Author Archives: Tom's Brain

Live From the Straits

Posted on by

It’s Friday morning and I’m in the 14-Foot Shoals cabin at Cheboygan State Park.  Have been here with my friend Sandie Jones since Sunday afternoon, and we’ll be heading back to Atlanta tomorrow morning.  It has been a pretty good week at the cabin.  Temps were unseasonably warm when we arrived – like in the high 60s/low 70s – which had me concerned.  I don’t come this far north to be warm.  Fortunately, it started to cool down by about Tuesday night, and I’ve had a fire going in the cabins stove since then.  I stormed last night and early this morning, and the wind and waves are high right now. Wonderful conditions for my wind game.

Duncan Bay at Cheboygan State Park, MI

At home, work continues on the floors.  I’ve pulled out all of the exisiting flooring on the ground floor (except for the tile in my kitchen pantry) and have begun putting down waterproof laminate oak.  The living room is pretty much done – still need to paint the floor boards and add some quarter-round, and I’m a bit over halfway across the hall and into the kitchen.   One of the first things I’ll need to do when I get home is rent a dumpster to get rid of all the crap that I pulled up from the floors. It’s currently piled in heaps in my music room and garage.

I’ve stained the decking on the deck – still haven’t done the railing.  I guess I should put that on my list of things to do, also.  Really need to buy a decent paint sprayer for that and for the railing over the retaining wall, which will need to be stained, too.  I also plan to rebuild a section of fence near the house.  It’s currently a big gate that’s falling over, and I’m just going to fence it in.

Sandie, meanwhile, has been remodeling my upstairs guest bathroom. She really wanted to do something and she’s done such a good job on her own house that I relented and gave her the bath, although I had no plans to do anything with it.  She’s done a good job so far, and it’s nearing completion. Still not sure what type of floor will go in there – but I replaced the sink, so the old one is currently leaning against a wall upstairs – yet another reason I need that dumpster.

And that’s about all I’ve got at the moment. Typing this on my annoying little Bluetooth keyboard, which has keys that are really close together and sometimes in just the wrong place, so I have to go back and correct every other word,  but at least it’s better than trying to use the keyboard on my phone.

The Eve of Destruction

Posted on by

Once again, I’ve managed to go a couple of months with nothing new written here – which is sort of odd, because a lot of new things have happened since August. I guess the most earth-shaking is that I’ve kinda started dating again. At the end of the last post, I mentioned that a couple of friends and I might hike up to Bob Bald since Joyce Kilmer was open. The two friends were one of my bartenders and one of her girlfriends, and the bartender bailed – so the girlfriend and I went alone, had a nice couple of days (in spite of the fact that we went up in the tail end of a hurricane), and decided to continue seeing each other when we got back to the big city.

As it turns out, Sandie (I’ll call her “Sandie” here – largely because that’s her name) bought a fixer-upper of a house several years ago, and she’s fixered-up the hell out of it since then; so she’s been very interested in making me move a lot faster with my own projects. What that means, frankly, is that she’d demolish my entire house if I let her. I’m not letting her. I’ve given her the upstairs guest bathroom as her own makeover project while I focus on replacing the floors in the rest of the house – at my own pace, thanks very much – which has been the plan all along.

The first step of that project was to buy some new power tools. Partly because I’d need them for putting down the floors, and partly because I needed them to build a new workbench so that I could clear up some space in my garage so that I’d have room in it for three pallets of laminate and my car. So I dipped into the refi money and bought a new table saw, miter saw, and brad nailer.

Yeah, so I didn’t really NEED the brad nailer, but I’ve always wanted one and I was in the store and…things just happened.

Next, I needed to buy enough lumber to make a long, sturdy workbench in the garage. The idea being that I’d be able to get rid of at least two of the three “benches” that are in the garage now and have plenty of room for the laminate. I built the bench top during the weekend of September 27th, and was moving along nicely….until I got word on the 28th that the laminate, which was supposed to have been delivered in the middle of October, would be delivered the following day. I spent much of the 28th moving as much stuff as I could out of the garage and into the attic above the garage, and throwing out a bunch of other things. Rather than freeing up room by replacing three benches with one, I actually received the pallets with FOUR benches in the garage (one being only half-built).

