Back when I was in school, not quite the stone age but it sure seems like it at this point, Summer School was for those students who - how to put this - weren't the best of kids. Or, at least that was the perception.

Maybe it still is, I don't really know.

The reality, our reality anyhow, is that Summer School is for those kiddos who want to get ahead. Those kids and students who want to have just a tad more flexibility in their class choices for the normal school year.

That is exactly what my two Freshmen are doing this month. They wanted to get into some Summer classes so they could take what they wanted during the Fall.

A wise decision that we as parents are absolutely, positively, 100 percent behind!

Today we just got back from picking up a couple of district iPads for them so they can take their "Health and PE" course online through the local Virtual School program. Things didn't go quite as smoothly as one would have liked, considering that we'd received a couple of emails letting us know the time and place for where to pick hardware up.

Naturally, there weren't a whole lot of people who knew what was going on - but, they were able to get us taken care of in great order!

There is not much going on this week, this evening the kiddos have been signed up for some food prep oriented classes at the local library and that starts up right around dinner time. Good thing it's leftover night at the house!

This Friday I need to have some cupcakes made for a birthday party. They're going with Oreo cupcakes. I've made them before and from what I understand they were a pretty big hit. I wouldn't know, since I can't eat them. Meh. We all make our decisions and get to live with the consequences!

This is post 91/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm going to make it to the end of the 100 Days To Offload Challenge.

The last year has just absolutely flown by. While one might think that "yeah, I can totally make a hundred posts in a year, no problem!", it's a bit more challenging for someone like me.

Writing up portions of my life every few days is not easy. I work…very rarely go out and do anything…so it seems to me that I've got very little to say.

Not that I'm writing for an audience, I'm not. Just an audience of one - future me. Possibly my family.

I'm not gonna call it quits just yet. I've got until June 15 to see if I can get 12 more posts out.

We'll see.

This is post 88/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I really don't like it when I feel this way - all antsy and restless and just way too many things running through my head of what I want to do.

It's tough to keep track of them all.

You start to do one thing, then something new and shiny pops into your head and you make some vain, useless attempt to keep track of what that thing is. Then, when you're ready to start looking into it….everything is black. Nothing. The fleeting idea is gone.

In what I'll say is no particular order, some of the things that are on my mind at this instance in time are:

• Run (yet) another mailserver. I don't know why, I just do. I know it's futile, I know it's not something that would stick around for very long so it would be a pointless exercise. Though I did manage to pick up a nifty family-oriented domain name of the dot.lol variety, so who knows….it kinda goes along with the next thing, which is….
• Run (yet…) another federated service. Whether that be something along the lines of GoToSocial, Akkoma, Known, whatever. It would be set up for the family unit to take advantage of. Note that I have intimated that I am already running federated services. I've got an instance of GoToSocial. An instance of Known. I've had instances of Mastodon and Friendica. Plus some other micro-styled blog that I don't recall the name of. Snac2 could be interesting as well.
• Then I'd also kind of like to move to a different hosted blog or service or something. I'm liking Ghost, so maybe one of the cool providers that use Ghost. Then that could, eventually, take over for whatever federated system I'm in. Maybe.
• Of course, I still like my eleventy blog I've got here. It's all plain text and easy to move to wherever. Plus it's cheap.
• I've got all the cruft that I still want to do with my Emacs config. Saving all the cool snippets and tips and tricks that I find everywhere. At least I've got an org document saved in a git repo for that.
• Couldn't possibly forget that guix system installation that I want to get sorted out. I don't know why, besides the fact that it's flippin' awesome. I've tried nix but I just couldn't get my head wrapped around that domain language. I've kind of gotten to where I can actually grok lisp-y stuff.
• Which kind of brings us into wanting to pick up more clojure stuff. Not that I could ever actually learn enough of it to get employment in a clojure job, but man, that would be cool wouldn't it?

That's just the tip of the iceberg here. One of these days I'll get things figured out.

This is post 89/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

A few months ago my Braun electric razor had need of getting the head replaced, so naturally I procrastinated the actual purchase of one. At which point, I found a cheap replacement head that had decent reviews.

So I purchased one of those. While it fit the Series 5 body just fine, it didn't feel very good on my face. Tugging and pulling and just generally it sucked.

Then I went on and did what I should have to begin with and just picked up another actual Braun head.

What really surprised me, though, is that it was doing the exact same thing. Lots of pulling and general pain.

Fortunately, at one point in time in my life I had toyed around with the idea of going the double edged razor shave route - so I still had my Van Hagen handle and set of blades.

Let me say, there is just no competition between the electric and the manual. I think about the only way I could get a better, cleaner shave might be to go the single edge barber style. But I don't think I'm quite at that point yet!

The really interesting point here is that I don't think it takes any longer to shave - from start to finish - with the double edge than it does with the electric. Plus, I really only need to do so every three days or so.

It did take me a few times - historically - to learn the "touch" and technique with this. Let that blade do the work. It's not gonna bite. I still find that I will on occasion get just the tiniest bit of blood from some bump or other, but even that's gone down significantly.

I'll probably continue along this road. I've found that I enjoy the process so much more.

This is post 90/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Specifically my own self control, not so much the self control of others, nor telling you how good or bad your own self control is.

This is mainly going to be centered around what could be termed diet I suppose, but for reasons I actually prefer to refer to this as a lifestyle change.

Because that's what it is. Or, rather, what was (is?) needed.

I understand that a lot of people out there don't want to be reminded about food and relationships with food, so I guess consider the title of this post your content warning.

I don't recall for sure if I've written - on this incarnation of the site - about my lifestyle change when it comes to food and weight. Perhaps a quick bit of history is warranted then.

Never was I ever one to turn down a meal, nor was I ever one to care about whatever it was that I was currently stuffing down my gullet. I never attempted to lose weight, never did the diet thing, just really didn't put a whole lot of thought into it.

I would not say that I ate all the time, but when I did eat it was - shall we say - not the most healthy of choices. Lots of carbs, lots of fried stuff, I loved baking (still do), sweets, cookies, candy, cake, you get the idea. Some of my absolute favorite foods were pizza (from scratch, of course), biscuits and gravy (flour and more flour? sign me up!), pancakes, waffles (round? square? who cares!), pasta, potatoes (all the forms). Stuff that was going to send me on a one way trip to diabetes and an early grave.

Every so often I'd watch either the weight loss shows, or more likely, the transformation videos that people would post on the Tube. Every time I'd think to myself, "Self, that's amazing. Just imagine if you could also do that." Every time, I'd just click on through and go on with my day.

My wife and I had looked into the ketogenic lifestyle over a decade ago, so it was something that we had considered and were aware of the ability of what it could do for ones health. But it would be a large expense to change out all the food in our lives just to wind up failing.

Failure. Failure is never a good reason to put off doing something that is this important. Especially when it's as important as our health.

One day, my wife decided that she was tired of being obese. She had slowly been working towards going the keto route, so I decided that I was going to do the same.

In August of 2019 I too was going to take that plunge. Now, for shits and giggles on the day before I started I was going to use an app to track all the food I ate in a day. After measuring out my morning cereal I have to admit that I "noped!" out of that choice for the day. The next day I started.

I do actually have photos of myself - though I started taking them a couple of days later. I knew that I would want to track my progress visually - you know, to kind of compare alongside with those users who's videos I'd watched in the past.

I find that I'm starting to ramble on this so I'll try to accelerate the story a tad. My weight started out somewhere in the vicinity of 330 plus pounds. I had just moved into a size 50 pants. My goal at the time was to drop 100 pounds in a year.

My personality is one such that I go full speed into whatever it is that's occupying my time. I absolutely "gamed" the keto lifestyle. In well under a year I was already down that 100 pounds. I kept going, eventually getting into "one-derland", seeing the 1 as the first digit on the scale. It was amazing. Within a year I was basically into maintenance mode.

My lowest weight was in the high 160s. I don't think I looked good there, but it's tough when you've had a poor body image your whole life, you still think you need to lose. I'm currently back in the 190 range and really prefer the look of myself in the 180s. It's a challenge.

The self control thing. It's a two lane street. I had excellent self control losing the weight. It's the "stay in the healthy range" part of the program that takes even more self control. I was never one to eat my feelings, luckily, so while I did have to change my relationship with food, it wasn't the drastic change that others have had to go through. I ate out of boredom. Now, it's getting that self control back to only eating when I'm hungry.

Dropping the weight (I don't refer to it as "losing", because I really don't want to find it) was - for me - not difficult. Shockingly easy actually. Seeing the scale slowly work its way back up is what messes with my mind. I've managed to keep in the same high 180s, low 190s for a couple of years now. I look better, I feel better. I no longer have to sleep with a CPAP or BiPAP (my sleep apnea went away after the first few months). My joints no longer ache. My back is so much better.

Even with all that, I still have the feeling that I'm lacking in self control at this point. There are still snacks that I get. Junk food. Granted, the junk food that I eat now is nothing compared to before: peanuts, peanut butter, cheese, silly "keto" bars and cookies. A lot of stuff that didn't exist before we started the life change. A lot of higher than I prefer calorie items. It's a self control thing.

What was the point of this post? I guess for myself more than anything I just needed to get this out of my head. I am proud of what I've been able to accomplish - it's a tough, challenging thing that not everybody is able to do. I can buy clothes most anywhere, assuming I can find them tall enough. Was it expensive? Yeah, it was. In more ways than one. However, the alternative would have been even more expensive.

This is post 87/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

The title of this particular entry, Did you expect an update?, is kind of a funny one to me because of some recent experiences that we've been having with a certain vendor at work.

Working with vendors and being at the mercy of their support system - or lack thereof in some cases - really kind of sucks sometimes. We've got a handful of them that we have to deal with on a daily basis and some of them are certainly better than others. At least they are before they get bought up by an even larger suckier vendor.

One of our products is SaaS, IaaS and all that jazz. It's great when it works, not so much when it doesn't. Naturally there aren't a whole lot of logging options on these things, so we kinda just have to roll with the punches on what can be done.

This particular product has been having some intermittent, very challenging to replicate, user presentation issues. Not widespread, yet, but who the heck knows when that could happen. We decide to open up a support request. We send them the only logs that I can grab - stuff from tailing the systemd crud generated from their application we use as a bridge. These definitely show some communication issues. But again, only intermittently. Usually our people are able to wait and refresh and have things "fixed".

I'll not go into the ordeal that ensued…but good grief it was weeks of back and forth. Eventually, after no updates from their end for quite some time (they had actually determined the problem to be a bug on their side, go figure), they patch one of our development instances. Of course, I was out when this happened and we were unable to respond and test for the last portion of that week. Then there is the weekend. Then I've got a Monday to play catch up with everything else that happens. So I didn't get to check the status Monday.

Tuesday I go to check on it. They've closed the request. We were not stoked about that. Not even a "Hey, we're getting ready to close out your request" email. Remind, it's perfectly okay for them to go a week or more with no contact. We fire off an email to our contact rep, then I call support. Fortunately it was not too challenging to get it re-opened. Just far too many hoops to jump through.

After that, we request that they send the patch to our main testing instance.

"Well, we've just bundled that up into the next big overall patch that will be pushed so you'll get it then." Fine. Just don't close the damn support ticket until after that, which doesn't happen for a week or so.

Guess what they attempted to do? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count.

At least this time I did receive an email letting me know that a solution had been offered. The hell it was, I think. We haven't even had the chance to test the patch since it's not been patched at this point. FFS.

So, yeah. They kind of expect updates for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I'm tempted to update the damn thing on the daily just for shits and giggles. I'm not, though.

I do imagine that for those of you out there who deal with vendor support probably have similar experiences. It is what it is.

And yeah, I know that none of you actually expect an update from me.

This is post 86/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

So there are times that I think that, perhaps, I should just do week-style notes like some other people do.

Nah, I think that would be far too much pressure on me. Ha.

I think I'll just continue to write on whatever sounds good at the time as a somewhat historical log of my life and times and whatever else is going on around me.

Last weekend we headed down to the Southeast part of the State where I grew up. I hail from Galena Kansas. It's an old mining town, lead infested, seriously poor. Honestly, about what one would expect from a predominately "red" state.

It's always challenging and difficult to go back there and I think that's why I don't make that pilgramage any more than every handful of years or so. I'd love to be able to see my friends more often back that way, but we've all got families and things going on to make our lives extremely busy which makes getting together tough.

We were able to at least meet up for some lunch at a little place called Latin Fusion that was pretty good. Talked about work and kids and geek stuff for a couple of hours - it was a good time to do some catch up.

Of course we did spend a little time at my Dad's place. The whole reason for heading down that way was for the grandkids to meet granddad. While it would be nice to spend more time with him, my Dad is kind of set in his ways (to put it kindly). We don't always see eye to eye on some things, so we try not to broach certain subjects. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what those might actually be. When some of those ideas did start to come up - it was time to get ready to head out.

Fortunately, by that time, it really was about time to hit the road for the three hour trip if we wanted to miss traffic.

On the way down we took the Missouri side. We came back to Lawrence on the Kansas side. I had wanted to show my family some of the other areas that I grew up, so that was the perfect opportunity. We drove through mainstreet Galena, not much to see there, but it does actually look nicer than it used to. Still a dieing town though.

Then it was through the old neighborhood in Riverton where the early years of my life were spent. That old place is…there really are no words for how run down that old home is. Growing up we had a chainlink fence, at some point it was replaced with a wooden fence. Which has never, ever, been maintained. One Christmas we got a Douglas Fir that was decorated and used as our tree, afterwards we planted it just outside my bedroom window. It was super cool to me, but was removed by somebody who purchased the home after we moved. I hate to see the disrepair of the place.

On the bright side, I picked up a physical copy of the Lunar Remastered edition on Xbox. I've got copies of them (Lunar and Lunar 2 - Eternal Blue) on Sega CD. Too bad I no longer have my Sega CD. Or Genesis. Or 32X. Or Super Nintendo. Or Neo Geo AES (2 joystick edition). I could cry.

Needless to say I've also added the remastered version to my Steam Wishlist and will pick up another copy of it when a sale hits. Because reasons.

Why can't I save money again?

This is post 85/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

To say that I have not really been in a writing mood would probably be a large understatement.

Yeah, that sentence pretty much sums up the way I've been feeling over the past few weeks. Writing, reading, pretty much doing anything - I don't know if it's just the time of year or what, but good grief have I just been in something of a meh type mood.

Our past few weekends have felt like they've been non-stop, with hardly any time to rest or recoup and I don't anticipate things slowing down any at all.

This weekend, beginning Friday afternoon, we will be taking off to head to the Southeast part of the State. I've not been back home in a couple of years at this point and we kind of need to get visiting some people. Mainly my Dad. He is getting up there in age and has not actually seen his youngest grandkid (who is 7…yeah, I'm a bad kid I guess), nor is he super mobile which makes it difficult for him to get up this way.

It's only about 3 hours, but it's also about a generation away.

My Dad and I basically get along all right, but there are certain things that we just more or less have to agree to disagree on - and that is okay. Politics, mainly. I just kind of leave it at that.

The hope had been to be able to meet up with some old friends of mine as well, but from the sound of things they've had what was to be an empty weekend suddenly sprout full of stuff to do. That happens, and I totally get it - especially with larger families and teenagers and active kids. We are going to try to at least grab lunch on Saturday, so we shall see how that goes.

I was last down that way a couple of years ago…I don't recall the exact reason for going, besides it having been about a decade prior before that. It was the first time that I'd been back to my old home since before the Joplin tornado. I may not have lived through that, but having family and friends be in the area and experiencing what that was…heart wrenching. Things had definitely changed and I didn't even recognize some of the old stomping grounds of mine. The only way that I could describe it was "surreal".

Last time, I had hoped to be able to bring back a few things of mine from my childhood. Silly things like game systems and models. Yeah, that didn't happen. They weren't tossed, but with a home move and storage not ideal who knows what became of all that stuff. Ah well.

I am looking forward to going, it will be good to have the kiddo's down there with me this time - I'm just hoping that they aren't bored out of their minds. Which, I know they will be. There just isn't much to do in an old mining town that's (while it's doing better than it was) on its last legs.

This is post 84/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

The end of last week was the end of an era for our household.

Saturday was the final middle school play performance for our twins, as they are nearing the end of junior high school.

I'll admit to being an extremely proud parent of those two. That's not too say that I'm not proud of the other three kids we've got, heck I'm proud of each and every one of them. But it's beyond heartwarming, in that it's something one has a very difficult time to put properly into words. I am not too proud to admit to having very nearly come to tears at times watching these performances: be they plays, musicals, or whatever.

It is bittersweet, though, in that the final play for middle school was not one in which they were able to have larger, more prominent, parts in. However, the roles were very much important to be had.

The play: Little Women. The roles: Professor Bhaer and Mr. Laurence. Both very respectable, and they did fantastic jobs. As an extra bonus the teacher/director is such an amazing and awesome person, who loves all of the kids also really loves our youngest kiddo and does her best to work him into the performances as well - thus we've got photos of all three on stage. Super proud parent moment, that.

As you can tell, I'm one grateful, proud Dad. Quite a lot.

I cannot wait to see them on bigger stages and bigger productions to see what they are capable of.

This is post 82/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Growing up, I always loved kite flying season. Not only did it mean that Spring was here, but that Summer was (as Frog would say) just around the corner.

Living just across the street from a cornfield did have its benefits. One of which being that it provided for a most excellent place to go outside and fly a kite.

My friends and I would make judicious use of that field for our kiting excursions - and living in the Midwest provided for plenty of windy days and many opportunities to get lots and lots of elevation for our kites.

I remember one such day, my friend and I were out using a brand new kite he had just picked up. It was your standard delta wing style, I don't remember what design was on it, but that is immaterial at this point.

The string we were using was a ginormous spool of some style of sewing or crocheting thread. Thankfully a very strong string, and ridiculously long.

The wind that day was not vicious, but still a really gusty wind. More than enough to have our kite flying pretty high.

