Archives March 2026

Usually Friday mornings I treat myself to DD coffee on the way into work. I pulled in and was in a pretty long line but that wasn’t that unusual. They had one of the staff walking car to car taking orders which I understand is meant to increase efficiency by giving staff more time to prepare the drinks/food. Right before she got to me she got a message on her headphone from inside the store, someone was “stuck”.

Evidently some genius in a Sprinter van with a roof rack drove right through the piece of hanging PVC that indicates height clearance which he certainly had to hit. Now that he was all the way to the drive thru he had a line of 8 cars behind him. I decided the best course of action was to park and walk in where I got to see the culprit. When I left it looked like he was trying to deflate his tires to get a little more clearance. I gave a couple people in cars a heads up as to what was going on so they could make different plans as well. People are dumb.

Speaking of dumb people, Kristi Noem got replaced yesterday as head of DHS. Not only was she terrible at her job but evidently was f’ing some guy that was given unusual amounts of authority “under her”, pun intended. Then there was the 200 million dollar no bid contract she gave to an ally/friend which featured Kristi in various commercials that I suppose were meant to alter the gustapo image DHS and ICE especially had created. The guy Trump picked to replace her unfortunately appears to be unqualified as well with a dubious track record. I can only hope Pam Bondi is on the chopping block next however Trump will never fire her, her exit will need to be expedited by Congress.

Things are going “fantastic” with the war in Iran. We are killing Iranians left and right including various leaders and even a school full of a children. Oh well, just collateral damage if you listen to the White House. We got amazing news that the conflict is expected to run 6-12 months at a minimum. To hell with all of the things we supposedly can not pay for at home, prioritizing keeping the coffers of defense contractors filled to the brim with cash is what matters most, disgusting.

I will do my best to not watch any news over the weekend. More and more I try to shut out the madness like a bear in hibernation, hoping to emerge eventually to a spring that does not have an orange sun.

I set a reminder to check out the blood moon that went down this morning between 6 and 7 AM. I did not see it. I am not sure if it was too low on the horizon for me to witness but I walked the entire yard in my boxers trying to spot it in the sky with no luck. Oh well.

Last night I got a chance to work a little bit more on the V12S tire swap, getting to the point of removing the old tire. However the feeling of accomplishment of getting the tire off quickly mutated into self disgust when I held it up to the tire I bought to replace it. As you can see, the new tire on the left is much larger. Evidently in my haste to select the tire I did not pay close enough attention to the sizing. I selected a tire with a 16 inch rim size instead of a 16 inch outer diameter. DOH!

I was frustrated and annoyed with myself although it certainly is not the first time not paying attention to detail has bitten me in the ass. What was more annoying was I could not find the tire model I hoped to use in the size that I needed. I don’t believe Michelin makes it.

After searching for 15 minutes on the internet I came up with another plan. I bought the tire that is on my Veteran Patton, which I love. If I love the tire on my Patton hopefully I will feel similarly with one on my V12S. Unfortunately it will take several days for me to get the different tire so the project will be on pause until then.

I have talked in here several times how much I dislike going to Costco. I like Costco products and business model. They sell good stuff and pay their employees pretty well. What I despise is how crowded the store is where there are rivers of humanity everywhere clogging aisles and making the experience miserable most of the time. I have found a solution.

If you go to sameday.costco.com you are able to easily select what items you need and then have them delivered to your door within a couple hours. The service utilizes Instacart to make this magic happen. I make my selections, checkout and I’m done. Now of course this isn’t for free. Instacart charges a small fee and you tip the delivery person as well. For me this is a great trade as I don’t have to drive close to an hour for the round trip nor deal with the quagmire inside the store. I really love this option which I plan to use frequently in the future, especially since the food that Elsa loves is sold at Costco in big bags which last longer.

Ironically they are building a second Costco in our area which will be literally down the road from me, 5-10 minutes away. Even with the close proximity I still think I will be pushing the checkout now button on my computer a lot more than pushing a cart through those overcrowded aisles in the future. Sure sometimes it’s nice to browse the store, stumbling across something that you didn’t expect to find but that juice is rarely worth the squeeze IMO.

