A couple days ago I got a comment from someone watching some of my older calisthenics content, which is pretty much all my channel was about for a period of 4-5 years. The conversation with him motivated me to shoot a video talking about my time heavily into calisthenics and why I got away from it. I do still incorporate calisthenics in my normal workout routine and try to get out to the bar park a few nights a week after work to do quick sets of pull ups, push ups, dips and hanging knee raises. I might try to expand my efforts to see how my body reacts as I likely have more of the fuel I spoke about in the video on reserve nowadays.
I have determined the yard finally needs a full whack/mow session. My hope is to be able to get the weed whacking done after work tonight to alleviate some of the demands on my weekend, which are shaping up to be substantial enough as is.
I am already half way through the new work week. Returning to cleaning the chicken coop by spotlight at 5:45 AM was not a welcome change. Since returning to work I conducted my first job interviews where I was the primary decision maker in the process. It is actually quite a tough job market from an employer perspective, there have been far less resumes coming in than the last time we had an opening. However I think we may have gotten really lucky and found a candidate that could be a near perfect fit for the job. I am crossing my fingers it all works out.
I have not done any deep introspection on how I envision myself being in charge of our department which is small in number but HUGE in organization responsibility. I need to have capable and trusted people working for me. I am not the type of person that gets off on wielding power over people to satisfy my ego or make them grovel for recognition. Instead I try to stick to my general philosophy of treating others like you would like to be treated. In that regard my short term effort has been to reward those that do a good job for me. It helps them and helps me in the bigger picture and longer term.
Another part of my personality that I am aware of is how I need to process and evaluate requests made of me. Quite often my knee jerk reaction to something may be negative but if I am allowed to digest things further I may come to a different conclusion. So for example I try to avoid blurting out NO, even if that is I how I am feeling initially. Instead “let me think about it and get back to you” is a more tactful response. Of course you can’t be the type of person that says that as a crutch and then never actually thinks about it.
I am slowly healing up from my series of falls during my GT testing. I have bruises on my hip and back as well as some nasty brush burns. I am no longer walking with a limp at least. I should be going back to my typical less risk filled riding habits now that the flurry of testing is done. Last night I tried on my new lower body hip/ass crash pads. I need to wear them consistently.
I have been trying some techniques to short circuit some of the negative thought loops I referred to in the last entry. It probably won’t work. Get it?
Looks like I last posted on Thursday. Wow, my last three days have been very full, despite house chores not being part of that equation significantly. The fall I took on Tuesday still had me sore but not enough to prevent me from going out on my 10 mile ride on my road bike. I did it earlier in the day Friday to get it off my list as I still had a long list of One Wheel GT want to do’s.
One of those was doing a range test which I did Friday afternoon. I wanted to go to the DD that is roughly 10 miles away, something I did once on my OneWheel XR and barely made it, coasting home on fumes. I was confident I should be able to do the ride on the GT that has a bigger battery but I wasn’t certain. I titled the video a “No Net” range test.
Doing a range test on a PEV is a risky proposition. If for some reason the device gets less range than expected you are SOL unless you have a rescue vehicle available. With every range test I have done in the past of course Cindy was that safety net for me. This was the first time I was doing such a test with no backup plan. This no net principal is something I will talk about more later as it applies to other areas of my life.
Originally I thought I would need to go slow to ensure I had the juice to do the trip. Instead I found myself right up against the board speed limits, carrying 18-19mph for the majority of the ride. I had 65% battery left at DD. On the way back I had enough reserve that I went into the park and farted around for nearly a half hour trying to use up more of the battery. I timed it pretty well as I rolled back into the driveway with somewhere around 5% battery and covered 27 miles and change, a great performance.
During the day I also installed my orange bumpers, rail guards and carbon fiber fender. It was an easy swap that really changes the visual of the board, I was happy with the end result.
Friday night I went to see the new Batman movie. A friend of mine said her brother thought it was the best Batman yet so I had high expectations. I thought the movie was dark and well done but not the best Batman ever. I would give the Christian Bale/Heath Ledger edition that title still. There are also some things in the story that annoy me that I can’t really talk about without ruining things somewhat. I’d give it a B+ overall.
I got home late Friday night and it became much later. I saw an email about an error the office network was having. I remoted in and wound up spending a ton of time on it. I eventually got things ironed out but I went to bed at a ridiculous time, somewhere around 3AM.