I recall that for some reason my friend had to head inside and had asked that I keep a hold of the kite. You can probably guess where this is heading.

A handful of minutes pass, I'm still letting some string out so the kite can soar higher and higher….when suddenly the spool rips out of my hand.

So, these types of spools aren't really meant for what we are using them for. They kinda flip flop around and are more for - you know - craft type stuff.

There I am, entrusted with my best friends' kite, which has now literally flown away from me. I'm like, "oh crap!". Panic sets in, I take off after the spool, which is being drug along the ground. I almost grab it a couple of times, only to have the thing slip from my not-nearly-strong-enough grasp.

All this time I'm nearly in tears, thinking that I'm going to have to tell my best friend in the whole world that I've let his kite get away from me.

Remember now that we are in a cornfield. Thankfully this field is not currently planted, plus, there are a number of sections that have old - very sturdy - stalk sections and other items that might just possibly be able to snag a line of string.

Which is exactly what happens.

I will never forget my feeling that day, when I was finally able to get that kite brought back under control. Winding that spool back up was certainly a challenge, but I was gracious to have the wing back on the ground.

The more I think about it, I don't believe we ever flew kites again after that.

This is post 83/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

In my last post, I'd said something about wanting to write more about myself. I think it had something to do with listening to a handful of random strangers talk about some of their stories and thinking that, while I may not have something that's directly relatable to the theme, I might have something that could be told.

Doesn't everybody?

Theoretically, I should suppose.

I am a "cusper". A child of the (extremely) late seventies and (moreso) early eighties. I could prefix those with "nineteen-", but just the thought of that makes me feel strange.

While there was the existence of something that would become the Internet while I was growing up, I would never personally encounter the online world until well into high school. Personal computers were not a thing that every household had. Phones were hard wired to a wall and some even had rotary dials on them.

Some people had remote controls for their televisions. Those were called "kids". We did actually eventually have a television with a remote, it was kinda cool.

I grew up in a really cool time. We spent a lot of time outside playing. A lot of time with friends. I don't dislike my childhood, but I do think it was a unique time in history. I'm glad that I am not maturing during the current timeframe. I witnessed the growth of technology. For better or for worse.

My childhood was split between a small, unincorporated town and an old lead infested mining town. I think I have memories when we moved into the home that my parents purchased, but memory is a fuzzy thing. A small three bedroom, one bath ranch style home, situated on a corner section of what everyone fondly referred to as "the block." More of an oblong rectangle, less of a square block.

We had what seemed like a fairly large large, complete with chain link fence. The majority of the homes in the neighborhood were similar, though they weren't actually the cookie cutter style of today's prefabricated HOA locales. The thought that some homes could even have more than one toilet, or heck even an complete extra bathroom, had never ever entered my thoughts. We just made do. Which isn't too difficult when you're only a family of three.

Of course, we didn't live there very long. At least, not as a whole family.

My parents say, even to this day, that they love each other. That's hard to believe. They were divorced by the time I was in fifth or sixth grade. Fifth I think. By then, I was in the custody of my father and we were in another town.

A new school, different friends, more to tell.

For later. Plus, more backstory.

This is post 79/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

My Dad called me yesterday afternoon.

He, and the rest of my family are basically the only people that I would even consider answering the phone for. Everybody else can leave a message and maybe I'll carve some time out of my life to call you back. But I wouldn't count on it.

He (my Dad) has actually called my twice now within the last few weeks. He's getting up there in age and it's been awhile since I've made the approximately four hour trek south to see him. I'm also really bad at calling him. Sometimes I don't think I've been a great son.

I would make the "politics" excuse, but I don't talk politics with my Dad. I do love my Dad and we did used to be pretty close, but we've grown apart. As happens with some people.

Anyhow. Yesterday he calls and of course I answer. His question is an interesting one: "I bought this 60 plus inch Roku TV, if I plug it in do I need the internet in order to stream or whatever it's called?"

Let me qualify something here for you, dear reader: my Dad still has to use a flip phone, is absolutely computer and technology illiterate and has really no desire to learn. Which is fine. He's done all right with what he's got thus far and has no need to complicate his life any more than necessary. At least he can text message.

Getting back to the story, I say: "yeah, you would need the internet to properly use your Roku TV. Do you even have the internet?" Of course he does not. But, he can have it installed.

Excellent. Next, he wants to know if I could help him get things sorted out over the phone. Yeah, no. I'm not gonna go that route. I love you, Dad, but that's just not something that I'm willing to invest my time and effort into. Far too frustrating. Well, could the installer help me, he asks. I guess that depends on the installer and the kind of day they've had.

That's a tough call. I did let him know that we're planning on a visit soon - we actually just booked the hotel this morning - and that I could help him then. Until then, well, he's got a great new TV he can still use his satellite with.

He's frustrated because he's paying all this money for DirecTV and really all he needs is…. Yeah. No comment.

We finished our conversation with a couple of tales about some former friends he's had, both of which kind of relate to feeling like time party of which is being taken for granted. That thought just kind of popped into my head now and the more I think about, the truer it is. My Dad, love him, sometimes needs to know how to say "no".

From one individual who keeps using him as the one and only emergency contact, who does and does not want help even when her health and well being are at risk, to the old friend who's gone blind and literally cannot see that the one person who has been there to take him to appointments and out for errands and beers and whatever else… My Dad's been pretty giving. It's tough to sit there and listen to someone complain about not having anyone that cares, when there is someone right next to you who does.

Sometimes you're just done.

He can be really, really good at cutting you off - but it's tough to do that for people that you care for and have been friends with for decades.

I don't know where I was going, necessary, with this rambling story. But I figure it's yet more of my life to get out there. It's part of what makes me, me.

This is post 80/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Yeah, I hear you saying "that's a strange title for a post."

It is, isn't it?

It might make sense here in a couple of minutes, if you'll just give me a bit of time to get the words down on bits and bytes.

I will be doing a bit of jumping around time for my childhood slash growing up posts, really it all just kind of depends on what pops into my head at certain times. Along with whatever memories I can manage to actually keep track of throughout the course of time.

It's not easy, sometimes.

Growing up in a small, unincorporated town in South East Kansas did come with some good times for me. Believe it or not. We lived in Riverton, which as its namesake is actually alongside a river. We had a coal burning electric plant (long since shut down), a pretty decent school, a small post post office, and the World Famous Spring River Inn. Whether or not it was actually world famous is, of course, up for debate. They did have some damn good homemade cinnamon rolls though - those things were ginormous.

As I had indicated in a previous post, we lived on a corner lot in a relatively small, moderately friendly neighborhood. I had a couple of friends that lived across the street and would spend a lot of time over at thier home, playing with whatever was available at the time. They had a pretty large side yard and back yard - complete with woods and a large corn field. I'll have some stories about that corn field later, but not today.

One feature of our neighborhood was that the interior lots (of which our house was on one) had really large ditches on the edge of the property. Another feature is that, since our town was situated on a river, the land had a tendency towards being water logged and easily flooded.

You could probably extrapolate at least partly where this is going now.

One year we had quite the torrential rain.

There was one home in the neighborhood, on the other end from our home, who had an exceptionally large section of yard next to their house. It was also quite depressed from the road.

Now, fortunately for this homeowner, from what I recall it was only the yard itself that was pretty low and the actual house was elevated enough to prevent any water damage. There definitely could have been the opportunity for flood damage, here, because the entire side yard was basically turned into a small lake for us neighborhood kids to frolic around in for a day or so.

And frolic we did! I don't remember how many of us there were, probably 10 or more, but it was a great distraction from whatever was going on during those times. There was a storm tube that was beneath the road, and I remember us riding our bikes off that sucker and tumbling off into the water. It was a good time.

I don't know how many kids I watched bike off that, to be flipped over their handlebars because the lip of the metal storm tube was bent up. Even I had to experience that one, for some reason or other. It was fun, though.

I drove back through there decades later. It didn't look nearly as large as memory served, but that doesn't change the experience we had. The memories will remain, and the memories will always be fond for me.

This is post 81/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

It's been a slow week or so, not that that's a bad thing at all. Sometimes we just need to take a couple of days and not do anything at all. It's actually kind of nice.

The past couple of weekends had been nothing but go go go and it can be just a bit draining on the psyche.

I am back to the point of being maxxed out on my leave at work, so once again I get to take payday Friday's off. Which, I will admit, I have most assuradely gotten used to and most certainly look forward to! Now, if only I could somehow finagle a way to get every Friday off. That would be super nice.

We did manage to get out, either Friday or Saturday - I don't actually remember to be honest, to have dinner and a walk downtown. It was pretty good, nice and shockingly quiet. Well, as quiet as can ever be in downtown Lawrence.

There were a couple of highlights - we found ourselves at a story book session, where people were telling there personal "ups and downs" of life. It did get me thinking, though, about getting words down on the screen of things that I have seen and experienced. While we might not think that our lives are very interesting (believe you me - mine is not) it's still not a bad idea to get the words down. If not for others, for yourself, possibly for your family. Of course, I can't say that I've publicised to my family that this site exists, but I'm not exactly difficult to find either.

I'll have to see what all I can come up with along that line. Growing up in an old mining town, in the middle of nowhere, I've got some tales to tell and they may be interesting to some. Who knows.

Towards the end of the night we found our way to a bar and I found a band that actually interests me - Dust City Opera. Eclectic for sure. I can't say that I've heard a whole lot of kick ass bands that feature a trombone and clarinet. Certainly cool, and I very much liked them.

This is post 78/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Hey, I'm now over 75 percent done with the current 100 Days To Offload challenge!

Now that that's out of the way… yesterday I almost thought that I had lost my Zimaboard NAS parts. I had recalled bringing the parts downstairs to look them over and get things put together. Only I needed to get an actual physical network connection.

So I put them away until I could figure something out. In what I'm sure I was thinking to be a really safe place at the time.

Yesterday I was thinking, "Self, I haven't seen that Zima Cube thing in awhile, you should probably find that!"

Evidently, I had placed it in about the safest place one could have done so: somewhere I had no idea where that might have been. Which was hilarious.

Just before bed, I'm standing in our room, looking at the bookshelf that I had put in a few months ago and already filled up. I see this short cardboard box.

Now, to be fair I had seen and known this was there before. Thing is, I had thought that the box everything was in was larger. You know where this is going.

Medium story short, I found my Zima NAS parts! Along with the pair of 12TB (I think) drives that I got for it. Whew.

Some people have Holiday Season's, well, we have Birthday Season.

In the span of a short handful of weeks, in some cases days, we have four birthdays that we get to celebrate. Okay, sure, a pair of those are for a set of our twin kiddo's - but still, that's a couple of birthdays that still need to be seen to.

It's tough to know what to do for a teen birthday party. So what's the best thing to do? Ask them, of course.

One wanted a karaoke machine. Okay, that's easy enough and we'll count that as one gift in the bag. This one also doesn't really like cake - so they both decided that it would be awesome to have an ice cream social during their party, which isn't too difficult. Lot's of ice cream (and non-dairy as well) selection, with some toppings (you gotta have the caramel, hot fudge, chocolate, cherries, sprinkles and canned whipped cream stuff) make for a decent build-your-own-sundae. Plus, I do like to bake, so I threw in a couple trays of chocolate brownies.

Oh, let us not forget the 10 pizzas that needed to be ordered - gotta feed the teens lunch. Ha. And soda, lots of soda. And some water, you know, since it's good for you.

I will admit that I was very anxious about this weekend and this party. It's the whole "well, I don't really have anything planned nor do I really know what to do for a bunch of junior high students during a birthday party." I was worried that I didn't have enough brownies made (there were plenty). I was worried that there wouldn't be enough pizza (there was plenty). I was worried that nobody would have any fun (it seems that all enjoyed themselves).

I don't think there was anything to worry about. Everything seemed to go all right.

However, all said - I think next year we'll just do something like a Dave and Busters, or maybe something downtown if that's an option. I think it might be just as, um, "cheap".

This is post 77/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Today is Thursday, February 20, in this, what has been yet another exceptionally long week in this year of 2025.

The kiddos had school, thus far, only one day this week due to insanely cold weather and snowy conditions.

We've had whatever illness run through our home over the last couple of weeks, with the youngest finally getting over most of what he had yesterday.

This weekend is going to be good and busy as well. We've got the youngest kiddo's bday party lined up at a really cool playplace in town, paired up with a friend whose kiddo shares a pretty close date as well - so we just rented the whole place for the morning.

I've got to look at getting a cake made too, for either his actual birthday or the same evening. He likes Minecraft, so at least that should be easier than, oh, a Dalek.

We've got a handful - six - of old phones that need to be reset and packed up to send in for rebates. That'll be fun.

That's all I've got at this point.

This is post 74/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Ah, I am once again at the point to where my vacation time is maxed out at work. So it's either use "it or don't gain any more" time.

One thing that I do really enjoy about my coworkers and my manager staff is that they absolutely, positively, expect and encourage us to use our time. It is a nice change of pace from those souls who work for people who actively discourage such use.

In my position, we max out at 304 hours of vacation. I accumulate 8 hours every pay period (less two pay periods, where there are three paychecks in a month, I think…). We also accumulate 4 hours of sick leave every check, which does not max out - which is nice. I'm near to 750 hours there.

I don't take a whole lot of time off.

But I have kind of grown accustomed to having every other Friday off. It's pretty sweet.

In some other news, I've been slowly trimming the dead nail off of my right thumb. There is just a small sliver left on the side at this point. I'm just really glad that I haven't caught it on anything and ripped the thing out yet. I don't believe that would be too pleasant.

I don't have much else going on right now. Oh, we did have the youngest kiddos birthday party last weekend, which had an excellent turn out! We paired up with a friend and rented out Up And Away Play for Sunday morning for a couple of hours. It went pretty well, though I'm not sure we'll do the same next time.

Next up we'll have the twins' birthday party, which is set up for an ice cream social slash pizza party slash other stuff at a city community room. It should be fun. They've been inviting a handful of friends, which for one of them is a little out of his comfort zone. Sort of. Although I will say, he had an excellent way to put things: While I may have few people that I would count as friends, because I think there is a difference between friendship and those that I have positive interactions with. I was completely blown away by that when my wife told me that he'd said that. It's just so mature, and I don't even think I'd come up with that one.

I love my kids.

This is post 75/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

A portrait of a "Chicken".

The Sheepadoodle

If you know, you know. 😅

….her name, it's Chicken.

I don't believe that I have, at least not in some time, had a weekend fly by as quickly as this past weekend did.

In hindsight, I do have to admit that it was great that it went by as quickly and smoothly as it did.

As you may, or may not know - or care about really - we have had a sheepadoodle in the home since late November.

She is still basically attached to me at the hip.

I would say she's a quiet dog, but, there are points where her protective side comes out. Hmmm, well, I don't know that I would say protective so much as scared and anxious.

We wish that we knew what she was scared about. Whatever it is, she most definitely does not like non household members.

Barks. Some growling. Not mean, just letting everyone know that she's not happy. Then there are the accidents.

At least our floor is polished concrete so it's easy to clean.

So, that's a lot of background to say that we also had an additional dog in the house this weekend.

The second dog was much easier going, but naturally our girl was not happy. Not at first, nor second. She did eventually come around. Sort of.

I had thought it was going to be a long weekend.

But it really wasn't.

Who would have thought.

This is post 70/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

For those that might be paying attention you'll notice that I've changed up the templating for the site.

For those that follow this site in their RSS feeds (probably just me, honestly), I'll apologize for the spammage that was just sent your way. Fortunately it looks like it was only limited to the last 10 posts.

I've moved from the old eleventy-excellent fork that I had, to a design based around the standard eleventy base blog design - with a spritzing of readable css. Trying to keep things simple.

The home page is basically the "about me" page that seems to be the popular thing to do these days, along with the latest 5 posts and 5 links that I'll eventually populate. I don't know that I'll do a whole linkroll/linkblog/whatever, and I'll certainly not replace raindrop.io with this, but it's just yet another section for content and a place to save yet more things for me to lose track of.

I'd say this was a lot more difficult than it needed to be, but I think I was just overcomplicating the whole "multiple remotes" and "multiple branches" git thing. Still hosted on github pages, still in the same repo. Yippee.

This is post 71/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Still doing some final checks and balances on things around these parts.

I noticed that, for some reason, that old "holiday" post decided to show up in the feed and echofeed grabbed it as well. Not sure what that was about.

I do know that I had to redo the git repo, again, seeing as how Zettel Notes still had an older version and, with the merge settings I have, happily forced up the older branch. Sigh.

All right. Let's see how this one pops up!

This is a draft post and will always be a draft post.

Testing the new mobile post creation.

Received the new phone yesterday.

We've moved on from one provider, T-MOBILE, to another, ATT. Not really sure which is better at this point - they are basically all just a commodity now.

My line was the last to arrive and the last to be ported, out of six I believe.

Everything with the setup went okay, just trying to get the final number actually ported and the esim activated took about an hour on the phone.

Overall, my wife probably spent about five hours on the phone with the ATT Costco support line. Way more than desired, and a lot more than we've spent with support on T-MOBILE over the course of 18 years.

But. Now we should be good. Now we worry about having everything we need from the old phones before we wipe them and send them on their merry way.

Overall though, I do kinda like the new device. I've been a Google Pixel user and disciple since the OG XL, so it's a little different to be away and on the Samsung 25 Ultra train.

I do like the stylus though, haven't had one of those since the Note 7. Which I did not have very long.

This is post 72/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

This is nothing but a draft thing. Seriously.

As you most likely do not recall, back in middle December I decided to give my thumb a smashing good time in my car door.

It hurt quite a lot and after doing the drainage thing for a handful of days it started feeling much better and the healing process began.

Not that the healing process hadn't technically began the instant it happened, but, yeah. Very nearly the entire undernail and nail bed bruised and it (still) kinda looked like I had painted that particular fingernail black.

The hope was that I was not going to lose the nail.

For awhile it sure seemed like I was in the clear on that one!

