Today is my last day of work prior to a week long vacation. I haven’t taken a week off for a staycation in quite awhile. I look forward to knocking out the smallish projects on my list. None of them by themselves should take more than a hour, when combined it might be a days work out of the 9 I have coming up. On the fun side, I have my new One Wheel GT arriving soon and I also would like to get out to see Batman in the theater. Hell I may even take a book to the beach and read, imagine that. I’m sure I’ll check in along the way but if you don’t hear from me much, don’t be concerned.
For Christmas my step mom bought me a bunch of frozen food from Omaha Steaks which seemed weird at first, since I don’t eat steak. It turns out they sell a bunch of other non-meat items as well. I have enjoyed them all. Last night I made the last thing I had left, some sort of casserole type thing. Again it was very good but the prep time was very long, by my standards. It had to bake for something like 70 minutes. Most of my meals utilize the microwave, not the oven. Since I already had the oven on I decided to make cookies with the remaining pre-made toll house batter I have had in the fridge for a couple months. It was one of the biggest food preparation windows I have had in awhile. I was rewarded with a tasty entree with warm cookies as desert.
I ate my dinner while watching Walking Dead. I have not talked about the show in probably years because I am embarrassed to admit I still watch it, it’s that bad. Thankfully this is the final season although they are breaking it into 3 different chunks. The story right now is ridiculous. Somehow they are now in a community where everything seems normal. People take showers, women wear make up, they serve ice cream in the streets, and more. There is no real explanation how this group has all of these impossible amenities in the midst of a global zombie apocalypse. I laugh out loud repeatedly during the episodes at the lunacy of it all. I keep watching because I have been in it since day one, like many things in my life, once I commit to something it’s hard to get me to break that chain.
Shugs dropped off Sadie last night. It’s the first time I saw her since her oral surgery where they removed a bunch of diseased teeth. Although the surgery was in her mouth I immediately noticed she seemed significantly less gimpy than last time. Her overall demeanor was very happy, something Shugs say they both have noticed as well. All night she was exhibiting better mobility and the horrible stench from her mouth was now gone. I have her until Sunday.
I got word back from my accountant on my taxes for this year. The refund was less than I was hoping for. For some reason in my head I assumed since I made much less from the 3D store in 2021 that my tax situation would be better. Even though I submit a bunch of stuff that could be itemized deductions the standard deduction now is so high that winds up getting used instead. In the big picture it’s nice I still can pull a refund considering I do get income from four additional sources outside of my normal job.
I saw Carson Wentz was traded yesterday after only one year with the Colts. I was somewhat surprised. Statistically Wentz had a good season with the team. His departure seems almost solely due to the team choking miserably the last game of the season against the Jaguars which eliminated the Colts from the playoffs. Carson is a strange guy to figure out. He is physically gifted and says the right things. But after he was traded by the Eagles stuff came out about his prima donna attitude at times and how he wasn’t very coachable.
Whatever the case is, he is now back in the NFC East with Washington. It will be very interesting seeing him twice a year, that is if he isn’t injured as he unfortunately seems to be quite often. I don’t expect him to get a very warm greeting from Philly fans. Despite some of his success in Philadelphia I think overall, the fans don’t love Carson all that much. Nick Foles after all was the guy that actually got things done when the pressure was the highest, not Wentz.
I keep forgetting to relay my thought on FF 9 which I watched Sunday night. The unhip among you won’t know this stands for The Fast & Furious series which has had more sequels than any movie franchise I can recall, even more than Transformers. For the most part I found the films entertaining but they have been getting more and more stupid as time goes on. I suppose the need to keep one upping yourself can lend to this. Well in a word, I thought FF 9 was awful. It was ridiculous in so many ways that I don’t have the time or motivation to lay them all out here. Thank god I got to watch it for free on HBO Max and never paid theater level money to see it. Unfortunately they set up ANOTHER sequel at the end of this one, it’s time they Thelma and Louise this thing. C-
I have a LOT of vacation time to use up. In recent years past I always would be holding onto my time just in case we wanted to go on a road trip, vacation or do something else that required time off. I also have had issues where projects at work made me feel like taking off was ill advised. Often the end result of this would be that as the year was expiring I would have a lot of unused vacation to either burn up or “sell” back to the office. (I can sell a week) Well I am making a concerted effort to use it, generously. When given a chance to not work, I would like to take it.