On Saturday I spit out two more videos, one of them involved aerial footage from one of drones. I love the way aerial footage adds visual diversity and perspective, too bad most of the time I am in too much of a rush to do it.
Later in the afternoon I FORCED myself to drive down to the coast. My intent was to sit on the beach and read for an hour or two, like I promised myself I would. I figured at that time of day, a little before 5PM, most of the areas elderly residents would be swarming to early bird specials, not the beach. Boy was I wrong. The two spots I checked were both at capacity. I said F it and instead carried my beach chair to a small park near the beach. I found a shady spot and read a book. It was quiet and peaceful, even without sand and surf in front of me.
So before I knew it Sunday was here, the last day of my 9 day staycation. I filled it mostly with more of the same, riding the GT and shooting videos about it. I made something like 8 videos during my time off. The first one was a more cinematic short video of the aerial footage from Saturday.
For the second video I headed to the Indian Hill area of Marco Island. This is one of the steepest hills in our area. I thought it would be a good spot to test the GT’s improved power and compare it directly to the XR. I did a similar test on my EUC’s where I go back and forth over Indian Hill 10 times which adds up to 20 hills and 2.5 miles of stress testing.
I used the XR first. Very early on in the test I was getting weird surging sensations as I climbed. These surges became more frequent as I got deeper into the test, they were warning signs that I did not heed. In the middle of the 7th back and forth the board surged one final time and then suddenly shut off, launching me to the asphalt once again. I landed on the same spots that were already bruised and brush burned, it was not good. My equipment took damage in addition to my body. The mounting clip on my mic transmitter broke as well as the door on my camera. I was pissed.
After composing myself and carrying the XR to the top of the hill I rode it back to the car. Throwing me on the road is an instant disqualification. Once back at the car I searched for a way to rig my camera so I could film the GT doing the same test. I grabbed some velcro from the “steering wheel balancer” I had in the console and used it to half ass throw things back together.
I expected the GT would do better on the test but after eating asphalt on the XR I was worried that doing the full 10 back and forths would be too much. Luckily the GT was up to the task. Other than a couple real minor surges late in the test the board gave no signs of problem carrying my 190 pounds back and forth over the steep terrain with no breaks. It was the final gold star of many the board has earned since I received it. There is no doubt in my mind it is a considerable upgrade to the XR.
I left Marco battered and bruised. My hip really hurt, that pain intensified throughout the night. The no net feeling returned. One of the benefits of having a partner is ideally they are your net, if you fall they catch you. I feel like I have no net anymore and it isn’t a feeling that makes me feel good. If something bad happens I have no backup plan. Despite having a week filled with a lot of things I enjoy doing, at the end of it I still find myself stuck in negative thought loops that lead to nowhere good. I still feel a lot of sadness in my heart which I hoped would be less obtrusive by this point in time.
It felt unwelcome getting up at 5:35 AM once again. My body was quickly getting accustomed to sleeping in between 7:30 and 8, especially since the time change. I limped out to the chicken coop and hosed off chicken shit, like every other day. I need to get back on track, whatever that eventually means.
Just wanted to give a quick recap of my prior two days as I am on the cusp of heading out for a range test ride on my new One Wheel GT. The GT arrived on Tuesday as promised but it was almost a miss. I knew the board was shipped by FedEx with signature required. Because of this after getting my coffee in the morning I planned to plant my ass at home all day, I did not want to miss the delivery. I spent a good portion of the morning just sort of bumming around. Around 1:30 I decided to go out and put the mats back into the chicken coop. I may have been outside 5 or 6 minutes. After coming back in the house I wanted to walk out to the mailbox. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the OneWheel box sitting in my garage.
I verified with my Ring camera that the delivery was made during that 5 minute window I was outside, unreal. Thankfully since I had left the garage open the driver assumed I was home and left the GT without signature. If he didn’t I would have been driving around the neighborhood chasing him down. I decided to fire up a live stream out of the blue for the unboxing, it’s a thing some people enjoy seeing. The board looked great and thanks to the massive hyper charger I got for it, I was able to go from 32% to 100% charge in something like 50 minutes.
