Yesterday we had an employee inservice day where the entire organization gets together to go through various presentations and education. It’s an all day affair that had highs and lows. I was stationed with my laptop to monitor communications and deal with a few ongoing projects we have. It helped me break up some of the monotony.
Last night was the last night for Sadie to be staying over and unfortunately it was the least restful for me. I woke up around 2:30 AM to see Sadie standing near the bedroom door, I assumed it meant she had a bathroom emergency. She went outside and peed but it definitely was not an emergency. When I went back to bed my mind had flipped back into active mode. I laid there for what felt like forever trying to fall back asleep. I’ll be running her back up to Babcock tonight.
I made a request to my bank to see if I could get an image of the check I used to pay my fine back in 2016 to Yellowstone. Unfortunately they said they only keep check images for 5 years however they should be able to get me the bank statement that has that check transaction on it which should be good enough to get the DA from Wyoming off my back, hopefully.
So Friday morning I get a call from the med clinic, finally. I had been asking for my CT results for two days, all I wanted was a phone call with the results. Well I got the call but instead it was to schedule an appointment to go over the results, wtf. I protested, asking why can’t they just give me the results now. They said it had to be done via an appointment, which I scheduled for 2:15 Friday afternoon. For the first time since this all started I had an oh shit feeling in my stomach. If the CT was ok, why would I need an appointment? Did they see a tumor? Am I going to die? All of these thoughts poured through my head in a short period of time. I felt emotional thinking about the possibility that something serious was going on.
As the morning went on my anxiety eased a bit. My buddy at work said how he had to go into the clinic to get the results of his x-ray which was totally clear. I’m not sure if this is a HIPPA thing or just a way to post another office visit to insurance to keep the dollars flowing. When he told me that I felt more inclined to think this was the same scenario. Yea I have lost weight but otherwise I don’t feel like I have any other symptoms. I tried to keep my mind off the results during the day, playing pickleball at lunch and keeping busy.
I head over to the clinic for the appointment and get the news, the same news I got in 2018 when I had a CT. They asked if I was constipated, told me I had nodules in my lungs, a small kidney stone and arthritis in my back, the SAME things I was told 4 years ago. There was no tumor, which is all I cared about. The stuff they did see had not changed in appearance so I called it a clean bill of health as far as I was concerned. I told the people that knew about the test, they shared my relief.
When I got home Friday I got a piece of mail that tempered my good mood from the test results, a letter from Wyoming. Wyoming is where I was prosecuted for a drone flight in Yellowstone 6 years ago. I knew this letter was going to piss me off, I was right. The letter claimed I owed them $500, the donation part of what I had to pay. $500 went to the Yellowstone slush fund and $285 was the fine and court costs. As soon as I saw this I was pretty sure I knew what happened.
When I got the bill in 2016 to pay it included the case id I was supposed to reference. When I paid the $285 via pay.gov I got a notice 3 months later that my bill was unpaid. It came to my attention that whomever sent me the bill put the case id of the other guy that was “on trial” with me at the same time for the same thing. So my payment got applied to his account. When I contacted collections and told them this they relented and I thought all was good, evidently not.
My assumption is they did the exact same thing with my $500, applied to the other guys fine. But the fact that it is now 6 years later makes it much harder for me to document the case. I no longer have that check and I am not sure if my credit union can get me an electronic image of something that old. It’s extremely aggravating. I emailed the contact on the letter. I plan to back it up with a phone call to make sure this is squashed immediately. The letter drug up just how angry I was about how the initial incident was handled. I’m glad to see they are continuing the tradition of ineptness.
Friday night I celebrated my health win with another 10 mile ride where I posted my best time/pace for at least 6 months. I then immediately weeded the yard into darkness as Sadie supervised me.
Saturday afternoon was consumed by mowing, nearly 5 hours of it. I tackled the normal mowing and the back yard which has finally dried up from all of the rain from Ian. The grass was a jungle at spots, consuming a lot of time. During the morning I did some more chicken area decommissioning, relocating a couple of the Ring cameras to the house area, throwing more stuff out and just cleaning up. The process is far from done. Elsa is amazed that she is now allowed to go inside the chicken yard.
