I’m still alive. I’m vegetarian now, but that’s not why I haven’t been writing. I’m not having a bad day, I just always smile when I see this video.
Weekend Update
The end of a weird weekend – but only sleep wise. I couldn’t sleep Saturday night – tossing and turning and finally got up and then went back to bed. I think I settled down around 6am. Last night! I woke up at 3am to go to the bathroom and returned to a room that was so dark, I felt like I was in a coffin. Then I managed to freak myself out thinking that if I went to sleep, I was going to die. No, I didn’t drop acid right before bed. Maybe I should have. I *almost* looked up fear of sleeping, but didn’t want to promote that idea. I tried unsuccessfully to go back to sleep, even with headphones and Netflix on but to no avail. I went downstairs, put on the TV, got in the recliner and I was out cold until I hit snooze 6 times – UGH! So much for going to work early today to get all caught up. I ended up getting in about 10 minutes late because also [also] the traffic was crazy.
I did manage to make a huge batch of oatmeal to bring in for breakfast. Yummy – lots of brown sugar and *cough* butter (not lots of butter, but butter, because before I could catch myself I’d dropped it in there and forgot I was trying to really avoid animal by-products today. I need to get back to my VB6 (Vegan Before 6) regimen. I’ll be 55 next week – 55 (fifty-five). That means I’m almost dead. That’s probably the wrong attitude – and I know there are people living to almost 56 and 57 these days. Who knows. My dad made it to 82, so I could end up with 30 more years of this.
We didn’t get to run the Cat-5 cables to the garage this weekend. I went out on Saturday and planned to get started. I started knocking out a piece of drywall in order to expose the wiring area that the previous owner left in the garage. About 5 minutes into that my son who was helping me squealed and he’d been stung by a wasp or hornet or whatever and as it turns out – I’d upset a huge nest of them living in the garage. Yay! I hate wasps and hornets. I’m sorry he got stung. Every time I helped my dad do anything, it seemed I ended up getting hurt – so I certainly feel his pain. My wife, who is completely unphased by bugs, sprayed the nest down Saturday night and we were all set to move forward Sunday but they were still there. Turns out “kills on contact” is maybe just a suggestion. I put on my big pants last night and sprayed the rest of the can on the nest. Hopefully they’ll be gone now.
I’m not sure why I didn’t sleep, but I did take a new “brain” pill last night called Neuriva. It’s supposed to make you all limitless like that movie (I wish!). Actually, it’s just some coffee derivative that seems harmless based on what I read. They said “make sure to take it before you go to sleep because you’re going to get super tired.” Yeah – I was more like “super wired”. I read some reviews and some other people take it in the morning, which is what I’ll probably do since I can’t afford to have my sleep interrupted.
In other news – we watched Beasts of the Southern Wild – which was a real tear jerker. We were going to watch an episode of Kim’s Convenience afterwards to cheer us up a little but turns out – we’re done with all of the seasons. Ugh. That show is funny.
I bought a new kitchen rug for in front of the sink and the cats spent about 0 seconds finding it and laying on it. They are also still enjoying their box city.
Someone sent me an email that said “Please Advise” at the end, and and I discovered that saying “please advise” in an email sets me off. If you say “Can you help me with” or “Can I call you and you go over with me” or “I saw a dog today” – any of those – are much better than “please advise”. Please advise sounds like some weird passive-aggressive way of asking for help. Please advise. Ugh! No, I cannot “advise” you. Did you want help instead?
We bought two giant corn stalk bundles from Home Depot to decorate for Halloween. It took an act of congress to find the price on them and once we did, we decided to get two since the lady worked so hard to find the info. So – what’s funny about that? Well, I completely forgot about it until I got in my car this morning and they were still wedged sideways from the front to back of the car. Ah. That’s right. I left them. I can see around them and I didn’t want to waste more time this morning taking them out.
Guess I’ll get on with my Monday. Have a great one!