I ended the stream and wanted to get out for my first ride. Because of the new rounded profile tire and high PSI the board felt very twitchy, especially the first 10 minutes or so of riding. My body adjusted to the physics somewhat and I was able to ride to DD to grab some coffee. On the way back I dipped into the park to take the board around some of the pathways. I sat the camera down to get some footage of me coming up one of the paths. I was carving back and forth and suddenly had an extreme back and forth wobble on the board, I must have gotten too far onto the tire edge. I was unable to ride out the sudden movement and got launched, landing very hard on my right side. Because I had the wireless mic on me, the sound of impact was pretty intense.
I sat there for maybe a minute doing a self assessment. My right elbow and hip clearly hurt. My right hand was scraped and bruised as well. The good news is nothing felt broken so I eventually got back on the board and continued on, although I definitely cut the ride short. It shook my confidence a bit as you can imagine. You can watch the first 10 seconds of the video to catch the moment of impact.
As expected I awoke Wednesday with a lot of soreness however I already had made arrangements to go ride at the Greenway with Clay. I don’t like to bow out of commitments so I just popped a couple Advil and headed there. Clay is real chill kind of guy and is a much more experienced OneWheeler than I am. He actually has a GT on order as well so he was excited to try out the board early. We had a great time cruising down to the beach and back. I rode his board most of the time so he could enjoy the GT. After we were done we talked about future meet ups, he was not aware that Cindy and I split up so it’s a good time to hang out with more of the local One Wheelers.
Today I awoke with second day soreness which may eclipse day one. My neck is now sore, likely from trying to prevent my head from smashing the asphalt when I went down. Again, I don’t have time for pain. Advil will be the key to the 20 mile+ Dunkin Donuts ride I am doing this morning. I have a lot of GT video ideas in my head but I am trying to not cram them all in at once as it could quickly consume a lot of my remaining time off. I still have some slow down and chilling I need to do.
Friday night I resumed my 10 mile bike ride after work after a one week hiatus. I had a pretty solid singles pickleball match at work during lunch so my legs were a little tired already. Pickle ball, especially singles really gets you moving.
Saturday morning Elsa again was excited to jump on the bed in the middle of my stripping it. It’s a very cute annoyance. In the morning it was hot and humid however in the span of an hour or two the temperature dropped almost 25 degrees as what is likely the last serious cold front of the year rolled in. The cooler temperatures made working on some chores easier.
I did have one list item “fix solar” become stupidly easy to complete. A week ago I noticed I was no longer receiving power from the two 160 watt panels in the chicken yard. I determined the solar generator they are plugged into was still working fine. I figured I was going to have an aggravating session with my volt meter, trying to find the break in the power chain.
Well while I was cleaning the coop I decided to take a closer look at the small adapter that connects the outside wires to the correct plug for the generator. After a closer look I realized one of these connectors was not fully seated. After pushing it back together power was once again flowing. In that moment I knew exactly what happened. Over a month ago I had something on the shelf fall off. When it did it hit the solar wires which come in through the window. However everything still worked fine. Evidently that impact must of dislodged one of those connectors but not enough to break connection. Over time it must have slid just enough to break the circuit. I was very glad to find such a quick and easy fix for that list item.
On Saturday I also tackled cleaning up several piles of stuff that had been in the garage, the side of the house and the pool deck for over 6 months. This is stuff that Cindy eventually will take, hopefully, whenever her living situation is finalized however I was tired of looking at it each and every day. It was like a little jabbing daily visual reminder of what no longer was, so I finally eliminated it. Things are now stored out of sight and I much prefer it this way.
Sunday morning was quite chilly with temps in the lower 40’s at the house. Elsa and Sadie seemed to enjoy the coolness. Sadie just sat out in the yard for prolonged periods of time. I knocked out a couple more to do’s during the day including repurposing some castle stones. When the chickens were free ranging the entire yard one of the annoying things they would do is dig in the mulch by the pool cage, kicking mulch out everywhere. I made two changes to address this, filling that spot with rubber mulch which flew less and adding a second row of castle stones to make a higher barrier.