But I managed to get the pallets in.

I also managed to finish the bench – last night. The final glue-up for the top of it (a piece of MDF) is the subject of this post’s featured photo. The final product ended up looking like this:

So far, I haven’t actually started putting in the new floor. Sandie, however, has gone crazy on the guest bathroom. She removed the stipple from the ceiling, then spackled it (and the walls), sanded everything, primed and painted the ceiling, and has primed the walls.

She also managed to talk me into buying bead board for the walls, a new sink, new sink hardware, new light fixtures, and a new fan cover. Somehow, she convinced me to take out the toilet – which I did yesterday, which resulted in a whole new set of problems and necessitated my having to buy a new Dremel multi-tool in order to get the busted closet flange out of the main pipe (in addition to buying a new flange and the ever-popular wax ring). I also determined that the sub-floor around the toilet might be suspect, and I may have to replace that (leading to removing the bathtub and vanity). I dearly hope not. The bathroom will end up looking amazing. Of that, I have very little doubt. I’d never planned to spend so much time or effort on it, however. I just want to put the floors down, to take my time doing so, and to deal with whatever comes up next….NEXT. Some people like to do everything at once. I’m not one of those people.

In the good news department, I’ll be heading back to Cheboygan next month and spending a week in the 14-Foot Shoals cabin at Cheboygan State Park. I opted for a “staycation” last year – worried that I waited too late and I might have a problem with snow at the Straits of Mackinaw – and I was unable to get the kind of relaxation that I needed. Combined with my health issues at the beginning of this year (along with other pandemic-related things), missing that week away really took a toll on me this year. I’m really looking forward to just going to my little cabin on the shore, putting a nice fire in the stove, and doing absolutely nothing for 6 days. If I get snowed in, I’ll find a way to dig out. Nothing’s stopping me from going this year.

And that should bring everybody pretty much up to speed. I’ll try (again) not to wait two months to update this – but maybe I’ll wait a month and update it from my phone when I get to Cheboygan.

The Rise and Fall of the Turf

Posted on by

Two more months have gone by, and we’re now officially well into the hottest part of the summer in Georgia. I’m quite settled into the work-from-home routine – though I’m actually at the office today because my internet crapped out at home and AT&T isn’t sending a technician until Friday. Yes, I do have a mobile hotspot, but it’s just barely sufficient for doing my job at home.

The routine for the last few months has been pretty much set in stone. I get up at 5:00, feed the cats, drink a cup of coffee while watching the news or some YouTube videos. Shortly before 6:00, I’ll head out for a 5-mile walk, which gets me home at just after 7:00. At that point, I’ll have another cup of coffee (decaf, by the way – always), will watch the tube a bit more, and might eat something for breakfast – egg white omelet, bowl of cereal, or some fruit. As often as not, I’ll skip the food altogether. At around 7:30, I’ll take a shower and start work. Somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00, I’ll turn off the computer, feed the cats again, take another walk, put something on the stove for dinner, and drink a couple of rocks glasses of bourbon while looking at Facebook or playing a game on my phone – generally sitting in the screen house on my deck, though it’s recently gotten so hot that it’s uncomfortable to sit outside for too long.

The “Bourbon Barn” on my deck – a screen-house with removable wind/rain panels – is where I’ve taken to spending most evenings. I took this picture the day the roof was being replaced, which explains the rope on the roof.

After an hour or so, I’ll wander back inside, eat whatever was cooking, watch part of a movie or something, and generally hit the sack before 9:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. It really shouldn’t be surprising that I quite often do not know what day it is. Seriously – it’s not unusual at all for me to start the day by saying, “Alexa, what day is it?”

There are some highlights and banner days, however. For example, I had my gutters replaced last Thursday. After getting quotes from three different roofers to do the job – and after all three of them gave me quotes, but never followed up to schedule the work even when I sent them emails, I called a fourth company who was recommended by my bartender on Sunday. They came out and took pictures on Monday, gave me a quote on Tuesday, and did the job Thursday. The gutters look great, the work was done in less than three hours, and I’m not sure why the first three companies didn’t think it was worth three hours of their time to make $1500.