Unboxing – Boxing
We were watching TV the other night and I noticed the cats were interested in this stack of boxes. I have four from a recent delivery and they were all inside of each other just sitting near the wall until I take them out to the recycle bin. Yes – I know cats like boxes, but I don’t think I’ve given it more thought than ‘Cats like boxes’. So we paused the show we were watching and I took the boxes out of each other and put them all around each other. Well! The resulting antics were more fun than any TV show we could watch.
The cats were in the boxes and out of the boxes – in the same box – in a different box – next to the box – climbing on the box. At one point, they looked like one of those follow fountains you might find in a mall where they just went in rapid succession from box to box.
I’m thinking I might leave them over near the wall. They are certainly more fun than just crumbling them up in the recycling.
Happy Accidents
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon here. Actually an un-quiet few weeks. Just busy. I’m finally almost caught up, but I have two or three pokers still in the fire that I need to address. Today. I’ll get all of that today – or most of it. I haven’t washed dishes in the last two days and I woke up late after hitting snooze about four times too many, so I ended up going to Hardee’s. They had a two chicken biscuit deal going on, so I got that. I had one for breakfast and left one in the car so I’d have one for lunch. Notice I had to leave it out there, because if I brought it in, it wouldn’t make it until lunch. I think I’m a nervous eater – or just an eater. Anyway, if it were in my office, I’d eat it.
Last weekend, we went to a ground breaking for a new kids center in our neighborhood. Lots of city officials there – and they had food. That’s not why I was there, but it helps. We are on the civic league, so it makes sense to go to events like this and support area growth.
I see Verizon people in our area – I think we are finally getting FIOS. It took years, so this could be exciting. We have cable internet – but it’s not super fast. We don’t have cable. Just not enough time in the day for it. I find I can get all I need from Netflix, Hulu, CBS, and Youtube. Youtube even had the debates streaming last night – looked great.
Guess I’ll go get to work. Here’s a couple of Friday tunes:
Plex and Quincy, ME
Quincy is like one of my all time favorite TV shows. Originally, all of the seasons were on Netflix which is why I signed up for it. Then they shifted it off and it’s not there any more. So I finally bought seasons 1 and 2 on DVD. It’s everything I remember as I spent almost every Thursday night at 10pm watching him solve some medical mystery.
Problem is – to watch a DVD, I need to fire up the DVD player and just maybe it will work. Honestly, I should use it more often since the last one froze up and wouldn’t open. They tend to do that when you don’t use them. I was listening to my tech podcast last week and Plex is now a sponsor. Plex. I think I looked at it a long time ago, but since they had a deal going I checked it out.
Plex is a media server for your home. You load all of your media files onto it and then if you have something like an Amazon Fire TV, it can connect to the server and play your files. I think it’s free. I signed up for a $5 a month plan, but only because the first month was free, but I honestly don’t know what I’m getting for that $5 yet. Maybe you don’t need to pay anything. Still, it’s a pretty neat package and certainly worth paying a little bit for.
I Googled how to rip dvd’s and started ripping my library. The first set of disks is from The Six Million Dollar man – Season 3. So why not Quincy? Well, I’d ripped some of those last year so they’d be on the computer, but I used some weird format and now I think I’m going to re-do them. While practicing, though, I used Six Million Dollar Man.
Anyway – I use HandBrake to rip the DVD’s. There are YouTube videos that explain all of this. You can put in the DVD and a few hours later, you have a set of media files. The cool thin about Plex is that you can put all of the files into a directory called Six Million Dollar Man/Season 3 (with names like Six Million Dollar Man – S03 E04) and Plex does the rest. I go to my Amazon Fire TV, load Plex and using the menus I’m looking at a nice and well organized listing of Season 3. It brings in the synopses of them and everything. I’m watching TV without DVD’s!
Now just to buy the other Quincy seasons so I can load them up – oh, and I have to re-rip Season 1 and 2 so I’m using the Handbrake format and naming them right. Turns out, what I have from last time is “title1, title2, title3” – and well. I’d have to try and figure out what they are and name them.
Ready… Set… Wait!