It was a huge expense and physical effort to do this, which now is wasted effort, a recurring theme in my life. So anyway I have been taking the second layer of castle stones and repurposing them in spots that make more sense. I already added some to one of the front palm tree islands. Yesterday I added a layer to the bird of paradise circle. The castle stones that were there were already buried from erosion. The second layer now gives it a much more defined look which I like. I still have a number of castle stones remaining. I was thinking about building a firepit structure with them but I fear it could turn out to be more wasted effort, after all who wants to sit around a fire pit themselves?
During the day I also shot a video regarding an update on the coop solar system, a request I got from one of my subscribers.
The other list item I knocked out was cleaning the freezer, something I am unsure if it was ever done. I pulled out everything, throwing out old items or food I will never prepare myself. I then brought in the shopvac to suck out all of the debris in the bottom and followed with wiping out the remains. There was a section that had some sort of disgusting goo which I believe is from a leaking freeze pack. It took awhile to get it looking decent but the end result was nice, a clean, organized space.
I took Sadie back to Ali and Shugg’s place last night, they were away for another of their extended weekends, this time in the Kentucky area. They love to just fly to random spots, rent a car and explore. I told them it sounds just like the road trip mentality that I enjoy, just flying to the spot first. It sounded like they had a good time, even with getting several inches of snow at one point. I didn’t get back to the house until around 9PM.
The last two nights I have had an issue getting quality sleep. I’m not sure of the root cause but my brain will start going on tangents I wish it would refrain from. I just want to close my eyes and wake up the next morning to blue skies and sunny dispositions. I will likely try to polish off my to do list today so the rest of my week is filled with almost exclusively whatever the F I want to do time.
Today is my last day of work prior to a week long vacation. I haven’t taken a week off for a staycation in quite awhile. I look forward to knocking out the smallish projects on my list. None of them by themselves should take more than a hour, when combined it might be a days work out of the 9 I have coming up. On the fun side, I have my new One Wheel GT arriving soon and I also would like to get out to see Batman in the theater. Hell I may even take a book to the beach and read, imagine that. I’m sure I’ll check in along the way but if you don’t hear from me much, don’t be concerned.
For Christmas my step mom bought me a bunch of frozen food from Omaha Steaks which seemed weird at first, since I don’t eat steak. It turns out they sell a bunch of other non-meat items as well. I have enjoyed them all. Last night I made the last thing I had left, some sort of casserole type thing. Again it was very good but the prep time was very long, by my standards. It had to bake for something like 70 minutes. Most of my meals utilize the microwave, not the oven. Since I already had the oven on I decided to make cookies with the remaining pre-made toll house batter I have had in the fridge for a couple months. It was one of the biggest food preparation windows I have had in awhile. I was rewarded with a tasty entree with warm cookies as desert.
I ate my dinner while watching Walking Dead. I have not talked about the show in probably years because I am embarrassed to admit I still watch it, it’s that bad. Thankfully this is the final season although they are breaking it into 3 different chunks. The story right now is ridiculous. Somehow they are now in a community where everything seems normal. People take showers, women wear make up, they serve ice cream in the streets, and more. There is no real explanation how this group has all of these impossible amenities in the midst of a global zombie apocalypse. I laugh out loud repeatedly during the episodes at the lunacy of it all. I keep watching because I have been in it since day one, like many things in my life, once I commit to something it’s hard to get me to break that chain.
Shugs dropped off Sadie last night. It’s the first time I saw her since her oral surgery where they removed a bunch of diseased teeth. Although the surgery was in her mouth I immediately noticed she seemed significantly less gimpy than last time. Her overall demeanor was very happy, something Shugs say they both have noticed as well. All night she was exhibiting better mobility and the horrible stench from her mouth was now gone. I have her until Sunday.
I got word back from my accountant on my taxes for this year. The refund was less than I was hoping for. For some reason in my head I assumed since I made much less from the 3D store in 2021 that my tax situation would be better. Even though I submit a bunch of stuff that could be itemized deductions the standard deduction now is so high that winds up getting used instead. In the big picture it’s nice I still can pull a refund considering I do get income from four additional sources outside of my normal job.
I saw Carson Wentz was traded yesterday after only one year with the Colts. I was somewhat surprised. Statistically Wentz had a good season with the team. His departure seems almost solely due to the team choking miserably the last game of the season against the Jaguars which eliminated the Colts from the playoffs. Carson is a strange guy to figure out. He is physically gifted and says the right things. But after he was traded by the Eagles stuff came out about his prima donna attitude at times and how he wasn’t very coachable.
