Archives October 2023

I had a fun weekend where I got to do some dog sitting for a friend while doing a whole lot of whatever else I felt like. One of those things was going out for a ride on my OneWheel. During the ride I talked about the announcement by Future Motion regarding their new high performance version of the board which they have named the S Series. Ever since I bought my XR more than 5 years ago I have always immediately purchased whatever new models they have come out with including the Pint and the GT. This is the first time I am not planning on doing that. The additional performance would just be wasted on me with the way I ride. Evidently a lot of people are looking for S Series videos right now. Mine got over 3000 views in a day, way ahead of my normal pace.

After the ride I originally intended to go grab dinner at Carrabas by the bar. I instead punted that idea and had Dominoes deliver a pizza instead. It got the job done.

I started my Sunday morning with another pickleball session out at Talis Park. Now that season is resuming there are more people showing up which could eventually cause some court contention. I hope to keep playing with the core group for as long as possible. My being a guest instead of an owner/member could eventually ruffle some feathers.

I got out on a second ride Sunday, this time hitting Dunkin Donuts on the Sherman S. One thing I absolutely have not done as much of as I hoped since moving is getting out on rides. I want to correct that.

I watched the Eagles/Commanders game Sunday afternoon. Washington took it to the Birds, driving up and down the field on them pretty much all game long. The defense seemed to have very few answers. The offense had some blunders as well, twice turning the ball over inside the 5 yard line, normally a death sentence. Luckily the Eagles had a strong finish and wound up winning by a touchdown.

I haven’t really made any commentary on how the Sunday Ticket has been this year now that it has jumped from Directv to YouTube. The short answer is, fantastic. For 20 years I had to jump through so many hoops and deal with tons of frustration getting the ST to work via satellite. The YouTube solution has been flawless with high quality streams available on any device that supports it. I’ve been very pleased.

On Wednesday night I decided to take an impromptu ride to the beach on my Sherman S. The humidity was low and I had an open evening so I figured it was as good of a time as any. Although not originally part of the plan, I wound up hanging at the beach until sunset, the timing worked out. It was a good way to help reset myself mentally.

Last night was on the chill side as well. I recently completed my quest to re-watch the entire Game of Thrones. As mentioned before doing so in a shortened time period really added to my enjoyment of the series. Although I remembered the big story lines from the first time around there were infinite details that I did not remember making most of the experience feel new again.

This weekend should be more mundane than last where I got to enjoy Siesta Key. That’s fine with me though, I never have an issue keeping myself busy and/or entertained. I still have Siesta Key sand in the Tesla that needs to be vacuumed out anyway.

Yesterday the down rod arrived that I needed to complete the last fan install in the kitchen. I was not expecting it for a day or two. I also was playing volleyball last night so I was tempted to cancel it and just get the fan up. I didn’t.

Instead I started on the install before I left to play, getting far enough that the fan was up on the bracket before I left. When I came back I jumped right back in.

I don’t recall if I mentioned that the old fan in the kitchen was dead. I think I discovered why. The house wiring in that fixture was much longer than it needed to be, long enough that it had to have been pushed in there. I realized that one of the wires had damaged insulation. My theory is that insulation touched metal and shorted out the fan. You could tell the wire took some damage, it would also explain why the top mount of the old fan had rust on it. I cut the wires to a more reasonable length and repaired the damaged insulation with multiple windings of electrical tape.

When I got the wires connected I held my breath as I did the first fan power up. When I heard the initial “I’m alive” beep I did a sigh of relief. After I did the final finishing touches I stood back and admired the new fan. As in all the other rooms, the modern fan refreshed the overall look of the kitchen. I am now done with my part time fan installer duties for the foreseeable future.

I had a great long weekend up in Siesta Key. I got to relive my volleyball days when I got to play some ball on Saturday morning. Siesta Key was always my favorite beach to play on not only because it’s beautiful. It’s extremely wide, flat and firm, the ultra-fine white sand compacts easily. Although I am not at the level of play I was in my younger days, I did ok and enjoyed every moment of it. I also got to play some pickleball on the new courts that are on the outskirts of the beach parking lot. I again had a great time playing with a nice group of people.