Another example: yesterday was Tuesday the 11th – and on Tuesday the 11th, my new retaining wall was completed. While it was expensive, it came out looking great and I’m confident that the erosion that has claimed about a foot and a half of my backyard over the last 20 years will now stop. I ended up hiring a hardscraper who lives in my neighborhood, and he went to town: 85-pound blocks, a few tons of gravel, two large drainage tubes, another ton of fill dirt, another ton or two of large rocks….the upper yard is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The new retaining wall shortly after it was finished.

The biggest disappointment with the new wall, however, is that my lawns were absolutely destroyed by the equipment and materiel needed to build it. As you can see in the picture, both the lower and upper yards are now little more than dirt. I’m fairly certain that it’s too late in the year to try planting grass, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Wendell (the guy who built the wall) really wanted me to hire him to resod the yard, but I’m not doing that anytime soon. The plan all along has been “Roof then wall then floors,” and I’m sticking to it. My floors – at least downstairs – are getting replaced next.

And I think the upstairs will get replaced sooner rather than later, too. Since I’m going to be working out of the house for the long term, I really want to get my upstairs office into better shape, starting with a new floor. It’s okay right now, but I need to make it feel less like a spare bedroom and more like an office, so I might as well start at the bottom, rip out the floor, repaint it, replace the lights, then put in a new floor and start getting the furniture laid out like an office. I think it will help me put some distance between home and work, and make the days a little less monotonous.

I did drive up to the NC mountains last weekend – mainly to find out if they were open and people could camp there again. I went to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and drove along the forest road next to the Little Santeetlah River, where all of my favorite spots did indeed have people in them. So that’s a good thing. I stopped for 45 minutes or so just to sit by the river and soak up the sound of quiet. Now that I’ve established that the place is open, a couple of friends and I may hike up to Bob Bald in the next couple of weeks and spend a night up there. That should be really nice.

Solutions, Part 2

Posted on by

A while back, I opined that it was time to get the retaining walls in my lower yard replaced, and pondered doing it myself vs. hiring somebody who knows what they’re doing to take care of it.

I opted for the latter, and had a number of people come out to take a look and give me some estimates. While they were here, I also asked each of them to give me an estimate on rebuilding my deck. One guy, basically a handyman who came highly recommended, stood out with his estimates for both the walls and the deck, and so I hired him to replace the deck. I didn’t have the money to do both, the deck was a bit cheaper, and I wanted to get something done that I’d be able to SEE right away.

So, as of May 23rd, I have a new deck. Not only is it not falling over. Not only does it not have a horrible paint job. Not only does it not have those stupid built-in benches that some decks have. Not only is it not attached to the side of my house (it’s attached to the foundation). But also – it’s 8 feet longer than my old one was. It’s a really nice deck. The guy was able to re-use a lot of my old deck (most of the supports, for example, were fine – they just needed to be set in concrete), got everything leveled up, extended it to the end of my house (where it logically should have gone to begin with), and built a new set of steps there. It looks amazing, and – now that I’ve put up a screen house on it that my neighbor calls, “The Bourbon Barn,” I’m spending just about every morning out there drinking coffee and watering the lawn, and just about every every evening drinking bourbon and reading. In short, I’m using the deck, which – honestly – I really haven’t done in 20 years.

The new deck as it was being built. The edge of the old deck can be seen where the color of the support beams changes. Everything to the right (8 additional feet) is the expansion.

At the same time that I was getting estimates for the walls and deck, I was working with a roofer and State Farm (again) to try to get my roof replaced. I first put in a claim with State Farm in about 2008 because water was leaking into my master bath. It was declined. Since then, I’ve tried two more times to get my roof replaced, and State Farm turned me down both times. A few months ago, I replaced my front door, and saw water literally pouring out of the front wall of the house once the door was removed. I took the opportunity to rip up a large section of my water-damaged foyer floor. I also vowed that State Farm was going to replace the roof THIS QUARTER or I’d be insurance shopping.

