Archives September 2021

I left work a little early so I would have time to grab some food at Trader Joe’s, my favorite place to get frozen, single serving, ready to heat meals. I had not stepped foot in there in years but I was glad to see they still had the most of the mainstays I relied on 9 years ago.

Last night after finishing dinner I had to decide how I wanted to spend the rest of evening.  I was feeling unsettled. I had several options run through my head.  Maybe I could gain another level or two on my WoW characters.  Maybe I could hop in VR to play some games or wander around the social apps. Maybe I should do a live stream.  Maybe I could hop on one of my EUCs  and ride over to the school area to clear my head.  Maybe I could have done a lot of things.

What I wound up doing was watching recorded TV content while thumbing through my phone, feeling sad.  As I tried to quantify exactly how I was feeling, the word that struck me was “hollow”.  Externally I appear more or less intact, the same as has been the norm with maybe a little more of a slower gait.  I have had people not familiar with my situation ask me if everything is ok and of course I snap back with “Yep, all good” because that is what I do, don’t burden others with my problems.

The reality is the lack of a relationship opens up the bark of my tree to reveal the hollow center.  This may be something I can fill in over time but most of my 21 years in Florida has been spent almost exclusively with my wife/partner with very little effort put into building anything else.  Generally speaking, I don’t typically feel sorry for myself very long before my inner drill sergeant chimes in and reminds me to get back on the path forward instead of spinning in circles.

In one of my videos from the weekend I talked about how rough holidays are going to be since this upcoming weekend is normally when I would pull out the Halloween inflateables.  Going through the effort to decorate the home just for myself may be just another exercise to put on an appearance that externally it’s business as usual. The reality is doing this sort of stuff with no one to share the experience/enjoyment with is a real struggle for me mentally.  I’m not sure if time fixes that issue or not.  Most of the single friends I know don’t do much at all for the holidays, maybe that will eventually be my new normal.

This week has been a pleasant surprise weather-wise.  The last two mornings when I have gone out to do the chickens there actually has been a hint of coolness in the air with a temperature right around 70. In addition the last two days have been full sun with no rain, allowing the hated standing water to dry up around the property.  I knew I had to try to get the mowing done last night after work.

I have had it stuck in my head for a long time that if I haul ass I can do the mowing in 90 minutes.  Well that is clearly not the case.  I think the addition of the chicken yard changed that number to no less than two hours.  Trying to mow the grass on a weeknight at the end of September is a tough ask as the sun sets pretty early compared to mid-June.  I knew I would be doing some mowing by headlight, I didn’t realize just how much.

I spent close to 45 minutes mowing with the headlights on.  The new ultra-bright LED floodlights I have on the chicken coop helped with illuminating the last section of the yard but there were plenty of spots where it was headlights only. Some of the spots were inundated for almost two weeks so it was like a jungle.  I got it all done a little after 8PM.

So I came in figuring I had one of those quick and easy single serving microwave meals left as I obviously wasn’t in the mood to do formal meal prep.  I swore out loud when I opened the freezer, dug around and saw I had none left.  My dinner consisted of a PB sandwich, cottage cheese, cookies and chocolate milk, f it.  I will be stopping at Trader Joe’s after work.

The Eagles/Cowboys game was awful, a true shit show.  THIS was more in line of what I expected out of the Eagles this year.  The Cowboys dominated the Eagles in pretty much every facet of the game.  Jalen Hurts looked lost and in the second half of the game seemed to quickly bail out on pass plays after throwing two bad interceptions and instead tried to make plays with his legs.  The defense was horrid, allowing the Cowboys to gash them with the run and pass.  Thankfully I dozed off for a good portion of the second half.  Things don’t get any easier next week with the Kansas City Chiefs rolling into town.  I hope Hurts confidence can rebound because he looked very shaken in the game last night.