Saturday evening I met up with Monique and her mom. We took a run to Sam’s Club, a place neither of them had been to in years. I hadn’t been there lately myself but it only measured in months. I grabbed a few things I needed and so did they. It was fun for me to have them tag along for the shopping experience and they seemed to have fun as well. When I got back to their house I took one of Gladys’s other sisters, Margaret for a ride in the Tesla. I drove a few miles out and then she drove it back to the house. She was VERY excited.
Sunday morning I drove to DD to stage a short ride on the T4. I felt a bit out of sorts during the video and I think it showed.
Most of the afternoon was spent editing videos which got to be a bit too much eventually. I still have more work to do but it can wait. I will be leaving in a few minutes to go attend a comedy show JP, Cindy’s brother is in. I attended one other of his shows a month or two after Cindy and I split. A lot has transpired since then for everyone. All I want to do is drink a few beers and laugh. I could use a break from the serious side of life for a little bit.
I hurried home last night to quickly do the chores and feed Elsa before loading her back up in the Tesla to drive up to Babcock Ranch to pick up Sadie whom I am watching for a few days while Ali and Shugs are out of town. Shugs dad and girlfriend are staying at their house. They have a place on Fort Myers Beach that took heavy damage from Ian. They told me crazy stories about what they both experienced and some of their neighbors went through that decided to stay put. One of those stories included swimming through storm surge to grab on to the railing of a house that was still intact, insane.
I had a quick bite to eat but didn’t stay that long as I had an hour drive back. Sadie is really struggling. Her ability to walk is minimal, her one eye looks like it has a cataract and the other eye has some type of infection that we are giving her eye drops for. I feel bad for her as you can tell she wants to do all the things she used to do, her body just won’t allow it.
So I reached out to the med center repeatedly yesterday, wanting to get the results from the CT test I took. The entire day passed without that happening, which annoys me. Early this morning I got a call from them saying they wanted me to come in to go over the results. I said I would prefer to just get them over the phone but they insisted it had to be done via an office visit, which I arranged for later this afternoon. So my knee jerk reaction was that this meant there must be something bad in the CT, which could be the case. However I have had to go into the office for other test results as well which weren’t necessarily bad results. My buddy at work said recently he had to go in there just to get the results from his X-ray, which was clear. They wouldn’t tell him on the phone. So my hope is this is just a HIPPA thing where they are not allowed to disclose medical information on the phone. Mid-afternoon I’ll be turning the page, one direction or another.
This weekend I have small projects around the house. I would like to continue on cleaning up the chicken area. I can repurpose most of the Ring cameras that are out there and get rid of some more things that were only useful in my role as a chicken keeper. I may go to a comedy show that Cindy’s brother is participating in locally. I went to another one of his shows shortly after the split and it was a good time. I could use a good laugh or two.
My buddy Jeremy has been working for the state of Florida for close to a year now. He reached out to me because he was in SW Florida, far away from his home in Tallahassee. He was assisting with a state initiative to provide Starlink systems to those in need in our area. Well in this case he was supposed to be dropping some off to various out of state emergency response teams. It was already after 7:30 when I left the house but I thought it would be interesting to see this all in action.
I almost did not get to see Jeremy at all as the approximate time he said he would be on site came and went. It was funny because one of the things I have always given him a hard time about is his lack of being on time. Despite it being close to 10 years since I had seen him, things hadn’t changed. To be fair he had some issues that held him up at the prior site. He had also been present at the governors press conference earlier in the day regarding the hurricane relief efforts.
So initially I tried to get into the JetBlue Park (Red Sox spring training facility) before Jeremy arrived and was greeted by some military personnel. I explained I was there to assist in Starlink set up however when they called it in they could not verify it so they didn’t let me in. I told them I would just wait for my buddy to show up. So Jeremy and his son arrived. He flashed his credentials and vouched for me which got me in.
The parking lot had been transformed into a huge mobilization center with tractor trailers and tents that looked like yurts, complete with AC. It was an amazing display of just how many resources were being put into this recovery. I had no idea that so many other states sent personnel in. We set up systems for teams for three different states.
