Archives 2023

I finally decided to tackle another small wart with the house, replacing the garage door trim on both sides. The original trim was rotting at the bottom. I found replacements at Home Depot that were made of something similar to vinyl which should not ever rot.

I pried off the old pieces which were just nailed on, cut the new pieces to size and nailed them in. I have some finish work to do like painting them and caulking the edge but that should be minor. It was nice to knock out a simple fix for the second week in a row. Last week it was the garage door door knob and deadbolt.

Evidently my electric eyes for my garage became misaligned during this work. I need to take the time to get them seeing each other again. Until it’s corrected I have to force the door closed by holding the button inside, not ideal.

I watched the Eagles game versus the Patriots on Sunday. After a one year hiatus I now have the Sunday Ticket once again for one reason, it is no longer held hostage by Directv. YouTube now has the rights to the Sunday Ticket which makes life easy for me as I can easily watch games on any intelligent TV in my house as well as my phone or computer.

The Eagles jumped out to an early 16-0 lead after capitalizing on turnovers. I thought we were going to be looking at a blow out. Instead the Eagles stalled only managing three field goals the rest of the game while allowing the Patriots to get back in it. I really thought the defense was going to blow it after allowing a ridiculous 75 yard drive in less than two minutes and then barely hanging on to sputter across the finish line. It definitely was not a stellar performance by the Birds but a win is a win. They turn around and play again this Thursday night against the Vikings.

So this weekend was yet another one of change in my personal life. Over the last year there have been a number of them. It’s ironic, my dad clipped an article from the paper regarding change and how you view it impacts your life.

I would say that in my past my resistance to change was pretty fierce. In many aspects of my life both personally and professionally I have tried to keep things as is if I felt more or less content with the situation. However ever since I split from Cindy my life has gone through several cycles of upheaval.

The biggest change of all has been selling and moving from my house of 22 years and change. During that process the attachment I had to so many things was severed as I threw out or gave away things by the truckload. Since that process completed it feels like I have continued to embrace change in many areas.

The one area where I would prefer to not have change is in my personal relationships. I embrace and cherish a feeling of continuity, security, and commitment with my partner. I have not been able to nail that down and the ironic part is that failure to secure that feeling I desire is my fault and nobody else’s.

I am hoping that before the calendar flips to a new year I am able to feel at ease, happy and secure with all aspects of my life instead of just some of them.

My extended four day weekend has come and gone much quicker than I had hoped. On Saturday morning I met up with Jason, the guy I helped with the initial stages of learning to ride EUCs. We rode the old golf course in Golden Gate. I let him borrow my S22 for the ride since his wheel is currently getting repaired. We did two full laps of the course which has some challenging terrain. Jason handled the challenges well, especially for someone that has been riding for less than two months.

Saturday afternoon I watched Christine’s son’s football game, who is 12. At this level they only have 10 minute quarters. Even so the game seemed to take forever, there were countless game stoppages by the ref’s that were hard to interpret.

During the day Sunday after playing pickleball I got around to finally replacing the old shitty brass doorknob set that leads to the garage with a brushed nickel handle style to match the rest of the house. I have been wanting to do this since I moved in and somehow never got around to it. The job took all of 15 minutes. As a bonus the door now closes easily. With the old knob the door required a sizeable pull/slam for the latch to actually engage.

Sunday night Christine and her two boys came over to watch the FSU/LSU game. Christine is a FSU alumni and a huge football fan. It was the first time both of the boys hung at my place which was cool. Christine was pleased with the outcome of the game.

On Labor Day I had the cleaning crew scheduled to clean my house. Before they showed up I headed out on a ride to kill time since I didn’t want to get in their way. It turned out to be a very long ride with me not returning to the house until close to noon. About 2/3 into it I stopped at Christine’s place so she could join me on her One Wheel. We had a good ride.

During Labor Day afternoon I helped Christine organize the storage area of her place. We moved some stuff around and I built a couple shelves that allowed her to get other stuff off the ground. It was hot and sweaty work but the end result was worth it.

Labor Day evening I did a live stream that covered roughly 2 hours. I was a bit tired so it wasn’t easy to get through but I think it went well overall.

My final day off yesterday was pretty slow paced. In the morning I shot a video review of an air inflator I was sent for free. Somehow I am now on the list for a number of companies to shoot short video reviews of their products. My payment for these reviews is getting to keep the product which I often give away to someone else.

I normally play volleyball on Tuesday nights. I decided to skip it last night as I was feeling a little low energy. Instead I had my longest session of WoW hardcore which was sort of fun. During it I almost died twice in 60 seconds which was funny but pretty stressful in the moment.

I now engage in a short 3 day week, I could get used to this.