The best thing about a trip like this is it pulls me out of my normal mindset which typically revolves around getting things done. Instead time was of minimal concern and I just got to enjoy myself doing whatever I felt like doing.

I got back in town around noon on Sunday after picking up Elsa from Ali. Ali and Shugs love spending time with her and surely wished I was away longer. It didn’t take long for me to fall back into a task mentality which is pretty normal following a trip, no matter how short.

Sunday night I watched the Eagles take care of the Dolphins. I fell asleep for most of the fourth quarter so I had to ask Alexa who won in the morning. What I saw looked pretty solid and it was a nice bounce back from losing to the Jets the week prior. It was cool seeing the team in their old Kelly green uniforms.

I am not sure why but I have seen next to none of the Phillies playoff run. My guess is since I have more or less checked out of major league baseball as a fan it’s hard to stoke that fire for the playoffs since I know very little about the team. I feel badly for not being more excited about their success.

I took Monday off and again tried to keep relatively busy. The biggest task was filling the 8′ x 4′ raised bed with 40 cubic feet of garden soil and then planting a nice little variety of vegetables and herbs. I’m hoping to have some mild success growing here. I haven’t made any serious attempts to grow my own food in quite awhile.

I spent some time testing out the sprinkler system again. I had my lawn guy take a look at it and he said all was well, it wasn’t. The one zone would turn on but never would turn off. I had to manually turn the valve to stop it. It turns out the solenoid for that zone was bad. I should now be good to resume regular watering shortly now that consistent rain is not all that consistent. With the garden in place this becomes more important. Significantly higher water bills here we come.

On Sunday I decided that installing three new fans in my house was just not enough. I bought two additional fans to replace the existing fans in the great room and kitchen. The fan in the kitchen did not work already so it was not very hard to justify pulling the trigger. The idea of having the same fans throughout the house appealed to me as well just as having the same counters and cabinets in the house did.

The fans came yesterday but the longer down rods that I needed did not. I figured I would get ahead of the curve by doing what I could awhile. I first removed both of the old fans. The kitchen fan had some odd rust around the mounting point that could be related to it’s failure. Getting the mounting bracket for the old fan out was a PIA because of the decision someone in the past made to use wood style screws instead of machine bolts to attach to the electrical box. One of them would not turn out conventionally and required me to get a vice grips on the head to yank it out via brute force.

I assembled the new fans as far as I could without the down rods and got the new brackets mounted to the ceiling. Once those rods show up I should be able get both fans up, hanging and juiced up in around an hour, hopefully. Once completed I am hoping my fan hanging days are over for awhile.

I mentioned last week how I initiated the recast of my mortgage by wiring a huge amount of money to the mortgage company. The other part of the process was to have them Fedex me some paperwork that had to be signed and notarized. That was supposed to be sent out asap, well it wasn’t.

I have called twice now to see what’s up, the last time being yesterday. When I called late last week the rep told me to not worry, he was just busy but would get that paperwork in Fedex’s hands by Friday meaning I would have it Monday. I gave him another couple days of leeway before calling again yesterday. The reason there is a concern about timing is I do not want to make another payment at the old rate on November 1. If this does not get processed in time it would be a $2500 whoops which I am not going to allow to happen.

When I called yesterday I got a different rep and she was able to tell me the paperwork was supposed to be in my hands by today. I can only hope her accuracy is more on point than her co-worker. Doing what you say you are going to do seems to be a big problem with so many people. My tendency to put such importance on following through on what I state I will do creates conflict with the majority of the population that does not have the same concerns, it must be nice.

This weekend I have plans for a three day weekend in Siesta Key which is close to Sarasota. I used to frequent Siesta Key a couple times a year when I was playing beach volleyball tournaments in the first 5-6 years of my living in Florida. The beach there is amazing. I have never gone there for simply pleasure. I am hoping to have a great weekend.