I never set up a Starlink system before. You could definitely tell it was an Elon product with stupidly simple set up which took less than 10 minutes to go from cracking open the box to pulling down data as fast as 150MBS. It was pretty impressive. It was interesting and cool to help with the process even on a very limited basis. It was also very cool to see Jeremy and Connor again. Jeremy and I agreed we need to get together sooner rather than later, a decade between face to face interactions is a bit much. By the time I got home it was after 11 and by the time I fell asleep it was technically Thursday morning. Despite this I woke up today feeling surprisingly ok.
I was checking all day yesterday in my online patient portal hoping CT results would be posted. There were no updates and none this morning either. I would love to get some news sooner rather than later.
My commute to work today was awful. At the county fairgrounds there are hundreds upon hundreds of utility trucks staged. Every morning right around the time I leave the police are there blocking traffic to allow large groups of the trucks to exit. So once I get past that the road is now bogged down by these hundreds of trucks. Today schools reopened which added to the traffic causing huge delays at every major intersection. However that was not the worst thing, I am used to shitty traffic. When I was a mile from the office I almost was involved in another accident.
So I am heading into an intersection with a green light, following some guy in a Mercedes. All of a sudden he basically locks up his brakes and simultaneously I hear a police siren. There were two police vehicles that were entering the intersection from the left road. It appeared to me they had their lights on but never hit the siren until they were right at the intersection, which is dangerous and dumb. The guy in front of me either didn’t see them or was trying to beat them across the intersection before he slammed on his brakes.
So the warning siren in the Tesla fires off and I simultaneously slam on the brakes as I feel the anti-lock system kick in. At first I thought I hit the guy but I apparently missed him by inches. I was already frustrated by the quagmire I had been driving through, to have this happen at the tail end of the commute was the perfect infuriating cherry to put on top. After the near miss the guy in the Mercedes put his hand out the window and waved, which I took as a “sorry I slammed on the brakes thanks for not rear ending me” acknowledgment.
Yesterday I had my chest, abdominal and pelvic CT. Prior to going I had to down two sizeable vanilla flavored barium “milkshakes”. I should have read the fine print, assuming there was some, indicating they will cause severe gastric distress. On the way home from work it felt like somebody pumped me like a balloon with colonscopy prep-like bathroom sessions later. It was awful. The test itself was a piece of cake, taking all of 10 minutes. I have had chest CTs before when they were trying anything back in 2019 or so to diagnose my mysterious fatigue I had off and on for almost 18 months. I hope to have results today but I’m not sure if that’s realistic or not.
The receptionist at this place who seemed sweet and friendly gave me a bit of a mental jolt on the way out. As I was walking out after the test she says to me in a very friendly manner “have a good day and good luck!” I know she was trying to be nice but I wondered if she had any sense of how that sounds to someone who was being screened for signs of a tumor, or anything else for that matter. Generally speaking if you are getting a CT it is not for anything you want to find. Bottom line is I knew she was trying to be nice, it was just weird.
I finally was able to coordinate with someone on FB marketplace to get the chicken equipment I was giving away last night. Before they showed up I wanted to start the process of getting the portable coop and run out of the chicken yard. I knew the four foot gate was going to be a problem. I pulled the coop to the gate and after trying a couple angles realized it was a no go. I had to not only remove the gate but also the hinge pins that are screwed into the post to hold the gate. After doing this I was barely able to get the coop out with it cranked to a side angle.
As I was pulling the coop up front they showed up. It was actually the woman I was dealing with daughter and son in law. I was worried that they would not bring a truck big enough to hold everything. I was relieved when I saw them backing into the driveway with a flatbed trailer being towed by a full size Ram truck. It worked out better than expected, not only did they take the portable coop/run they took everything else I was giving away which included the inside perch, portable perch from the run, the nesting box stand and the outdoor water shelter that I built. It was great. The only negative was I tore a big chunk of skin off my middle finger helping load that bled like mad.