Usually I leave Trump chaos for the end of most posts but I wanted to get it out of the way. We now have entered into an undeclared war with Iran, the country whose nuclear capabilities were supposedly “obliterated” last year. Of course this has been pushed by Israel forever. They have wanted the US to be involved in Iranian military operations for a long time. The hypocrisy of action versus prior words when it comes to this conflict is ridiculous but that is the new status quo. What the administration says versus what they actually do changes daily. Their comfort with circumventing the constitution and general rule of law would be a huge cause for alarm in a normal reality. However time and time again these actions are met with no consequences so the hope for different outcomes fade away, at least for me. Short of divine intervention, all I feel I can do is try to survive until the state of madness is no longer the norm.

I did not play any pickleball this weekend. I have tired of the huge crowds on the weekend which make the wait between games 30 minutes or more at times. Those prolonged cool down periods just do not play well with my IT band problems. I did decide to test myself physically this weekend in another way when I went to the gym Sunday morning.

When I was huge into calisthenics HIT style workouts were a core part of it where you are doing high numbers of reps of different movements with as minimal rest as possible. They are very tough but also very effective as you are working your strength and endurance simultaneously. Somewhere between four and five years ago I was doing a 400 at the gym pretty consistently. The workout consisted of 100 pull ups, push ups, hanging knee raises and body weight dips broken into many micro sets.

The way I did the sets back then was an initial set of 10 reps of each and then sets of 5 each until I got to 90 reps where I would grind out a final set of 10. For reasons unknown to me I wanted to see how I would do with the workout now. I don’t do consistent cardio routines anymore, the closest I get is playing pickleball, which is not enough.

In my mind I thought I could complete the 400 reps in roughly a half hour. I vaguely recall that when I was doing the workout consistently I did it as quickly as 28 minutes and change. Wow was I wrong. I never feel all that strong first thing in the morning but man, it was a struggle right from the get go. By the time I got up to 100 total reps I was already feeling tired, a feeling that only increased with each set. The killer part of this routine is the pull ups.

I still do pull ups in my gym routine but not nearly the volume I used to do. All the sets of 5 exhausted me much faster than they used to and were the biggest reason the workout took as long as it did. For a good portion of the sets I would only be able to get four in a row and then would have to drop off, regrip and get the 5th rep which takes way too much time.

I mentally was on the verge of quitting several times. At first I thought if I made it to 200 reps that would be good enough. When I got to 300 reps I got the idea that I would do the other three movements but not pull ups for the rest of the time. I was so tired. However in the end my stubbornness won out and I completed all 400 reps. My time was 47 minutes, wow.

This was a good wake up call for me and illustrated how I need to add this type of intense endurance work back into the mix of what I do. When it comes to health and fitness the path of least resistance is never the best choice. My upper body was spent all day afterward and I am sure the next couple days the soreness will amplify further.

I’m not sure if the full moon was tweaking my head but yesterday I took on another challenge of a different variety that I had not done in awhile, ripping apart a perfectly functioning wheel to do an upgrade that I don’t really need.

My V12S has been a nice wheel. The one gripe I have had is it feels wobbly after I cross the 25MPH mark. I have a theory that a different tire might address that problem so I bought I Michelin Pilot Street 2 tire for it, a tire I have used successfully on other EUCs. Based on my research I knew changing a tire on this wheel was not exactly easy but I was hoping I could find a streamlined method to do it. Well that method doesnt exist.

After about 90 minutes of disassembly this is the state the wheel is in. I still have a couple more things to remove before I can even access the tire to change it. Then the fun job of putting it all back together will begin. I have no doubt there will be a couple bolts that might be left over at the end. It’s going to be a kick in the head if after I do all of this work the issue is no better which is a distinct possibility. There are no V12S tire swap videos on the internet so if nothing else, I can fill that void of content. I hope to be able to work on this after work this week as time allows.

Elsa had another good weekend, eating well, pooping well and being happy. That’s all I can ask for.