...And, Twenty One

Now the blog is old enough to drink!

Twenty Years of Blogging

It hardly seems believable but its true: I started this in 2003, more than a lifetime ago it seems.

A Wild Ride

Well we're still here, 16 months and 500,000+ deaths later...

Tomorrow marks two weeks after my second COVID vaccination (Phizer Pham, thank you very much), so it's the first day that I am officially immunized. I'll be staying mostly socially distant for a bit longer, until more people are in the same boat, but that's one load off my mind and I did my part.

Twenty Twenty

I've got nothing to say really, here or elsewhere. Just "Happy New Year!" and so on; my blogging is still going on over at my new site but even there it's a bit quiet right now.

There's been a lot of "good riddance" chatter about 2019, how it was so horrible and this new year would necessarily be better, at least it couldn't be worse... Well five days in, and we're looking at the world about to burn.

See you in another few years, God willing and the creek don't rise...

Is It Still Winter?

Just waking things up here to see if an embedding problem with Garmin is just at my old site, or here as well. Let's see:



Now let's check it out.... yep, problem here as well.

UPDATE 12/19/2018: Some time in the past year, this problem has apparently resolved itself.

Happy New Year!

This is probably the start of a bunch of tough years, but here we go...

Surprise!

Just keeping my hand in the game here...

I Have Trouble Letting Go, So Now I Say Nothing In Two Places

I will not be shutting this blog (or my original website) down, and I may actually post something here occasionally, but my new website, complete with new blog, can be found here.

I've had the new website for a while now, but it's been more a sandbox for experimenting than anything else, and may not contain much content for a while.

Just saying...

Like, When You Jump Down And Land On The Ground, And Your Legs Flex To Jump Again

Just about the bottom of the year, the solstice only days away -- official winter about to start, and already summer latent in the sky. (It's been freakishly warm lately by the way, but the colder weather has finally arrived, and it feels like Christmas at least, even if it doesn't look like it yet.)

Meanwhile, speaking of triggers being pulled...

Friday was my last work day of 2015, and it was the last day of a hectic, stressful week. There's a decision I/we made about two years ago, and the time we targeted is fast approaching: I'll be giving notice at work, in either the first or the second week of the new year, and my career will be done. This has been in the works for a while, and the target date has long been established; the events of the past year (slow ratcheting-up of the stress levels, increasingly hectic pace, increasing levels of bureaucratic/HR bullshit, and the loss of a bunch of vacation days and holidays, as we get integrated into the company that bought us), and then finally this past week, are not really why I made this decision, but they've certainly done nothing to make me change my mind.

I'm not sure what will come after, but the basic idea is "early retirement." We are now financially independent, if we live simply and sensibly (and maybe even if we don't), and though my original plan was for a career change, maybe some computer/web freelance work, we now are both ready to stop working, at least for a year or two -- until (perish the thought) we grow bored, and tired of "doing nothing."

Trigger Pulled And Deed Is Done

I left my bike and shoes/helmet/pack/gloves out overnight Sunday, as well as a bunch of clothes I put on the line to dry, expecting yesterday to be sunny... I noticed a cloud on the way home, figured maybe a ride wouldn't be smart, then realized I might not even beat the rain home - almost made it built not quite. Anne had already grabbed my laundry and brought it in, but the bike stuff got a bit damp.

Either way, no ride yesterday, so last night was the night I installed Ubuntu on Anne's old MacBook Pro - it was so old it could no longer get any software upgrades, but the hardware itself still worked fine, and this was something we'd been planning for a while. She'd already backed up all of her files, so I basically overwrote the entire drive, no more Mac and hello Linux.

Looks good, though it will probably take a bunch of tweaks before everything's "just so." If I like what I see I might also upgrade my laptop.