State Farm sent a guy out to look at the roof. He found a few large holes. I also showed him the foyer floor, the garage ceiling and walls (evident water damage to both), and he went on his way. And about two weeks later, miracle of miracles, State Farm agreed to replace the roof.

Working from home while all this was going on was not fun – but it’s so nice to have a roof that isn’t an eyesore, and should actually keep things dry!

That is being done today. The roofing crew was onsite by about 6:20 this morning. It is now 3:40 in the afternoon, and I believe that they’re finishing up on the ridge vents and getting ready to start cleaning up. After 12 years, I’ve got a new roof. It looks amazing, and – assuming that I don’t have water in my foyer after the next heavy rain – I can now begin focusing on replacing the floors in the house. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but could not until I got the leaks taken care of for good.

What about the retaining walls? Well, they’re on the docket, too. While I’ve been doing all this other stuff, I’ve also been in the process of refinancing the house and pulling some money out to do all of these improvements. I’m now in the final stages of that project – waiting for the mortgage company to give me a closing date. They’re at the point of verifying my employment and insurance, and I’m fairly sure that I’ll be able to close within a week or two. As soon as that happens and the money is in my account, I’ll get one more estimate on the retaining walls and then pull the trigger on that project. The floors downstairs will come next. Then upstairs. Then I start looking at the kitchen.

Solutions. I’m getting them.

Getting Started

Posted on by

So I’ve made good progress on most of the things I mentioned in my last entry. I actually completed one of those things, if you count “walk 100 miles in a week,” as I managed to get in about 105 miles between the 27th and the 3rd. I did not attempt a repeat of that this week – I haven’t even taken my walk yet today. I think I’ll end up at around 75 miles, which is plenty. I did the 100-mile week just to see if I could.

On the house front, I’m happy to say that State Farm finally came through for me on a home insurance claim! They’ve made things as difficult as possible, but they are going to pay to replace my roof (minus my deductible), and I’ve got a contractor signed up to do the work. Actually sent the signed contract back to him this morning. State Farm started things off by telling me that the replacement value of the roof was just over $9,000 and that the depreciated value was just over $5,000 and then said they were sending me a check for $2,600 – which has to be endorsed by me AND by Chase Manhattan, because they hold the mortgage. I started to lose my mind when all that happened, but after a few chats with the claims agent, I managed to deduce that they’ll send me ANOTHER check (again, to be endorsed by Chase…sigh) either after the work is done or (hopefully) when I send them a copy of the contract to do the work.

If they decide to wait until after the work is done, I need to figure out how to pay the contractor out of my pocket while waiting for the insurance (not sure how I’ll do that), or convince him to wait for it. He and I have discussed that, and he’ll probably be okay waiting if necessary.

He may not have to, though, because I’ve started the process of refinancing the mortgage and pulling out some money for the other projects. This process began as complete fiasco. I initially put in an application with Chase because they’ve had my mortgage for close to 20 years, they’ve been spamming me for the last three with offers to lower my interest rate, and I figured it’d be a piece of cake. And it was at first. Did the online application, gave them all of the relevant information, said that I wanted to lower my rate and pull out some money for home improvements. All good. Got a call back from a banker and everything was pleasant.

Until he mentioned that, because of COVID-19, anyone who wanted to pull money out during a refi had to show that they had 18 months of mortgage payments in reserve, and 12 months of those had to be liquid reserves. You following me on this? In order for me to pull out $20,000 in a refi, I had to have about $14,000 in liquidity. I was like, “Dude. If I had fourteen grand lying around, why would I be asking to borrow twenty?”

So he offered to lower that amount by adding two points on the loan, and rolling those into the loan. You following this? Because they’re so concerned that I’m going to either lose my job or die because of COVID, they insist that I have enough cash on hand to pay my mortgage for a full year, but if I DON’T have that, they’ll be happy to give me a BIGGER loan and only hold me to having enough to pay for nine months.