I officially have Covid fatigue.  I am sick of hearing about it, arguing about it, and dealing with it.  If anything is clear, it is that there has been serious misinformation spread around regardless of your point of view.  I think mandating vaccination is stupid when we are seeing at capacity football stadiums, concerts, and all sort of other events that will pass around a highly transmissible virus like candy. It is obvious that like it or not, the country has decided that they are done with covid and any attempts to reel that sentiment back in is going to be an awful failure.

At first vaccination was pitched as the covid cure.  Well obviously it’s not, getting vaxxed will hopefully keep you from having a serious covid encounter but you still can get sick.  We have had several vaccinated people at work get covid and thankfully they weren’t crushed by it.  So if you are vaccinated, great, in most cases you have an insurance policy on worst outcome covid reactions.  However if you didn’t get vaccinated, that’s fine, I don’t give a shit.  If you wind up with a bad case of covid I will have a hard time feeling much sympathy for you but if that is a risk you want to take, go ahead.

Initially the sentiment that was pushed that being vaccinated meant not getting covid, meaning less spread/risk to others.  That is clearly not true, I as a vaccinated individual can carry covid that might not be affecting me severely but can be passed to others.  Now you could go down the “everyone should wear a mask” all the time road but we already know that is an established failure.  People “wearing” masks that protect their chin are everywhere.  It is clear that you can not count on people wearing masks reliably or consistently, no matter how much you encourage it. The only way that works is with disruptive things like lockdowns, closings and strict enforcement.  We all know how that went.

So what is my bottom line with all of this?  Self responsibility.  Decide your risk tolerance and if the time comes for you to pay the price for those decisions, so be it.  With everything that has transpired from this mess it seems pretty clear to me that alternative choices could/should have been made in several of the forks in the road.  The insane cash grab by vaccine makers is something that can not be ignored, as well as the efforts to bury less expensive alternatives.

It may be time for some people to think about working on those comorbidities that are taking a lot of covid victims down.  Living a healthier lifestyle pays dividends in many ways. I also think that natural immunity is always a preferable option if either your immune system can hack it or you have effective treatment to knock it down. Requiring people that have confirmed cases of covid to get vaccinated make no sense IMO.

When I went home Friday I was planning to take my road bike with it’s brand new front tire out for a 10 mile ride.  Of course hard rain once again washed that plan away.  I am so tired of oppressive precipitation at this point.

On Saturday part of my mental list included weed whacking but at some point I talked myself out of it.  The ground was still waterlogged making mowing a bad idea, why weed whack if the grass in the main lawn is going to be shaggy anyway? I gave myself a rare pass on a household chore that was on the LIST.   Elsa and I ran some errands which included stopping over to see Cindy to do a PEV swap.  I brought her the Minipro and picked up the Dualtron to be brought back home and hopefully sold.  If I sell it I’ll use some of the funds to get Cindy a PEV that works out better for her.  I also dropped off a laptop that I redid for her to use.  It’s modern enough to comfortably run Windows 10.  I also got her on a VPN since the WIFI where she is at is wide open, and dangerous.

I did tackle one annoying list item, finish painting the spare bedroom.  Cindy had started the task but the ceiling needed to be done as well to better blend with the walls.  I was hoping there was enough paint left to get the room completely done.  If I haven’t mentioned it before, I hate painting.  I really hate painting ceilings.  To save paint and cut down on mess I decided to use a 4 inch brush for the work instead of a roller.  I worked slowly, bringing in an auxiliary light to help me identify where I did and did not paint since the two shades of white were not that far apart.  I was happy that I not only had enough paint for the ceiling but also to go over a few places on the walls where the coverage was a bit light.  When everything dried it looked good enough.  It felt good to have that room cleaned up and ready for whatever use I have for it down the road.

I had a bit of an incident as I boiled pasta on Saturday night.  I heard the unwelcomed sound of water hitting a hot surface.  The pot was boiling over badly, creating a huge mess on the glass top stove.  The good news is the pasta still came out well.  The bad news was I spent a lot of time getting the stove cleaned up later.