I have put in to take next week off. I have no exciting plans but I do plan to put it to good use, getting a number of smaller tasks I have been putting off done and out of my hair. I started my list for next week last night and I think it currently sits at 7 or 8 line items. The time off will work out well in another way. My One Wheel GT that was ordered at the end of OCTOBER is finally due to arrive next week. It will give me a great opportunity to ride/document the shit out of it.
Less than a week ago I had my physical which included highlights like being told I had an abnormal EKG followed by getting the finger in a very private area. Today I got to visit the dermatologist where I had three different areas on my head cut into to get tested for skin cancer. One of them is actually on the back of my head on my upper neck, inside my hairline. I have never had a spot cut into on my scalp so that was a new and exciting experience for me. I am tired of getting cut into as you can imagine but it’s happened so many times at this point it becomes part of my routine.
After my physical on Friday I was given a referral sheet for a cardiologist to have them follow up on my EKG. I left a message on Friday. When I heard nothing back I left another message Monday morning. When I heard nothing back by late Monday afternoon I contacted our med center which made the referral. I asked them if we should be looking elsewhere since it’s been two business days without a call back? I was told that is not abnormal for return calls to be measured in days. Really??? I left another message this morning. If I don’t hear anything by tomorrow I am going to ask for another option for the referral as I prefer dealing with organizations that at least make a reasonable effort to get back to people. If it takes them a week to return a phone call, imagine how long it will take to book an appointment.
On Friday I had my physical that is required for our insurance qualifier. Usually this happens every 2 years but because of covid they skipped the physical requirement one year so my last physical was all the way back in 2019. I had never even met the LPN that works at our med center now. She was a nice Haitian woman named Jules. So at my age one of the things they do is an EKG. This requires hooking up a bunch of electrical leads and using them to get a peak at your heart function.
So the test is run on me and a few minutes later they come back in and say they want to run it again. They didn’t give me specifics but just said they wanted to make sure the results are accurate. Well as you can imagine this did not make me feel very warm and fuzzy. So they run the test again and the results are similar. Jules says it showed some borderline numbers. When I asked what she meant she said one of the markers could be an indicator of my having a mini-heart attack. Say what???
I told her I have no recollection of feeling anything resembling heart attack symptoms. Obviously I look healthy and am still active. However because the EKG in 2019 looked fine she had some concerns. She gave me referral to see a cardiologist to have more testing done. If getting a bad EKG wasn’t enough bad news for the day, I got the digital rectal exam to cap off the visit. I was not a happy camper.
I talked to another guy in my department. He had a similar scenario where the med center said his EKG merited a cardiologist visit however when he went to the cardiologist all the testing came back negative. I am hoping for a similar outcome. I’d rather not be checking out quite yet, Elsa and the chickens still need me.
Friday night I shot a video unboxing my new OneWheel GT accessories. They send the accessories before the board, which will hopefully be here within a week.
On Saturday I spent almost the entire morning out in the yard. I was removing a lot of dead vegetation that was killed by the couple of really cold nights several weeks ago. Some stuff that initially looked like it survived has since wilted and died. As I have been pulling dead things I have just tossed them in the yard. The yard was looking pretty bad with all of these dead plants littering the scene. I fired up the tractor and mowed them over repeatedly to turn most of it to mulch. I also mowed the mound in front of the house to at least make that area look at least a little cleaner.
Late in the afternoon Saturday I took my V12 for a ride, parking at the Greenway. I rode all the way to downtown Naples and briefly stopped at the beach as well. It was a reminder of how I need to do these sort of things more often. As I said on the video, if I wasn’t scheduled to live stream that night, I would have considered just rolling into a bar and hanging there for dinner.