So I said, “Screw you,” and went to Quicken Loans. Fired up a RocketMortgage application, took 2.5 percent off of my existing interest rate and pulled out $25,000. Changed from a 30-year mortgage to a 15 and lowered my payment to boot. That took a morning. Now I’m just going through the follow-up stuff with my loan agent and he thinks we’ll close within a couple of weeks.

That will make things interesting with the State Farm checks…

Anyway, I also settled on a contractor to replace my deck, and I’m waiting for him to send me a contract for that. Going to tear the whole thing down, replace it with a few modifications, and extend it about 8 feet so that it takes up almost the entirety of the back wall of the house. Since I do have enough in savings to cover that work, I’m hoping he can get started as early as this week.

I might use the same guy for the retaining wall, as he’s given me a pretty attractive estimate for that work. Going to see how he does on the deck before I make that decision. I also need to call one other hardscaper who lives in my neighborhood and see what he’d charge me for that work.

So things are moving forward and I’m excited about the upcoming changes at home. Here’s hoping I survive the pandemic long enough to enjoy them!

Weight Lifted

Posted on by

Went to a vascular surgeon on Monday morning to get the ol’ carotid arteries checked out. That’s something I never dreamed that I’d be saying as little as 4 months ago, but apparently 2020 is just going to be one of those years where weird shit comes at you from every direction. Lose control of your eyes in January. Find out you’ve got carotid stenosis in February. Get hit by a global pandemic in March. Develop chest tightness in April.

Can’t say that I’m really looking forward to May.

However, the visit to the vasculatorium© turned out okay for me. Got my temp taken (98.4, I think), BP (140/85, I think – heart rate was 76), weight (170). Got to talk to about 14 different people, none of whom was the doctor that I made the appointment with. Got to regale them all with stories of why I went to the ER in January, and two of them made me smile and pull their fingers and raise my eyebrows and stick out my tongue. Both approved of my performances and declared that I haven’t had a stroke.

Then I went in for an ultrasound of the arteries, and that was pleasant enough experience. Had a lovely technician basically massage my neck for 10 minutes and then leave.

At long last, the actual DOCTOR doctor came into the room…and made me smile and pull his fingers and raise my eyebrows and stick out my tongue, before approving of my performances and declaring that I haven’t had a stroke. I was beginning to wonder if anyone there had bothered to read the reports from the ER saying, “no stroke.”

The dude finally got around to my carotids and told me that, yeah, there was some blockage in both. He drew a very bad representation of a carotid artery on a piece of paper and showed me where said blockage was. Then he said that it was under 50% in both of them, no surgery, come back and check again in a year.

I said, “That’s it?” Yep. That’s it. I asked what the actual percentage of blockage is, and he said, “Under 50%. That’s about as specific as I can get.” I asked if either artery is more blocked than the other, and he said, “No. About the same.” I asked what would happen if it gets to be more than 50% and he said, “If it’s under 80%, you’ll need to check it every 6 months. If it’s over, then we’ll talk about surgery.”

So I made an appointment for April, 2021, and I left. And I felt much better than I have since the first week of February, when my GP made it seem as if my carotids were both about to explode. I’ve got another appointment with him in a few weeks and I might tell him he’s a jerk…or I might just get a prescription refill and be on my way. In either case, I won’t be as stressed as I was a week ago.

In other news, the family had a zoom conference call on Sunday afternoon, and it became apparent that I need to get remote access into Dad’s computer so that I can get him set up correctly should we do it again (and I hope we do, as it was enjoyable).

I’ve been trying to get some estimates from landscapers to see what can be done with my back yards. So far, I’m having a hard time getting any of them to call me back. Guess they don’t want money?

Insurance agent is supposed to be coming to look at my roof next Monday – I’d really love to get THAT fixed.

Oh yeah – Right Networks acquired another company yesterday – Rootworks. As I understand it, that acquisition puts us in a pretty good spot to become the go-to cloud company for any CPA firms with fewer than 300 users. I’ve decided to be positive for a change and to believe that I’ll be able to work at RN until I retire. Maybe not as lucratively as I’d once assumed, but comfortably enough, I guess. And if the house has a new roof and good-looking backyard, maybe I can even get a nice chunk of change for it if I want to move to a shack in the mountains.