Last night on my way to Costco with Christine I spotted a pristine Chevelle in a specialty car dealer lot. I was interested enough to turn around and take a closer look. It was a cool deep green color with white stripes. I saw the SS badging on the rear as well as the 4 speed manual transmission it was equiped with.

The real show stopper was when I saw the front fender had a SS 454 badge on it, woah. For those of you that don’t know the 454 was the king of the Chevy big block motors, putting out massive amounts of torque. I could hardly believe I was looking at one.

This was a 72 Chevelle, one of my first vehicles was a 71 Chevelle that had a “tiny” 307 motor and was automatic. I loved that car.

This car was in very nice shape overall. There was some rust in the rear quarter panels but overall seemed very clean. We jumped on the dealer website, curious what the 50+ year old vehicle was being sold for. The answer was $42,900.

Christine absolutely loved the car, I did too. There was a long period of my life where I either owned or desired to own a “muscle” car, the last one being my 2005 Chevy SSR. For whatever reason, although I thought this Chevelle was awesome, my desire to own it was a few ticks above zero. I’m not sure what that says about me nowadays.

I took off Tuesday to extend my Labor Day weekend even further. I don’t have a lot of set plans for the days off although there are a few small things I would like to get done. I’m not sure what that says about me nowadays, either.

I hosted my fantasy football league draft once again last night for what seems like the 20th year in a row. Christine helped me do the reconfiguration of the living space to accommodate the 10-12 people that would be in attendance. My food prep was minor consisting of ordering 3 pizzas from Domino’s and picking up some snacks to be in bowls on the tables, a far cry from the extensive food prep I used to do. Even though the living space in my new house is appreciably smaller I came up with a layout that worked pretty well.

I got my laptop connected to the TV in the great room and was ready to go almost an hour in advance of anyone showing up. The pizza arrived just as the first set of cars pulled up. The only thing I had to change once we got rolling was bringing over some additional lighting for the wall where the draft board was located. We only had two owners connected in via Skype. In years past we had as many as 5 people remote but nowadays some of those people just do their picks through the website without being dialed in live.

As has been customary for most drafts, my preparation was bare bones. I simply printed out a draft cheat sheet that ranked players numerically and went from there, normally choosing the highest available player for whatever position I needed. I had the number one pick in the draft so that meant that most rounds I was drafting two players in a row which can be challenging. According to our league website I drafted pretty well as I got an A rating. We will see how that translates to success during the season.

The draft wrapped up right around 10PM. I went into whirlwind mode, cleaning up and reverting the house back to it’s normal state. I had everything back in place in a little less than an hour which I thought was a decent result. Even with it being late I had a rough time falling right asleep. I probably didn’t close my eyes for good until a little after midnight. I fell asleep content that the draft went well, despite the shift in venue along with all the other shifts in my life.

On Monday I was taking in my trash cans when one of my neighbors was walking by. I started talking to her about the incoming storm and how I felt lucky that it looked like it would not affect us in a major way (it didn’t). During the conversation I asked her if there was any flooding from storm surge last year from Hurricane Ian, she said there was not. She said the only time there has been standing water on the street was during Hurricane Irma 6 years ago. She said the water started to touch the sidewalks but never threatened the houses.

This was all good information but the most interesting part of all of it was she told me all of the houses in the development have emergency drains. There is a capped off 4 inch PVC pipe near the front of my house which I never knew it’s purpose. That is the emergency drain. If there is a flooding threat I unscrew the cap and it will divert water away. I thanked Barb for the information, information I would have never learned without initiating the conversation, something I historically have been poor at doing.

Like I mentioned, the storm was pretty insignificant for us except for about a one hour period yesterday afternoon when tornado warnings were flying around. I am not exaggerating when I say between calls to my cell, my home and texts I was notified at least 20 times about the potential threat. Is it odd to admit that I eventually found these notifications intended to protect me from harm, annoying?

Tonight I host the fantasy draft for the first time at the new house. It should be interesting to see what sort of arrangement I come up with.

Since I have moved there have been a lot of changes in my routines as you can imagine. One of those has been my tv viewing habits. For many, many years I utilized a DVR to record episodes of my favorite shows. I would open up the menu and see all of these recorded shows I felt I needed to watch and I did just that, pretty much watched it all. This was something that I spent a lot of time doing with my significant others. Even after I split from Cindy I continued that habit although there were a number of shows that I cut from the list.

When I first moved I continued this behavior, recording shows to be watched back as I pleased. However over time I started to have these episodes pile up. I would start deleting all of the prior ones and only watch the most recent. Eventually I just said, f it, and deleted the recordings scheduled and stopped the practice altogether. At this point it has probably been at least 4-5 months since I discontinued recording tv content for consumption later. Sure I will binge stuff on streaming services if it interests me but my days of spending large blocks of time watching recorded content seem to be behind me.