On Saturday afternoon I also got a chance to do my first day time ride on the Z10.  I took it to the nearby DD for some afternoon coffee.  I really am enjoying the wheel, the style of riding it is unique because of the way it was put together with an extremely low center of gravity. In the video I talked about how the upcoming holiday season is going to be a struggle for me.  I am not really sure if I should act like they don’t exist or act like it’s business as usual.  Both options have their own unique challenges.

Sunday felt pretty casual since I did not have an Eagles game on the schedule that consumes 3-4 hours in an afternoon.  In the morning I installed my new wheel cover delete kit for the Model Y.  This was the last real “mod” I had left on my immediate list.  I prefer exposing the good looking alloys on the car.

Mid-afternoon I loaded up the Z10 and my camera gear to head down to the Greenway, a venue I have not ridden in many months.  I brought the 360 camera, thinking it would do a good job of capturing some of the beauty that ride contains.  I had a great ride of over 90 minutes.  When I got back home and started editing the footage I was angry when I discovered that somehow I put the camera into the incorrect shooting mode.  I had no appreciable footage, just real tiny video files.  There was nothing I could do about it other than be frustrated with myself.  I still made a video out of the dumpster fire anyway, trying to make some lemonade out of a bunch of lemons.

The rest of my evening was pretty chill.  My biggest hope for this week is it just stops, raining….

On Wednesday evening I briefly took my new Z10 out for it’s first ride after 8PM.  The darkness emphasizes the cool light treatment the wheel has.  This weekend I hope to get one if not two decent rides in on the wheel if I can somehow make it work time-wise.

Yesterday I worked from home all morning as I waited for a Tesla remote tech to show up to install the Homelink kit into my Model Y, which gives it an integrated garage door opener.  The install window was 8:30-12:30. It was nice to have a more casual pace in the morning instead of the Chinese fire drill a normal morning contains.  I also wish management was more open to letting me work from home occasionally, I can do pretty much anything I do at the office at home.  The tech showed up somewhere close to 11:30 and was done in record time, I am not sure if it even took him 15 minutes to complete the work.  I packed up my stuff and backed out of the garage, having the car autoclose the door based on my geo location.  My inner nerd was happy.

Last night while I was catching up on DVR content I was also working on replacing the front tire on my road bike.  I noticed a few weeks ago that somehow I picked up a tear on the side of my existing tire.  I have been riding on it still but it’s not a great idea, considering the very high PSI you run road bike tires at (100+)

I received a new tire over a week ago but had not had the motivation to tackle the tire swap as typically they are a big pain in the ass.  There was definitely a little pain this time around.  After winging it unsuccessfully I watched a quick video to give me a refresher on the best practice for swapping the tire.  Ideally you pop the new tire onto the rim using just your hands to minimize the chance of damaging the tube but I had to use the pry tool at the end as the new tire was a tight fit.  I was happy when I inflated the tire and saw it held air at high PSI.  If the weather this evening is ok I hope to give it a 10 mile road test.

This morning I evidently heard and then turned off the alarm, followed by immediately falling back asleep.  I awoke 20 minutes later, turning my normal morning dash into an all out sprint.  I saved time by swapping out my normal egg and toast breakfast with two cold Pop Tarts and a glass of almond milk.  I got to work about 10 minutes late so it could have been worse.

As mentioned earlier I hope to get out on the Z10 this weekend.  My yard maintenance this weekend is going to depend upon it staying rain free the next couple days as there is still standing water in many areas.  I will at least weed whack for sure.  I do have 3-4 more hours free this weekend since the Eagles do not play until Monday night against the hated Cowboys.