As you probably might guess, it does appear that I'll be losing the nail. Not that it's anything major, just kinda some suckage.

I made the mistake of picking at the edge of the nail, which then more or less started the displacement of it all. The other day I was putting my jacket on, getting it zipped and cozy, and somehow - someway - caught the edge of my thumbnail in the cloth. Half the nailbed came out.

Had to do some trim work on it, will probably be doing trimwork on it for the next few weeks or so. Sleeping with a bandaid on it so I don't catch it on anything in my sleep and rip the bad boy out. That would suck.

It is certainly gnarly, and has been quite some time since this has happened to any of my nails. Our oldest has had the privilege of losing not one, but two nails in his short life thus far.

This is post 73/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Well, yesterday (or the day before) my wife had a Costco run.

Normally, not a big deal. Despite the fact that it does run us a few hundred bucks a shot. But that does come with a family of seven. Lots of (teen) mouths to feed.

That said, part of what she picked up while there, something that was completely unexpected, is that we are now in the process of swapping cellular providers.

We've had T-Mobile for just shy of 20 years. I hate, hate, hate to say that we'll now be on ATT. But, by making the swap out bill will be lower.

Maybe we'll swap providers every time we finalize the conditions of the contract.

It will be nice to have a phone with a stylus again.

This is post 69/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I don't generally like to *meta post”, blog about blogging and all that…but there are times that I shall make an exception.

I have finally decided that it is high time to take advantage of some of the features my mobile note taking application has - namely that it does offer templates and widget creation.

One of which is to create a new note using a template, naturally.

In becoming more comfortable with the use of capture templates on my desktop using org-mode and Emacs, I figure that I might as well try to take at least some of the friction out of blogging on the mobile side.

Especially seeing as that's where I do the vast majority of my posting from.

While Zettel Notes can write in org format, I'm using eleventy for my site and markdown for my content. So no org capture setup on the mobile side, sadly. However, Zettel does have a simple template editor that can fill in quite nicely.

Plus, now I no longer have to remember to change the dateline in my content. That's a win.

I just have to keep better track of which post number I'm on for my current writing challenge. Meh.

Now if I could just figure out how to get Zettel to prompt me for a post title, we might be on business. Although, sometimes I don't know what I'm gonna name things until I'm done.

This is post 68/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Sitting here, with my youngest twin kiddo, doing some checks to re-ensure that everything is going to be okay with him physically.

Years ago, he was diagnosed with a hole in his heart, though it was believed to have closed up enough to allow him to do things he enjoys doing.

Like, running. Cross country, track. Things like that.

But, we see and experience what happens with friends, family and acquaintances. Loved ones are lost due to undiagnosed problems.

So we double check. EKG. Echo's.

We want our kids to be healthy. Happy.

Do the things they want to do.

But when your kiddo complains about his chest hurting, his body hurting, and doesn't want to connect the dots from post athletic event to the actual pain. Then we need to step in and push pause.

I don't want to take these things away. I enjoy taking him to them and watching him do them.

It's friendship and comraderie.

We just need to know.

This is post 66/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Ugh, I just haven't been feeling it lately!

I had even made the attempt to start a post the other day. Got as far as copying my template over to the ol' draft folder.

Dunno what happened but that's as far as that went.

It's been kinda meh around these parts lately.

At least most of the snow has gone, the temperature has kinda been decent (for what that's worth at this point), and everything has been more or less healthy around the household.

There have been some points of interest though.

I need to pick up a new smoke/carbon monoxide detector for our hallway. Just have not been able to get to the store yet for a replacement. I did, however, at least get an adapter kit so I can just reuse the existing wire harness with the new style that Kidde goes with these days.

We attended parents night at the local High School the other day. The twins start 9th grade next year, and it's always good to feel prepared. I feel that we (well, me, at least) are more prepped for these two than we were for their older brother. I still think, sometimes, that poor kiddo got the worst end of the stick from me. I love the hell out of him, but I just didn't know what I was doing through the whole thing. However, despite that lack from me, has turned out pretty well.

I'm just glad that our Cameron's Coffee order came through before those prices shot through the roof. Plus, I already had a four pack case (we have a monthly standing order for four 32oz bags) just sitting around. We go through a case a month in our house. I'm not looking forward to the future there.

I think that's all I've got.

For now.

This is post 67/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

For the longest time - well, not really the longest time but there are moments when it seems like it's been forever - I've been attempting to patch together my own Emacs config.

Having gone from Spacemacs, Purcell, Vanilla, Doom, Prelude, handcrafted, literate, back again through multiple attempts at each of the previous as well as pouring through everybody else's (and their dogs - hello, Corgi!) configs I have finally come to a conclusion.

I figure that since I basically always wind up trying to reinvent Doom Emacs, that I might as well meet them in the middle and move over to recreating Doom with a complete literate Doom config.

I've seen a handful of users that have done this, and while getting it bootstrapped was a little interesting, I think it's going to work really well.

As it's basically an art form, my Emacs config is never done - but I've got it to a point where I'm happy with it.

I do actually like some of the convenience macros that are provided with the Doom Emacs framework. It makes a really excellent library.

Will I stay with this? You know, I think that since I generally always found my way back to Doom (even though I don't use evil key bindings), plus with my desire to have "my own thing"….yeah, maybe.

Just maybe.

This might be my final form.

Minus some tweaking.

One of these days I'll have to get back to doing weekly link dumps.

This is post 65/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Well we are evidently in an actua Blizzard Warning now.

Yippee!

I attempted earlier this evening, just after dinner, to go out and grab some stuff from the store. Milk and whatever.

I had, earlier this afternoon, salted the walk and driveway. I guess I should have salted just a bit more in some areas, since I took a decent header going to the car.

Made it about half a block down, slip sliding all the while, until I decided that nobody needed milk that badly. Backed up and headed back home.

Gone maybe 5 minutes, including scraping ice off the windows.

Now, I've got a ginormous welt on the side of my left leg.

It's sore, but livable. Certainly huge though.

Woot.

This is post 63/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

If it isn't one thing it's about seventy three others with our luck.

When we moved into our home over nine years ago we had to pick up a few appliances. A refrigerator, washer and dryer, we also procured a stand up freezer for the garage.

The house came with dishwasher, range and microwave.

After tomorrow, only two (!) of those items will remain as original.

The warranty on our fridge, an LG, ran out after 5 years had passed. We just barely squeaked in a warranty covered repair to the compressor on it, mere months before the expiration.

The washer and dryer unit that we originally bought, well, that I originally picked out because of cost (either Maytag or Whirlpool, I don't recall at this point) have been replaced. Twice. (The original units, believe it or not, did not have a clean out for the washer….so eventually when all the kids socks get sucked in, you can't easily access them to clear them out.)

Two Novembers ago, maybe three, the range died. It's been replaced.

Now… After sitting with an error code that has not allowed the external panel to work for a couple years, nor the external water and ice maker (yeah, horrible, sigh…it's tough to find them without ice) to work, the fridge has finally decided that it's the end of days.

It gets replaced tomorrow.

This stuff is nearly impossible to work on. It's just not the same kind of items that even our parents bought.

Gone are the times when you grew up with the same, oh say….refrigerator…in the home throughout your childhood and young adult years.

Sigh.

Naturally, the assigned delivery window for tomorrow's unit is right smack dab around school pick up time for the kids.

Because, why wouldn't it be.

This is post 64/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Has it really been a year?

Another one??

Already?!

As one gets older, it just relentlessly accelerates towards whatever the endgame is in all of this.

The next thing we know, we shall have four more birthdays in the house - one in February, three in March.

Then it's time for end of school.

Next it's school starting back up.

Then Holiday season starts all over again.

Somewhere in there, we'll have to mow the lawn perhaps.

I'll be one year closer to half a century old. Definitely something that I never, ever would have considered anything of import during my youth.

You know, I've never really been one for resolutions. New Year's or otherwise.

They seem silly. It is the extraordinarily rare person that is able to - essentially - flip and inner switch and say "I'm gonna do X" from this day onward.

Sure, goals are great. Targets and milestones are great. But they're difficult to come up with something that's achievable. I certainly don't want to feel like I've failed at something within the first week.

Maybe that's why it took me so long to get my rear in gear on a healthier lifestyle. Keto was a thing that I feared for a decade or more. Not just the cost (which is debatable at this point) but the fear of failure looking wide over me.

Now, are there things that I would like to accomplish within the next year?

Absolutely.

I would like to finish reading The Expanse series. I'm on Babylon's Ashes currently.

I would like to get some debt paid down. That's actually plausible this year, with the wife having her own insurance this year (same everything, so no real change apart from new cards on her side). That's over $500 a month in our pocket right there.

I want to start a vegetable garden out back, using the straw bale method.

I'd love to get some permanent LED holiday lights set up on the house.

Getting the garage organized. Getting our bedroom organized.

Some of these things are certainly more doable than the others.

Ah well.

On a closing note, I started a Hardcover account. I kinda like it, but I do think I prefer the way books can be added over on OpenReads with taking pics of the barcodes. I may use both for a bit before deciding to stop using either of them, because, honesty. While I need to keep track of what books I've got and read, I don't know that I can actually do that.

Maybe I should add that to my New Year's Resolutions.

This is post 62/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Tis the season, I suppose.

For some car maintenance and time off, that is. Ha!

Oh, and Christmas and New Year's and all that jazzy stuff.

Yesterday was my last day of, um, "work" for the year. There was much really to do except help with a couple of requests, which was totally cool. Had a handful of things that needed wrapped up and it was actually kinda nice to be able to do so.

This morning was up at the standard time - sleeping in?! What the hell is that?? Had to get the car into the shop for some juuuuust barely overdue service (maybe a hundred miles?). Not too bad.

At least the dealership doesn't try too hard to oversell crap.

That done, it was time to go home. Open door, hear the kids argue.

Sigh.

Dammit.

Sometimes I just wish they could solve their own problems. I basically just ignored them this time. Ha.

In some absolutely non related tangents, I've really been trying to come up with a new from scratch emacs config.

Don't ask me why, I don't have any answers at all.

None. Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

I've managed to stick with Doom Emacs for quite some time now and I just keep going back to that. I like it, sure.

There is just part of me that, I don't know, wants to grok the whole dang thing. For some reason.

The problem is, I either keep trying to basically recreate Doom, or I'm just not really certain what packages I want to start with.

I've got all of what is consider the "new standards" covered: vertigo, marginalia, orderless, whatever else goes into that stack.

Then I'm like a stinking dog that chases squirrels all over the woods. It gets exhausting.

Plus, I'm trying to get org more incorporated into my desk life - so there's that. I'd say "life", but there aren't a whole lot of decent and mature org related apps on Android. Tmux and emacs running within on my phone don't count, in my mind.

I do have Zettel (using it now!), Orgzly Revived and OrgNotes…but….eeh. I want better templates and capture/sharing.

Anyhow.

Take care, you all.

This is post 60/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

We have survived another Christmas Holiday season.

We have spent far to much money.

But - at least - we haven't overdone things.

I would like to think that everyone in the home received at least one item that they wanted or like.

We did, somehow, some way, manage to get through the event without picking anything up that requires batteries to operate.

I don't know how we managed that one, it was definitely accidental.

Christmas Eve we took the family on a small tour through town to see some of the neighborhoods lit up, including a handful of homes that do the whole animation alongside mini radio transmitters.

It's something that I would like to do one of these years. I want to do the permanent LED light installation here.

We did find one very cool section of town where there were blocks and blocks of people who had strung lights all throughout their trees from home to home, it looked very cool and almost web-like. Very much not something I'd expected to find but I was so glad that we had!

Our newest family member, the Sheepadoodle, has been doing really well. She's not super comfortable with strangers or non family members, apart from the door knocking, doors opening or closing, or certain family members coming down the stairs, it's about the only time she'll get vocal.

Still need to find and get her into a vet though.

Now just to get through New Year's.

This is post 61/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I did a thing last night that I never thought I'd ever do.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I now reside in a home that does not subscribe to some kind of non-ota television service.

I've been subscribed, well been subscribed, to YouTube TV since almost day one. Sucked into the whole Google everything and the kick butt "DVR" that came along in tow.

I even talked multiple people into signing up, it really was a great value.

Yeah. At $73 a month it was time to rethink the subscription. The only thing I was really using it for at the time was to put PBS on, or maybe the occasional Daily Show.

I had been considering saving the monthly cost, but just hadn't pulled the trigger on the cut. But, at $83 a month I'm out. Not that anyone really cares, but yeah.

I swapped over my MAX add-on to Prime. Went ahead and decided that I might as well throw three more bucks Jeff's way and go AD free on Prime as well. I imagine I'll also toss some cash into the coffers of my local KPR station since I listen to them quite a lot.

So far as PBS goes, I've been a supporter of the Kansas City station for some time, so I've got their passport into the app for viewing their content.

My only complaint: We've got an LG TV, and while I love WebOS they don't have a PBS Passport application. I'll have to either dig my Chromecast back out, vor maybe look into another option.

It'll be nice to save a bit more cash this year! Thank you, Google!!

This is post 58/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

A Saturday down, a kiddo and his first chess tournament.

A very successful day, all in all.

Today was not all roses and daffodils, however. Yesterday afternoon I pulled a real doozy move and somehow managed to close my right thumb in the driver's side door of my car. How in the nine hells I managed to do that I have absolutely no flipping clue, I wasn't thinking at all and just managed to ever so slowly and methodically gently close my thumb in the door.

It smarted, quite a bit. My dog was in the car, my youngest was in the car. I let out quite the yelp.

After attempting to yank my thumb free I realized that wasn't gonna work, so I'm glad I was able to relax and actually open the door.

It still hurts. From the tip of the digit to the middle of the palm. I'll be shocked if I don't lose the nail.

Anyhow, back to today.

Up good and early for a Saturday at 0700. I'd been up since 0600 with the thumb throbbing in pain anyhow. Shower. Coffee made. Dog taken out and fed. Snacks and easy provisions gathered and our the door.

We got little man registered and set up around 0845. Then 6 rounds of chess. He had on win and two draws, for two points. We call that a successful first event for the first grader!

His team tied for third, but got fourth due to the point tiebreaker. Still not too shabby.

Done a little before 1700, then off to the DQ for a Blizzard and O-rings! He'd never had DQ before.

It was also my first chess tournament, quite the experience.

All told, not a bad day.

This is post 59/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Well, today certainly did not go anywhere near how I had planned it to go.

Though there is a proverbial silver lining, I hope, since something that I'm hoping was the problem has been solved.

You'll see.

Went to the store yesterday, only picked up one gallon of milk. Now, normally this wouldn't be a huge issue, but this family of mine can easily go through a gallon of milk with no problem. Should have bought two.

I'd also intended, or had expressed that I'd damn near come close, to picking up another bookcase for the bedroom. To store books on. And other crap that I have piled around the room.

So, plans were then laid out that I would go back to the store today, get those items and a few other incidentals that are darn near always needed: eggs, cheese, what have you.

I drop a couple of the boys off with their friends and head to the store around noon. Do my shopping, pay, load up the car.

Get into the car, press the starter…

And….it throws an error that it has been throwing either earlier this year or last year. Coincidentally sometime around the point when the dealership updated the software to automatically engage the parking break.

It hadn't done this in quite some time, it did eventually stop and didn't repeat. Online searches suggested that the errors were due to the battery needing changed. Which I could totally understand, but the battery was checked and had decent life still left.

But, this time it also nearly stranded my wife in KC, and then me on the other side of town. It also definitely sounded like the battery wasn't providing the power to do what needed to be done.

It was, eventually, able to start. Left it running for some time while we tracked a battery down then went to grab it. Had to bring it back home to get it installed, with help from my wonderful wife - I was unable to get the connection to the positive terminal to lift off. She was able to work the magic.

New battery in, all so far so good.

The only thing I wanted to do today was try to get some organizing done in the bedroom.

Sigh.

Until next time.

This is post 56/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Well, we have survived the weekend that I had been dreading!

I would even consider the past weekend to have been something of a success.

A few months ago, both of the twins auditioned and were accepted into the regional Honor's Choir. Super awesome for them! The older twin had performed last year, the younger did not get the opportunity. Both were accepted this year as bass singers. The older has an exceptionally low singing voice for his age group.

Also, a few months ago, the older twin also tried out and was accepted into the regional Honor's Band for Horn. He is an excellent instrumentalist, and could be even better if he were able to get more hours in to practice (but he has something of a full schedule). While I don't know if the chairs were ranked in the concert seating, his name was listed third in the Horn section for his group - and they weren't alphebetical. We're kind of proud of him, so this was pretty awesome.

About a month ago, probably a bit over, looking at some of the emailed details I notice that these two events are on the same day. Okay, cool.

Looking closer, they are at different locations. Okay, not quite as cool.

I had already been in talks with at least the choir teacher at thier school, and did know that the students would not be able to perform in both. So, definitely not as cool.

Naturally, the band kiddo wanted to perform in the band concert - since he'd already had the choir experience. I fully understood, respected and supported that choice. Cool.

The next logistical challenge would be figuring out whether or not we'd be able to make it from one location to the other, about 10 miles give or take - 20 minutes or so - within the timeframe of say 15 minutes. That includes gathering two other kiddos, getting back to the parking location, grabbing the older twin and his instrument and stuff, driving into the city, finding a parking location after everybody was already there, walking all the way back across the second location and finding a place to sit. No fun.

We did it though! Only missed perhaps the first song and the introduction. I'm kind of amazed and proud that we were able to make it through.

The twins did amazing. Both of them were up around 05:00, 05:30 or so. One had to be on a bus by 06:30 the other - at another location of course - by 06:50. It was a long day.

Worth it, though.

This is post 57/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

That has been both a very long and a very busy week.

At least it's only my four day work week.

Progress has been made in the work realm, that's probably one of the more fulfilling aspects of the week.

Earlier this year Oracle decided that they were no longer going to support the graphical interface version of their Business Integration Catalog tool, which, grand scheme of things is awesome as it's an icky, gross, Java gooey that I despise.

