Archives 2026

Yesterday was the first day that I didn’t notice a noticeable improvement in my knee pain. It’s better than it was but nowhere close to normal yet. When I woke up this morning feeling basically the same I knew that my decision to not play tomorrow in the pickleball tournament was the only viable choice I had.

Yesterday I received an email from Zillow notifying me that my old house was back on the market. It had been sold twice already but evidently those deals fell apart. I was a bit shocked when I saw the price of 589,900 almost 100K from where the price started at 9-10 months ago. Here is the listing.

Evidently a new realtor has taken over as I saw new pictures on the listing. I had to laugh when I saw the interior pictures. They evidently used AI to overlay furniture and accessories in the living space to make it look more appealing. When I saw some of the pictures of the outside it becomes clear the property has not been closely maintained in a long time. Landscaped beds are filled with weeds, the out buildings look like they haven’t been pressure washed since I moved and in general everything just looks a bit dilapidated. It makes me a bit sad to see the property I meticulously maintained for over 20 years looking like that. Hopefully it gets sold to someone willing to put in the work to keep things looking decent.

With the pickleball tournament crossed off the weekend calendar I will be focusing on doing some prep for the road trip, the road trip that is still sort of up in the air. I am going to do what needs to be done so we will be good to go. We probably won’t make a final decision till later next week. If we do go it will be with a very flexible mindset instead of having hard target destinations that HAVE to be reached each and every day. We will be taking the Tesla so I need to find a way to rotate the tires this weekend with a gimpy knee. I will find a way, I always do.

One of the cooler 3D prints I have done finished yesterday after more than two days of continuous print time. It’s a robo-octopus with incredible detail and articulation. I printed it on the Creator 5 Pro, my newest printer as a test to see if it could handle a long print. It passed the test with flying colors.

I officially had to tap out of playing in the pickleball tournament. My injured right knee is just not healing fast enough to consider playing Saturday as even a remotely good idea. If I tried to play in 48 hours a couple things would likely happen. First I would not play well. If you can’t move at least a little bit it’s very difficult to have any success playing. Right now just slow measured steps takes effort. Quick changes of direction that are part of every pickleball game would just not work. Second I would wind up injuring myself even more which could have more serious consequences. I am supposed to be rolling out on a road trip the following weekend. Trying to do that with a destroyed knee would be absolutely miserable.

The only reason I did not immediately drop out of the tournament was I felt an obligation to my partner Brian to give it a go. I HATE letting people down that I make a commitment to. So even though I hate to back out, I have to. I am frustrated that I ignored some of the signs that I should have backed off playing last weekend. If I did not play last Saturday I likely would have been good to go this weekend.

My Creator 5 Pro is closing in on completing one of my longest and most detailed prints ever, a robo-octopus. This articulated model has incredible detail and use of color. Even with the wonders of multi-head 3D printing this model will have taken roughly two and a half DAYS to complete. Yea, it’s a long print.

There have been some odd issues with the CP5 that I need to mention in my review video but the fact that it can complete a print like this is a big feather in it’s cap.

Elsa had another stand alone episode of diarrhea and throwing up yesterday. It seems to happen every 7-10 days, another side effect of her kidney issues. We just keep rolling along day by day with her dealing with the issues as they come. I wish I could wave a magic wand and roll back the clock to a time when she didn’t have to deal with such things. Every time I see her happy or excited nowadays it gives me more joy than normal.

My four day weekend ended with me hardly being able to walk. I played pickleball for a little over two hours Friday morning since we were off. I came out of that session with some mild pain in the right hip and knee but nothing that seemed out of the scope of normal for me nowadays after playing. If I got up after sitting too long my first few steps were “limpy” but again, that isn’t all that abnormal for me any more. I felt good enough Saturday morning to suit up and play again, after taking two advil of course.

I played roughly another couple hours and didn’t have any particular incident that felt like I hurt myself. However by the time Saturday night rolled around I was in pretty bad pain and was limping consistently. I still didn’t think it was that serious. I theorized that going to the gym Sunday to stretch my lower body and do some cardio would help loosen up my knee and lessen my pain. At the end of the session I had the bright idea to do the rower for 10 minutes which I think was the icing on the pain cake.

