As this year winds down, I take this moment to glance in the rearview mirror to see what transpired in this year.
I did look at my posts from the start of 2019, and alas, I failed to live up to many of my goals. I did exercise more, and even bought a new bicycle that helped motivate me. But the big drag was my role as trustee/executor of my stepfather’s estate. That consumed hundreds of hours of my time, and amped up my stress into the stratosphere.
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I have been pretty quiet about it, but the last 8 months I have been playing the role of trustee of my step father’s estate. It has been an enormous quantity of work, and one of the perks is that I get to pay myself.
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Way back, in September 2017, I was happy using Google Drive to put some of my documents. It was reliable, and if not as feature rich as Dropbox, my go-to solution for syncing between computers, I did get a block of storage free with my Google Suite account.
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54 down, ? to go…
Today marks the completion of my 54th trip ’round Sol, a time for reflection, celebration, and looking to the future. Not to wax philosophically, but with what is certainly the greater fraction of my life gone by, it is a bit of an eye opener.
There are good things to be thankful for. My health remains good (even though I could stand to lose some weight,) I am doing meaningful – if highly stressful – work, I have a wonderful family, my wife and our two fur kids, and finally, it could be a lot worse.
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In the last installment of bread making, a new hobby, I was just beginning on the adventure of making sourdough bread.
I followed the “sure bet” recipe for Rustic Sourdough from the fine people at King Arthur Flour, and it came out well. However there were two deficiencies:
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As a quasi-serious photographer, I have at multiple times posted about the trials and tribulations of photo management, here, here, and here as I struggled with the zigging and zagging that Apple has done on native photo management on OSX. The net result was me going all in on Adobe Lightroom that I got as part of my Photographers Bundle from Adobe. It is an amazingly powerful package with many built in capabilities that are immensely useful, and it got me completely out of the iPhotos/Aperture/Photos morass.
I also did a little diversion into the Google world with the now defunct Picasa, shudder no, Google photos is not a product that I am willing to use. They already can mine too much of my data, no need to add a couple hundred gigabytes of personal information, thankyouverymuch.
For the first time in my life, I have a house with a yard that I take care of, or, more importantly that I care about. Something about a $700K house.
One of the factors in our selection of this house was a safe, sane yard for our dogs, at the time an epileptic greyhound, and his older brother, a well aged greyhound. The small back yard had a pretty decent piece of grass, my lawn, and I have put effort into keeping it nice.
The first challenge was the west end of the yard, it is perpetually in shade, and when it rains (which happened a lot the last year), it never dries out, grass didn’t get enough sunlight to grow, and it was almost a permanent bog. (more…)
The downside of working full time again is the dearth of time to exercise. Little over a year ago, spending some down time between jobs, I was able to get out for lengthy exercise sessions every day. That included typically 3 bicycle rides a week, often up to 30 miles at a through. Alas, that freedom to get out and pound the pavement was severely curtailed with a regular job.
I still did get out on the weekends to walk and hike, but the bicycles have remained (mostly) parked in the garage. Earlier this spring I did get out a few times, but ouch, the acclimatization of my derrière to the saddle was punishing, so apart from isolated rides, they remained hung up in the garage. (more…)
Capital of Silicon Valley? Perhaps. But on April 10th, the VTA changed the schedules of the buses and light rail trains. Here we are, two and a half weeks later, and they still haen’t posted updated schedules at their stops.
How freaking hard is it to print 50 or so posters of the new schedule, and get them posted? Seriously.
And the changes? They moved the times ahead 3 – 5 minutes. That means that I need to leave my house no later 6:30AM if I am to make 8:00AM calls in the office. Sigh.
I am going to admit that I am mostly streaming my music (and I pay for Apple Music and Pandora), so when I come across something I really like, I go out of my way to buy it.
Being an old fart, and having inherited a decent stereo with turntable when my Father in-law passed, I try to buy on vinyl. I know that it isn’t as crisp as a good digital copy, and that in a blind hearing, I probably can’t tell the difference, but I don’t care. I like the tactile feeling of pulling an LP down from the shelf, removing it, putting it on the turntable, using the Discwasher to remove the dust, blowing the dust off the stylus, and dropping the needle on the disc. (more…)