But, having replaced my laptop and not having kept the older version of the BI tools install setup (why, Shane….why), I had to get the newer one set up.

Which, shock of shocks, is a command line tool.

Super cool, now I can actually sorta kinda script the process. Not to mention that now report creation can be somewhat saved! We always had to manually select and click to create and run reports - now, at least, by virtue of saving the command line it's more easily repeatable.

Now, it's just all about learning the switches and fine tuning the reports themselves.

Oh and don't even get me started on getting the stupid tool installed.

I'd almost, almost, forgotten just how horrible that process was.

Our environments have a limited amount of temporary directory space. Normally it wouldn't be an issue, just make some new directory, assign it properly as as temp, set your shell environment variables and your good to go.

Sometimes you might even need to set your java options. Because, java.

But, does the Oracle installer bin file respect those environment variables?

Of course it doesn't.

Why would it.

Nope, it needed some obtuse way to let the bin file know what the java.io.temp (don't quote me on that one) needs to be: -J-Djava.io.temp (again, don't quote me). Sigh. At least I got it and it's documented.

On the personal and family side of things, tonight is opening night for the middle school musical. This year they are performing Emma.

The older twin has the male lead. I feel horrible that I can't recall what the younger twin has…./but/, he is the understudy of the older. So there is that.

Supposedly the other middle school brother is doing crew - but I have my doubts as to the veracity of that claim.

I guess he'll be performing in the Spring play, though he probably doesn't realize that at this point.

Not much else going on currently, so with that I'll sign off.

This is post 53/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

There is nothing to see here, folks.

I was just noticing that the Echofeed to Bluesky cross posting wasn't working, so that's what I'm testing here.

The past weekend, despite it being my three day weekend, absolutely did not feel long enough.

It almost feels as if there were two days stolen from me.

A thought that I find unexplainable and honestly just plain weird.

Friday and Saturday were event days, in more than a couple of ways, with Friday being the second evening of the middle school production of Emma and Saturday being the final showing of the same in the early afternoon.

Saturday was also something of an interesting morning as well, we went into Kansas City and checked out a couple of rescue dogs.

All right - let's get things straight first: I am not a dog person. I am a cat person. We already have a cat, who is nearing 10 years old at this point. I don't despise dogs, nor other animals, but I have come to the conclusion that I much prefer other peoples pets. I certainly do not have time to train and deal with a puppy.

The plan on Saturday, was not to come home with a dog. We were going to look at a couple of them, both poodle mixes: a Bernedoodle and a Sheepadoodle.

The Berne was your run of the mill rescue animal: skittish, but not aggressive at all, just scared and wanting to go back to his enclosure. His coat was okay, soft but in definite need of grooming. We walked with him for a bit, got to see that his stool was a little on the runny and soft side - which, not completely unexpected as he's nervous, but it could also be other problems. We had about an hour to check this guy out before we had to go to the next appointment.

Next up we had the Sheepadoodle. It would be fair to say, I believe, that this lady was a complete 180 degree turnaround from the Berne. Super friendly, the people at the rescue had been with her since birth as her mama was litter bound when brought into the center. She basically choose me, it seems, a pretty lovable dog.

There are certain breeds that I really like. Old English Sheepdogs being one, though - again - I don't want one. They are gorgeous animals. They take a lot of work. But they are iconic. I don't like Poodles. Now, that could be because most poodles that I've seen have that pretentious cut and groom on them. I don't know. But, I like some of the features of Poodles: not much shedding being one of the key points. I'll say that I do like the mixes and sheepadoodles look really good to me.

So.

We probably know where this is heading.

Meet the new family member.

This is post 54/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Today is turkey day here in the States.

Whatever that means.

Many people, families, whatever, will gather for some kind of meal - stuffing their bellies overfull of food and arguing about who the heck knows what.

Many people will profess their "thankfulness" for things and ideas that they hold dear to their hearts.

I'll not deny that I and mine are also participants in some way. We've got the turkey in the oven. The pumpkin and pecan pies have been made. The corn flavored bread has been made. Other stuff will also be made.

We'll have perhaps one or two other people here in our home, though there will be no talk of politics or other high blood pressure inducing subjects. We shall just enjoy our food and company.

There would have been a time, many long years ago, that we would be planning out what to do tomorrow. What stores we would hit, where we would attempt to stake our claim on the commercial purchases for the upcoming gift giving season.

While I have no doubt that some people will be doing that - we are not. I would think that, in general, with stores and companies having expanded their "Black Friday" sales from a single day to a week (or more) that many people would be closer to done with shopping than not.

I know that we won't be going shopping tomorrow. I'll say that I'm mostly sure we are done for this year - with perhaps the exception of one or two things.

I'd say that we didn't overspend this year, but that would be a lie. The same as every other year, sigh. We try to do one nice gift for each kiddo….with five kiddos that gets a little spendy. So we try to do what we can throughout the year.

I don't normally do the whole "I'm thankful spiel", but I am thankful that I've got a roof over my head that I was able to get a mortgage for and that I've got a decent vehicle and a job that I really enjoy.

I don't doubt that I'm definitely privileged to be in the position that I'm in.

So, for those of you out there who read this, and for those of you who celebrate - enjoy the day.

Take it easy. Until next time.

This is post 55/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I have just not really been feeling it over the last week.

I do believe that I shall leave it to as an exercise for the reader to figure out why that might be.

Friday was my "off work" Friday, so it's essentially a four day weekend for me, what with tomorrow being Veteran's Day. I guess I won't actually complain about that, since there really are worse things going on right now.

Eventually, my complaints won't even be referable as first world problems, for, you know, reasons.

I just don't understand some people's children.

But, I sure do believe that we're gonna waltz right into the find out portion of the night's program.

And I, absolutely, one hundred percent, hope those people find the…. Yeah.

The rather unfortunate aspect of all of this being, that those of us who do understand some of these things will also get to go along with this ride.

I don't know who to blame.

I don't know, I didn't understand.

What I do know, is that I am at least fortunate being what I am. A white, hetero male.

I guess I'm lucky.

I'm also glad that I've already got a mortgage and a roof over our heads.

I just want my family and kiddos and friends to be able to live and work and play in a safe world.

I'm not too sure that's going to be the case.

What have I been doing lately?

Not much, I would say.

I did start a new book recently, What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher.

It's a retelling of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher. I'm only a few chapters in, and it's fairly short, but so far it's pretty good.

I'm still also reading The Expanse series as well, plus I've picked up a decent number of other titles that will get added to the to be read pile.

I think I'm preparing for the times when physical books are not as easily accessible, what with the way things are going. Both societally and politically.

Anyhow.

I've also ordered a couple of 12TB hard drives to pair with my Zima Board NAS kit and am certainly looking forward to getting that set up to store my media on. The stack of Blu-ray movies and DVDs in our library are in desperate need of being ripped.

Can't say that I'm looking forward to that process, but it's needed.

Another item that has had me occupied over the last couple of weeks or so is coming up with a new emacs config.

While I have been using Doom Emacs for quite awhile at this point, I do like to know how things work a bit better, and this is a good way to grasp that understanding.

The sad thing is, that I'm afraid I will basically just wind up reimplementing Soon Emacs, only with elpaca.

There are a lot of good things with Doom, however, so I may just stick it out with that. There are also some quirkiness' as well - such as needing both package! along with use-package! to get something both installed and configured. It does make sense, seeing as use-package! is not a package installer though.

I think I'm slowing down.

I'm moderately certain that I am slowing down.

Not that I want to make this post be anything more than a "Hey, guys! I'm almost halfway finished with my 100 days challenge!" But yeah, that may be dang near what this turns into.

Today is November 1. (Which reminds me, I need to update the front matter to this post.) Which would make yesterday Halloween. Yep.

We took the two youngest kiddos out trick or treating last night, along with a couple of the older ones friends. We had a pretty good time. What were we all dressed as, I hear absolutely nobody asking….well, I'll be glad to say!

We had Thing 1 and Thing 2, a Minecraft Ender Dragon and the final kid didn't really have a costume unless you counted their standard daily "skater grunge punk" as a costume… meh why not!

The wife dressed up as a good looking broken doll, while I was some dapper looking gentleman from old time-y whenever and wherever. It was fun.

The older two did also dress up, though one went out with his friend to trick or treat, while the other started out at the community garden before heading downtown. The first was a cool looking anime school character while the other was some kind of dark leather bound bird demon or something.

I'm glad that's over, though. More or less.

Now it's all about getting ready for the holidays.

I'm just kinda sad that I never made it to the World's of Fun Haunts.

This is post 49/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Here I sit, doing something that has become - for lack of a better word - unusual.

I normally do my posting, updating, whatever you may, from my phone. So for me to be sitting at my desk, hands on a keyboard, eyes firmly entrenched on the monitor to my left, typing away at this Emacs (FTW!) window, it's rather not normal.

Over time, I've just kind of gotten used to writing in this journal from my mobile device. It's easy, if not quick, and it just works. I guess.

I would love to be one of those persons who could throw out tens of hundreds of words at a time, in a coherent and easy to follow manner, on any number of wonderful themes. But I'm not.

I write about what's going on in my life, usually something that's centered around my kiddos or my job. Most usually something that probably isn't even interesting to myself. But I still try to find the time to do this.

It does, perhaps, in its own way, help me to keep my sanity in some kind of check.

So I sit here today, writing at my desk.

Yeah, I'm using Emacs (not, I guess, in a by the way fashion of the Archlinux variety - which I do not actually use). Of the Doom Emacs variety. I've tried to go the roll your own route, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm always just trying to come up with my own Doom-spin-from-scratch…so might as well flippin' use Doom.

But I don't use evil. Because I'm not evil-leaning. If you wanna use vim keybindings, then you do you. No harm no foul, doesn't hurt me either way. I can get by in vim, I think that anyone who works in a Unix environment should at least know their way around.

Oh…yeah, tomorrow is the day. I'm so ready for this crap to be over, but I am realistic to know that tomorrow is really only the beginning of the ending. Either it's all gonna burn down (again) or it's gonna be a controlled burn. Either way. I know that I'll vote for the side of sanity, because I care about where I would like things to go and I care about the country that I leave my kids to.

Living in a Red State, I'd normally say that my actual vote doesn't really count, but, it's kind of (almost) starting to actually count. Give it time, maybe it will. There is still local stuff, which is uber important as well.

Then, well - and I kind of almost hate myself for admitting this fact - there is a small tiny part of me that hopes the side of chaos and insanity wins. Why the ever loving F would I want that?! Because I really despise the morons and idiots who think that the great orange gibbon gives a flying flip about them. Maybe they should get their just desserts. But, I don't really, really, hope that happens. Certainly not enough to vote that way.

That would make a great story, though, perhaps.

Though, I guess it's probably already been written a few times.

This is post 50/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Whoa! I'm halfway through the challenge! Woot.

What all is going on this week?

Not a whole heck of a lot, although I do suppose that there will be a holiday of some sort thrown into the mix, in one way or another.

We've got most of the costume situation sorted out, at least for those that want them.

The major question is whether or not the last one is going to arrive in time. I do believe that things are going to be very close.

Last week was pretty good over all. One contract at work was finally taken care of, which is one giant weight off of my shoulders.

I've also recently (re)learned, after having forgotten, that Oracle is no longer supporting their graphical catalog manager from the BI tools packages. They are, however, continuing development of the command line client.

Which, I suppose, is actually not a bad thing as I can script that bad boy to get my reports.

This upcoming week should be good, one kiddo will be heading to an orchestra event. Leaving at 6:45 in the morning. Yippee.

Should be a good week!

This is post 48/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

This particular post is most likely just going to be of interest to future me, though some others may find some information of use.

As my place of employment is a Microsoft shop, we use a large number of Microsoft applications. Personally, I'm not really a major fan of some of these apps so I like to look for good alternatives.

Fortunately, I have grown used to being in the WSL environment and Emacs in particular.

Historically I have been using OneNote to keep track of, um, notes and tidbits and whatever else one might want to put into a notebook. It has worked just fine but I don't like the fact that I don't have a lot of control over the format. I've kind of grown fond of just using text, and have been attempting to integrate Emacs' org-mode into more of my workflow.

(I would love to say that I'm using org-mode for this blog, but alas, I am not - although it is plain markdown.)

I recently came upon a tool that caught my interest, the OneNoteExporter PowerShell script from alopezrivera. Easily enough installed into my Windows 11 laptop, it only really required pandoc as an additional requirement.

Once I had the configuration file tweaked to my liking, I fired the script off. Of note, the powershell script needs to run at the same user level elevation as the currently running OneNote application. Also, a temporary script bypass may need to be run in powershell in order for the process to succeed: Set-ExecutionPolicy ByPass -Scope Process

There were a handful of errors at first, which were similar to this issue. I was able to make the same edit as suggested and those problems were resolved.

The next stumbling block that I came upon was the large amount of screenshots and images that I had in my OneNote notebooks. Those were not being exported by the pandoc process. As is normal within the world of the internet, I was not the first person to have this problem. One thing that I most absolutely did not want to have to do was re-save all of those images in another format, or copy and paste the pages themselves into a new page - both of which were suggested as possible solutions. Thankfully, a very simple solution was found by another user in that OneNote needs to download all files and images before syncing.

With that issue taken care of, everything was golden, right?

Mostly.

I still had to go through and add the proper filename extension to all of my fresh org files. Still haven't figured out why that was, but it was easy enough with emacs and wdired mode.

Now, with my work related notes over in org mode and copied up to the work OneDrive I should be ready to roll.

I hope.

This is post 45/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Time to play a little bit of catch-up, seeing as I didn't post anything yesterday. Or the day before.

I shall wait for the collective "aww, shucks, we sure missed reading your stuff!", because, yeah, it's still basically just for myself. Which is totally cool with me.

It has been such a long, unusually strange week.

Let us take yesterday, as an example: it was a Friday, but it didn't feel like a Friday. Nor did it feel like a Saturday. Or a Sunday. I don't know what day of thee week it felt like, it just seemed off.

I would imagine that having odd number of kiddos home probably had something to do with it. Parent teacher conferences make for a short week of school. The majority of them only had a three day week. The one oddity being the kiddo in advanced math having to take his class on Thursday at the high school. Then they were all home on Friday, which is super exciting.

Insofar as work goes for me, I assisted with a presentation and facilitation of a question and answer session for the new ticketing tool that we've been on for a month or so.

That actually went pretty well.

Documentation has been added to for the department. I think that is one of my favorite things to do, if I'm being honest. I try to keep good instructions for not only future me, but for my users as well. We've got a pretty decent wiki application for that. Of course I still wind up just exporting stuff out to PDF, but it is what it is.

I have jumped back into trying to learn Angular once again. The previous attempt was back in 2020 and I almost made it all the way through the course that I was taking. I've got a handful of them, two of them are pretty highly recommended. I would say that I'd like to get some kind of webdev position, but I think realistically I love what I do far too much to go that route.

Of course, I also like to dabble in Clojure, so yeah.

I feel that I'm kind of akin to the hyperactive pet who sees one shiny thing after another and just can't keep his mind on one thing at a time. I get bored easily I suppose.

Then I'm also currently staring at a hard copy of Django 5 By Example. Ugh. I've liked django since before they went through the magic removal stuff. Way, way back in the day at this point. I'd even built a blog that contained a reading list that pulled info from a certain well known book selling website to keep my reading list in. I was kind of proud of that.

Ah well.

Not much going on today - we'll make a store run and take the little one to birthday party. Should be fun!

This is post 47/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

It feels like it's been a decade since I last made a post here.

It has not, of course, but just the nature of the beast that is time, has made the days and hours drag on into endless streams of murk.

Yesterday was disable access and delete our cloud service desk product day.

I think. The days just kind of blend together. It went fairly well, I think. I've been able to get a small handful of documentation put together as well.

There was a lot of stuff that got accomplished yesterday, in fact. Got some quotes, got some import scripts written and ran. I still want to go through and clean these up, maybe get them working with uv. Assuming root isn't required.

I've got to get some patches on the schedule, which is all good.

Good grief has it been a rough day.

Had the youngest kid home today, "sick", from school.

Naturally, when I got back home from picking one of the twins up from zero hour to take him to school number two, the child was all "I feel much better now, can I do this other thing that I am not allowed to do on days that I'm home sick from school?"

Of course, that wasn't exactly how he asked, but I'm sure the idea has been transferred.

That was also not the only thing that was asked for, nor were these questions only asked one time.

Incessant, constant nagging.

It really, just kind of grates on the mood and makes one want to just disassociate.

After all of that, then it's time to get dinner prepped and ready. Something that I generally actually enjoy doing.

Cooking is fun. Relaxing. Prepping things that people might want to eat.

Low and behold, today was the attack of the crummy, small, no stinking room in it, kitchen.

No room in the floor. Nor the countertop. Cat food spilled all over the floor. Cauliflower dropped on the floor.

There are some days where it just feels like the world is out to get you. I know that's ridiculous.

But oh my ever loving lord.

This is post 41/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Yesterday I started my first session of the Couch to 5K program.

I'm not going to say that it was completely brutal, but it was definitely a challenge for myself.

I've never been a runner. Nor a jogger. Heck I haven't even been much of a walker with the exception of the last year, maybe.

But for some reason, I've got this crazy idea that I would like to run a 5K.

Slowly but surely I have been trying to work my body to to being prepped, in some way, for the coming activity. By walking and trying to keep a brisk pace, by going longer and longer distances.

At this point, I can do right at a three mile walk in about 40 to 45 minutes. My average is just over a 13 minute mile.

Certainly not an Olympic caliber, but I'm okay with that.

Yesterday, using one of the many C25k apps out there, was my first stress test. I would say that I succeeded.

Sure, it was not easy, and yeah I was looking forward to that "You are on run 8 of 8" notification, but I survived.

I did the complete 3K (I think) trek in 30 minutes, finishing very close to the end of our trail at the conclusion of the program.

