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.
I just heard back from my insurance agent, the one that recommended I get a wind mitigation report because it would be required by any new carrier. Instead of getting the good news about lower premium options from other carriers I got the opposite. He said he got quotes from five other carriers and the Tower Hill rate was still the lowest. WTF. I responded and asked if across the board all carriers have jacked rates tremendously? He said they have, some by as much as 50%. Welcome to Florida. It was a disappointing outcome but I have little choice but to bend over and take it.
Speaking of bending over I have my physical today. I am very much looking forward to it being in the past tense. I universally dislike being an examination subject.
This weekend I am live streaming with Ulf from Germany. I had him on once before. The funny thing is this time he will be in Thailand. He is in the middle of an extended vacation but agreed to come on anyway. There is a 12 hour time difference between us so when I start the stream at 8:30 PM Saturday night it will be 8:30 AM for him. I’ll be drinking beer while he drinks coffee. He has a lot of technical knowledge so I will be asking a lot of questions while he provides the answers.
The latest news out of Ukraine was dangerous with Russia evidently bombing a Ukraine nuclear plant which is the largest in Europe. That sounds like an extremely reckless and ignorant act. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Putin really may be losing touch with reality. The call for his removal, one way or another are going to get very loud, very quickly if things don’t change direction soon.
I wasted little time yesterday taking action towards giving my home insurer, Tower Hill the heave ho. I had a guy out at the house doing a wind mitigation survey which is required by any new insurer. He told me he needed access to the attic to do the survey. In the past this would have meant I would have had to drive my ass all the way home to let him in. However thanks to the wonders of my new smart garage door opener I was able to have him text me when he arrived and left. When he did I was able to remotely open and close the door as well as view the live feed from the camera attached to the opener. Just for safety sake I also flipped on the camera that is inside the house to monitor if anything weird went down. (it didn’t)
Tomorrow I have a physical, the first one in more than two years, probably closer to three. I am hoping they forget about the DRE but I could only hope to be so lucky.
When I got home last night I had the unwelcome feeling of soreness in my throat. Many times in my life that has been the precursor to illness so I was hoping this was not the case again. I have heard of multiple people having strep throat in our area. Cindy told me she had a sore throat last week and several people at work have been out with it as well. I gargled my listerine for awhile to hopefully kill whatever I was feeling. Luckily I woke up today feeling mostly normal so I’m hoping it was just a false alarm. During Covid there have been multiple times where I felt like I was getting sick to only have it fade away, weird.
Yesterday was a busy day with it being my first official day as department director. I feel like I have a lot of loose ends that need some tying up. The ironic thing is I also have a dump truck full of PTO time that I need to start using up. That doesn’t align well with the feeling of having a lot to do.
So I got a letter the other day stating that my home insurer Tower Hill was becoming an insurance “exchange” in Florida. I am no expert but it basically is almost like a co-op where the thing is self funded. Whatever the details, it is really just an excuse to raise premiums. I got a projected premium for my next policy period that was 33% higher. To add insult to injury I got another letter from them with a “consumer report” from Lexis Nexis. Somehow this report was supposed to be additional justification for the higher rates, it listed my “insurance score” as 806. The scoring range is 200-997 with a higher number being worse. I found this very confusing and annoying. As far as I knew no one should be able to run a credit report on me as I have my credit frozen with all three major credit agencies.
Evidently it isn’t frozen with LexisNexis. In the report it listed some negatives like the number of accounts established, insufficient information on department store accounts (I don’t have any I know of), number of open installment bank accounts, and the percentage of accounts reported in last 24 months compared to total accounts. My credit score is pretty golden the last time I checked so I found it really annoying. So I called my agent today and am going to get the ball rolling on looking for another carrier, f them.
So yesterday was my boss/buddies last day at work of his 30 year career. We had some cake for him in the afternoon and we gave him the print I had made up for the occasion on Etsy. It was pretty low key, if it was up to him we wouldn’t do anything at all. After eating the cake a small group of us just sat around and talked, sort of like we did at South Street the day before. During that conversation I told him that I never have worked with someone for as long as him, some 22 years plus at this point. At the end of the day I helped him load his personal belongings into his car. It didn’t take long as Don is an amazing minimalist.
For the last 22 years our routine would always be to walk out of the office together, exchanging thoughts on whatever was on our minds. Knowing that yesterday was the last time that was ever going to occur sort of struck an emotional chord with me as I got in my car. It was just another example of loss in my sphere of existence.
I’m not sure if the retirement had anything to do with the lousy sleep I got last night. I felt like I was awake more hours than I was asleep. I am sure as the day goes on I will be paying the drowsiness toll in spades.