It’s not like I made a conscious effort to stop watching as much TV it just has sort of faded away and now that it has I can’t say I really miss it. Absence and time can make a significant difference in behaviors and feelings about them. It’s a lesson I could apply across various aspects of life.

It looks like Hurricane Idalia is going to pass far enough to our west to avoid causing major impact to our area. With my new living arrangements the only prep I did was take the trash cans into the garage, there seriously is not much more to do than that.

On Thursday night I went to a country music concert with Christine, my first concert in years and my first country concert in an arena ever. Although I don’t talk about my musical tastes much, country music is not normally among them. Christine however is a huge fan so I was happy to go. My plan was to consume enough alcohol to make any situation tolerable. I went overboard. I had an unknown amount of tequila sunrise cocktails that had me drunk, really drunk. I was so drunk that I had to abruptly stop drinking as I could feel the danger signs of vomitus eruptus coming on. We had fun even with my excessive drinking and I got to meet a couple of Christine’s friends that were also at the concert.

After an understandably slow start to my Friday I eventually started kicking things in gear, getting done a number of chores that are normally slated for Saturday. One of those tasks was reattaching some fence boards that were coming loose. To do this I had to wedge myself between the outside of the fence and the 8 foot tall hedges that border it. It was a challenge but one that successfully navigated.

I also configured my laptop to be used with the fantasy football draft party this week. I have hosted the draft for almost as long as the league has existed but this is my first time doing so at my new house. It will be interesting what I come up with for the final furniture configuration. I did find out that I have the number one pick in the draft this year, hope I don’t mess it up.

The rest of my weekend was a hodge podge of activities. I got back into WoW hardcore and have managed to die twice already. It’s frustrating as hell but at least it happened before I got very far.

I shot my first video in quite awhile yesterday. It was not even a riding video, rather me doing some minor upgrades to one of my wheels.

So we have the first hurricane threat of the year for our area spinning out there, Idalia. If the forecast track holds it will be significantly west of our area while passing. However if I have learned anything since moving to Florida it’s that hurricane forecast paths are educated guesses, at best. It’s not like I would have much prep to do other than crossing my fingers that my unprotected windows don’t take a shot from potential flying debris.

For a long time I have inserted these three words randomly into context where it makes absolutely zero sense. There is no rhyme or reason nor hidden meaning to the statement as I do actually enjoy pie. However when utilized in online communication where it does not belong, has always been humorous to me. Last night I was drunk enough that “i like pie” was inserted without any context, any explanation or justification. It made as much sense to me as anything else at this point and time.

Last night I did the final sanding and painting of the trim I mildly damaged when replacing the AC unit at Christine’s place. It’s not perfect but good enough that unless somebody knew work was done their attention would not be drawn to it. I’m happy with the outcome as at one point I was not quite sure how it was all going to turn out when the old AC felt like it was wedged in place.

I also finally got around to washing my Tesla last night, something I clearly recall thinking it needed starting at least two weeks prior. Why it took me two weeks to do something that took 15-20 minutes is unclear to me.

It’s an odd thing that sometimes, really most of the time, coming up with something to talk about here is a relatively easy task to accomplish. For whatever reason that ease has been missing recently.

Friday night I did something very out of the norm for me, went to a high school football game. Christine’s oldest son was playing. The team they were playing was supposedly pretty good but the final score did not reflect it. Her son’s team won easily 42-7. It was very interesting being in that environment, the most interesting part might have been observing what current day teenagers are like. It’s a whole new world.

On Saturday I tasked myself with replacing a small 5000 BTU air conditioner that is in the back room of Christine’s place. Normally it would be an easy task. This was not so. The old air conditioner was not in a window but instead in a dedicated cut out on the back wall. Apparently after the old AC was installed they put trim pieces around both the outside and inside walls around the old unit to help secure it and make it look more finished, I suppose. Unfortunately when they did this they were not considering the difficulty that would arise if the unit failed.

I wound up having to pry trim pieces from both spots to get the old AC out. Doing so did some minor damage to the wall that I still have to address. Once the old was out the new slid in rather easily. I reattached the trim pieces and flipped on the new AC which made a pretty significant difference in the overall feel of the house.

On Sunday Christine and I drove out to Ave Maria to ride the One Wheels. Despite driving through some torrential rain to get there the weather mostly held up for the ride. Ave Maria is a great place to ride, I had not had a One Wheel out there in a loooong time. We had a pretty steady flow of Cayman Jacks to keep the fun flowing.

If it seems like there has been less blog entries and less to chew on inside of them I apologize. Like many things in life there are ebb and flow to it. Both the ebb and flow are on the lighter side lately.