Of course, silly me still wanted to finalize my actual normal walk path, so I continued on for another less than mile.

That, I admit and know now, was a mistake. According to my Fitbit app, the first two miles were under 13 minutes each.

The last was at an over 17 minutes pace. Yeah, no good, and I felt it!

I'm looking forward to doing this again today!

This is post 42/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Yeah, this is one of those "I'm just kinda pissed off days".

I despise these days, but I guess at least I know it's a thing - right?

The so called straw today has been the fact that we have to replace the plate on one of the vehicles. This would not be a problem if the plate were easy to remove.

But, no, one of the screws is good and rusted in and now stripped out. Went to one of the hardware stores in town and bought the only screw extraction kits they had - some POS that is. Sigh.

Now I'm waiting on the Dremel to charge up. Yeah, I'm just going to go nuclear on it. Kind of out of options at this point, honestly.

I just want to know why it is that the State can't just have plates replaced as they go. Seems like an expensive ordeal to me.

Oh well. I need better tools.

Well today was the day.

We've been working towards getting the new single overall help desk slash inventory slash cough/project management/cough service set up for our department for a handful of months at this point.

Things were finally, more or less, set up and turned on this afternoon. The last thing that was holding things up was the email set up and monitor service. This, evidently, required a lot of thought and assistance from central IT, from the vendor we're purchasing the service from, and from the vendor we procure our email service from.

Even with all of that help, it took hours of working over multiple days.

But, they've gotten it set up for us. It's great to be the guinea pig.

I think I'll keep it short and sweet today.

I'm at that point to where I think I really stinking despise Amazon deliveries.

Was supposed to get a couple of packages today, a movie along with some other useful items.

We received some of them. One item, though it was packaged decently, has this ridiculous white scratch mark that shouldn't be there and that I shouldn't have to live with. So that'll have to be dealt with - fine.

One item, a 4K movie, which had been ordered separately but was shipped in the same delivery (theoretically) was not received. But does Amazon have a way to say "one item from this delivery was not received"? Not that I can tell. So, I just say "delivery not received", with a comment about the item missing.

I'm done with Amazon.

At least for now.

It's hard to avoid them sometimes.

This is post 38/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Sometimes there are aspects of my job that are really, really, butt pickering and anxiety inducing.

Today is lining up to be one of those days.

As I write this, it's after 08:30, as soon as I get back into the (home) office I get to remove a couple of our cloud applications we subscribe to.

It's a cloud service desk product, a very popular and well known one. We have turned over to a new system as of this week, basically. We will only be continuing with one of their products, for project management, since the new one kinda sucks, in order for people to get used to the change.

Naturally, this company is unable to provide us with an appropriate quote for just the single product unless we remove, thus deleting, everything that's on their servers. We have their export for our own cloud pulled down, so, we should have everything.

In theory.

It is still arse clenching to remove these though.

This is post 39/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Happy long weekend all!

I guess.

I can't really relax, I have this constant feeling today that I need to be doing something. Anything.

It's not like I've been lazy today, either. Woke up, made my mug of coffee. Cleaned out the floor of our "soon to be coat" closet. Emptied the dishwasher. Filled the dishwasher. Ran the dishwasher. Took my first sip of coffee.

Still there are so many things that need to be done. Or, that I feel should be done.

I should mow the lawn, for example.

I can't get motivated today.

Not much of an interesting week, this one.

I've been meaning to try to get something down and posted but it's been a week of zero motivation.

I haven't even mowed the lawn in two weekends at this point. Fortunately I don't think I need to mow yet, but I probably will before the season is out.

One of the twins was able to participate in the first cross country event this season and he did pretty well! I would like to be able to run with him, but I'm not there yet.

I still try to take my lunch hour excursions and walk. Generally I can get in just under three miles in about forty minutes. Then a quick shower before logging back in to work.

My goal still remains to run a 5K. I'm sure I'll get there.

I had ordered the Run Your Own Mail Server book, by Michael W Lewis, towards the end of the pre-order period and it finally arrived this week! I've run mail servers for myself in the past, generally through systems like mail on a box or yunonost. I think even at one point I had set up qmail toaster.

But it's nice to know more about the what's and the why's, and it looks like this most excellent book is going to help out in that department. I don't know that I'll set something up from scratch… But that is certainly an itch.

It's almost like it never ends, you know!

Received an email notification from Ye Olde Vendor that they were scheduling the next patch for our development environment. Great! But damn…it sure seems like we just went through all this!

I guess that was in mid to late May. But test didn't get patched until flipping June, not to mention prod not that long ago.

Ugh. At least they actually keep stuff updated. No new patches available for the gateway product, yet, so we'll keep an eye out there.

It's been a pretty good week, actually. Got some documentation written and sent out. Got a quote and an order out together for some new laptops to replace out of warranty stuff. Not a bad week.

Some days you just feel like you got at least one thing accomplished.

Today is one of those days.

This morning was good, upgraded one of our development applications to the latest vendor patch. The super awesome thing about this being that as of the middle of last week said update was not available….though it probably should have been. Given the name of the patch and all is from last month.

Sigh.

Then, I was able to get some simple documentation done for our users. Granted, I think that we all know that it matters not how well said documentation is written, it's not gonna be good enough.

Additionally, got some requests fired off to another vendor.

Nifty.

Tomorrow is another day. The plan for noonish is to upgrade the same application previously mentioned, but in the test environment.

It is so nice actually having both DEV and TEST.

I'm not anticipating any issues, I think I've got this down to a science.

Till next time!

This is post 31/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Just got back from taking the kiddos to the local water and amusement park locale…we are all incredibly tired and wore out.

It was, supposedly, a heat warning kinda day - but honestly it didn't seem nearly as bad as it has in the past. At the park, I didn't even get in too bad a shape until towards the end, and to be realistic I was actually cold.

It goes along with water and not having a large amount of body fat these days. Something of a side effect I suppose.

After spending some time with the kiddos in the wave pool, we headed over to the adjoining amusement park and fed the family. The nearby diner has a decent selection of, well, cheeseburgers or chicken fingers, salad, fruit, fries and onion rings.

Lots of stuff that the kids like.

Since we have four "dining meals" to go along with the gold entry passes, it makes things more worth it to eat a couple of meals there.

But, good grief am I shockingly sore.

Sometimes I just don't really know.

There are days that I just want to give up.

Throw in the towel.

Half of today was one of those.

Things were okay for the most part, but then, the crap just gets flung into my face.

Then, I turn irrationally angry.

My mood sours and I become dour.

I just, don't know.

I guess I'm glad I've not done anything I won't regret doing.

Right?

This is post 33/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Whew, one day post birthday and one more on the books.

For myself, I consider my birthday to be just another day. I can't say that I really care how the day goes, one way or the other. I would assume, like most other adults my age - it's just another day.

I'm 47 as of yesterday. It's not a milestone year, just another step in the path.

I don't feel 47. It's no different to me than, say 42 or 45.

It's kind of surreal, if I were to say it was anything.

When you're a kid, you don't really think of middle age. It's just something that you don't really see yourself being.

Then, all of a sudden, your trying to put things into perspective. I try to place myself into my father's mindset and shoes and whatever when he was my age. How things were back then.

How things have changed.

I'm sure there's a word for the way I think, the way I feel.

Ah well.

The first day of school for the kiddos is in the bag!

Everything would seem to have gone nice and smooth, although it's not that much is actually done during the first day.

I have to consider the fact that all of the kids really enjoy school, which does make things so much easier.

Granted, the majority of them are teenagers (more or less) so all is not peachy and rosy. Sometimes just getting the older ones up and about can be quite the chore.

But, I will most certainly take that little inconvenience over having a house full of kids that want nothing to do with school.

Blessings counted and duly noted.

There are a couple of things that I've recently realized about myself.

One of them is something that I'm absolutely terrified about.

Another is just a quirk, an interesting tidbit about me that I hadn't fully recognize before.

First - in some ways success terrifies me.

Second - while I'm about the least competitive person that I know, I'm always extremely competitive against (with?) myself.

I would say that I'm a day late with my post, but then than would imply some sort of contract between myself and the reader. I'm pretty sure that we are all aware that there is no such thing here. Ha.

Last week I did go ahead and get a pre-order in for Michael W Lucas' new book on Run Your Own Mail Server. The ebook has already been delivered and I'm very much looking forward to flipping through the paperback when it arrives. I had considered picking up the hardback, but that cost is a little more difficult to justify.

I don't necessarily intend to run my own mail server from scratch, but you never know. I do, however, currently run a mail server via yunonost and have in the past used mail-in-a-box, which is very nice as well.

They are mostly just toy or hobby servers in my case though.

Now that the kiddos are in school and it's super quiet during most of the day, I've been more able to take some time to get out and walk during the mid day once again.

Related to an earlier post of mine, these are not exactly mind clearing excursions, but moreso a way to get active once again.

Currently my average is right around the fifteen minute minute mile, or just below. I want to get faster, and once I'm super comfortable with my progress I will attempt to jog it.

All for my goal to, possibly, maybe, run a 5K.

Today's walk was pretty good, I changed my route up quite a bit and made a much larger circuit. Although it didn't actually make much of a difference in the distance, very negligible.

Anyhow. That's what I've got, I think I've worked on this entry long enough now. It's been sitting for a couple of days.

This is post 30/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Talk about one heck of a week.

We had a pretty standard storm come through the area on Wednesday night, with the added benefit of up to 80 mile per hour winds at the head of it. Lots of trees down. Lots of power lines down. We were without power for just under 24 hours here, though some unfortunately people were much longer.

If it's something that we take for granted, it's electricity. Thankfully our home is decently insulated, so the downstairs remained in the lower mid 70s temperature wise. The upstairs, not so much.

We were gonna have the kids sleep downstairs the second night, but that was not necessary. The thought had occurred to get a couple of hotel rooms, but we didn't really want to spend the near $300 that would have ran us.

It was certainly very nice when power was restored.

I suppose this is the first milestone that I've reached for the 100 Days To Offload challenge - post number 25!

As those who have read many of my previous posts (and, thank you for that!) you may know that I have struggled of late with some aspects of my keto lifestyle. Not so much the keto part, per se, so much as the amount of calories that I haven't been logging and keeping account of.

In other words, snacking.

I was standing in the kitchen earlier today, having toasted a slice of "keto friendly" bread (the heel, if you're curious), buttered and cinnamon "sugar" topped….and stared at it.

I took a bit of a pause at that moment: did I really want to eat this? I've gone from thinking that I could easily do a 24 hour fast (perhaps even going longer for more frequent timing), to this undesirable feeling that I've got to snack.

It's not even that I feel hungry.

I used to eat out of boredom, maybe that's what I'm going back to? I need to get back in the game, my head is just a bit on the spacey side.

I need to be able to look in the mirror again and be proud of what I've accomplished.

It's a strange feeling.

It's funny how some things work out, you know?

Yesterday was a milestone post for my bloggy journal thing, whatever one wants to refer to this site as, and today is a life changing milestone in that today is the fifth anniversary of the day that I started keto.

Five years ago we made huge lifestyle changes. We were both sick and tired of being obese and wanted to see our kids grow up and have lives of their own.

Five years ago we decided that we wanted to model better behavior for our kids, at least as far as nutrition choices were concerned.

Five years ago I was well on my way to diabetes I'm sure of it. On my way to an early death at least.

Five years ago I weighed over 330 pounds. I hated how I looked. I hated how I felt. I hated that I couldn't sleep without a CPAP.

Now, while most of the physical stuff has changed and I'm significantly in a healthier state, I'm still working on my mental health. Though not as actively as I did on my physical body, I'll admit.

But, at least now I can select from a wider variety of clothing while I do it.

This is post 26/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

It's been a couple of days since my last update, so obviously there must have been basically nothing going on at all.

Some progress was made in the work/vendor department though, from Friday and on through the weekend. Mainly in that the patch scheduling foobar was taken care of.

All that took was opening up to two technical support requests. Sigh.

One of which was really only commented on by the vendor representative once. Once. I'm not gonna count the comment that was entered after the second SR was opened and resolved.

Once that problem was taken care of, we were off to the races on, well, yet another problem. All of which is somewhat related to every tool being moved to someone else's comput….er…cloud.

I will give them props, though, because at least this particular cloud took us replacing some old arse java app. So, progress. Yay?

On the home front side, we've got some appointments tomorrow that will need to get taken care of.

The lawn, yeah, it didn't get taken care of this weekend nor today. I'm hopeful that I can tackle that tomorrow as well.

Otherwise my poor, poor battery powered mower will not make it.

I'm also closing in on a third of the way through reading The Icewind Dale trilogy to my kiddos. Good stuff and it's my second time through this series.

This is post 20/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

It's been a pretty successful day thus far.

Upgraded one of our large test application servers with no issues. Insofar as application patches go, it's one of the easier ones that we've got. Not quite of the "click, click, click" and FIN variety, but very close. It does require a certain amount of babysitting, which is completely and totally obnoxious.

I did get a start on reading my newest book, though I'm going to admit to not making it all that far yet.

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville. Next to the book is my blue coffee canister.

On the personal way of life stuff (isn't that what this whole journal thing is, though?) I'm attempting to get my mindset back into the keto game. That doesn't mean that I haven't continued to remain in the keto lifestyle all this time - I have. What I've not done is be more strict/stringent on logging everything I consume, which leads to laziness and unnecessary snacking.

My weight is slowly sneaking up past that 190 pound entry, way too close to 200 for my taste. Things are not helped along by the fact that we have too much prepackaged junk in the house, sugar free slash keto "friendly" or not. I shall be getting back on that wagon, full speed.

This is post 21/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

We've been watching a lot of streaming shows over the past couple of days.

I didn't normally go in for the binge mentality of how things seem to be these days, although I haven't ever been against waiting things out for a few weeks to let the (old school) DVR (or, even older Tivo) build up a few weeks worth of episodes to watch.

I still prefer to not watch them all at once.

Still though, it does happen.

Yesterday we watched the entirety of Eric on Netflix. It was a pretty decent tale, with a handful of threads that wove together okay. I think that it could probably have been cut down by an hour/an episode, but all things considered it was enjoyable.

Today we finished up with Netflix's Beef. We had watched the first episode the other day, and worked out way through the rest of them today. I really like all of the A24 stuff that I've seen, and this was not too bad either. Granted, the overall story is just insane enough…but then so was Eric.

So far as other television stuff, I've got my YouTube TV set to record all the Olympics stuff, so I'll watch some of that in time. I'm more of a Winter fan than Summer, though.

Of course we're also watching House of the Dragon and The Boys, as one is aught to do.

The new school season is nearly upon us once again.

We will have three kiddos back in the same building, at least for a little while, with but two grades between them. Not that they don't always have, or that they won't always have two grades between them. Sometimes we forget that the youngest of these three is the youngest of the three - this kiddo has seemed for some time now to be the more mature of them all. Always a surprise to me and also I must admit that I am not overly certain that I am deserving of such amazing children.

One of the twins will be spending the first part of some days at another school taking higher level math courses. Similar to what the youngest kiddo was going through last year, when he bussed from the elementary school to the middle school for his math course. I am more scared for the elder twin, though, than I was for the younger brother. Probably has to do with the fact he'll be going into a High School, opposed to a middle school.

I think that everybody will do fine, but as a parent I think I'm allowed to feel that fear for my kiddo.

We also find ourselves near the time of open enrollment for insurance.

This year, I'm definitely looking forward to making some changes there. My wife has recently - this is her third week - started working at the same employer as I. Which means that we'll get to save a not insignificant amount of money on insurance! She will take over her own insurance plan and payment, using the same provider. I will continue to cover the kids and myself. All in, we look to save about $500 a month for coverage.

It is insane.

I have slowly been working my way through the book of elsewhere, taking a bit of a break from The Expanse books. The hope is that I can finish reading this before my hardback copy of the BRZRKR graphic novel arrives, which should arrive early October I think. Plenty of time, right?

This is post 23/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Sometimes I wonder how in the world I managed to write a new post every day during the previous challenge that I subjected myself to.

This week has thus far been fairly non eventful. Boredom is a good thing sometimes.

Last week I made a purchase that I almost regret doing. Even though it's an item that gets daily use, and I'm in it probably eight plus hours a day, which kind of makes it a necessity, I'm not a hundred percent happy with it.

Obviously it's some kind of work from home item. It's the Hyken Mesh Chair from Staples. The one thing that I'm not happy with is the "headrest".

Note the quotes there.

As it's not super adjustable, this headrest comes all the way up to in between my shoulder blades.

Unless I crouch down.

Which I am not going to do.

Fortunately I can remove it, which I'll probably do.

Other than that, it's an okay chair for those who don't have or can't afford to get the kick arse Herman Miller Aeron. Sigh.

Ah well, back to the grind!

This is post 16/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

It's Sunday. Whatever that means.

The end of the weekend and the beginning of a new week.

Currently we're just taking in the time to watch the youngest play in a local indoor jungle gym. It's a friends birthday party for the little.

So far as Sundays go, it's actually been a moderately busy one.

The boys and I got haircuts. We went to the store.

Spent some time at the local splash pad. Definitely a decent way for the little to cool off, but still…. really hot.

Drove around town for a bit, mainly due to having forgotten when the party started. Ha.

Now, it's all about figuring dinner out. Although I think we'll let the older kiddos fend for themselves with leftovers and pasta.

There are a handful of things that I don't understand.

For one, why can't certain vendors let their customers know that the product that they depend on for their day to day usage was not actually patched to the current patch level on the scheduled time.

Not only was the time scheduled, but it was of course scheduled by the vendor, seeing as how the customer is basically at the mercy of said vendor.

Not only did the customer (us) have to check to ensure that the product was patched, but then the customer (us, again) has to contact big vendor support to ask why it wasn't patched.

Why can't they just pop some kind of email notification that says it was either successful or not?

Then if not - what the plan of action is?

Yeah. We asked this question on Monday.

I was out sick on Tuesday.