Whatever the case is, he is now back in the NFC East with Washington. It will be very interesting seeing him twice a year, that is if he isn’t injured as he unfortunately seems to be quite often. I don’t expect him to get a very warm greeting from Philly fans. Despite some of his success in Philadelphia I think overall, the fans don’t love Carson all that much. Nick Foles after all was the guy that actually got things done when the pressure was the highest, not Wentz.
I keep forgetting to relay my thought on FF 9 which I watched Sunday night. The unhip among you won’t know this stands for The Fast & Furious series which has had more sequels than any movie franchise I can recall, even more than Transformers. For the most part I found the films entertaining but they have been getting more and more stupid as time goes on. I suppose the need to keep one upping yourself can lend to this. Well in a word, I thought FF 9 was awful. It was ridiculous in so many ways that I don’t have the time or motivation to lay them all out here. Thank god I got to watch it for free on HBO Max and never paid theater level money to see it. Unfortunately they set up ANOTHER sequel at the end of this one, it’s time they Thelma and Louise this thing. C-
I have a LOT of vacation time to use up. In recent years past I always would be holding onto my time just in case we wanted to go on a road trip, vacation or do something else that required time off. I also have had issues where projects at work made me feel like taking off was ill advised. Often the end result of this would be that as the year was expiring I would have a lot of unused vacation to either burn up or “sell” back to the office. (I can sell a week) Well I am making a concerted effort to use it, generously. When given a chance to not work, I would like to take it.
I have put in to take next week off. I have no exciting plans but I do plan to put it to good use, getting a number of smaller tasks I have been putting off done and out of my hair. I started my list for next week last night and I think it currently sits at 7 or 8 line items. The time off will work out well in another way. My One Wheel GT that was ordered at the end of OCTOBER is finally due to arrive next week. It will give me a great opportunity to ride/document the shit out of it.
Less than a week ago I had my physical which included highlights like being told I had an abnormal EKG followed by getting the finger in a very private area. Today I got to visit the dermatologist where I had three different areas on my head cut into to get tested for skin cancer. One of them is actually on the back of my head on my upper neck, inside my hairline. I have never had a spot cut into on my scalp so that was a new and exciting experience for me. I am tired of getting cut into as you can imagine but it’s happened so many times at this point it becomes part of my routine.
After my physical on Friday I was given a referral sheet for a cardiologist to have them follow up on my EKG. I left a message on Friday. When I heard nothing back I left another message Monday morning. When I heard nothing back by late Monday afternoon I contacted our med center which made the referral. I asked them if we should be looking elsewhere since it’s been two business days without a call back? I was told that is not abnormal for return calls to be measured in days. Really??? I left another message this morning. If I don’t hear anything by tomorrow I am going to ask for another option for the referral as I prefer dealing with organizations that at least make a reasonable effort to get back to people. If it takes them a week to return a phone call, imagine how long it will take to book an appointment.
On Friday I had my physical that is required for our insurance qualifier. Usually this happens every 2 years but because of covid they skipped the physical requirement one year so my last physical was all the way back in 2019. I had never even met the LPN that works at our med center now. She was a nice Haitian woman named Jules. So at my age one of the things they do is an EKG. This requires hooking up a bunch of electrical leads and using them to get a peak at your heart function.
So the test is run on me and a few minutes later they come back in and say they want to run it again. They didn’t give me specifics but just said they wanted to make sure the results are accurate. Well as you can imagine this did not make me feel very warm and fuzzy. So they run the test again and the results are similar. Jules says it showed some borderline numbers. When I asked what she meant she said one of the markers could be an indicator of my having a mini-heart attack. Say what???
I told her I have no recollection of feeling anything resembling heart attack symptoms. Obviously I look healthy and am still active. However because the EKG in 2019 looked fine she had some concerns. She gave me referral to see a cardiologist to have more testing done. If getting a bad EKG wasn’t enough bad news for the day, I got the digital rectal exam to cap off the visit. I was not a happy camper.
I talked to another guy in my department. He had a similar scenario where the med center said his EKG merited a cardiologist visit however when he went to the cardiologist all the testing came back negative. I am hoping for a similar outcome. I’d rather not be checking out quite yet, Elsa and the chickens still need me.
