.  They basically just wrote themselves a check for over 14 million dollars with this new “simplified” plan.

Since I don’t live in Lehigh Acres I have no ability to vote  on it.  Hell even the normal public referendums that would surround this sort of decision were dramatically scaled back due to Covid, the only “discussion” about it was supposedly via email.  Of course the extra $300 is not going to break me but the intent and methodology used in this money grab really rubs me the wrong way.  I just wish the lot prices in Lehigh Acres would be following the upward curve of other real estate in SW Florida, I would sell mine in a second if I could.

Monday morning we still had some strong bands of rain blowing through from ETA.  Late in the morning I decided to put on my raincoat and start pressure washing the lanai.  The gas pressure washer didn’t seem to enjoy running in the rain, it kept shutting off so I switched over to the Ryobi electric washer.  After about 15 minutes blasting away with it the wand hose broke, causing the hose to lash around wildly like a crazed snake.  Well I was only about halfway done with the work so it needed to be addressed right away.

When I looked online at Home Depot I saw they had upgraded replacement hoses in stock for a rather steep $40.  What I couldn’t believe is you could get another Ryobi pressure washer, the updated version of mine for $70.  Cindy and I drove to Home Depot and I bought BOTH items.  The thinking was we would give the old unit to Katie who could use a pressure washer.  When I got home I put the new hose on the new washer as it was longer and higher strength than what is normally included.  I then swapped the normal hose onto the old washer, awaiting donation to Katie’s household.

I continued on with cleaning the scuzz.  I had just done this no more than a couple months ago, I was very surprised just how bad it had gotten in that short amount of time.  Once I was done there I worked on undoing some of the hurricane prep that in retrospect was not all that necessary.  Better safe than sorry I suppose.

After getting all of that done I still had a good chunk of the day left to do things I wanted to do like play a little WoW, do some stuff in the 3D room, and of course play some more in VR.  Cindy recorded this the other day while I was playing Beat Saber.  Cindy played a lot of Beat Saber yesterday as well.  She is clearly better at the game than I am.

This weird week continues with me having off tomorrow for Veterans Day.  The tree trimming is still scheduled to occur tomorrow as of now.  My plan is to go around and trim the low trees I am not paying to get done and hope that they let me throw the branches into their chipper instead of me having to haul the debris out back to the fill pit.

So what is the over/under on the amount of times Trump says he was cheated out of the election?  My guess is at least 1000.  The guy takes no responsibility for his failures, ever.  Go back to the first Iowa caucus in 2016 which he lost.  Even then he claimed some sort of shady shit occurred that which was why he lost.  It’s a reflex reaction for him, blame others for his failures.

Saturday was on the light side as far as outdoor chores go.  I only weeded and mowed the new bahia grass areas that seem to grow faster than everything else.  I did have things to do inside that helped fill the day as well.  During the day the headlines had both good and bad news.  The bad news was tropical storm ETA which is ridiculously late in the year and has had a crazy zig zag path so far was going to definitely impact south Florida.  The good news was the election was officially called for Joe Biden, an outcome that was expected for days. The networks were very careful to make sure it was a certainty before making the declaration, because of the lunatic sitting in the White House.  Well, technically he was on the golf course, again, when the news broke.

Cindy and I, along with millions of other Americans were thrilled with the election officially being called.  With it dragging on all week I almost felt like I do when the Eagles have a two touchdown lead going into the fourth quarter and drop into a prevent defense.  I just did not trust a win could really happen until it finally did.  Trump’s reaction was what you would expect, pestilent, childish, and defiant.  The irony of him being proven to be what he loves calling countless others, a loser, was precious.  Cindy and I watched Biden’s speech Saturday night and I thought it came off well, focusing on non-partisanship, addressing issues head on, and moving away from divisive speech and actions that only fosters conflict instead of resolution.  For the first time in a long time, I actually feel hopeful about the future.

On Saturday night we picked up food from another local restaurant.  When I went inside there was not a mask to be seen except on the face of waitresses.  There was no attempt to socially distance the tables either.  I guess since the governor declared “Phase 3” it basically opened the doors to restaurants not giving a fck about covid preventative measures, which is a mistake IMO, just look at the steady rise in the spread. We enjoyed our food while watching the new Borat movie.  It had the same raunchy humor as the original which was cringe worthy at times but I still lol’d quite a bit.  I’d give it a B.