The only response we've had thus far was an incorrect notice that none of our instances have been patched at all.

We have three instances: one each for development, testing and production.

Our development instance had already been patched, as scheduled, so I got to let the vendor know that…um, no, I don't believe that's correct please don't re-patch.

Sigh.

Anyhow - now the vendor has let us know that it's time to board the patching train because they've scheduled the production instance for updating next week, when we haven't had a chance to do any testing in the test instance. Which is less of a playground than dev.

It's beyond infuriating.

Welcome to the cloud.

This is post 18/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

It's crazy the stuff that I have packaged up and toted along with me throughout all of my moves.

What's even crazier are the items that I didn't bring along with me, for some reason or another.

Items like video games. Lots of cartridges and disks, cases and manuals.

Games that I wouldn't mind playing again on my SEGA Genesis/SEGA CD/32X (yeah, I had the SEGA Stack….) or Super NES.

But.

There's always a "but", isn't there?

Do I actually have any of those here with me? No, of course not.

I do have my boxed Dreamcast and some high profile games, but not the older stuff.

Sadly, I'll probably never see those things again, either. Last year I made the couple hour trek back to my childhood home, with the hope that I could bring some stuff back.

My father (whom I love immensely) had moved an entire home full of stuff into a couple of self built storage buildings.

I was heart broken. Having seen a couple of the figures that I still could find completely covered in dust and dirt and everything, and some electronics just in tatters…the weather had done them no favors.

Of the items that I was hoping to find (including multiple unopened, complete on card figures) was a complete in box Neo Geo AES with two sticks, memory cards and six games (I think). I can recall Magician Lord, Baseball Stars, 2020 Baseball, Samurai Showdown, I can't recall the others. I'd purchased the whole package over 20 years ago on eBay for less than $600. Good luck trying to find anything similar these days for twice that. This gutted me.

Completely.

These days, as I attempt to go through a boatload of boxes, I just have to ask myself: Why would you bring bits and pieces of this stuff, and not the actual decks that make these things work?!

Gah!

This is post 19/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

First day of vacation and I'm already sick and tired of it. Note: it's now the second day, but my feelings haven't changed much here.

Maybe one of these times I can actually plan to go somewhere or do something, get away from things.

I just don't get it.

These things should be enjoyable, right?

Does it help that most of the people - it seems - in this home are depressed? I'm gonna go with a "No sir, not one bit" on that one my friends.

We've got one adult who is dealing with a loss of something that never should have happened in the first place (something that never should have to to fruition to have been lost, that is). Another adult dealing with their own family issues, which are by their nature spilling over into the home life. Kids who we are trying to keep from becoming depressed.

I'm walking on eggshells around here, and it's extremely tiring.

This is post 12/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Happy Fourth of July, for those that celebrate.

Yet another Holiday here in the States where we, basically, get to set our wallets on fire.

Quite literally in some cases.

I will admit that this is one of my favorite days of the year.

It is currently just after 22:30 Central time, we just finished up with our small handful of fountains and sprinklers. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves, and yet another year with no need to send anybody to the emergency room is a win in my book.

This was also one of the cheaper years that we've managed to get away with, with a bill only just shy of two hundred.

Yeah, we totally didn't need to spend the money. But think of the kids! Especially the six year old who lives for the smoke bombs.

Still more than I'd like to spend for an hours worth of entertainment.

In other news, we will be back to a double income family soon. Super nice.

Until next time!

This is post 13/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Does Sunday count as a vacation day, ergo being the last day of a vacation?

I can't say that I've ever actually counted the weekends in my vacation, but I suppose they do.

Tomorrow is return to work day. We'll put "return" in quotes, seeing as I work from home and it's not like we actually left home over the last week.

There were no plans set out for the week, so nothing was accomplished. But on the other hand, seeing as there were no plans to do anything I can't be disappointed that nothing got done!

Win win for everybody on that one.

The family did get out for the Fourth of July (non) event that was held in town. There was music (not that great), craft booths (not that great), food trucks (probably decent, but not our kind of nutrition), and a drone show.

Oh, and a kids play area. Which was fun for the young one.

We went for less than an hour and walked around to see what was what. Finding things not worth it, we left to go get the kids some ice cream cones.

We did go back for the drone show, which was supposed to start at 9:45.

Then it was supposed to start at 10:00. Then 10:30. 10:45. Then it was called at 11:00.

At which time it started raining.

Evidently, the vendor was having issues getting the show code loaded onto the 200 drones via their Verizon Wireless hotspot. They shoulda had T-Mobile. Ha.

The weather had stunk all day, so they weren't able to do the pre-work earlier, either.

Now, the city has a $30,000 credit for next year.

We were really looking forward to seeing how it went, so I guess we'll check it out next year.

This is post 14/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

First day back is now in the bag!

Not nearly as bad as those times when I take two weeks off (FSM knows that those both make me want to never take another vacation and never go back to work again) but there was still a bit of cleanup and catch up to do.

Some of the cleanup involves coming back in to work post fiscal year end, when it's not necessarily been completely opened back up. Not a huge deal, but still needs to be taken care of.

There is also the metric arse ton of email to sift through. Although I'll be honest and say that I do continue to keep my work email synching through my phone and delete most of the crap that doesn't pertain to me.

Sue me. I don't like surprises.

What was best today, though, was not one but TWO Monday morning meetings.

Back to back.

Right up there with Friday afternoon meetings with my favorites.

Fortunately these are extremely rare for me and Mondays are generally pretty tame.

Well, I'm thinking it's getting close to dinner time and I haven't yet figured out what to feed the kids - I probably ought to take that under consideration.

Until next time.

This is post 15/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Ah, the great and powerful Monday.

I actually don't mind Mondays. Sure for some people it's the beginning of the work week (myself included), but it also means a great day of getting stuff done at work with little interruption.

Naturally today we had about an hour long team meeting to discuss projects new/old/upcoming and other leadership tidbits. I don't mind, at least it wasn't a 3pm (4pm!) meeting on a Friday. Those stink.

In household news, the granddaughter is starting to feel more and more comfortable. She does get a little upset and sad when her Dad leaves the room or goes to work, but it passes much quicker now than it used to. She's a whole lot happier and just seems to be in a better mood overall now. It's great to see.

Today we also found out what the final cost of repairs are going to be on the vehicle. Shockingly not as bad as I was anticipating, but then I did have a worse case scenario in my head, just so I could be relieved if that was not the case. It still hurts and is money out the door and straight into the incinerator, but it could have been about a thousand dollars worse.

Now all we need is for a major appliance to vomit all over itself and call it a day.

I'm thinking it's about time to get some dinner prepped, so off to do that I go.

What a week!

Last week was quite a ride. The weekend hasn't been much different.

I look through a few job listings, not only for my spouse but - potentially - for myself as well.

Again, not that I'm looking to replace my current job, but perhaps more to supplement what I do have.

As far as the spouse goes, well, sometimes I feel like I'm kind of limited. She is great with children and youths, not so much with peers.

It's her perfectionism and drive to do things by the book. Which, in and of itself is not so much a bad thing.

However, when you are around a new group of coworkers who have been doing things the same way for years, well, then that can be a little dicey.

It's not always good to be that squeaky wheel. It gets greased, or it gets replaced.

Not to mention the fact that fitting I to a new clique can be extraordinarily difficult.

Another thing that makes things challenging is that I'm not the most patient teacher, I think. Especially when it comes to how basic computer applications work. I do understand that I should do better here, do more teaching rather than taking over and doing.

There are a lot of jobs out there these days that require basic skills - not to mention even getting an application submitted. I get frustrated far too easily, sometimes.

No matter what she does, though, I completely will be here to support.

All things said, even hobbies can make some extra money. There have been plenty of ideas in this home, plenty of supplies have been purchased, now there is also an abundance of time.

This is post 11/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I know that I have previously written on my struggle to work on maintaining my weight, as well as some of the body and confidence issues that go along with that.

We shall count today's journal entry as yet another one of those.

Within the next two months, August 8th I believe, will the the fifth year milestone of living a keto lifestyle.

Before that, I remember sitting in my office chair and watching these amazing transformation videos of people. It always felt a little hypocritical of myself when I did this. There I sat, three hundred thirty plus pounds, knowing that I would never be able to be one of those with a success story of my own.

Within weeks of starting keto, I knew that I wanted nothing more than to just be down a hundred pounds after one year.

Well, I like to say that I basically turned that whole change into a game: how large of a calorie restriction could I maintain, how close to zero net carbs could I average?

I blew way past that hundred pounds loss within that year and was already very close to my current weight already.

My lowest weight was in the 168 pound ballpark. I'm a six foot two plus guy, and I know for a fact that that was too low. I did not look good.

I have slowly worked back up to low 190s. Insofar as health goes, I know that's perfectly acceptable.

But. Mentally, it is not good enough for me. I want 180s. For my mind, where I'm at is just too close to 200. I don't want to be there again.

So, I know that I dropped the weight (I don't like to say I lost it, because I really don't want to find it again) really quickly. Probably not super healthily either. However, I have managed in many ways to change my relationship with food.

I never really ate my feelings. It was more out of boredom than anything. Now, I really try to enjoy the feeling of looking better and use the extra time to read or work on some other self development process.

If I have missed anything at all during this life change, it's that my hair is no longer thick and composed of ringlets (think Weird Al hair). That's about the only thing I miss. But, it could be age related as well.

Today has been a good day, thus far, when it comes to food. Here's to keeping on.

This is post 5/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I figured that today would be a good time to post something a little more lighthearted.

So I present some of the artwork of my youngest kiddo, which is basically overtaking all of the free space of the fridge.

Not that there is a problem with that, of course.

This is post 6/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

When I was in middle school, in what now seems like half a million years ago, a friend and I started writing stories.

We each had a single subject notebook and filled them with what were - to us anyhow, at the time - fantastically interesting tales.

I can't recall what stories my friend had written about (and, sadly, cancer has taken him) but mine was some kind of space opera mash up with robots and power suits and who knows what all else.

I'm sure that it was all horribly juvenile, but it felt really grandiose to me at the time.

My Mom even read what I had one at one point and did say that it was pretty good. Of course, as a parent you are a little biased.

She was - is? - well read, however, and did encourage me to read a large variety of works. I still have that love of reading.

There are far too many conversations going on in this house, I can not recall where I was going with any of these thoughts.

Oh, yes. Writing. Write anything. I've seen a lot of posts from people recently who struggled to start writing, who thought that people would not want to read what they had to say.

Does any of that matter? No. 

When writing for yourself, it matters not what your getting down. It doesn't matter if you think it's "juvenile" or otherwise uninteresting - you are writing for yourself.

It matters not if my readership is a party of one.

It has been a couple of uneventful days, which if I'm being honest is not such a bad thing.

Work has been moving along at a nice steady pace, with some progress being made on the good old Team Dynamix front.

On that, I shall say that my enthusiasm has been ever so tempered at this point. There does not seem to be a path forward for our department to be able to have the type of control that we would like, nor some of the project management features that some would hope for.

We shall, however, make due.

Next week will be an off week for me. Yet another week of vacation.

Most people would be super stoked and excited about that, I'm sure, but if you're a reader of my past posts you might know that I'm not a fan.

However, my wife also has next week off - so maybe we can get out and hit a local park or something with the kids. Take advantage of those uber expensive passes we have.

What we really should do, though, is work on getting our extra bedroom set back up for the eldest kiddo. Along with the rest of the home. We are considering getting licensed by the State for an in-home childcare center. To do that will require a little bit of setup but totally worth it.

Of course, I know for a fact what we'll actually do next week. Absolutely nothing. Apart from doing stuff with the kids for the Fourth of July.

Here's to a good rest of the week.

This is post 8/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Now is the time to tighten the proverbial belts.

We will very soon be down to a single income in the home. More or less. I do suppose that the older kiddo does have a paycheck, but he has his own set of problems to take care of.

One really has to hope that this situation does not last longer than it needs to, and, perhaps, it can be used to open some doors for another opportunity.

Like now there should be plenty of people hours available to work on getting the home straight for that in-home childcare plan that was mentioned previously.

Is there a silver lining?

This is post 9/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I had something written up earlier that I was going to post, but as is often the case in life things change.

Is it always for the best?

I find that I am, for the first time in a very long time, contemplating the need to do one of two things: either procure a second income, or find another income.

Neither of which is something that I desire to any degree.

I like what I do and I like where I am.

However. Something something life.

Whatever.

I guess it's time to take stock of what my abilities are and what I'm capable of.

What a week.

This is post 10/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Let me begin today by first stating that I love our cat.

I'm a cat person, more than any other animal. Please note that I stated "I'm a cat person" and not "I'm a pet person".

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that I much prefer other people's pets to having my own.

It's just so, so much easier. And cheaper. Don't want to forget cheaper.

All right, now that that's out of the way. Again, I really love our cat. He's a big ol' gray and white beast that would rather just leave you alone so much as look at you. Which is totally cool with me.

I don't have to worry about him getting around my work area or laying on my laptop. I don't, generally, have to worry about him being underfoot. With the general exception of him racing me downstairs in a vain attempt to trip me.

Of course life isn't all gumdrops and lollypops with the cantankerous cat around. No sir.

He's an indoor cat. If it's one thing that I like even less than pets it's fleas. Most likely because fleas really love me. So what's the one thing in all the world that this animal desires?

Yep. Uh huh. He absolutely desires to go outside. Even just the garage. And good golly gee whiz is he uber, super vocal about it.

I'd swear, listening to this bad boy meowrl just could drive me insane. Dude is loud. Like, if I didn't know better we'd swear he was a she and not neutered (he is).

It's a near constant ordeal, some days.

Have I told you I love my cat?

Ah, the Tale of the Telluride just will not quit. It's like the gift that keeps on giving.

Not in a good way.

But then, how often are things "good" when that particular phrase comes into play. Yeah, not all that often.

So after paying too stonking much for repairs due to a, um, we shall say "self imposed" accident, now it looks like we might have a little bit of salt rubbed into that festering wound.

You know, for good measure.

While it's probably entirely coincidental, it looks like we'll be replacing the battery in the beast. Twice today when going to start it up we've experienced a series of error checks (ECS, BCW, blah blah blah) and clicks and basically what looks like a computer system spasming out and proverbially vomiting all over itself.

It's great. The vehicle is a 2021, so I guess it's about that time for the OEM battery to go. At least that's the opinion of the interwebs, that they'll last about 2.5 years. I don't mind, really. Having the battery die or running out of gas are about two of the larger vehicle fears that I have.

Hopefully that's what the problem is.

This morning, the vehicle was taken into the local big box retailer that also happens to have a tire and lube department. Supposedly they can also check batteries, but honestly I don't know how much I'd trust them to even unlock a vehicle if you handed them the keys and a YouTube video with instructions.

This is coming from a person who used to be a salary manager at this store. So, yeah, when you've worked there and seen that the department has had to replace two engines because reasons - you lose what little faith there was.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the vehicle was taken into this store to get the battery checked and maybe replaced. Evidently, they checked the battery and it was fine. I guess.

I don't know, though. The car is over 36 months old, so in my opinion I think we should replace the thing. It's spendy, but I'd rather not get stranded. I suppose that I'll just keep the mobile jumper in it. Charged.

The spouse drove it around to her appointments today as well and has said that it did not act up. I would like to follow through with some plans we had for this weekend and go to the local amusement park - but I've got trust issues.

I have been known to basically be done with my car at the onset of issues. Seems bad, but, it is what it is.

Happy Father's Day Eve!

To all of those who are parent figures to somebody or other who needs the support or the assistance, here's to a day filled with the joy and happiness that goes along with that personal fulfillment!

As a father figure to my kiddos, I have cherished every day I've been around them. Have they all been easy days? Oh, heck no. But even those difficult and challenging days are completely worth it.

Anyhow, on to today's stuff!

Not that I've got anything really special to impart today.

It was supposed to rain today, so the first thing I did upon waking up was head out and get the lawn mowed. It takes about an hour, so long as I'm able to keep up on it every week.

We've got an old Snapper battery operated mower, with a 4Ah and a 2Ah battery pair. I really love it when I can get things done within a single battery. This morning was no different.

While the battery operated mower is nice and we don't have to put up with having a gasoline container in the garage, it does entail the need to mow more often. Otherwise you wind up with a field that the poor machine just can't deal with.

Did it wind up raining? Of course not. It looked pretty gnarly though.

I'm sure it'll rain tomorrow though. That would be perfect, especially since we plan on heading to World's Of Fun for the day.

Lastly, I'm considering doing the whole 100 Days To Offload challenge.

I figure that since I'm trying to write more that it might be something worth doing. I like personal challenges of this sort.

With that, until next time.

As today prepares to come to an end, I'm sitting here at home waiting on the ibuprofen and acetaminophen cocktail to do its thing.

We did make it to Worlds Of Fun, as a way to have a fun Father's Day. It was a pretty good day. There were a couple of us that managed to get in a few good coaster rides, facilitated by some decently short lines.

I had never ridden the Prowler before today - definitely one of my new faves. It's an older wooden coaster, I think it's celebrating a birthday this year as well. I'm kind of surprised that I had never been on it previously, but sure glad that I did.

Now I've just got to get over the heat and sun induced ache that I've put myself through.

Last night my head was killing me.

This morning my head was still killing me. I have to say that I consider myself extremely fortunate to have a very flexible career that affords me the ability to take time when I need it. It is not something that need be done very often - not for myself anyhow - but I'm more than happy to take it.

Currently, I'm sitting in the quiet of the dinning area, watching one of the kiddos make some kind of banana slash chocolate slash puff pastry dessert that he and Mom had seen online somewhere. It looks interesting, and I'm sure it'll be tasty for them.

Did I mention that this kiddo is only just out of fifth grade? He's been baking and cooking for what seems like a couple of years now. The kiddo is very driven and fairly well rounded.

Normally, anyhow. Sometimes these kids will surprise with some of those "You asked what?!" questions. They are all super intelligent, have gifted IEPs in school, but still - on occasion - they show their age and remind us that they are still children, and need guidance to make their way.