One of my big plans for Saturday was I wanted to get a real bed for the guest room. I already had bought the used bed frame last week. My plan was to go to Sam’s and buy a king size box spring and gel foam mattress. So I walk in the place and survey the bedding area. They have no box springs at all that I saw, odd. The king size gel foam mattress I found online was not on the shelf either. Grrr. What they did have were all in one hinged queens size platforms as well as a queen size model of the mattress I was looking at.
So I decided that the room will now have a queens size bed instead. In some ways it makes more sense, it’s a ton of bed for one person and enough for two for short durations, what you want in a guest room, right? The smaller size also makes the room feel larger, another plus. I loaded the two big boxes on the mattress cart and pushed it out to the truck.
Shortly after getting home I set it all up. The platform is quite nice although costlier than a conventional frame/box spring set up. Yea remember that used frame I drove an extra 40 miles out of my way for? I curbed it. It only cost me $20 so no big loss.
I made a video of me opening the vacuum sealed mattress as some comedic relief.
On Saturday night I watched Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds. I seem to enjoy any movie he is a part of and this was no different. I thought the movie was very funny and entertaining. The video game theme of course resonated with me as well. It’s a solid A movie for me all day long.
My Sunday was abnormally busy. I drove to Veterans Park to meet up with Rich for another weekend pickleball match. Unfortunately I pulled into a jammed parking lot with tons of people on the courts, none were available. Rich was still en route when I got there, I told him we had no shot of getting a court there. Evidently Sunday morning is prime pickleball time. I suggested we could try the new park by me again, he agreed. I was concerned that one could be packed as well. Luckily it wasn’t, only two of the six courts were being used.
Rich and I played 5 long games, there was a lot of siding out going on. I lost four of the five which I wasn’t thrilled about but I still enjoyed playing. The last couple games we both were really minding the heat. By the time we left near noon it was closing on the mid-80s. I can’t imagine playing in the heat of summer. After I took a shower at home I felt wiped out. I would have taken a nap if I didn’t have a party to go attend.
The party was at South Street, an old stomping grounds of mine when I was socially active in the running club. They reserved the back room for our group. I arrived about a half hour after the official start time. There was a solid turnout of 30-40 people at it’s maximum, all there to celebrate the retirement of a regional manager and my boss/friend Don. Don is even worse than me when it comes to being social normally but he seemed to be having a good time. I got to see some old faces I have not seen in awhile as well which was a treat. I kept the Miller Lites flowing to lubricate my social interactions. I had either four or five. The party officially ended at 5 but me and a small group of people hung around until almost six just reminiscing. Many of the stories pre-dated me but they were fun to listen to anyway.
By the time I got home, ate dinner and played a little WoW it was already time to get ready for bed. The weekend had flown by. This week I take over as director of our department, there are going to be a lot of balls to be juggling in my immediate future. My boss has a knowledge base that is not really transferable which is going to make for some rocky roads for a period of time until we navigate those roads ourselves.
If you haven’t noticed, I have been going through a transitional period of life. If you know me a little bit you know may realize that I am all about maintaining the status quo. That’s why I continue to try to live a healthy lifestyle, work inside of routines, and try to address most conflict with a level headed approach. I do this because I foolishly pursue the idea that I can somehow stop time, or at least slow it dramatically by continuing to do things as I always have. If I still am doing pull ups and push ups at 54 it connects me in time to when I was doing them when I was 34. It’s hard to verbalize just how this strategy accomplishes anything tangible but it’s the reality I have always existed in. Consistency equals protection I guess. If I am still trying to do the same things now as I have done over the last few decades, somehow I am “winning”?
I routinely make mental comparisons to my trajectory and my mom’s. My mom had a number of longer term relationships after she was divorced. Her last one ended in her early 50’s, she was dating a man that had all sorts of inner demons despite outwardly being really outgoing and funny. When that relationship finally ended she never had another serious relationship and insisted she was happier being single, which I never believed.
I know in my mind, the idea of trying to determine the true nature of a person to see if you want to invest increasingly more precious time into possibly starting a relationship sounds daunting, exhausting, and frustrating most of the time nowadays to me. The dating app that I am on only reinforces those feelings along while making it apparent that so many people are in a similar boat as I am, just searching for a person they can trust enough to build something significant and long lasting with. When you get to the age range I am in people have so much excess baggage they need a 20 foot trailer to carry it all. I think if I had an honest conversation with my mom she would have expressed a similar mindset, that trying to find someone you really connect with when you are older is such a big mountain to climb that it’s easier to just raise the white flag and fly solo.
So in addition to the life transition I now have a job transition to manage as well. In some ways it isn’t a major shift as I will still be doing much of what I already do as my buddy/boss was much more specialized in his tech expertise which was not really IT focused in a conventional sense. His background was as a lifelong cobol programmer. I had large areas of responsibility already but now I will have ALL of the responsibility for our department. One of my early tasks will be filling the position that will open up. I have never had any direct hiring/firing duties, now I will. It is a step forward/upward for me for sure and likely the last forward movement I will have in my career until I retire in 8 years. I still can’t help wishing I had someone taking those final steps with me. After all I have always been in relationships so as outlined above, my natural instinct is to want that to continue.
