Categories
Animals and Pets car project religion work

Slight slipping

[Saturday: 6.9 miles; Monday: 3.2; Wednesday: 3.2]

I’ve been coasting a bit, not sure why. You can see I’ve been doing my little jogs, and those are going well. Making it to church on Sunday and that has been good.

My dieting and food logging is still in play but I’ve been kind of slipshod about it. My lowest weight so far has been 183. I’m in a bit of a plateau. The app I’m using actually is giving me more calories in the daily budget and I’m not sure why. Does it think I was dropping too fast? My clothes fit much better. I would still like to be 150 but I have less motivation toward that goal (until I strap on the C-pap mask and that reminds me).


I looked out the window a few minutes ago, a bit after 6 am. There was an armadillo digging holes in the yard. They seem to do that in kind of a seasonal way. I don’t know what they dig for; something to eat, obviously, but I don’t know what.

In other critter news, the wounded duck is gone. Infection had left him blind. Otherwise his wing seemed to be recovering somewhat. The big problem was that we couldn’t figure out how to manage him with the other ducks. I think it was probably a mistake to “rescue” him from his early situation, getting chased around by the three big males. We brought him into the house, he grew, he got wounded, we tried putting him back out with the others (he was big enough, we thought) and even the females didn’t want him. We’re new at this and we probably made a lot of mistakes. But the decision was that he had gone far enough.

So that is kind of sad. How long to go on? We run into that same problem with our pets. I think we probably err on the side of going too long.


The neighbor is back to trucking. There are still things to fix on the “new” old truck, and the “old” old truck is sitting in need of big and unknown repairs. But the list of things keeping life from continuing on seems to be getting more manageable… meaning that I’m less in the loop.

But I was over there last night for awhile. He called and said that the friend he borrowed the engine hoist from was wanting it back, and the engine mounts were at hand. (This is on his classic car build project) and I went over and we wrestled with that for a couple of hours. And we eventually won! The engine mounts are not completely bolted in. But they are enough in to keep the engine from moving around. And the engine is sitting on the mounts, in the engine bay, in the car! I’m kind of doubtful about the hood fitting on top of that engine, but I don’t care about that much at the moment.

About half of the things I’ve “helped” him with on the big trucks recently he has had to re-do to get them to work. And I fully expect this engine thing is probably in the same boat. I keep telling him I have no idea how this is supposed to be done. I say that for almost everything he asks me. But he keeps calling me back.


Work has been going ok. The flurry of excitement about corporate layoffs seems to be gone. I’m a “contractor” and remote worker, so I only ever got a whiff of tension in various zoom meetings. (we actually use Teams, but I think “zoom meeting” is the Kleenex/Jello/Coke generic term for that kind of thing now). Our software is getting to the stage where they want it in “releases” which then get tested by the testers and potentially put on a machine somewhere for an early release customer or demo or whatever. And then they find something that brings consternation and we have to figure out what the problem is by reading tea leaves of description along with whatever log files or other artifacts we can acquire. The bugs get more obscure as things mature.

My immediate supervisor has been out for a couple of spells of paternity leave. He told us this last time that he would have his phone if we need him but otherwise he would probably be fishing somewhere. We can assume that as a form of childcare for the older kids? More power to you, dude!


I’m still on the Youtube kick that started a few weeks ago. There’s a channel I follow where the guy gets on live stream at around 5 am and invites people on to talk.. this is the AA guy I have mentioned (did I mention? I think so) And I have gotten on and talked to him a few times.

And there is a pastor in California who does “rando” conversations, just asks people about their history, and leans in a bit on their religious experiences and opinions. The slots for being a rando are rare. But somehow I got one. We are supposed to have our conversation next week and then he will release it later for public consumption if he wants to.

Both of those guys are in the same little cloud of channels, mostly built around conversation. So they are brady-bunch talking heads videos with people just going on about whatever is in their mind.

The pandemic made zoom meeting a generic thing and now we do them for fun!