I forgot to mention I spoke to my Dad Wednesday on my ride home from work.  He was asking me about what cellular carrier I have as he has now added Consumer Cellular to the long list of companies he refuses to deal with.  Unfortunately, I have ATT which is a company that was already on his no-fly list.  Dad has a long history of getting very angry with companies over things that in the grand scheme of things seem minor like billing errors.  In this newest case the issue was related to him insisting on paying them via check because he hates the idea of any company having his credit card on file.  He likes the control he feels he has by writing a check.  Unfortunately in 2021 that control also lends itself to potential complications, such as what he is having.

I get being pissed off about being charged unfairly, Indian based help desks, infinite phone menus, long hold times and all that jazz.  However I do feel lucky that these things do not inspire me to take on a crusade like determination to spend large amounts of time and frustration on routinely.  Sure I will do it from time to time but I will not often take a cut off my nose to spite my face position like my dad often will.  As I get older I find less and less battles worthy of spending that time, anger and frustration on.

All of my whining about the excessive precipitation in our area over the last week apparently was laughed at by Mother Nature.   There was widespread hard rain once again yesterday afternoon that went on for hours.  Once everything is already covered in water I guess it’s all the same.  The only thing that changes is how high it goes above my ankles. The chickens are the ones I feel the worst for when the property gets like this.

I did get my new used Z10 yesterday and did a two and a half hour live stream to celebrate.  The topics covered were very varied, many of which had nothing to do with EUCs.

When I picked up Sadie at Ali’s new place last Thursday she gave me some old electronics to do with as I please, the list included an original Ipad 1, another newer Ipad, and an original Amazon Kindle.  The newer Ipad appears dead and does not respond to charging.  The original Ipad actually appears to be in good working order however it is so old that if you connect it to the modern app store all you get is a whole bunch of “too bad so sad” replies if you try to load any apps.  The hardware and software on the device is incompatible with modern apps.

I did do some research about potential workarounds, it looks like the only real solution is to jailbreak the device and then find older versions of the apps somewhere.  It became quickly apparent it would be more trouble than it is worth to try to do anything useful with the ancient Ipad that was bought somewhere around 2010.  It’s too bad, I originally hoped it may be something useful for DJ to screw around with. The original Amazon Kindle still works as well.  However after letting it charge overnight until the light turned green the device ran all of 10 minutes before it said the battery was low.  It was on long enough for me to at least de-register the device from Ali’s Amazon account.  Sadly I think all three devices will wind up in electronics recycling.

Once again the house was inundated with rain last night that was accompanied by violent lightning that scared the crap out of Elsa for a good portion of the night.  The property is the most flooded it has been this year, which makes me feel wonderfully shitty.  Wet season really, really sucks.

My used Z10 is supposed to arrive today, if it does I will be doing a Live Stream to talk about it.

On Friday when I got home it was raining lightly so I opted for indoor riding instead.  However instead of doing an instructor lead session I just did a manual ride where I set the resistance to 20 and maintained an 80 or higher cadence for around a half hour.  Doing it this way allowed me to multi-task, catching up on some recorded DVR content. I was not thrilled when Friday night the already soaked property was subjected to yet another downpour, making it swampier, if that is even possible. I swapped out the heated bed on one of my Prusa’s during the evening as well, just to knock that off the potential tasks for the weekend.

As I was finishing up weeding the property Saturday morning I saw Jeremiah roll up on his EUC.  I had said something to him about the possibility of selling a couple of my PEVs, my S18 and OneWheel Pint.  We had talked about him borrowing them to go show his wife who was skeptical about the purchase.  So he rode the S18 back to his house while carrying the Pint.  An hour or so later he returned with his wife Emily, who was riding the Pint.  Jeremiah was carrying the S18, evidently I gave it to him in a low battery state unfortunately.  His wife LOVED the Pint and it seems she liked the S18 as well, they decided to buy both PEVs.  They gave me cash for the OneWheel and took the Pint with them.  Jeremiah said he would come back with a check later for the S18, I told him I would throw it on the charger awhile.