I know I have said this a number of times but 2023 feels like it has had more significant ups and downs than a number of prior years combined. In the end I know I am very, very fortunate in may ways to have found my way to where I am albeit via an extremely twisted road that has doubled back on itself many times. It’s all about the journey, not a destination.

I had to work from home both Friday evening and Saturday morning to get a very important procedure done. This was supposed to be completed earlier in the week but because of some annoying issues it got pushed backwards several times. I believe those issues have been handled. I don’t wind up having to do much after hours work nowadays so I can’t really complain. This task is one of the most important annual procedures we do so it had to get done.

Saturday was a mixture of tasks in the morning that kept me moving. I made arrangements to meet Jason out at Ave Maria to do a ride. On the way there I drove by my old house to take a look at the new fence my ex-neighbor told me about. They installed a black vinyl fence complete with an automatic gate along the front property line. It butts up against the existing field fence. It felt a bit strange seeing this pretty significant change to my old home. Oddly the first thought that came to my head was the additional maintenance required to keep those several hundred feet of fencing weed whacked and manicured. I was not envious, at all.

I had a good ride with Jason where we rolled around for a couple hours at Ave Maria. The town was the busiest I had ever seen it, there were cars and activity pretty much everywhere. Jason and I had a small collision when I turned where he did not expect. He bumped in to me at low speed causing both of us to dump the wheels, luckily nothing was damaged other than our pride.

Sunday morning I got out and played a couple of hours with pickleball with my group at Talis Park. As always it was a lot of fun. Despite almost all of the members being older and much, much more financially affluent than I am they seem to enjoy my company as well as playing with/against me.

I did some more purging of clothing yesterday. I recently did a massive culling of old t-shirts I no longer needed/wanted. This time I went through the drawers of my other dresser and again used a mindset much more open to discarding things that are worn or no longer see regular use. In the end I had another garbage bag of clothes I dropped off at Goodwill.

I flipped on the Eagles/Jets game. The game followed the path of most games the Birds have played this year, they didn’t play spectacularly but seemingly well enough to win except for one final detail, the didn’t win. The seemed poised to pull out another close victory with Jake Elliot lining up for a short field goal that would have extended their lead to 17-12. Instead Elliot who has been automatic all year pushed the kick wide.

After forcing a Jets punt the Eagles seemed poised to still lock down the game with a drive that could eat up the remaining game clock. Instead Jalen Hurts threw a bad interception that almost got returned for a TD. The Eagles allowed the Jets to score quickly so they could still drive the fields to potentially score their own game winning TD. It didn’t happen, instead the offense sputtered and died leaving the team with it’s first loss of the year. I don’t believe anyone expected the Jets to hang the Eagles with their first L of the season. Hurts threw three interceptions in the game so a lot of focus is going to be on him and why statistically he has fallen off this year. I’m not looking to blame anyone in particular, I just hope the loss helps motivate the team to clean up things in several areas of their game.

I have made significant progress in my Game of Thrones binging which started a number of weeks ago. I am now a few episodes into season 7. It has been a real treat to be able to watch the series in more rapid succession.

Although I have done a ton of things since moving into the house there are certain things that have just been lingering on, for no real good reason. Last night I dug into two of them. The house has a sprinkler system that I have done very little with except turning it off at the start of rainy season to knock down the big water bill. I had some time last night so I decided to familiarize myself with the system more since regular rain is going to be ending soon.

I manually activated each zone to see where in the yard it corresponded to. I was surprised to see I have sprinklers all the way up to the corner of the development along the sidewalk. I assumed that was a community maintained section but evidently I water it as well. What my test revealed was half of the 8 zones don’t appear to be working. I’m not sure if the valves are just bad or if something else is going on. I’m going to have my lawn guy take a look at it and depending on what he finds either I will have him fix it or do it myself if the cost is high.

I also reset the controller so I could get it connected to my phone and wifi which allows me to control and monitor the system remotely. I’m always a fan of being able to pull the strings on my home smart devices from the cloud.