Magnificent Saturday

Posted on by

I felt pretty good this morning, which was nice – because the weather today has been fantastic. It rained very early (like between 0600 and 0800), and I sat on my deck in my bathrobe, drank coffee, and read my phone during that time. In addition to the rain, there was a pretty strong breeze and it felt amazingly like sitting under a tarp during a camping trip. Very relaxing and a nice prelude to the rest of the day.

I should mention that the featured photo for this entry is one that I took of sunrise over Lake Superior in October, 2016. It was at Au Sable Lighthouse at Pictured Rocks National Seashore, and a few hours after I took that shot, I was on a call with my (AT&T) boss and getting the first inkling that my job was in jeopardy. One of the most beautiful mornings juxtaposed with one of the worst. I need to get back to Pictured Rocks, though. I haven’t been since that autumn, and I don’t want to conflate that wonderful place with bad memories.

After the rain had stopped, I put on a shirt and some pants, along with a windbreaker, and headed out for a brisk walk. “Brisk” in the sense that it was still a little chilly – probably 60 degrees. I didn’t set any speed records, but after two days of not really walking (and about six of those days in the last two weeks), I really wanted to just have a nice long walk. I got 5.5 miles in and averaged about 15.5 minutes/mile. I’ll take that every time.

Back at the house, I jumped into yard work. Mowed both of the back yards, as well as the front-side one, cut down a lot of weeds and shrubs in the back of the house, cleared crap out from around the deck, and fixed the “blow it all out” hole on my lawnmower. The cover had come off – what a pain THAT was to get back on! It was a perfect day for this kind of work. Sunny, high sixties, breezy…one of the nine perfect Georgia days that I’ve written about previously.

In the afternoon, I played around with my router a bit and discovered that it will do an admirable job of cutting some miter-jig grooves for my table saw, so I’m going to try to do that tomorrow. I also did a few loads of laundry and took another 2.5-mile walk in the afternoon, during which I tried to take a picture of a squirrel standing straight up in the middle of the road. Said squirrel took off as soon as I brought my phone up, but I did managed to get him with all four little feet off of the ground…which was nice.

For dinner, I cooked the first of my Rastelli’s pork chops. Like the chicken and salmon before it, the pork chop was fantastic. I took a chance on Rastelli’s a couple of weeks ago and put in an order for $140 worth of chicken, salmon, and pork – mainly because I saw a good review for them and because I wanted to stock up on meat that I could eat without health concerns. I’m now a devotee. When this stuff runs out (a couple of months, probably), I’ll be making another order.

Throughout today, I’ve been running scripts to delete old profiles from all of my firms. This will result in them all having less data on our servers and they’ll save money because of it. They’ll probably never know I’ve done this for them, and that’s fine. I really just wanted to script something cool, and this fits the bill. I’ll continue running the scripts tomorrow and I should be able to have all of my firms cleaned up by Monday. Then I’ll have to come up with something else to interest me.

Looking forward to sleeping well tonight. This has been a really good day.

More on the Health Front

Posted on by

My last entry, written last Sunday, indicated that maybe I’d caught the virus, and – if so – it wasn’t all that terrible. Man. I need to learn when to keep my mouth shut. Six days later, I’m not going to make that mistake again.

After resting through most of last Sunday and going to bed early, I felt pretty good on Monday morning. Told my team as much, indicated that I wasn’t at 100% and that I’d be in and out during the day, but that I’d be working. And, for the majority of the day, I did.

Then came late afternoon.

At around 4:00 or so, my chest once again tightened up, my neck started to hurt…and back to bed I went. I sat in bed and tried to decide whether I was having a heart attack or dealing with the virus. I looked up symptoms of both (they’re basically the same). I did my best to fall asleep, with very poor results. I worried myself basically to death and felt completely helpless.

When you don’t know what’s happening, but you do know that if you go to a hospital these days you’re probably either going to get sent home or get sent to ICU – and in either case, you’re going to be on the hook for a few thousand dollars – you feel helpless.