One of the things I did during the day was do some troubleshooting on my solar set up in the coop. Late last week I noticed the battery was not charged up as it normally would be after a mostly sunny day. After doing some plugging, unplugging and restarting the unit it seemed to me the MPTT charge controller wasn’t working. This is what is connected to the two larger panels out in the yard. I put my volt meter leads in the connector coming from the panels and had volts present although getting the reading was iffy. So my assumption was maybe the MPTT just went bad somehow.
So on Saturday I did one more quick test. I have a small 50W panel going into the PWM charge port on the other half of the Yeti. There was still charge coming in via that small panel. I unplugged that panel and plugged it into the MPTT port, bingo, juice is flowing. Hmm this was a head scratcher for sure. I had already looked at the wires coming from the big panels to verify something did not chew on/damage the wires. I saw nothing but checked a second time. I still see nothing obvious. In my next trouble shooting round I will be back out there with the meter checking for current right off the panels themselves. It seems unlikely the wires or connectors would just go bad but who knows. For the time being I am just running the small panel through the MPTT port. It won’t make enough juice to fully charge the battery during the day but it’s better than nothing for now.
Saturday night I had another long live stream, well over three hours. I had a guest which is a rare thing, Ulf. Ulf lives in Germany but is currently on vacation in Thailand for a month. He has a lot of knowledge about EUC power systems. His internet connection was not super reliable so at times communication was a bit tough but overall it went ok. It was a fun stream and once again required me to do a lot less talking than I normally would do.
My Sunday was pretty low key. Other than heading out for coffee in the morning and late afternoon I was home and mostly indoors. It was sort of stupidly hot outside for early March, the temps were approaching 90 degrees. I didn’t feel like dealing with it. Instead I edited the Saturday video and then published the live stream to podcast format. I then turned my attention to the shelves in the office.
Although to the casual observer the house is pretty clean and organized there are small pockets of disorganization and chaos that remain. I have been trying to attack these in bite sized chunks. The shelf unit in the office is one of the early things that Alison and I bought for the house. It’s from Ikea and fits the corner of the room pretty well. However over time it has become increasingly cluttered and messy as things were haphazardly stuffed without any sort of regular upkeep. I decided to give it my full attention.
This meant removing every single item that was on the shelves, evaluating it’s need to remain, cleaning the shelves, and then putting back whatever passes the test in an organized and visually appealing manner. It took a long time, I bet a spent close to a couple hours. I got rid of a ton of crap. Some of it went straight in a trash bag, some into recycling, and some will be given away. It felt good to get one small chaotic space cleaned up. I will continue to target them as time moves on. Once I clean an area it is pretty easy to keep it neat.
One of the things I came across as I was cleaning was the football you see in the picture. It is a Wilson Indestructo football, yes that is really it’s name. This football is from my childhood and was one of a few different footballs we had. One of the activities my brother and I would do routinely was punting and kicking practice. This was done in the narrow backyard that lead to the barn. The ball was named this because it was literally indestructible. It was not made of leather, instead it was some sort of weird plastic/vinyl/rubber hybrid.
Being indestructible also meant it was hard, very hard. It used to hurt to kick the ball and if you were unlucky enough to catch the tip of the ball with a hard thrown pass it would leave a mark. Still it is the only football to survive my childhood and more than likely will survive me as well. This thing is somewhere around 45 years old and counting at this point.
I just heard back from my insurance agent, the one that recommended I get a wind mitigation report because it would be required by any new carrier. Instead of getting the good news about lower premium options from other carriers I got the opposite. He said he got quotes from five other carriers and the Tower Hill rate was still the lowest. WTF. I responded and asked if across the board all carriers have jacked rates tremendously? He said they have, some by as much as 50%. Welcome to Florida. It was a disappointing outcome but I have little choice but to bend over and take it.
Speaking of bending over I have my physical today. I am very much looking forward to it being in the past tense. I universally dislike being an examination subject.