And that is perfectly fine. It's what we are here for.

This is post 2/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

I am notoriously difficult to purchase any kind of gift for.

Anything that I generally want, I have a tendency to go ahead and make the purchase at any and every time.

Anything that I don't immediately buy, is most likely because the item just cost too much and I can not justify the purchase.

I do have a few things that I enjoy though, and high on that list is anything and everything Peanuts.

Of the Charles Schulz variety, of course. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock, all of them! I've been enamored of the crew since I was a child.

Some of my earliest memories of reading, not just making things up and babbling and looking at pictures, is of laying on the living room floor, the Sunday Comics spread open in front of me, reading and laughing at Peanuts.

I remember Dad asking me if I was actually reading, then him being surprised when I said yep!

All of that to say that my wife is pretty awesome! She always knows what to get me.

The best squishmellow of all time!

This is post 3/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

What to say about today?

Today is Juneteenth. This would be the first year that my place of employment has (I think…) provided those of us who are able to have the Holiday off, off. There are those who are declared as essential, so I would assume that they could have their Holiday moved, or just make the extra pay. I don't honestly know how that will work for this case.

Me, being a white, caucasian, cis dude who is near half a century old at this point in his life…I can not help but just feel really kind of weird having this day off as a Holiday. Now, I absolutely do believe that it should be a Holiday, no doubt about that.

It just feels strange for me, personally, to have the day out.

Okay, that's about as political as I ever want to get.

In other moments of not so much excitement, the power was off for an hour or so here.

No idea what happened, but it did provide a moment to ponder and read a part of my newest book:

Clark. First Edition, First printing, US Edition, Black Cover.

I remember watching the series of this when it aired a few years ago and thought that it might make a good read.

I was grateful to have found a good hardback copy of the first printing/first US edition for a really good price.

Here's to eventually getting it finished!

This is post 4/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

Just because the May challenge is over doesn't mean that I can't still try to keep some writing going.

As I had stated earlier, I've had the opportunity to move my workspace into a downstairs location, and I think I kind of like how things are situated now. It's a good feeling to have a nice clean start, without quite so much clutter. I had even brought another box down, but said to myself: "Self, do I really need to bring all this crap down here? No. No I do not." At which point, I promptly packed that box back and trotted it right back upstairs.

Probably one of the nicest bonuses to having this setup down here is that I can dock my SteamDeck and play it without feeling too guilty about not being around the family. I don't get a whole lot of time to game these days, so I haven't really been able to take advantage of having my Deck. Now, maybe that can change.

All right, with that I think it's getting to be about time to get some dinner prepped. It's spaghetti squash with homemade alfredo night, with a side of asparagus.

Have a good night all!

I kept telling myself that I wasn't going to go through with it, that I've already spent enough money on games - specifically my Steam backlog - but they just keep pulling me back in.

Silly sales. Gah, dang it.

It's half off now, so naturally I've got to make one last, final splurge. At least I've only bought one copy of this title. Ha!

Now, all I've got to do is wait for the thing to download and install. Only 11.6 Gigs down, another 75 Gigs to go. It's disgusting. 😑

I was not raised in a family that provided a lot of what I'll call emotional attachment. My parents probably loved each other, at one point, but if they did I never saw proof of that. Quite the opposite, actually. My parents divorced early in my life.

I can remember only twice in my life - I'm currently nearly 50 years old at this point - that I witnessed my father cry. The first time I was probably still in the fourth grade (I'm wildly guessing here at timeframes) and it was early morning before school. I'm sitting at the dining room table (we actually had one of those, both the dining room and the table, quite the concept) eating breakfast and the question is put to me: "Would you rather stay with your Mom or your Dad?".

For the love of pete, what a question to drop on a young kid.

What would you expect the response to be? If the kid leaves, then he has to change everything: schools, friends, homes, the whole bag.

Of course the kid is going to opt stay with the Mom.

Which I did, at that time.

That was the first time witnessing the tears.

My Mom was, quite likely, bi-polar. I think she even said that at one point that she'd been diagnosed, but I'm not positive. Some days were great, some not so great.

I can remember a lot of volitility. Dishes, utensils, pots, pans, all being thrown out of the kitchen and at the wall in the hall.

There was a time when I snuck into the kitchen one afternoon and grabbed a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Oh, I can tell you right now that I never did that again. I had a wooden mixing spoon broken across my backside for that one. I would have to say, I don't believe that punishment fit that crime.

Then there was the time when my Mom was supposed to give me swats with a flyswatter. For some reason, she just barely tapped my bare bottom with said swatter. I don't know what I had done to deserve (or not, such as the case may have been) that one.

I didn't spend much time with my Mother. I did wind up staying with my Dad. I know that they both loved me, but neither of them were very good at showing said love.

Did I yearn for their attention? No. I can't say that I did.

Has that history made my current life and years difficult? Oh, I think that's safe to say. I can't let people get close. I'm not one for really showing affection. I am emphatic and I do understand when others are going through difficulties, but I'm not really equipped to help necessarily.

I'm thinking this is just gonna be a short little snippet of an update.

There is this part of me that wants to just take a couple of weeks and just "go". No real destination, no real plans. Just get in the car and drive.

Realistically, I'd rather get on the bike and ride, but that's kind of challenging when one no longer has a bike to get onto. To qualify, when I refer to a bike, I'm not talking about the peddle powered version.

Just me. Just on my own.

I'm so tired.

All of the following is more for myself and future reference than anything. (Though, who am I kidding, this whole blog thing is all personal future reference, isn't it?)

I figure that I've been blogging this way for a month or better at this point, so it might be worthwhile to get down what my current process is for getting a post up. I'll even include some nifty screenshots. All from mobile, even!

Last evening I had the opportunity to update one of our Oracle applications. Something that I've gone through a handful of times now and have been able to fairly well document. It's kind of a flaky system, in that it requires some toggles and buttons being pressed in a very specific order. A rather unorthodox and strange order in our opinion. But, I've got it down to a science now.

Today was uneventful. So excellent.

On the home news side, hopefully tomorrow we will get our second vehicle back after an accident with one of the wheels and a curb. Though it's kind of bittersweet, since it'll be a large bill. Definitely not looking forward to this.

Yeah, I'm still tired and this whole vehicle situation doesn't help.

Today we had a short conference with one of the music/band/orchestra teachers in the school district. One of the really cool things that our district provides (well, free it isn't…but it's available) is for incoming junior high students the opportunity to try out a variety of band and orchestra instruments over the course of four days, to see what they like.

All of our kids have participated at this point, the current kiddo just finished his stint up. He went into it grudgingly, steadfast in his thinking that he just wanted to play the violin and nothing else. We did find out, through the whole camp experience, that he is not able to play brass - kiddo was just not able to buzz his lips. That's perfectly acceptable.

Two of the instrument styles, both I suppose would be woodwinds, he actually played very well. Clarinet and flute. Totally hilarious, especially when considering that he really, really, did not want to go those days because he would just not be able to do anything at all with them. Ha.

Even when all was said and done, what was his top choice? Well, still the violin. Totally cool. That said, his second choice was actually the flute. The actually also recommended that he try to choose the bass, he checked all the "hell yeahs!" on that one. Both the teacher that he worked with on bass, and the assistant, were former bass players and were very excited to see how well he performed. Fortunately, those skills do translate well to the violin.

All in all, we should now have half of a string quartet in our home now.

I did not post anything yesterday.

After over a month of managing to get something put up, I skipped a day.

And you know what? That's okay.

It's not a habit until it becomes something more normal. I hope that days like yesterday are more the exception than the rule.

There was some productivity that was had yesterday, despite the overnight rain I was able to get the lawn mowed and some other weeds taken care of. We've got an older Snapper battery operated lawnmower, and I consider it a major accomplishment if I'm able to get the lawn mowed within a single 4Ah battery. If I can get it weekly, it's usually possible, and only takes about an hour.

Still, I really need to run the weed eater though.

The second vehicle is still at the dealership, hopefully it's finished by Monday afternoon. It really stinks not having my car. Not that I go anywhere, or that I could go anywhere at this time. But still.

I've got a question into our insurance agent, wondering about a few things that are related about that vehicle issue, but I'm not overly optimistic about any responses there. Certainly nothing favorable, anyway.

It's getting close to that time to begin thinking about birthday gifts for the spouse. Sometimes I'm just not really in a gift giving mood, and this seems to be one of those times. I do, however, think I know what I'm going to get, so that's positive.

The first half of my day has gone pretty well so far, considering the work area move so I can keep an eye on the grand. Well, it does make it easier to keep an eye on her, but that was of course not the full reason for the move. We still hope to have the extra room usable for the eldest soon.

I do admit that it's nice to have a cleaner desk to work with. I still need to bring my side table and printer down, as well as get my Openmedia Vault box set back up. I miss my qemu box.

Thus far today, I've managed to stay firm in my determination to keep junk food out of my face. So that's a solid win. Not feeling any hunger, which is to be expected with my experience.

This month is nearing its end, but I think I'm going to continue to attempt to get something down every day. It's been easier than I expected, and I keep basically doing this for myself and none other.

Wanna read my other #weblogpomo2024 posts?

Whoa, it has been a week this day. I'm glad that it's almost over. Not only is this day, erm week, almost over, but so is the month. Which also brings us to the end of the Weblog Publishing Month challenge.

And I do believe that I accomplished the challenge.

So what made today a challenge? Largely that we will most like have to have the wheel replaced on our vehicle. Naturally, the vehicle has the premium package so yeah, won't be cheap. Somebody hit a road divider turning into a parking lot and bent the inside of the wheel, popping the bead on the tire. So, not looking forward to that damage.

Another item, which was actually positive, is that the Uber sectional super rearrangeable couch that we purchased showed up (mostly) today. Like, a week early. So we weren't prepared. But, it worked out because more people were home to help get things sorted out!

Overall, I have to say that it's been a great month. I had hoped to do something different, but I think writing about my life worked out. I think that I should be able to continue this.

Thank you for those that are reading.

Wanna read my other #weblogpomo2024 posts?

The 20th of the month, and the first time that I've actually sat down at a computer to write a post in, oh, what seems like forever at this point. I've remembered to git pull --rebase so - hopefully - there won't be any errors thrown by git. What I've not done is to come up with some kind of theme for todays entry.

The morning was pretty much blown, not only was there no real sleep to have been had (stopped up nasal situation, creating a wonderfully sore throat), but then there was the need to get the two oldest and the youngest kiddos in for their annual "well child" check. Always a good time. At least our family doctor is easy to talk to and we generally really like her. Would definitely recommend her as a local doc anytime I see people ask about who to go to in any of the local groups. The only thing that I (we…) don't care so much for is the fact that her practice was sucked up into the local hospital conglomerate a handful of years ago. Ugh.

Today was the recognition ceremony for our fifth grader. This is certainly a special class, one that we feel honored to have gotten to be involved with. Our fellow parents are amazing, our son's peer group is just flat out phenomenal, we couldn't ask for anything better.

This class has marked a couple of milestones. First, the school principal started out with this group in kindergarten. She's been a wonderful person - an advocate above all who believes in all the students. Sadly for this school, she is leaving for another district.

Second, our young man has had a gifted IEP for a number of years now (recall what I said about the principal being an advocate?), and he was the first gifted student for his particular gifted facilitator. She, too, has been a joy to work with. We have had nothing but positive memories for this school and the people there.

Fortunately, we still have one more kiddo to take through this journey. He is getting to go through this school's beginning of a Montessori program. So far, it's been good for him. We would have loved to have had more of them go through this type of learning system, but at least one is able to.

When we first moved here, I admit to having doubts about this area and this school - but no longer.

Wanna read my other #weblogpomo2024 posts?

If I were to be honest - and really why wouldn't I be so - today has been something of a productive day. I don't feel like I have a whole lot of actual product that came out of today, but I do feel that I made some learning progress today for work.

That, my friends, is certainly positive. I'm learning some working details of our new ticketing/asset/configuration item/project system. We're moving from the atlassian product, so it's something along those lines. I don't mind jira, but it'll be nice to not have different login system and be able to use our single sign on. Plus, while I will be a department admin, I don't have to admin the whole thing.

Today was also the last day of school for the kindergartner and the fifth grader. It's bittersweet all around.

Yeah, it's a short update day.

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It's certainly been a day.

And night, honestly. Late last night our eldest came home with his little one. I will say that it wasn't entirely unexpected, and that we as a family are glad to have them here. We are grateful that we are able to have them here. This weekend will be a bit of work, as I have kinda taken over the extra room and made an office out of it, which will have to be swapped back over to make room for the two of them.

We've also got a couple of us in the home who aren't exactly feeling all that well. One probably should have come home early with an ear infection/headache/head cold. Myself, I'm halfway stopped up with a scratchy throat and can't sleep worth a darn. It's been a pretty not so fun time overall here in the household.

The twins have the last day of school tomorrow, assuming that they are both able to go. Next year they will be finishing up middle school.

Right now, I'm just sitting here, listening to the quiet that is octonaughts. Who are also asking for peace and quiet. It's kinda meta.

Wanna read my other #weblogpomo2024 posts?

It's been a day of feeling absolutely miserable. Took a couple of benadryl may night, with the hope being that I might be able to some decent sleep to go along with being stopped up with a sore throat.

Yeah, that didn't work too well. While I was basically falling asleep at 22:00 last night, I also managed to forget to put the recycling and trash out for the morning. At least I was able to get them out this morning. The problem with benadryl is that it takes forever to wear out of my system.

So even right now, at 1700 the next day, I feel like I could go to bed.

Sigh.

At least the grand daughter wasn't too bad today! She doesn't really know us, but we've been working on that and I think that we are making progress.

Anyhow, here's a photo I took of our backyard swing while I was pushing our six year old on it. Enjoy. 😃

on the left side.

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As the saying goes, "oh for crying out loud!" Not only have I/we not all been feeling too well, but last night my right eye began bothering me. It felt really dry, not super itchy or anything, just dry and a little hazy at times.

I get up and look into the mirror.

Whoa, that's certainly a red, rather angry looking eye I've got there.

Now, being a parent of five kiddos, there really is only one thing that goes through my head at this point, and I can't quite figure out how in the world I would have come down with pink eye.

Sigh.

Fortunately, we do have five kiddos (well, mostly four, though the first is back under the roof with his own as well now) in the house. Plus, we don't like to throw medication away. Or anything really, but that's another story. So I guess it's eye drops for me.

How I've managed to go all my life without getting this before I'll never know. It's right up there with how in the world did I get it this time?

So annoying.

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Well, it's after 1500 so I guess that is should probably work on getting something written up.

It's also a long weekend here, normally that would be a good thing, but once again I just struggle to enjoy all the free time. What doesn't help this go round is that I get to play the bad guy in the house. Some people in the home want an animal, specifically a dog. I don't have anything against dogs, so long as they aren't mine.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a pet person. I much prefer other people's pets. I know that if we get a dog, the person that winds up taking care of it 80 percent of the time or more, will be the person writing this entry. I don't want a dog. This makes me feel like an asshole. It is what it is.

I have a hard enough time keeping care of the cat and two bearded dragons that are in the home. Our walls are scratched and destroyed - at some point in time I'd like to get those taken care of. The yard looks like ass right now, I don't want it to get worse nor do I relish the thought of scooping poop. We tried having a dog already. He ate part of the couch, some books, a couple of apple trees, a peach tree, a cherry tree and a fig tree. Yeah. I don't want a dog.

I'd almost consider going back into the office to work before that.

Well, that turned into a thing.

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The long weekend is nearly at an end. I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted. Color me all kinds of surprised. Did manage to get the lawn mowed and the AC fan unit hosed off, so there is that.

What I had really wanted to do, get the office/extra room cleared out for the eldest and the grand, didn't happen quite as planned. We need to get room cleared out in some other places first. Namely the master bedroom. My workspace is once again going to be the corner of the bedroom. I don't actually mind, I think it's more than worth it to have our eldest and his kiddo in a better situation. It's going to make things interesting around here for awhile, no doubt about it.

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Good grief have I been cutting it close these past couple of days! I wound up taking the day off with a migraine and sore throat. Plus the salt in the wound that is the pink eye, which is being treated successfully.

I also got the opportunity to watch the grand today, for whatever that was worth as she wasn't feeling the best either, what with it being a new environment and not having her dad at home. It's going to take a bit for her to get used to us, but kids are very adaptable.

Still wasn't able to make any progress on their future room, though. Not sure how well tomorrow will go in that regard either. It does make me feel kinda horrible.

Ah well, on to the latest episode of Dark Matter.

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Bad habits. I seem to have fallen back into some of them. Most of which seem to revolve around food, which I can only blame myself really. I've been doing a keto lifestyle since August of 2019, about five years at the time of this, and it could be said that I'm still keto.

I generally stay under twenty net carbs a day. No sugar. None of what works normally be considered a part of the regular American diet. It was a change that needed to be made if I wanted to live to see my kids grow up and not find myself in an early grave. By all measures the change has been a glowing success.

Lately though, and by lately I should probably qualify that with about the last year or so, I've been really, really bad about continuing to log what does go into my body. I have been really bad about junk food. I've probably already talked about what I consider junk food, it's not really what my fellow neighbors would consider junk. But, high calorie crap that I absolutely, positively, do not need. If I do partake, I've got to ensure it's accounted for. I don't always do that, so shame on me.

This morning, I weighed nearly 194 pounds. Still down from 330 plus, but in my eyes, I see that getting far too close to the double century mark for my liking. This guy has got to get back into only eating when he's hungry. That's my bad habit now.

I never really "ate my feelings". I always ate out of boredom or habit. It didn't take long to drop breakfast. Then lunch eventually fell as well. I need, I have the desire, to feel that hunger once again.

As they say: Keep On Keto On

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My original idea for this month, the challenge of posting a "simple" blog post each day, was to have myself read the "Writing to Learn" book and then give my thoughts on what I had read. This far, I have only succeeded at half of that challenge, having not really made much progress in the book.