So, eventually, I just lay there. Pretty much all night. I got up at some point to pee and had major chills – which actually came as somewhat of a relief, because that let me lean more towards COVID and less towards “heart giving out.” I still didn’t have a thermometer, but having the chills helped; because (after peeing) I could just curl up in a fetal position under the covers and wait them out. My chest was still tight when I took deep breaths and my neck still hurt when I coughed, but those two things were no longer keeping me awake – which was a huge relief.

I only managed to get about two hours of decent sleep on Monday night, though. I told my team on Tuesday that I would not be working. I had Jenny bring a thermometer and some expectorant to the house (she left them in the garage), and I spent most of the day in bed. Unfortunately, the thermometer consistently showed that I had no fever (was, in fact, a degree LOW) and the expectorant did very little. So, as I lay in bed all day, I tended to magnify every little ache or twinge and wonder if I was about to die.

Felt better on Wednesday morning after getting a pretty decent night’s sleep, but again told my team that I’d be taking the day off to continue to rest. Which I did. Drank a lot of hot tea, took my temp regularly (never high) and my BP (fairly normal for me) and my heart rate (normal), and dozed all day. I felt a lot better after late afternoon came and went with no chest tightness, so I took a shower and went back to bed. Slept okay.

Thursday, I worked normally, though by then I was stressed beyond all recognition because I still didn’t know what the issue actually was. Every time I felt a twinge in my neck, I’d think, “My carotid artery is about to explode.” Every time I’d feel a tingle in my arm or neck or chest or leg (and guys, I’m getting up there – twinge happen!) , it felt like an indication that something was terribly wrong. And every time I got stressed, my heart rate went up, which stressed me more and…you get the idea. Not a happy camper at all.

So on Friday, I made the call and made an appointment with a vascular surgeon. I’ll go in a week from next Monday to find out exactly what type of blockage I’ve got in my carotids, what my heart is doing, etc. At that point, I’ll have to make a decision (maybe) on surgery. But at THIS point, I can at least tell myself that I’m taking steps to do something. I’m doing something, even if it’s just asking someone else to do something. And I’m can hopefully stop stressing myself out.

Not a fun post, this, but it’s getting the facts out there.

In NORMAL news, I did a lot of yard work today, particularly when it came to cutting down trees (well…SMALL trees – diameter of under 3 inches) by my fence at the back side of the house. Cleared out a lot of them, and discovered that I’ve got a fairly large tree on the right side of the house which is leaning towards the house and is going to have to go.

So I guess I’ll be looking for some tree removal people. Can’t do that one myself.

More yard work planned for tomorrow (need to mow the back lawn and I still want to trim SOME of the branches that are scraping the house), but for now it’s bedtime. I put in a lot of work today and I’m looking forward to sleeping like a log tonight.

Is it COVID-19?

Posted on by

So everybody stay calm. It’s probably nothing. On my way home from the store yesterday, I noticed a tightness in my chest, which has waxed and waned a few times since then. I have no trouble breathing, no fever (as far as I know – the only thermometer in the house had enough juice in it for one measurement, which came out low), my heart rate is normal, and my blood pressure is (for me) fairly low. Not dead yet.

That being said, I’ve never had the flu in my life (as far as I know – I believe I did have pneumonia once when I was quite young), and the chest thing isn’t a cold. So either I’m get to experience my first flu or I’ve got the mystery virus that’s been going around. Nothing to do about it except sleep and drink water, which I’m doing (also making a salmon filet). Sure, I could probably find a place to get tested, but to what end? I have very mild symptoms and I’m not going to a hospital. I told Jenny that if it gets worse, I’ll let her know and maybe I’ll try a teledoctor or whatever.

I know what you really want to know: What store did I go to? That’d be the Home Depot. Picked up some lumber, glue, bolts, screws, and light bulbs. The bulbs are for a lamp. Everything else is what I need to extend the table on Dad’s old table saw (which, I learned today, is 11 years older than I am), which I began to do yesterday afternoon before getting to a good stopping point and deciding to pay attention to my chest and lie down. I need to do some surgery on the stand that Dad built for the saw in order to drop the motor about two inches – in order to be able to increase the length of the table and let longer pieces of wood slide onto my workbench.