After finishing up I took Sadie and Elsa for an errand run which included DD, Pinch-A-Penny, Sam’s and Walmart.  After getting home I decided that despite the underwater sections of the property I was just going to mow around them.  As I completed the task I thought to myself that a month from now the drudgery of wet season should finally be behind me.

After mowing I decided I wanted to try to complete the low battery behavior test on the V12.  This was the third ride I have done since charging the battery, trying to get it’s charge level low enough to do a proper test.  I wanted to grab some afternoon coffee so the timing worked out well.  The V12 did surprisingly well in this test, once I turned off the feature that babysits you at low battery levels.

I also did a video regarding my latest Vroom appraisal on the new Model Y.

On Sunday after tending to the chickens and a prolonged bill pay session I loaded up the dogs again, this time for a DD, Rural King, and Home Depot route.  At Rural King I had a rather annoying check out experience that I documented on Facebook, it went like this:

Last night after I got home I quickly tended to the chickens before loading up Elsa in the Tacoma and heading to Ali and Shuggs new place to pick up Sadie for the weekend.  The drive was not awful, around 45 minutes, which is what my daily commute takes many days.  Their place is a mile or so away from the new Tesla dealership that I just picked up my car from a couple weeks prior.

The apartment complex is new, very new.  Ali is the first person to live in the brand new one bedroom unit they are renting.  The space is small as you can imagine, but nicely equipped with high quality surfaces on the floors and counters, as well as nice appliances.  The amount of contraction they had to do to move from the 3/2 town home to this was massive. She does have a storage space rented which is holding a lot of her stuff until their long term living arrangements are worked out.

Elsa was very nervous at first but once she saw Ali, Shuggs, Sadie, and Ferdie excitement took over.  After getting the brief tour of the space, we walked the grounds with Elsa in tow.  The pool area this place has is massive and looks like it belongs in a high end resort, it was really nice.  There are a lot of perks at this place, which may be expected with what they charge for rent.  One of them is Thursday nights they have a food truck on site which provides free meals to residents, a very cool arrangement.  This month it was a taco truck.

We ordered our food and then hung out drinking a couple Bud Light seltzers as we waited for the food, which took quite awhile.  The residents that were hanging out there seemed youthful and high energy, it was a fun scene.  Elsa did well in the environment and received lots of praise for how pretty she is, as normal.  Once we got the food we walked back to the apartment and ate it there.  The food was good, made even better by being free food.  I didn’t hang around long afterwards as it was already past 8:30 and I had the drive back home.  I loaded up Elsa, Sadie and some tech devices Ali didn’t want anymore to be repurposed if possible.  I got home about 9:30.  I was glad to see Ali and Shuggs seem more or less content with their new accommodations.

Man my weekday morning routine is tight, very tight.  There is no longer any time at all for deviation or delay in the routine.  Gone are the days of laying in bed an extra 5 minutes to let the cobwebs clear or watching a short YouTube video as I eat my breakfast.  I get up with the alarm like an electric probe was stuck up my ass, step on the accelerator and keep it pressed until I sit in the seat of the car, it’s a bit stressful as you can imagine.

This weekend has a solid block of to do’s stacked up.  I’ll keep chipping away at it like a jackhammer.

Tonight after work I am picking up Sadie for a visit while Ali is out of town.  This is the first time I am doing so since Ali sold her place and moved to Fort Myers to live in an apartment until she figures out her next move.  The process of Sadie exchange used to be pretty easy as Ali’s old place was sort of on my way to and from work.  That is no longer the case.  Ali said it works out to be almost an hour drive from my place to theirs so the convenience has been yanked out of the equation.  We still will make it work but it’s going to require more coordination with us meeting at halfway points or something like that. Tonight however I am driving all the way there so I can see their new place and have dinner.

I can already see my pile of to do’s for the weekend growing from here.  I wish I could mow the grass on a weeknight but standing water and the rapidly diminishing amount of daylight makes that impossible.

Remember that new office we are building that is scheduled to open later this year? It’s big, really big.