As you could expect it felt somewhat strange to have all of this stuff gone, much of it having been built by my and Cindy’s hands. I did however come up with an interesting idea to repurpose the coop. I could turn it into my EUC shed , storing my wheels out there to eliminate the risk of a lithium fire inside the house. I’m not sure how viable the idea is but it’s something I plan to explore. I have utility and solar power out there which could be used to charge the wheels. My question is the negative impacts of storing wheels in the non-air conditioned shed. We will see.
So with owning chickens for so many years all of the birds in the neighborhood have reaped the benefits of the treats and scratch grains I would put out in the yard. They would even fly into the run before I got there, waiting for me to put out food. Since Kathy died I don’t have the need to continue putting food out but I do anyway for two reasons. First I have chicken food/treats left over, there is no need to waste them. Second, I like it. Even when I run out of the chicken food I can see me still grabbing bird food to put out there daily. Squirrels and rabbits have come to count on the leftover food as well so I would feel badly pulling the rug out from under them. I am sure Kathy would have appreciated my effort to keep her friends fed.
Last night I was buzzing around the house doing my normal Monday night duties as well as washing the Tesla which was getting sort of cruddy. Later at night I recorded a quick video announcing I wasn’t going to the LA EUC tour as well as two more “Shorts”. I think my theme with shorts is how to do things in 5 seconds, perfect for the average attention span of many humans.
I rescheduled my CT for today. It will be good to get it over with. I get to chug two barium milkshakes prior to the visit. I am curious what the side effect of this will be down the road, if you know what I mean. I am crossing my fingers that the imaging shows an all clear and I can move forward without further health distractions, there have been a lot of them recently.
As I tended to the relatively minor issues around the property this weekend I almost felt survivors guilt. Yes there have literally been people that have died in the storm but my guilt was just more connected to the total devastation so many people suffered. Seeing pictures and videos of what Ian transformed the coast area to were horrific. I had been to many of the locations that have now been destroyed, it’s a very weird feeling in an awful sort of way. Repeatedly I internally recognized just how fortunate I was to escape relatively unscathed.
I did have a lot to deal with related to work. I went into the office Saturday morning to investigate what appeared to be a total outage. It was that but not just for us. The outage impacted multiple carriers, even shutting down the county 911 services. Luckily by mid-morning most services were restored. The explanation I got was a major network colocation facility had a generator failure turning it and everything connected to it, dark. I was also communicating back and forth with management of our office all weekend, trying to determine our ability to open branches on Monday. Surprisingly it appears that we will be able to open every branch but one, the branch in Marco Island that had standing water inside the building. This is a far better outcome than I was expecting on Friday when almost every branch was offline.
On Saturday afternoon I dug out the Halloween decorations. I only got the blow ups for the yard as I didn’t really feel like decorating inside. When I opened the container I saw two brand new boxes. I had totally forgotten that after Halloween last year I bought two more inflatables that were on sale. You will see the new items, the black and white spider and the ghost in the foreground of the picture. Last year I recall having internal struggles regarding if I wanted to put out Halloween decorations at all since I had always viewed it as something Cindy and I did together. This year I don’t have that struggle as I recognized I put them out because I like them and that is all that really matters.
Later Saturday afternoon I road my new Begode T4 over to the park to play pickleball with a co-worker who lives down the road from me. It gave me another chance to ride my new wheel which I am still adjusting to. I think once I get a few things worked out I will be happy with it. I also produced a video going over my initial thoughts about the wheel which are not entirely positive.
A good portion of the night I watched an arm wrestling PPV event that I really enjoyed. I am a big arm wrestling fan for some reason. This event had some incredible matches that were worth the price of admission in my book.
My Sunday felt sort of lazy by my standards even though monitoring work issues was an off and on thing all day. After paying my bills and grabbing coffee with Elsa I spent some time tending to little nagging things around the house that have been back burnered for one reason or another. It feels good when you get to squash some of those small visual annoyances. As I did this work I listened to the Eagles/Jaguars game. It started out poorly with the Jaguars who are coached by ex-Eagles coach Doug Pederson, jumped out to a 14-0 lead. However the Eagles stopped the bleeding and scored 29 points before the Jaguars scored a late touchdown. The Jaguars are much improved this year so it was a solid win, keeping the Eagles as the ONLY undefeated team in the NFL. I can’t tell you the last time that happened.