On Sunday ETA’s forecast path remained threatening to our area as it was forecast to cross just south of the Keys before hooking back towards Florida later in the week.  The main impact for us looked to be rain but they were talking about the winds touching hurricane cat 1 force potentially so we wanted to take some precautions.  We moved a lot of plants out of the landscape and lanai.  We also pulled down the solar sail off the pergola and secured stuff in the chicken area as well.  It wasn’t a huge task, only taking maybe 90 minutes or so. As we got later into the day the winds picked up as did the rain squalls but it wasn’t anything eclipsing some of strong storms we get routinely during the summer.

Later in the afternoon I shot a video inside since riding was out of the question.  In it I talked about how I just sold another one of my wheels to make room for the Veteran Sherman which is supposed to arrive late this month.  I also talked about the approaching storm and a recurring issue that people are seeing with their new “hollow motor” type wheels.

So before bed I glanced at my phone and saw a number of missed text messages.  Surprisingly to me, they decided to close our office today.  I don’t think it was because it would have been that difficult to get to work.  It more likely was because Collier decided to close school today so that would have became a baby sitting nightmare for a number of staff.  I welcome the day off of course, even if I think it wasn’t really necessary.  Hell we are off on Wednesday for Veterans Day as well so this will be a light week of work for sure.

So I got my estimate from the tree guy.  When I first talked to him he quoted me $26 to trim each cabbage palm tree.  When he was out looking at the work we also talked about him cleaning up the two oak trees in the front of the house.  We did not talk about the cost of doing so but in my mind I assumed it would be a similar cost to trim the oaks as well.  I got an email with the estimate and had some sticker shock with a quote of $185 to trim up the big oak and $135 to do the smaller one.  My reflex reaction was to email him back and say that we can drop the oak trees from the scope of work.  However after sleeping on it I decided to have them do the oaks as well.  The oak trimming will be much more involved where they will be lifting and shaping the tree which takes time.  The oaks have never been professionally trimmed so I feel ok laying out the chunk of money to have it done right.

Today once the rain slows down I plan to take advantage of the mostly clear pool deck by getting out the pressure washer and give it a quick descuzz cleaning.  Did you think I was going to sit around and eat bon bons all day?

So as is the case with most of the country I have been watching the excruciating slow election results come in.  The march towards Biden’s victory has continued with him actually taking the lead in Georgia overnight which is a minor miracle.  The vote there is still not 100% and it’s too close to call but man, that would be great if Georgia turned on Trump.  Pennsylvania likewise has been slowly moving Biden’s way.  What was initially a 12 point gap is now a fraction of a point.  The experts expect that state to flip as well. Nevada is all but assured to go to Biden and Arizona is likely too as well although the numbers will be tight.

Trump made his first public appearance last night since calling himself the winner on election night.  He was composed, logical, and said he respected the process and was patiently waiting the results like everyone else.  Hah, who I am kidding?  Of course he didn’t act like an adult, instead he threw unfounded allegations out machine gun style.  He said he won with all of the legal votes.  Does that mean if you voted for Biden by mail it was an illegal vote?  He rambled on just further digging the outhouse style hole he was already standing in, whining like a child, making excuses and lying like his life depended on it.  I will absolutely cherish the moment when he will be finally forced to accept the outcome of the election, live with the embarrassment of being voted out after one term, and worry about the the removal of the presidential shield that to this point has protected him from prosecution.

I am happy that a number of republican politicians have called out Trump’s election result facade as bullshit.  There has never been a president that called for votes to not be counted, ever.  Hopefully we never have another one again.

This has been an absolutely ridiculous storm season which officially ended November 1st.  Of course Mother Nature doesn’t care about our calendar as she has created yet another tropical system that is forecast to impact our area.  It should only be a tropical storm as it approaches but that still will bring major wind and potentially buckets of rain.  Since I have lived in Florida we have never had this many storms or one target us this late in the year.  I am sure the increase in severe weather has nothing to do with climate change, nothing to see here, right President Big League? Science is for losers.

For my part I will be busy around the property.  I made arrangements to have my tall trees trimmed next week.  If it all works out it would happen Wednesday which is perfect because I am off for Veterans Day.  I could knock out the smaller trees while the crew handles the big stuff.

It’s amazing what a difference 24 hours can make.  Yesterday I was feeling very angry, frustrated and defeated about the presidential election.  The idea that Florida went harder for Trump, courtesy of non-stop radio ads in spanish making Cubans think Biden was the next coming of Castro, made me feel very pessimistic about how the rest of the outstanding swing states would go.  Trump was ahead in almost all of them and based on how Florida accelerated towards Trump as more votes were counted made me feel like all hope was lost.  However, the reverse has happened.