Walking became increasingly more painful Sunday afternoon/evening. When I woke up Monday morning walking was almost impossible. As I looked down at my right knee I saw it was badly swollen. It’s been a long time since I had seen the knee like this. This type of swelling is normally caused by some sort of inflammation or irritation in the knee joint and I usually would see it like this after volleyball sessions over the last 25 years. I spent my day off mostly sitting or laying in bed while pumping advil and icing the knee several times. By the end of the night I was walking but very slowly and still unable to put much weight on the right leg.

This morning I am still walking with a bad limp but feel a bit more mobile. I am angry with myself for pushing it too far and likely damaging it more at the gym. The anger is amplified by the fact that I am signed up to play in my third pickleball tournament Saturday. I have to do whatever I can to get the swelling down. I would hate letting my partner down.

So outside of my knee issues I had a productive weekend. I replaced the shock on the Inmotion V14 on Saturday afternoon, bad knee and all.

I watched more World Cup soccer this weekend. Unfortunately the two teams I was pulling for, Mexico and the US both got eliminated in their games. The Mexico/England game was crazy. Mexico had a ton of scoring opportunities they just missed and the game was filled with action in the 3-2 loss.

The US/Belgium game never felt that close. The US seemed out classed very early on. Belgium players seemed to press more defensively and had better ball handling skills, stealing the ball from US players routinely. The US also made some bad mistakes, the biggest being their goalie coming way too far out and turning over the ball in the process which lead to an easy Belgium goal. The game made it clear the US is not in the elite tier of world soccer yet in the 4-1 loss.

The 4th of July was another misery fest for Elsa. Firework zombies were firing off damn close to midnight. Elsa spent all night hiding in various spots around the house but her favorite is the guest bathroom where we run a loud vent fan to block some of the noise. I clearly recall thinking fireworks were awesome when I was younger. I now can say confidently I could never see/hear another firework in my life and would be totally fine with it.

I watched the US/Bosnia game last night. Even though I have seen a lot of World Cup I have not seen any of the US playing live because of when it came on. They came away with an impressive 2-0 win, the first time the US has beaten a European team in 5 years. The win advances them to the round of 16.

The win was more impressive because the US had a red card pulled on a player which seemed wrong. He clearly accidentally stepped on the opposing player which should be a yellow card. With the red card the US played nearly 30 minutes of the game with only 10 players. Even with that handicap they scored a goal while shorthanded on a penalty kick. I was genuinely into the game and now that I understand it more I appreciate soccer as a sport more. It only took 58 years.

I had a disrupted night of sleep after Elsa got me up around 2:30. I’m glad she did because she had do do a 1 and a 2. It was not fully diarrhea but it wasn’t solid like you want either. She then threw up but only a small amount. This was after she had a great day of eating where she cleaned her plate and bowl of every bit of food we had for her. This endless cycle of one step forward and a step and a half back is not fun to go through but the reality of her condition. The idea of going on an extended road trip in a few weeks is sounding less and less likely because I don’t feel comfortable rolling the dice that she will be ok for that long.

I have a long weekend ahead. We get off Friday for 4th of July and I took off Monday as well. I am sure the time off will include several hours of pickleball play. It will also give me an opportunity to shoot more V14 Pro content, address a few small to do’s around the house and do my best to keep Elsa calm when all of the backyard firework shooting crowd does their thing on the 4th.

For about a week I was getting a stream of notifications about user accounts being created on my WordPress blog installation. It didn’t make any sense because I have registration disabled. I would check my user list and not see any of these user accounts which were being supposedly created which obviously were not legitimate users. I was paranoid and unsure of what was going on so I installed a security plug in on the blog to keep an eye on things. I finally realized yesterday what was happening.

I host my blog with GoDaddy. One of the options they have is to create a staging site where you can try out changes first in a test installation before doing them to your main site. I evidently created a staging site years ago but have not touched it. It was this site that the bots found and were creating bogus accounts on. I addressed the issue by simply deleting the staging site, end of problem.

Mexico won their knockout game last night in the World Cup, the first time they have done it in 40 years. Sure I am pulling for Team USA but Mexico is my number two based on my girlfriends rooting interest.