I made arrangements to meet up with Monique for a bike ride. Well she rode a bike, I took my T4. On the way there I wanted to see if I could finally find a gas station that did not have a line at least 15 cars deep. I managed to do just that on a hunch. I drove up to Bonita Springs to a Racetrac that is just east of I-75. During non-hurricane times this station usually is not super busy. I was able to pull right up to a pump with no waiting, unheard of for the last 10 days. Once again I felt fortunate.
We rode over to the Greenway. When we arrived they had a gate in front of the two entrances but one of them was pulled partially open. I assume they didn’t want people on the path yet but after riding the full length into Baker Park I’m not sure why. Other than some minor damage and debris on the path, there was no problem getting by. In total we were out for at least two hours. I always enjoy my time hanging with Monique and this was no different.
I expect this week to be rather hectic as we deal with the aftermath of Ian. Keeping calm when the pressure is on is an attribute that has helped me in my job over the years. I will be leaning on it this week.
Yesterday was the first day post storm. It brought with it horrific pictures of the destruction. This was truly worst case scenario thanks to the storm surge. It made me feel all the more fortunate to only have some minor landscape damage to deal with. Mid-morning I drove into our main office with Elsa along. The drive was challenging as almost every traffic light was out. It seemed about 50% of the drivers were aware of the “treat like a 4 way stop” rule when signals are dead. I also got to see some of the mess ranging from downed trees to roads with lots of debris from when they were underwater. I needed to see what was and was not working. Everything at the main office was good to go but most of our branches were offline. The branch at Marco Island was totally flooded out, meaning it could be a very long time until it resumes operations, if at all. I got the information I needed for now and headed home.
The few gas stations that were open were being pummeled with lines reaching a half mile or more. I had between a half and three quarters of a tank left in the Tacoma so I deemed it good enough. When I got home I decided I wanted to get started on some the issues in the yard from the storm. The first and biggest issue was the avocado tree. The winds late in the day yesterday combined with the saturated ground resulted in the avocado tree leaning hard to one side. I used a ratchet strap attached to the Tacoma to help pull it the other way. I then used some old metal temporary fencing posts on the opposite side to keep it there. It doesn’t look beautiful but it seems to be doing the job. I also cut several of the low hanging branches to even things out. The storm and my pruning resulted in a ton of not quite ripe avocados falling to the ground. I am going to give some to Monique and keep a few for myself, hoping they ripen up.
I also cut up the bird of paradise that fell. I felt lucky that it did not fall into the pool cage. I did several runs back to the fill pit with the tractor to dump debris. At spots I was rolling through standing water approaching a foot deep in the back yard. I was glad I did not get stuck. I also did some work in the chicken area. I took down almost all of the corrugated plastic roof panels that I had attached to the run for rain protection for the birds. They looked like shit and weren’t needed anymore. I also disassembled the temporary shelter I made a few years ago for them to reclaim some lumber for future use. Doing this invoked emotions of sadness in me, undoing what I did on their behalf, but it needed to happen. I have more undoing in there to do this afternoon hopefully.
Later in the afternoon I was excited to realize my internet service was restored. I was limping by with my limited access on my phone but it felt nice to be hard wired once again. I was talking to my buddy and former boss Don. He had no power yet. He came out last night with Lucky to watch the Dolphins/Bengals game on Amazon Prime. (he is a Fins fan) The quality of the broadcast sucked with pixelation of the picture the entire time, something that evidently has plagued every game Amazon has streamed so far. I am surprised that Amazon can’t get live streaming figured out. The Dolphins lost the game but it was nice having Don and Lucky there. They slept over, being the first to use my guest room in it’s latest iteration. Don said he slept well. They headed out bright and early this morning.
Today we woke up to glorious weather with low humidity and temperatures in the 60’s, something we have not experienced in close to 6 months. I opened the windows and really enjoyed stepping outside. Mid-morning I headed to another branch to do some troubleshooting of our connectivity issue. I got the ball rolling with our WAN provider and as a result we now have a half dozen more sites that have come back online which is awesome.