What I hadn’t really thought about was how Florida handled the mail in vote logistically compared to the rest of the swing states.  Florida for once is proactive and allows mail in ballots to be tabulated before election day.  This meant that the results were front loaded with mail in votes that had already been tabulated, the majority of which are democratic.  This is why the numbers slipped for Biden in Florida as the day of voters were more in the Trump camp.

However in other states the rules restrict mail in votes from being counted until election day and in dumb PA’s case, not until the polls close.  The end result of this has been the walk up vote, which was more Trump based got counted first and what we now have been seeing is the tabulation of all of the mail in votes which have been trending much more heavily towards Biden. When the day started yesterday Biden was getting crushed by 12 points in PA.  By the time I went to bed it was down to a couple point deficit with over 10% of the vote yet to be counted.

I won’t recap all of the scenarios for you as there are millions of other places doing that already but the cliff notes version is Biden should actually win this election when it is all said and done.  If he manages to take PA it would be sweet as the margin of victory would be better but even if he just gets Arizona and Nevada he can seal the deal.  I bet Trump regrets talking so much shit about John McCain now. Hell Biden could even grab Georgia, which would be a huge upset.

The path to closure on this is going to be a long one.  Trump is already trying to get lawyers involved to challenge the close races but I am confident it is all just dog and pony show to support his fabricated narrative of the election being rigged.  I think the most telling thing was President Big League was almost silent all day yesterday which was a wonderful preview of what life without a cartoon character as President could be in a couple months.  If Trump’s defeat does indeed come to be, it will be difficult for me to hide the joy I will feel to have the self proclaimed greatest President since Lincoln get booted out after one term, something that has not happened in nearly 30 years.  Adios to the extremely stable genius.

Last night after work I met up with the guy I contacted about trimming my trees several weeks ago.  The reason there has been such lag in getting him to the house is he contracted covid.  He had no idea how he got it and he said when he first tested positive he was not feeling all that bad.  However a few days later it hit him like a truck.  He is an ex-smoker which made things worse.  He was in the hospital for a total of three days.  He said it was the worst he had ever felt in his life, a description I have heard echoed from several people I know that have had Covid 19.  He seemed like a good guy and said he thinks he can get the work done next Wednesday.  I’m not having him trim the trees that I can still easily do myself, I’m not that lazy.  Getting him involved will cut the job from an all day affair with multiple very dangerous moments to a couple hours that should be very easy in comparison.

So like most of America Cindy and I watched election coverage for a good chunk of the night.  When we went to bed there was still a lot of uncertainty although it did seem pretty clear that Trump was going to win Florida, again.  When I got up this morning I saw this was indeed the case.  When I discovered that he actually won Florida by a wider margin than he did in 2016 it made me sick to my stomach.  Sure, in 2016 some people thought they would take a flyer on Trump, with it being more of a vote against Hilary than anything else.  But after witnessing the events of the last four years, to see that support in the state bolstered instead of eroded is beyond logical explanation for someone like me that assumes that bad behavior is supposed to have consequences.

So as I looked at the tallies for the states that have not been called yet, which I see as seven right now, Biden is ahead in three and Trump is ahead in four. The margin in most of those states is very close. Ever since 2000 when Bush was elected I have been disappointed repeatedly when the election results are tight so my gut reaction is to assume the pain train is on it’s way again.

My home state of PA is going to be key.  The state has taken the mantle from Florida as being the most inept when it comes to the voting process.  Thanks to illogical rules that don’t allow them to start counting mail in ballots until the polls close, 25% of the states votes are yet to be tallied.  However the current numbers give Trump a big lead in the state.  The fact that the election is even close is damning enough of American society.  It’s a clear indication that a huge portion of the population adore being lied to.  As long as it is what they want to hear, they just don’t care if it’s the truth or not.  Joseph Stalin would be proud.  I’ll continue to assume the worst about the election results and be happy to call myself an eternal pessimist if I am proven to be wrong.

So the day we have been waiting for has finally arrived.  I recall after the shocking and sobering election result in 2016 I tried to have an open mind and expressed some degree of hope that Trump would not be as awful as the lead up to the election revealed him to be.  I clung to a faint idea that maybe he would actually be grounded by the massive responsibility that was being entrusted to his care.  I thought perhaps this reality would sink in and he would at least try to act like a President.  Instead Don decided to double down on his super power, feasting on the ignorance of others.  Every single day since he stepped foot in the White House there has been something he said/did or tweeted that was an embarrassment to the office of the president.  That is sadly not an exaggeration.