I was excited to leave the house early today 6:20! Then I got in my car and it immediately told me I needed gas. Then – I had to go to the bathroom. Like bran muffin/coffee bathroom. Ugh! No point in driving 40 minutes like that. I went in to the bathroom then remembered – eyebrows. My wife told me two days ago to check my eyebrows and then yesterday I was at work and looking in the mirror and I saw Andy Rooney staring back at me. So I went to work on my eyebrows. Mostly these weird genetically altered white ones that just don’t belong. And long? Goodness! That’s too long for an eyebrow. I could do a comb over with it. I plucked all of those out and then since my bags were already in the car, I thought – I’ll take a drink with me, so I got some iced tea in a cup and finished off the pitcher. Well, now I have to make more tea – so I started that. Now it was 6:35 and I still had to buy gas. Oh, well. I still got here fairly early.
We finished season 3 of Handmaid’s Tale. The last show was so – wrenching/stressful, but it turned out gleefully well. Had they broken that into a cliffhanger, I would have hated it. We are still enjoying Kim’s Convenience – we are in season 2 somewhere now. What a cute and warm show. I’ve started watching the nightly news from the night before each morning on Hulu. Last night, Trump had a hurricane map with Sharpie drawn on it to prove that Alabama was going to get hit by the hurricane. Honestly – I think his staff is just punking him now. He could have done that – or maybe there was only one map and office worker #3 (nameless) drew it on there for fun, not realizing it was the only map and they had to use it. It’s certainly possible he did it too – but wouldn’t his handlers say “Uh, don’t touch that!”?
Four of our chickens are in full-on egg production mode. So we’re getting 4 eggs a day. Problem is? I eat like one egg a week. Ugh! My wife bought an Egg Skelter:
Not that one – but one like it. It’s full. Yesterday and today, I took eggs to work for breakfast. Eggs are supposed to be good for you – at least in some circles. Other circles (squares) tell you to avoid them like the plague. I normally eat vegan sausage for breakfast and a vegan burger for lunch. Yesterday, I had eggs and today I had eggs and vegan (fake) sausage. I forgot my bread for lunch yesterday and ended up eating my vegan “beef” patty with some left over celery I had. End result? I think I felt better yesterday without all of the extra bread. So today, I just brought my “beef” patty, but with lettuce, celery, and carrots. Feels right.
Well – off to work. Have a great Thursday!
Hatches. Battened. Check.
We just spent all evening putting everything away in preparation for the storm. As far as we are concerned, we might just get wind and rain. They say 50mph winds – which is normal for a north easter and we see enough of those, but the last 15 years have had plenty.
Years ago, my dad died and we knew we’d have lots of people over, so we bought a screen tent for the back yard. It was big – maybe 30 x 20 or something. Sears had it for a ridiculously low price (good timing). We had people over and had a good time reminiscing about my dad. Then about two days after that, torrential rains came and obliterated the tent. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I called Sears and they actually gave me a new one. It lasted maybe 20 days. We knew we kind of liked having a screen tent so I think the next summer, we bought one and put it behind the house. Then a storm came and it kind of – ROLLED away – across the back yard and fell to pieces. We bought another and the rains collapsed it. Finally, about maybe 4 years ago we bought a screen tent and this time, we built a 10′ x 10′ base out of plywood and 2×4’s and then I totally reinforced all of it with conduit. Basically, every piece of original tent metal had conduit attached to it. The roof was massive – 8 crossing pieces of conduit resting in a kind of ring that kept them in place. It lasted about 2 years and then a hurricane wind came. I say ‘hurricane wind’ because it came out of nowhere. It’s like – I wasn’t watching the news and there wasn’t a storm, but suddenly we had a storm. I don’t even think it had a name. So I was hoping the tent would stay up. My son has video of it – it was shaking and jumping, but holding it’s ground. Then – all of a sudden it gave up and collapsed. Just a huge pile of metal and mosquito netting. If I’d only taken the roof canvas off – it would still be here.
So last year, my wife found a $100 screen tent online and we bought it and I again – reinforced it everywhere. Tonight – I took all of the sides off and we rolled the top up to the middle and put a strap around it. Hopefully, the preparation will save us from this one – falling over and into the swamp.