I then turned my attention to my smart thermostat. Like the sprinkler controller, I knew it had the ability to be controlled via Alexa but again just had not taken the time to make it happen. I actually had to get support involved to get the thermostat online because it was still registered to the prior owners. They were able to clear that out so I could activate the thermostat in the app under my name. Once this was done I got it connected to my app and wifi. This then allowed me to link it to Alexa which in turn now allows me to change the thermostat with a simple voice command. I remember at the old house I always wanted to be able to do that but the proprietary Trane set up would not allow for it. Even though I rarely change the thermostat, being able to do it with my voice is appealing.

Speaking of the old house, I was told by a co-worker and ex-neighbor that the new owners have been doing stuff, the most notable being fencing in the front of the property as well. It’s been a couple months since I last saw the place so I think I may swing by there to take a look this weekend. I have had a handful of people recently ask me if I miss my old place. It’s strange but the honest answer I give them with little to no hesitation is “not really”…..

Yesterday I finally got to speak to someone at the bank regarding recasting my mortgage. This entails applying a large lump sum to the principal to make my mortgage payments reasonable once again after 6 months of sky high numbers. The rep I talked to was very helpful and laid out the steps. The biggest step of all was wiring a very large chunk of money that has been sitting in my bank since the sale of my house. After that there is some paperwork that is being overnighted to my house for me to sign which should make it official. My payment is going to drop to less than a third of what it was previously not only because of the lump sum deposit but also because that principal reduction allows me to remove PMI from the loan. I am very much looking forward to having my monthly living expenses greatly reduced. If all goes well my November payment will reflect this much anticipated change.

My weekend included a lot of fan installation. I completed replacing the fans in the other bedrooms with each install getting subsequently easier than the last. I like the refreshed and modern look of the new units. I then went back and got the “smart” features of the fans working, getting them on my home network and then configuring them to be controlled via voice with my Alexa devices. The light and fan can be independently controlled via voice which is convenient.

On Sunday I watched the Eagles/Rams game. The game was very close until later in the second half where the Eagles started to slowly grind the Rams into the dirt. Their ability to chew up the clock with time running out was impressive. Although they have looked less than stellar in doing so at times, 5-0, is 5-0. They are just finding ways to win and that is all that really matters.

Yesterday was our employee inservice day where the entire organization gathers to have day filled with updates, team building, and other presentations designed to enhance office productivity and satisfaction. I never look forward to these events and rarely find them interesting, I’m not sure what that says about me.

I have a a core and crucial tax to work on this week at work so if I disappear for a few days don’t be surprised.

Last night I got motivated to try to install some of the new ceiling fans. My original mental goal was to get two of them hung, one in the master bedroom and one in the office but I only managed to get one of them up and functioning.

Both of the old fans that I took down had mounting hardware that I had not seen before. I had no desire to repurpose the old units so they got trashed immediately. The new fans I bought are “smart” fans that have the ability to connect via bluetooth and wifi. I don’t really need the extra intelligence in my application as these were bought more for their modern appearance but more tech is never a bad thing in my book.

The install of the fan wasn’t horrible. The instructions were pretty clear. The biggest hassle which I have had with other “smart” fans is the amount of wires utilized in conjunction with the receiver module. Trying to get all of the wiring and module concealed within the housing unit is a hassle every time. I eventually got everything in there but it was a battle as I balanced myself on the edge of the bed while cursing at the fan.

I was relieved when everything fired up after I flipped the switch. The fan looks good, is very quiet, moves more air than the old fan and can be controlled by Alexa devices. The first install is always the worst install. I know each subsequent go around will be faster than the last.

Yesterday I played an unplanned session of pickleball at lunch with my buddy from work. That added up to two pickleball sessions as well as two hours of sand volleyball in a 24 hour period. As hectic and crazy the majority of my 2023 has been in many ways, physically I am holding up much better than I would have ever expected. When I first started playing pickleball I recall thinking the max I would be able to handle was one session a week. My thinking has obviously realigned and the end result is my body responding to a “you can” instead of a “you can’t” mindset.