The Russia/Ukraine debacle is unfolding. It seems insane to most that the entire world said Putin was going to do this as a form of dissuasion and he does it anyway. I hear some at home saying this is all Biden’s fault, that if he was a “strong” president Putin would never have attempted this, really?? I would love an explanation of how a strong president would react differently? Drop a nuke on Russia? Send US troops into Ukraine? The only realistic reaction is to try to cut them off from as many sources of support as possible. The Russian people are already protesting the move into Ukraine. Imagine how that wave of dissension will grow as conditions in Russia continue to degrade.
My understanding is this is mostly about controlling the pipeline that runs through Ukraine despite whatever Putin says about human rights of russian friendly citizens in the eastern region. The idea that Ukraine was becoming more west leaning was a real line in the sand for Putin along with talk of Ukraine joining NATO which was unlikely to ever happen. It’s a real cluster f.
The response to the conflict has been harsh from our allies yet there is a very tight rope that is being walked. If NATO countries would get directly involved in the conflict things could spiral very quickly. As is, Russia will be unleashing all of it’s tricks to sabotage anything and everything it can with it’s cyberterrorism capabilities, which are immense. We already know how adept Russia is at sowing seeds of psychological manipulation into social media, that effort will ramp to new levels for sure. I clearly remember time when Putin first came into the scene that he was seen as a decent, reasonable, leader. His transformation into a thinly veiled dictator (that Trump thinks is “brilliant”) is very sad. At least the world has something else to talk about besides covid…..
This weekend I am attending my first event at South Street in many years. They are throwing a party for the two people retiring on Monday, my boss and another regional manager. It will be fun to be in the bar socially, something I used to do pretty routinely the last time I was single. I am sure there will be lots of swiping left as well. I prefer to make my own memes by the way.
Yesterday as I was washing my hands in the office restroom I looked at my hair and the switch flipped. I had been trying to grow my hair longer which you can kind of see from this picture from several weeks ago. I then tried to taper my hair from short on the sides/back to longer on top, that didn’t go well. It almost looked like a bowl hair cut.
I then tried to “fix” it but that looked like shit as well which eventually lead to my hair apocalypse last night. As soon as I got home I took out the clippers with a 4MM guard and buzzed my head. There is something therapeutic for me when I remove 99% of my hair. It sort of hardens me mentally for whatever reason. I will probably try to let my hair grow longer again but this time I will utilize the skills of a hair stylist to trim it. Trying to do it myself with a mirror is a recipe for failure. Fun fact, in my life, I have only had my hair cut by someone other than my mom or significant other twice.
I have three days left until I take over as the director of our department. If I had my preference I would want my buddy to stick around until he was 62 to retire like he originally planned. However in the big picture if I had my 30 years now like he does in I would be out the door as quick as he is. If I was in his spot I would probably be uprooting most of my existence and be rebooting in some other zip code with my current state of affairs.
Last night after work I headed to Bonita Springs to pick up a used king size bed frame I saw on FB marketplace. I have decided I want to put a real bed in the guest room, something that has been missing for years. For years people would refer to the house as Hotel Duffey as the guest room had a king size bed, furniture and a tv. Ali used to even put mints on the pillow as a joke. We used to try to make guests comfortable. Over recent years that room has been changed up repeatedly. All of the furniture I used to have in there was given away, the king size bed was removed along with a number of other changes.
Since Cindy moved out the room is rather barren with a blow up queen bed in the center, a small cube by the bed and my great aunt/grandmother’s old chest of drawers with a TV on top that is too big for it. It’s pretty sad. The bed frame is the first step in “renovations”. (I guess the single curtain was a step too) I plan on getting a king size box spring along with another foam/gel mattress similar to what I have in my bedroom. I think the addition of a real bed will be a nice plus in there. I can add some additional furniture at some point but the antique drawers will be ok for the time being.
I have described over the last few months the weird nausea I have been experiencing in the mornings. This morning it was particularly strong, I had to take a few deep breaths to push the feeling of near barfing back below the surface. This does not happen all the time but pretty regularly. If I feel that way I quite often will skip the eggs and just do two pieces of PB toast instead of one. I have no idea if this a sign of a physical condition or if it’s more stress related.
I remember when I was a young child I used to complain of feeling a similar way although I was too young to know what nausea was. I must have talked about it a lot because I recall my mom actually taking me to the doctor for it and having a number of tests run on me as a result. As far as I remember nothing ever came of the testing and that feeling just sort of faded away as I got older. I managed to go 45 years or so until these feelings have returned, weird.
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.