Once I’ve got the table extended, I’ll start work on a cross-cut sled. That will be fun.

Salmon is nearly done, so I’ll wrap this up. Just thought I’d get it down for posterity that maybe I’ve caught the dreaded Coronavirus and – at least for now – I don’t feel too awfully terrible.

Solutions

Posted on by

Another day home, another day getting better at working there. The boys are currently settled in happily on their kitty tree by the window. They don’t both have to be there, though. They were being little hellions yesterday. Fighting over the top spot on the tree, then flying around the house and yowling at each other, they made it very difficult for me to get any kind of a work groove going. With that in mind, I added another chair (Gramma Sprague’s old wing-back) to a spot in front of the window today. Joshua immediately curled up in it and went to sleep, and Chamberlain settled into his favorite spot on top of the tree. I had an uninterrupted morning.

I also had some issues with my internet yesterday, which was a bigger concern than the cats. I figured that the problem was probably my wireless signal and not the speed of the outside connection, but I really didn’t want to move everything downstairs in order to plug the laptop directly into the router. Truth be told, that’s exactly what I’d tell a client to do if they called in needing help for internet issues while working from home.Instead of doing that, though, I spent $130 on NetGear PowerLine Adapters,which I was able to buy online from Best Buy and pick up at the store at about 10 yesterday morning.

We used a version of these things at Digital Life when a customer didn’t have good wireless strength throughout the house, but I was never overly impressed with them. The newer generation, though…just damn. Call me impressed. The way the adapters work is pretty simple. You plug one into an outlet near the router and you attach it to the router with a Cat-5 (Ethernet) cable. Then, you plug the other adapter into an outlet near the system that needs a better connection (my upstairs laptop, in my case). The adapters use the electrical power lines in the house (basically) to connect the “far away” adapter directly to the router. Much easier than having to fish cable through the walls. The “far” adapter can serve as a wireless access point, a physical network port, or both. In my situation, I connected my laptop to the adapter with Cat-5, and my download speed when from about 8MB to about 29MB instantly. Problem solved.No problems for the rest of the day yesterday and today is a continuation of that. Decent speed, no jitters…just like working from the office.

I also connected my upstairs Roku to the wireless access point; and that seems to be running better, too.

Joshua looking regal in the wing-back chair

Chamberlain has now moved off of the tree and settled into the wing-back. Everybody’s still happy.

For the last week or so, I’ve been opening the front windows for the boys, but I don’t dare open them all the way, as I do downstairs. When they see anything – a bird, a dog, a bug, or an air molecule – they tend to try to get to it. I yell at them downstairs when they do this, but the paranoid side of me can see both of them leaping for a squirrel outside of the upstairs window, hitting the screen with a combined 35 pounds, and falling out. Because of this, I basically crack the windows open about 2 inches on either side (these are tall windows that open side-to-side, not bottom-to-top.

Since I do want to be able to open them a little more, I think I’m going to try to build some frames this afternoon, into which I can insert a couple of heavy-duty pieces of wire shelf. I can then attach the frames to the windows and let the boys have about 10 inches of fresh air. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll put a picture in here after I complete the frames.

The featured image for this post (also inserted here) is one that I took in my back yard a couple of days ago. I went out on Tuesday evening to mow the back yards – first time I’ve done so this year – and determined that I can no longer look the other way when it comes to fixing the landscape timbers that are keeping the upper part of the lawn from sliding into the lower part. As you can see, they need to be replaced. I don’t know exactly how to do this, but it’s something that has just risen to the top of my list. I talked with a friend who is a handyman by trade, and he told me that I can probably get the timbers – pretreated and stained – for about $10 each. If that’s the case, then I’m probably looking at $600-$700 for the material and God knows how much time learning how to replace everything. No way am I hiring somebody to do that, however. It can’t be that tough, right?

Famous last words, I’m sure.