Abnormal, Probed, Part of it, Sun is broken, Florida to Thailand, One spot at a time, Indestructo
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.