I talked to my dad on Father’s Day. During the call he informed me he was sending me a large collection of pictures he has of me. I guess he came across the collection and thought I would want them. I said sure. The box arrived yesterday. Inside were dozens upon dozens of pictures, mostly from my childhood, some of which I never saw before. There were pictures of me and my first junior high love interest, my first girlfriend, and my first wife, none of whom have I thought about it in a very long time. The pictures illustrated the various stages of my childhood where I went from being a pretty cute kid to an awkward and downright weird looking teenager.

Of course flipping through them fires off memories of when these photos were taken. It’s a bit surreal in some ways mentally retracing the twisting path you followed to get to where you are at this current time and place. I stored the photos in a box that already has a ton of photos that I have not touched in ages. Maybe some day I will, maybe somebody else will, who knows.

I talked to my brother yesterday for his 56th birthday. It has been awhile since we caught up. He has a myriad of aches and pains as I do but to a more serious degree. He already has had a hip replacement and has knee problems. Like me he has had his knees scoped, each knee once. I had the same knee scoped twice. After his second knee was done he did not get any sort of significant relief which can be an issue with scoping. To me it’s sort of a crap shoot if it is effective or not depending on how scar tissue forms. He also has back pain. He has been relying on cortisone shots to get by which is not a great solution. Getting old sucks.

I neglected to mention that I saw Supergirl on Friday. I had already seen the numerous negative reviews on the film. I went into it already having disliked the recent James Gunn Superman movie, the worst version of Superman I can recall, IMO. Maybe I forgot to mention I saw it because the movie is pretty forgettable. The only noteworthy thing is a very strange choice they made in the plot at the end where Supergirl does something she would never do based on her comic book history. I mean the movie was ok. I wasn’t bored but it did not invoke any sort of significant emotion in me. I just didn’t really care what happened to the characters, good or bad. I’d give it a B-.

Remember how I doubled my memory in my PC which used to sit at 32GB? My plan was to sell the old memory on FB Marketplace. When I listed it I did not get one inquiry in the first 24 hours so I said f it, took the listing down and installed the memory back into the PC since I had two available DIMM slots to do so. I now have 96GB of RAM and can run whatever I want without concern of memory overhead.

I had another solid pickleball session Saturday morning, again playing with Brian whom I will partner with in my next tournament. We played well overall winning the majority of our games against some good competition. As I have become more intellectual about my play I have become more patient with my shot selection which helps a lot. It used to be I got much more satisfaction just smashing a ball so hard that my opponent can’t touch it. Now things like a dink that turns the opposing player around like a corkscrew, a well placed but slower paced shot that is in or having the opposing player bang the ball as hard as they can only to have me block it back in their face give me similar levels of enjoyment.

I had a busy riding weekend on the V14 Pro, doing a 50 mile range test on Saturday afternoon/evening followed by an off road test Sunday morning. The range test was actually split between two rides because of intense rain that swept in around the 30 mile mark. After 90 minutes or so I was able to head out and finish although I got a bit wet in that segment as well.

The off road test had it’s own difficulties. I planned to ride the swamp just as I have for the last nearly 10 years. When I pulled up to the gate I saw it was locked with a notice that the boardwalk was closed until the end of the year for replacement. It was getting dilapidated so I am glad they are fixing it, I just wish I knew about it.

I saw that you could potentially still access the loop via the connector trail in Bonita. Even though it was another 40 minute drive I figured I would give it a shot. I don’t know the Flint Penn trails well at all but I did manage to find and ride to the connector trail. Unfortunately that connector trail was a water logged mess. Every few hundred feet there was a small pond on the trail. I called it quits and rode back to the truck.

I was pretty beat up from the 70+ miles of riding I covered in two days. I spent the rest of my Sunday editing the two videos which took quite awhile. I filled in the remaining time doing some more leveling in WoW.

Elsa had another episode of unwellness where she threw up and had diarrhea. Lately it seems to be happening every week or two. It isn’t as severe as what happened in January but still disconcerting. She was better last night and this morning. At this point the idea of going on the road trip is fading as I can’t leave her for over a week with Alison if her well being is a crap shoot. It’s a difficult thing having her questionable health looming in the back of my mind most of the time.

