I was going to post something her for my birthday, but life and other committments drove it out of my mind, so here we are... Things are going well enough, though the world has been going haywire for about a decade now. I'll see you next year -- I hope!
It hardly seems believable but its true: I started this in 2003, more than a lifetime ago it seems.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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."
Well that was a fun one!
I took off Friday and we had an afternoon pizza party (making our own pizza in the bread oven); Anne invited a bunch of her nieces and other friends with young children, and we had a bedlam-styled blast.
Saturday was the 4th, and unfortunately it rained - as in, it poured - in the morning, so we did not get in the ride we had planned, but we puttered around the house, and later in the afternoon we stopped in at Greg and Judy's BBQ before going up to Jim Thorpe.
We got in our bike ride yesterday morning: just over 32 miles, casual pace. Home, more easy living, then we went over to Steelstacks to watch the World Cup final. Awesome game! Awesome weekend.
Morning weigh-in: 196#, 10.5% BF
I had off Friday but took it easy, basically sitting on the porch and finishing Zero History by William Gibson, though we did ride over to Steelstacks to watch the USA-China soccer game (and check out the new elevated walkway through the steel mill), stopping at McShady's for some wings with Scott & Carrie and her friend.
Saturday was rainy so I took it easy some more, doing a bunch of coding and web browsing - we went out that night to see Spy.
Yesterday was a leisurely bike ride: we rode to Sals to watch the MTB race, then over to Emmaus for coffee. Saw Doug & Lori later that evening at Brew Works.
The living, as they say, is easy.
Though I can't say it escalated quickly... You might remember those programs I wrote a few weeks ago, to automate some task at work that I didn't really have to do more than once or twice (but it was a good, fun exercise). Well, I added some things to it, namely the ability to print output as an AutoCAD command script, to draw the defining lines and arcs of my tubes, and as an AutoLisp program, to generate a 3D model of the completed set of tubes. (See the picture below, where my program's results were run through AutoCAD: script on the left side, and lisp-based model on the right.) Anyway, that was an evening of coding here, a few hours on the weekend there...
Morning weigh-in: 194#, 9.5% BF
Memorial Day Weekend just flew by in a blur: Friday night with friends in Southside, Saturday towpath group ride and long lunch in Easton, family picnic on Sunday (we took advantage of having cleaned the house for the previous weekend's party), then Monday we just sat in the backyard and read, and napped...
We had volunteered to host our friend John's surprise 50th birthday party, which was this last Sunday, so Friday was an enormous amount of yard work, along with a visit from the plumber around noon (which meant getting up early so we could do all of our weekend errands, running around and being back home before the plumber). We got a lot done, all in all, but it was a long whirlwind of a day.
Saturday was the second in the "Earn Your Beer" running race series, the Weyerbacher 5K. Pretty hilly course, and we kept it to just one beer after the race, but the event was a lot of fun and great people watching. I remembered the first race, where I came home after 7 miles and 3 beers and passed out, so that's why so many of our weekend chores were scheduled for Friday. (I actually did nap for a bit, but Anne got in some more gardening...) The afternoon and evening was spent cleaning and preparing the inside of the house.
Sunday was another early start, getting the last preparation done, and people starred coming over to help around 1:00; the party proper starred at 2:00, and John showed up at 2:30, and was properly surprised - or so we thought. He gets up to say thank you, but then adds "this is a surprise, but not the one you think: Donna and I planned this together, because we are getting married today, right now." And they did!
Most awesome surprise party ever.
Morning weigh-in: 194#, 12% BF
I have a CAD puzzle or problem at work, bending groups of tubes in 3D to achieve a certain configuration. It's not hard but it's tedious, and involves a lot of iterative trial and error for each tube - and there are dozens of tubes in each configuration. It takes me about half a day to work through one full configuration, and there are a whole bunch of configurations to look at...
I figured out a way to automate the process, but we don't have access to any real computing power here (we're not allowed to have any programming capabilities, and the most advanced math package available to me is Excel). So, what I did was write a C program at home, using only the typically available libraries, and once it ran correctly I put it on my SDF shell account and compiled it there. Now I log into SDF from my phone and run the program to get my results. It's like I'm using my phone as a calculator; it's (barely) less tedious than my other method, but the process is now moving much faster.
Jumping through hoops FTW!
Morning weigh-in: 193#, 12.5% BF
That looks nice, but the lost weight is mostly suppression: I ran yesterday, biked last night, ate a few handfuls of popcorn for dinner, and ran again this morning. My current normal weight is probably higher, but this kind of push is what forces the trend line down.
Tonight I may skip riding, so we can run a bit longer/harder tomorrow morning - we signed up for a (hilly) 5K on Saturday, and I could use the focus.
Morning weigh-in (Friday): 195.0#, 11% BF
Morning weigh-in (Saturday): 194.5#, 14% BF
Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 194#, 12% BF
Towpath ride Thursday night, followed by dinner and a nap (which eventually merged into bedtime). Another towpath ride (longer but easy) Friday night, and some still-easy-but-more-real MTB at Nox on Sunday, while Saturday was an all day schoolwork fest...
I finished the last test for that accounting class (due Sunday at 6:00 PM) on Sunday morning, and after thinking about it, this may be my last NCC class for a while. They're interesting, but they were easy A's, not nearly interesting/challenging enough for the amount of work and time they eat up, and I've flip-flopped on my original motivation: I'm not seriously considering a career change anymore. More on this some other time.
This morning was a short run, tonight will be a towpath ride.