This afternoon I plan to change the oil in the Tacoma and try to figure out why my windshield washer now trickles out washer fluid like an old man urinating. It seems that this issue developed after the windshield was replaced. Hopefully it’s something simple. I plan to continue my clean up of the chicken area removing/repurposing whatever I can. I am hoping that now that the storm has passed I can actually respond to the avalanche of FB marketplace messages I received about the stuff.
I also have decided that I am not going to be going out to LA for the EUC event mid-October. The storm has postponed my CT until an undetermined date and I am going to be needed to facilitate whatever comes up with post storm logistics at work. I actually have already come up with another idea which I prefer, just going out there sometime before the end of the year and meet up casually with a much smaller group of people I know in the area. It will be a much more relaxing pace for me and more enjoyable.
Here are the various videos I produced over the last few days.
Our office decided to close at 1PM yesterday due to the threat of Hurricane Ian. A couple days ago the forecast path kept sliding west however in the last day the track had reversed, sliding more and more east which is bad news for us. Once I got home I put a few more things away but put my trust in my new hurricane impact windows. A number of people put up hurricane shutters last minute.
The rest of Tuesday was spent watching the rain pile up outside, the property was already flooded before the sun went down. I watched a lot of the local news coverage of the storm but also took breaks to watch some “normal” stuff. There is a limit to how much of the fear stoking broadcasts I can watch at one time.
When I went to bed it was still raining hard but not horribly windy. I got awakened several times during the night by Elsa. One time she crawled all the way up to my head. I pulled the blanket over her and covered her with a pillow as well. Despite my efforts she was still scared. I was then worried that she had to go to the bathroom so I walked her outside into the storm in my underwear. It didn’t seem like she had to go urgently.
I finally fell back asleep and didn’t open my eyes until 8AM. When I looked out the window it was extremely dark with standing water everywhere. The trees were now getting whipped consistently by the wind. I looked at the latest NOAA graphic and couldn’t believe the max wind of the storm had exploded to 155MPH, a couple ticks below category 5. It was still off the coast with the eye almost even to the house. What a shit show. The projected path would have it make landfall somewhere close to the Lee/Charolette county line. The property in the path of those core winds are going get smashed, however that might not be the worst of it. This afternoon the storm surge from the storm is going to start pushing onshore and it is predicted to be as much as 12-16 feet in some areas. In the Naples area there could be substantial surge as well which can be absolutely devastating.
For me, being 17 miles inland is a good thing with this storm. I don’t think I will see hurricane force winds here although there have been some very strong gusts already. Flooding is a given so my biggest concern is power outages. Irma 5 years ago resulted in almost two weeks of no power madness. I am crossing my fingers I can avoid a similar situation this time around. The story of this storm is not going to be completed for at least 18 hours. It is going to be a very long day.
The predicted path for Ian still is pretty favorable for our immediate area. The center of the storm is predicted to be pretty far west when it passes Collier County. Despite this schools have already closed for today and tomorrow. The Clerk of Courts has also closed. I’m not sure if our office will close tomorrow or not, if it does it would likely only be if other local county agencies did first. I went outside and did very minor prep for the storm, pushing pool deck furniture close to the house, untying one side of the solar shade in the rock garden and putting away a few loose items. When Cindy lived with me the deck had a lot more stuff on it so that alone took awhile to secure. I guess there is an advantage to the minimalism I have outside the house nowadays.
My latest wheel arrived yesterday. Despite just doing a live stream two nights prior I decided to do another unboxing stream last night, they are normally fun. I did something that I tried multiple times to do in the past unsuccessfully, run a two camera set up. I set up my laptop and connected it to the stream so it could point at my table that had the wheel on it. I think it turned out well other than the onboard camera on the laptop being sort of low quality. The stream went a little over two hours and was actually more viewed than Saturday night’s stream, with less notice. Maybe Monday nights are a better slot to stream since most normal human beings have plans on a Saturday night.