I do say that I'm not really all that surprised. I did take this week off of work, so did my spouse. Therefore I just don't really have much in the way of a desire to sit, read and contemplate. What o have been able to do, though, in stealing away a few bits of time here and there to write, has been of good use. It's been not quite cathartic, but very close, to get words out of my head and onto the screen.

This morning was field day for the fifth grader. We signed up to assist the teachers with attempting to keep the students under some kind of control. Basically just ensuring that they didn't maim each other. I had myself stationed at what I'll refer to as the sponge fighting location. One of the handful of water areas that are set up. The idea here being that the kids pair up and toss a sopping wet sponge back and forth. If you can't catch the sponge, then you wring it out over your head. It's all good fun. It all more or less kind of devolves into "let's just throw wet sponges at each other!"

We go back shortly to help out with the Montessori primary group - the kindergartners. It should be a lot of fun. Our six year old is very excited to have us there with him.

Tonight is another performance, as well. The twins have the last major show for honor choir, which the class has been working towards for some time now. After that, then then of school. It's crazy, how quickly this year has gone by.

It will soon be midsummer. Then it'll be turkey day. Then new years. Then…

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It's the eleventh of May. Saturday. A day to do not a whole lot. Same as tomorrow I guess.

I've been trying for most of the day to come up with some kind of theme for todays post. I guess it's been staring me in the face for the day as well, if only I could open the proverbial eyes. It has actually been making its path through my hands, in front of my face and down the old gullet multiple times today.

It's kind of funny, what is one person's junk food is not the same as every body else's junk food. What was junk food for me me years ago is completely off limits to me now, nor do I crave those items now. Thankfully. Today, my junk food is stuff like cheese, natural peanut butter, macadamia nuts. All high calorie stuff.

When we first started keto, I thought that must difficult things to give to would be all the baked goods: cookies, biscuits, cakes, etc. I mentally gamed it, though, and was able to conquer those cravings. My first hump was getting past 220 and into the so-called one-derland. Now, that I've been past there, into the 170s, my new plateau is trying to get back below 180. I've continued to be in the 190s for longer than I like.

I really need to get back into that track, stop snacking, get away from the peanut butter and dairy, start tracking everything that goes on my plate once again.

I've started not feeling my best. I need to get there once again.

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Today is the twelfth of May. The last day of my vacation, yet another vacation where absolutely nothing was accomplished. I'd feel bad, but I generally don't get much done on these things. Who wants to work on their vacations. Normally I'd take a pair of weeks off, which would at least enable me to sorta almost get something done during the second week. But not this time.

I'm sitting here at someone's home, of whom I have no idea who they are. Well, I guess it's a home, more a ranch. It's a really nice place. But, even then it's one of those deals where I don't know anyone here and really don't have much of a connection with anyone. All I can say and think is, man, I couldn't even fathom owning this much land or this kind of property.

Thankfully we aren't going to be here long.

Lucky number thirteen!

I wasn't too certain that I was going to make this one, if I were to be completely honest. It's been a day full of watching a sick kiddo and trying to keep myself in check as well. To say that it has not been a great day would be an understatement at the least.

We've had a couple of really long nights, as our youngest has been making his way into our room (which is not so different from the normal) and coughing up a storm (which is different from the norm). Hopefully he'll be able to get this thing beat soon.

I will say that I'm lucky in that my job is very flexible in allowing us to e to care for family and self. I know that not everyone is so fortunate. For that, I am thankful.

As an aside, I have finally been able to watch Dune Part Two, which was excellent. I had really wanted to see it in a theater but was never able to make it. The first Dune was actually the he first movie I saw in the theater after the world had began to open back up. Some might say post COVID, but I think that we all know we are still current COVID. Sigh.

These entries have been good for just getting my mind settled and thawed out for the day. While nowhere near what I had intended to write about, I hope to be able to continue on this path. Whether anyone reads them or not, matters not to me.

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Two weeks in, so far so good?

One thing that is certainly a bonus when participating in a weblog writing challenge is that one may just happen upon some other interesting writers or posts. Which is, I suppose, one of the reasons the challenge even exists. There have been multiple reasons - excuses really - for why I've never done much writing for myself, the least of which being my internal thought that I have nothing of interest for anyone to read.

Ah, but really though, is that the sole reason to write? No. I should write for myself, no matter how mundane I think the entry of the day will be. Have I been taking care of a child with a racking cough, who rends at my heart because there just isn't much that I can do for him? Yep, so I should write about that. Was I finally able to get some yardwork done because the incessant rain finally stopped? Yep, note it down.

Why shouldn't I go on and just use a blog as a daily journal. It takes zero effort at this point and it's for my own good.

For those that might be interested, including future me, here is the post that sparked this entry.

It's still early, so there may be more.

We seem to be nearing the midway point of the month. I am just getting back to work from a week of "vacation", then two days of having a sick kiddo at home. Okay, so three days, really, but today has been more of a "letting the kiddo keep his temp normal" kinda day. Not so much sick, as he is stopped up. At least the cough is more or less done.

As is the way of things, after taking a week off of work today has basically been spent playing catch-up. At least it hasn't been as bad as it's been in the past. Just a couple of quick answers that needed to be sent out. I'm so glad this is a slower time of year. I've generally taken two weeks off at a time, but figured I'd change things up this go round. Of course, what with the sick kiddo I was beginning to wonder if I might have wound up taking this week off as sick leave too.

It's the afternoon and I'm sitting in the car, waiting for the two youngest to get released from school. I can't complain about how the day has gone, it's been pretty good and relatively productive. I'm just glad that the little one was able to go and stay at school all day! I love that my kids, generally, enjoy school.

Part of my job role involves application upgrades for some decently large vendors, Oracle and Salesforce come to mind. These upgrades can be a tad kludgy. An understatement to say the least. I've been through a handful of one upgrade in particular that I have been able to get documented fairly well, and I believe that I now have it down to, if not a science then at least an art. Art is still allowed to be messy - and this thing is no exception. I think my favorite part of this last patch cycle was that Oracle has evidently stopped providing (what appears to be) either a second copy of their jdk, or they've streamlined it into a non-versioned directory. Which I suppose is nice. At least it was easy enough to sort out.

We've got some other projects in the hopper at work, and it feels good to be a part of them. It almost feels like progress.

Ah, the kids are picked up. Some garlic olives have been snacked on (it is weird how ones tastes change when away from carbohydrates for so long). I'm sure I could ramble on more, but I think I'm good here.

Thanks for reading, if you are. If you're not, then that's okay too.

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I feel like I should have more to write about today.

I feel like I could (should?) have been more productive today.

Let us count what all I've accomplished to get done this fine, fine Friday the seventeenth. - One of our major SaaS applications is going to be upgraded at the end of the month, so that needed to be added to the calendar. - A group request that I'd made a couple of days ago was just fulfilled, so I was able to make a couple of updates in prep for a background process. Which can't be finished until a separate sync occurs. - I brought an item to another groups attention, so that the requestor can be thought how to help themselves. - I've started learning a new service management/issue tracker/asset management/knowledge base system of which I am one of the main admins for our group. This should be fun. - Trying to pick up some Laravel. I don't know why or for what purpose, seeing as I actually prefer clojure for fun and….well, not really profit seeing as how it's a hobby.

Yeah, that's about the gist of what I've done today. I guess I did upgrade one of my Kimsufi boxes and portainer container. It's been a moderately full day, and for that I'm completely okay!

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Ah, welcome to the weekend!

Finally was able to sleep in a bit this morning, all of until 8am. Still feels like sleeping half the morning away, though, especially when one is used to getting up at 6am.

For a Saturday it's been kinda productive, managed to get the lawn mowed for the first time in over a week. It's funny, when I was a kid and had to mow two yards and a large back lot I was never a fan of the chore. It could have had something to do with needing to deal with a black walnut tree….if you know, you know. Ugh. Now, though, it's a good time to unwind with some music and enjoy the process.

Certainly it's not something that I'd consider a chore. My yard doesn't look the best in the neighborhood, but at least it's far from the worst. I try to take at least a little bit of pride in how the home looks. It doesn't hurt that the neighbors also have really nice lawns.

I've got other things around the home that I'd like to do - one of which being permanent holiday lighting with some programmable LEDs. Maybe I can tackle that project this Summer.

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It's Sunday, which thankfully means that the weekend is nearly, blessedly, over. One of these days I'll figure out what it is about the weekend or time off that I don't care for. Sigh.

Managed to get the dishwasher unloaded and reloaded this morning. Sometimes I still feel very much like that butter robot. Only I get to do more than just "pass the butter", I also get to fetch fresh paper towel rolls from storage! Aren't I lucky.

I know that people don't take me for granted, but good grief sometimes it really does feel that way. Are there things in my life that I would haved changed, given the chance? Sure, I don't think that there is anybody out there that would say otherwise. I try to stay upbeat and somewhat optimistic, but it can be a challenge. Especially when you live with somebody who has depression. Anyhow.

I was going to write something here related to what I've stated above, but I'm not too sure that I want to get into some of these items just at this time. At least not in public. While I don't share these posts within my close friend group, neither is this site exactly hidden. I think I'll just leave it at that for a bit. Talk about vague posting, I guess.

Now for an attempt at something a little less depressing I guess. While I really, really have been enjoying Zettel Notes, I would like a way to more easily share pics on this site. Without the need to host the images myself. Yeah, that kinda limits me with workflow simplicity. I've got the pixelfed account, so there is that, but then omg.lol also has a pretty simple image host as well. Both just take a little extra steps. But this should work, I guess.

I guess that should do for today.

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Well it's finally here: my first entry into Annie's Weblog PoMo 2024. As with most things that I do when it comes to writing, I haven't really planned this out. Does that mean that I'm most likely going to fail at it? That is a definite possibility. But I'm willing to at least give it a shot for myself.

Of course, there is nothing like getting an Echofeed set up for it to help with some accountability - up to and including having the Amplify Bot boost your stuff.

With that out of the way, let's get the ball rolling on #weblogpomo2024!

The second day brings with it a second chapter of the Writing To Learn book. To be completely fair, I had read about half of this yesterday and have finished it up this morning. To be even more fair, it will be highly probable that I'll read chapter 3 and add more to this post today as well. Let us find out what has been digested this go round, shall we?

It's day three of Weblog Posting Month 2024!

Whew!

I'll be honest, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to make it today. Today has been challenging, to say the least, so I will be putting off today's reading of the "Writing to Learn" book.

"Why is that?" - I hear absolutely noone asking. Well, I'll tell you anyhow. I do much of my blog posting through emacs using org-mode capture templates. My current emacs configuration is a semi modified doom emacs build which has worked very well for me in the past and continues to do so in the present. Generally. I don't know if I had some kind of hardware issue (which is possible, as my config is hosted on a local NAS with used drives) due to perhaps a recent storm, but my org capture templates were just not working at all. Even after a doom doctor, doom purge, doom build cycle…nothing worked.

Which necessitated a nuclear option of a fresh git checkout of doom and starting over. It's not really a complete do over, though, since I still have my private/personal doom init files that live in a different directory.

All in all, after about an hour and ten minutes of waiting for the build process to finish (ugh…) we are back to par. Yippee.

This is the fifth day of the challenge! Yesterday was an attempt to post something using the GitJournal app, which sort of worked, but didn't work quite as smoothly as one would have liked. It failed to save the new file in the appropriate folder, though I'm fairly certain I saved it where it needed. Then when trying to move it, it does a copy instead.

Which plays havoc with the push to git and the workflow run. Sigh.

So, in my attempt to both come up with a post today and perhaps a decent mobile way to post, today is just straight into the github web site and add a new post. Is it preferable? Absolutely not.

In other news today, I was able to get the yard mowed before it rained. I've got this feeling that for the next month or so it's basically going to be "mow whenever you flippin' can". Otherwise, my old battery operated Snapper just - literally - isn't going to cut it.

Well, off to the store. Tonight is homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese with smoked gouda. Perhaps a tasty antipasto salad as well.

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It's day the next around these parts. For whatever that means, right? I've not made nearly the progress on my book that I'd like to, so today's entry will be another one of those "day in the life of" ordeals. I might even be able to make this interesting, but I wouldn't let odds down.

This year I turn 47. Not quite the same as when one turns 40, though let's be honest here, I don't think my 40th was anything all that spectacular. Nor is it quite the same as turning 50, I'm guessing. As I get older and watch my kids get older, I can't help but think that it really wasn't all that much long ago that I was their age, almost in their shoes, going through similar phases. I've tried to do my absolute best buy my kids. My Dad, who I love, has probably told me that he loves me only a handful of times. I know he does, but I've tried to reverse that trend with my boys.

I think back to some of the points in my life, I try to correlate how old my kiddo's are, to how old I was, to how old my Dad was (or, would have been at that time). I always wonder what would have been going through his mind. It's just strange, trying to put myself into his place. There are differences between the two of us, there is no doubt there. As parents, we try to ensure that our children have access to things that we never had - or, in my case things that I never knew that I should have or would have wanted. Things as simple as high school yearbooks.

I didn't go to a large high school, nor did I have an over abundance of friends, nor did I ever think that I would want to ever reminisce about those years of my life. Of course, growing up I think I must have thought that yearbooks just magically showed up at school on yearbook signing day. It never would have occurred to me that there was an (at times) significant cost involved. My kids may not realize it now, but they'll be thankful for those, at least, in the future.

Yes, we love our kids and want the best for them. Though, what parent does not.

Anyway, with that I think we shall close out this day.

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Aye, and on the seventh day yet another post has appeared! We are coming up on the end of another school year for our kids, another year that continues to speed on past us. The next few weeks are going to be very full of events. Along with the full schedules, comes special types of stress.

Stress. Along with most people, I would imagine, I am not a fan. Some people stress eat, thankfully I am not one of those. I eat out of boredom. At least this is something that I am aware of. I've been trying to eat better for a handful of years now, some would say successfully. My wife and myself opted to go the ketogenic journey and I have kept a out 145 pounds off my frame for some time now. Three thirty plus to one eighty five, give or take.

Okay, so where am I going in all of this rambling? As I get older, as I watch my kids grow into greater ages, I made a decision that I wanted to see them get older. I knew that if I had continued on in the direction that I was going, that I'd be in a grave within very little time. I have no doubt that I have avoided diabetes and at least taken one foot off of the banana peel, so to speak. Not to mention feeling much better and, hopefully, modeling a healthier behavior for my children.

No rest for myself on this day, though. The second day of my vacation and I've done little to nothing that I would like to get done. Ah, but then who really wants to do pre-spring cleaning on their vacations.

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It's the eighth day of the month. I got to drop the older two boys off for zero hour honor choir a little early this morning, 6:50AM instead of 7:00AM. One wouldn't think that 10 minutes would make much of a difference, but it certainly can. We did get there in time, so yay. Of course, for me just being some place on time actually means that I'm late. Now, if I could only get my spouse to adhere to that philosophy. 😂

This morning, and tomorrow morning, will both be basically the same. The twins have a music performance on Friday that is the big finale for the year. Tonight we also have a band concert for one of them. Like I said the other day, it's gonna be a full week. It has been a full week.

I think that I've come to where I would much rather be working. Work is enjoyable, vacations are nothing but just waiting to to back to work. It's not so much a dread for the end of the vacation, but just knowing that I never am able to accomplish what I would like to do during the time away from work.

Not that I'm disparaging the vacation. I'm equal opportunity when it comes to not being a fan of not working, I'm not really big on weekends either. Granted I'd probably to absolutely insane if I did nothing but work. One has to have some time off.

Where I work, we get plenty of paid leave to earn. Eight hours per every Eighty hour work period, up to a maximum of 304 hours. Of which I am routinely butted up against. Plus, a discretionary holiday. I really should take more time for myself, I'm told multiple times by multiple people that I should.

But, alas.

The current question then becomes, do I feel that anything has been accomplished during this break. There was some yardwork done. The car was washed, by hand, even! I may have gotten the yard mowed once. It just always feels like there is something that needs to be done.

Meh.

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For those of you who follow my pixelfed feed, you may have seen the following image

While it's only tangentially related to what I do at work, it's something that is actively encouraged for us to do - continue to learn. I figure since I am around Oracle Databases all the time, I should probably widen my breadth of knowledge a bit.

Who knows, I might even be able to add to my repertoire.

We shall go ahead and tag this one into the rambling series, why not? Kind of a small update of a few things that have happened over the course of the last couple of days I suppose.

This will be the first hand crafted post on the site!

It's very exciting! Super exciting, even!

Ah and now for something (not so?) completely different! For those of you who have been following along at home - which, I suppose, would really just be me, myself and I - I've made some changes to the site.

No longer is the static site based on Eleventy Duo. Welcome, instead, to eleventy high performance blog. Being a tinkerer does at times really, really suck. Never being happy or content with the way things are on the old blog.

The change actually went a lot smoother than I was anticipating it going. I cloned the new template to a clean directory. Made the changes that I needed to make to it (at least, started them - I'm sure more will come). Renamed the remote origin and added a new remote origin. Then, over in my now old and stale github repo I renamed the 'main' branch, added a new 'to migrate' branch, then went back to the new template and did the ol' something of a force push to the new branch on my static site repo.

Once that was done, I had to rename the local and remote repos back to main and set the new default branch.

Thankfully, things still just worked after that! Had to make a single change to the emacs org capture template to ensure the directory for the posts was good…now, I think we're golden.

Or at least a decent shade of pale yellow.

I think I'm going to try to do something that will be very difficult for me. I've decided to join the group in a post every day during the month of May challenge that has been dubbed #WeblogPoMo2024.

I shall be using the same tag here, as well for sake of categorization. I guess it's likely that I'll even start using the echo feed account that I've been paying for.

We'll see how this goes. I was able to do the "post a photo every day for 30 days" thing over on microblog to get that badge, which wasn't super easy for me either.