This weekend I am live streaming with Ulf from Germany. I had him on once before. The funny thing is this time he will be in Thailand. He is in the middle of an extended vacation but agreed to come on anyway. There is a 12 hour time difference between us so when I start the stream at 8:30 PM Saturday night it will be 8:30 AM for him. I’ll be drinking beer while he drinks coffee. He has a lot of technical knowledge so I will be asking a lot of questions while he provides the answers.
The latest news out of Ukraine was dangerous with Russia evidently bombing a Ukraine nuclear plant which is the largest in Europe. That sounds like an extremely reckless and ignorant act. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Putin really may be losing touch with reality. The call for his removal, one way or another are going to get very loud, very quickly if things don’t change direction soon.
I wasted little time yesterday taking action towards giving my home insurer, Tower Hill the heave ho. I had a guy out at the house doing a wind mitigation survey which is required by any new insurer. He told me he needed access to the attic to do the survey. In the past this would have meant I would have had to drive my ass all the way home to let him in. However thanks to the wonders of my new smart garage door opener I was able to have him text me when he arrived and left. When he did I was able to remotely open and close the door as well as view the live feed from the camera attached to the opener. Just for safety sake I also flipped on the camera that is inside the house to monitor if anything weird went down. (it didn’t)
Tomorrow I have a physical, the first one in more than two years, probably closer to three. I am hoping they forget about the DRE but I could only hope to be so lucky.
When I got home last night I had the unwelcome feeling of soreness in my throat. Many times in my life that has been the precursor to illness so I was hoping this was not the case again. I have heard of multiple people having strep throat in our area. Cindy told me she had a sore throat last week and several people at work have been out with it as well. I gargled my listerine for awhile to hopefully kill whatever I was feeling. Luckily I woke up today feeling mostly normal so I’m hoping it was just a false alarm. During Covid there have been multiple times where I felt like I was getting sick to only have it fade away, weird.
Yesterday was a busy day with it being my first official day as department director. I feel like I have a lot of loose ends that need some tying up. The ironic thing is I also have a dump truck full of PTO time that I need to start using up. That doesn’t align well with the feeling of having a lot to do.
So I got a letter the other day stating that my home insurer Tower Hill was becoming an insurance “exchange” in Florida. I am no expert but it basically is almost like a co-op where the thing is self funded. Whatever the details, it is really just an excuse to raise premiums. I got a projected premium for my next policy period that was 33% higher. To add insult to injury I got another letter from them with a “consumer report” from Lexis Nexis. Somehow this report was supposed to be additional justification for the higher rates, it listed my “insurance score” as 806. The scoring range is 200-997 with a higher number being worse. I found this very confusing and annoying. As far as I knew no one should be able to run a credit report on me as I have my credit frozen with all three major credit agencies.
Evidently it isn’t frozen with LexisNexis. In the report it listed some negatives like the number of accounts established, insufficient information on department store accounts (I don’t have any I know of), number of open installment bank accounts, and the percentage of accounts reported in last 24 months compared to total accounts. My credit score is pretty golden the last time I checked so I found it really annoying. So I called my agent today and am going to get the ball rolling on looking for another carrier, f them.
So yesterday was my boss/buddies last day at work of his 30 year career. We had some cake for him in the afternoon and we gave him the print I had made up for the occasion on Etsy. It was pretty low key, if it was up to him we wouldn’t do anything at all. After eating the cake a small group of us just sat around and talked, sort of like we did at South Street the day before. During that conversation I told him that I never have worked with someone for as long as him, some 22 years plus at this point. At the end of the day I helped him load his personal belongings into his car. It didn’t take long as Don is an amazing minimalist.
For the last 22 years our routine would always be to walk out of the office together, exchanging thoughts on whatever was on our minds. Knowing that yesterday was the last time that was ever going to occur sort of struck an emotional chord with me as I got in my car. It was just another example of loss in my sphere of existence.
I’m not sure if the retirement had anything to do with the lousy sleep I got last night. I felt like I was awake more hours than I was asleep. I am sure as the day goes on I will be paying the drowsiness toll in spades.