Friday night I shot a video unboxing my new OneWheel GT accessories. They send the accessories before the board, which will hopefully be here within a week.
On Saturday I spent almost the entire morning out in the yard. I was removing a lot of dead vegetation that was killed by the couple of really cold nights several weeks ago. Some stuff that initially looked like it survived has since wilted and died. As I have been pulling dead things I have just tossed them in the yard. The yard was looking pretty bad with all of these dead plants littering the scene. I fired up the tractor and mowed them over repeatedly to turn most of it to mulch. I also mowed the mound in front of the house to at least make that area look at least a little cleaner.
Late in the afternoon Saturday I took my V12 for a ride, parking at the Greenway. I rode all the way to downtown Naples and briefly stopped at the beach as well. It was a reminder of how I need to do these sort of things more often. As I said on the video, if I wasn’t scheduled to live stream that night, I would have considered just rolling into a bar and hanging there for dinner.
One of the things I did during the day was do some troubleshooting on my solar set up in the coop. Late last week I noticed the battery was not charged up as it normally would be after a mostly sunny day. After doing some plugging, unplugging and restarting the unit it seemed to me the MPTT charge controller wasn’t working. This is what is connected to the two larger panels out in the yard. I put my volt meter leads in the connector coming from the panels and had volts present although getting the reading was iffy. So my assumption was maybe the MPTT just went bad somehow.
So on Saturday I did one more quick test. I have a small 50W panel going into the PWM charge port on the other half of the Yeti. There was still charge coming in via that small panel. I unplugged that panel and plugged it into the MPTT port, bingo, juice is flowing. Hmm this was a head scratcher for sure. I had already looked at the wires coming from the big panels to verify something did not chew on/damage the wires. I saw nothing but checked a second time. I still see nothing obvious. In my next trouble shooting round I will be back out there with the meter checking for current right off the panels themselves. It seems unlikely the wires or connectors would just go bad but who knows. For the time being I am just running the small panel through the MPTT port. It won’t make enough juice to fully charge the battery during the day but it’s better than nothing for now.
Saturday night I had another long live stream, well over three hours. I had a guest which is a rare thing, Ulf. Ulf lives in Germany but is currently on vacation in Thailand for a month. He has a lot of knowledge about EUC power systems. His internet connection was not super reliable so at times communication was a bit tough but overall it went ok. It was a fun stream and once again required me to do a lot less talking than I normally would do.
My Sunday was pretty low key. Other than heading out for coffee in the morning and late afternoon I was home and mostly indoors. It was sort of stupidly hot outside for early March, the temps were approaching 90 degrees. I didn’t feel like dealing with it. Instead I edited the Saturday video and then published the live stream to podcast format. I then turned my attention to the shelves in the office.
Although to the casual observer the house is pretty clean and organized there are small pockets of disorganization and chaos that remain. I have been trying to attack these in bite sized chunks. The shelf unit in the office is one of the early things that Alison and I bought for the house. It’s from Ikea and fits the corner of the room pretty well. However over time it has become increasingly cluttered and messy as things were haphazardly stuffed without any sort of regular upkeep. I decided to give it my full attention.
This meant removing every single item that was on the shelves, evaluating it’s need to remain, cleaning the shelves, and then putting back whatever passes the test in an organized and visually appealing manner. It took a long time, I bet a spent close to a couple hours. I got rid of a ton of crap. Some of it went straight in a trash bag, some into recycling, and some will be given away. It felt good to get one small chaotic space cleaned up. I will continue to target them as time moves on. Once I clean an area it is pretty easy to keep it neat.
One of the things I came across as I was cleaning was the football you see in the picture. It is a Wilson Indestructo football, yes that is really it’s name. This football is from my childhood and was one of a few different footballs we had. One of the activities my brother and I would do routinely was punting and kicking practice. This was done in the narrow backyard that lead to the barn. The ball was named this because it was literally indestructible. It was not made of leather, instead it was some sort of weird plastic/vinyl/rubber hybrid.
Being indestructible also meant it was hard, very hard. It used to hurt to kick the ball and if you were unlucky enough to catch the tip of the ball with a hard thrown pass it would leave a mark. Still it is the only football to survive my childhood and more than likely will survive me as well. This thing is somewhere around 45 years old and counting at this point.