I remember growing up and being taught about world history.  I recall hearing about the stories of Nazi Germany and saw the video of a man that by the outside world was seen as nothing but pure evil yet to his supporters, he was a deity that they chanted madly and blindly for at every opportunity.  I recall wondering just how human beings could support such a man but felt comfort that it was long ago and society had progressed to the point where this sort of extremism was no longer possible and certainly never in America.  Well these last four years have smashed that theory into a million tiny pieces.

The embracing of racism, greed, environmental sabotage, fear mongering, stupidity and infinite lying over the last four years has been sad and disgusting.  I see people that I interact with routinely fall into the net of the false prophet, which angers and frustrates me time and time again.  The amount of hypocrisy on display in our world is staggering.  Somehow it has now become cool to call people losers.  The way to handle facts is to redirect the narrative.  The way to hide the truth is to try to disparage those that are reporting it.  It’s a full blown circus in Washington DC and needs to end.

We can only hope today we wake up to a brand new day in America, a world where the President doesn’t get aroused from seeing his name on every media outlet day in and day out.  I fear that even if the outcome of the election is favorable, the damage inflicted upon this country by Donald Trump will be a long lasting wound that will not heal anytime soon.  His zealots will never accept any reality that doesn’t include his visage at the head of it.  The rest of the world is right there with us, hoping America wakes up from this awful spell it has been under.  Well the rest of the world outside of Putin of course.  He loves a good American shit show.  If you haven’t already done so, please vote.

I was hoping to be able to skip mowing the grass this weekend but as I surveyed the property on Saturday morning I knew the chore needed to be done.  I mowed and got done a number of other things while Cindy was working.  During the afternoon Cindy worked on finalizing the prep for our Halloween live stream.  She dressed me up as Joe Exotic from Tiger King while she was Carol Baskin.  We even had DJ on camera for awhile in his baby tiger outfit which was cute.  It was a mostly silly 90 minutes of streaming but we had fun.

One thing that was talked about on stream was the possibility of me doing a virtual reality EUC ride, meaning shooting and publishing a ride in native 360 degree format like the Insta360 One R supports.  With a VR headset it could almost feel like you are the one riding the wheel.   I decided I wanted to see if I could make it happen.

I combined a number of short GoPro extensions to elevate the camera off the helmet to allow for the best perspective. I tightened up my chin strap to minimize movement and then headed out on my KingSong S18 for the swamp, which I thought would create an interesting environment for a VR ride.

Overall the experiment worked pretty well.  I had planned to make two videos out of it, one on the ride in and one on the ride out.  Unfortunately the camera locked up and I lost the footage from the ride in.  I was able to save the footage from the ride out at least.

As expected the size of the video files from 360 footage is massive.  The 20 minute video was almost 30 gig in size.  It took forever to process and upload to YouTube.  The main file is still not even viewable on YouTube because it is not done processing. I did shoot a brief intro to the ride which you can check out now to see the 360 effect.

Later in the afternoon Katie and DJ came back with Cindy for a visit.  I had wanted Katie to try out the Quest 2 to see what she thought of it.  Once we got her strapped in she had a similar reaction as I did, her mind was blown.  I had her try out various titles but when I got her into Super Hot VR she really got to experience VR.  The game is a simple physics encounter where you battle very generic looking mannequins that are coming after you with various weapons from bare fists to machine guns.

To succeed in the game requires all sorts of movement.  Katie really liked it and got further in the game than I managed myself.  It was cool because you have the ability to stream the video the person in VR is seeing to your phone/tablet, so I could see what she was seeing.  By the time she pulled the headset off she was in a full blown sweat, VR can be quite the workout.  I look forward to having her try some of the other games.

The Eagles/Cowboys game was Sunday evening.  It may have been the least excited I have ever been for a Cowboys game.  I just don’t feel like the Eagles are going anywhere this year and the same can be said about the Cowboys.  The game was basically a mess.  The Eagles turned the ball over four or five times.  Wentz threw two more interceptions and fumbled.  Despite all of this the Eagles won 23-9 but the game was actually much closer than the score indicated, despite the Cowboys being forced to start a rookie QB that was not very good.  So the Eagles are now perched on top of the NFC East with a 3-4-1 record, fantastic.

Today is the eve of the biggest election of my adult life.  By all indicators the turn out is huge, possibly the largest in history.  Historically that means good things for democrats.  The tidal wave of misinformation is still hammering away on social media.  Just this morning I had to correct an ex-coworker that was sharinging flat out lies about Biden’s tax plan, she stated he planned to tax all homeowners a 3% “federal property tax”.  It took me all of 20 seconds to disprove her claim which I did with the following qualifier.  “This is why Facebook and social media in general is so dangerous, lack of due diligence.”  If I was the praying type I’d be on my knees from now until the results are final.  The madness needs to end.