It is safe to say I have watched more soccer in the last couple weeks than the rest of my life, combined. I have learned to have a greater appreciation of the game but there is one aspect, well actually two, that annoy me.

I can’t stand how players try to draw fouls by grandstanding if they are bumped by another player. Sure sometimes it is legit but most of the time it’s pure acting from what I see. It looks ridiculous when a player flops, the ref knows it’s a flop and the player stays on the ground writhing in “pain” until he realizes his ruse was not effective. He then gets up and goes back to normal.

The other annoying/confusing thing is how stoppage time is added on to the end of both halves. The refs evidently keep track of stoppage time during a half and then add that onto the back end. The thing is you never know exactly how much time is remaining in a game because there is no clock that accurately shows it. Instead it seems when there is a convenient stopping point around the end of stoppage time the refs will blow the whistle to end the half or the game. I have never seen a sport with fuzzy time keeping like this.

Yesterday I signed up for my third pickleball tournament which will be on July 11th. It will be a similar format to what we played last time. I am playing this one with Brian who I played with and won, in my first tournament last October. It should be a fun time for sure, regardless of outcome.

Last night I went out briefly on my V12S to do some sunset seated riding. It was peaceful outside after an evening filled with storms.

This weekend will include some pickleball play on Saturday. I need to shoot some more content for the V14 Pro, the type of content that takes more of a time commitment. We will see if I can make that commitment over the two days.

Last night I installed a memory upgrade in my PC. Despite having 32GB I was running into issues when doing video editing and playing WoW where I was pushing the limit. I bought 64GB to upgrade it. If you know anything about tech you know that RAM prices have been going through the roof because of the insatiable demand created by AI infrastructure. The two DIMM modules cost $500, geezus. They installed cleanly and within 5 minutes I had doubled my available RAM which should alleviate my issue. I hope to offset the memory upgrade cost by selling the 32GB of memory I pulled on FB Marketplace.

I believe I mentioned in the blog that I threw a $50 reservation on the new Slate electric truck awhile back. When it was announced the EV tax credit was still in place so it was advertised as being a sub 20K new vehicle which is unheard of nowadays. Since then the Trump administration has killed that incentive the starting price which was just announced has bumped up to $25K, still about half the average price for a new car nowadays.

Their approach is unique where every single truck that comes off the assembly line is identical, initially. If you want a different color they offer wraps for a reasonable number. However the customization options after that are crazy. You can tweak this truck a million ways including changing it into a SUV by adding seats and an enclosed top. It has manual windows and a bare bones interior that supposedly has enough head and leg room for someone my size. It has about 200 miles of range and ample power. Initial driving reports have been positive.

They opened up preliminary orders yesterday which requires you to commit another $250. Doing this supposedly gets you in line to get your Slate somewhere between January and March 2027. You aren’t actually picking out any options at this point, just committing more seriously to purchasing one as this deposit is non-refundable. I am not ready to commit yet.

When I laid down the initial $50 it was the idea that potentially the Slate could replace my Tacoma which is now 10 years old. Of course it is much smaller and would not have nearly the capabilities of the Toyota. However at this point I think I will continue rolling forward with my two vehicle household. Although I don’t see myself ever buying another gas powered vehicle there is a part of me that likes having my bases covered having the Tacoma in the collection. If I got into a scenario where charging the Tesla was problem as in a wide scale and long lasting power outage after a hurricane an ICE vehicle would be more viable.

I also have hesitancy about jumping in with two feet with a brand new car company. Who knows if the Slate will launch without major issues. How do they get fixed if something breaks? I think I would rather other people serve as guinea pigs to see if the Slate is indeed a good vehicle longer term.

One of my co-workers just picked up a low mileage Chevy Silverado EV, trading in his Model Y to do it. You may recall that was another vehicle I was considering. In that scenario I would trade/sell both my Tesla and Tacoma to replace them with one vehicle which would save in registration and insurance costs. I got to ride in it. It’s very nice and huge with space for days. On the downside it is the LT model which is missing a few bells and whistles including no self driving capability. To get that you need the pricier RST model. If I got one it would need be the RST but it just makes no financial sense right now. As much as I dislike Elon nowadays I do love my Tesla.