It’s been awhile since the cold froze the hairs in my nose. Now, maybe it’s because there’s more hair in my nose than ever, or it could be that it’s 20 degrees out.

I went to a funeral today. Kodi & Tyla’s mom passed and tonight was the viewing. It was good to see them and the others that I knew but it was sad that it was a funeral. An amazing bright spot was meeting Kodi’s daughter Allie. What an amazing spark that one has. The excitement in her voice as she described her college life and aspirations was amazing, I don’t think I’ve ever had that kind of zest for life.

I almost had a heart attack today at work, I had been heads down trying to get the ‘standard’ offer letter done and hit on some other issue only to realize there are a whole bunch more offer letter types to contend with. But the code was sound and works as written with just a few modifications. I think I’m ready to show and tell at work with this thing, we’re close enough for that.

I signed up for the AI usage class today. I haven’t taken the intro yet but I’ll get around to it shortly. I’m kind of excited to take the class and learn how to use it. I’ll keep you up to date on what I learn.

The temperature dropped throughout the day on their way down to 13 tonight. I don’t mind, it’s not like I have to go anywhere. Just hunker down and get to work like I usually do. I do worry about the outdoor creatures but I guess they’ve been dealing with the outside for literally thousands of generations. I’m also convinced that they just don’t feel cold like I do. One of my faults is that I empathize too much. So if I’m cold inside looking outside, how is the skinny little cat supposed to survive? Well they do and not only survive but thrive. I need to quit projecting my limitations on the other living beings that I encounter.

Other than that, we’re on the hunt for auto insurance. I am of the opinion that insurance is one of the greatest scams that exists. The reason we have a government is to run services that the people need that shouldn’t be a profit maker. So things like health care, infrastructure and insurance need to exist but no one should be making a profit on them. It needs to be run by the government as a non-profit. Only making a 3% profit that it returns to the general coffers. No stock holders demanding constantly increasing profits. Insurance fraud becomes a federal crime and the agency is under congressional control, although that group of idiots needs to be revamped.

We had a sit down dinner of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans with biscuits. It was a nice way to get used to the cold and pretend we’re someplace in a cabin by the fireplace as the winds howl outside.

Well the three day weekend is at an end. I didn’t get much of anything done with a free day. I did make it over to the gym for 30 minutes of a workout. I did my usual thing of trying to see how high my BPM can go and after a lap and a half full speed I felt a little off, like I couldn’t catch my breath and my pulse topped out at 157 or so. Probably my fault, my nose was a bit stopped up.

I got my steps and circles done. Yay for me. I lost 6 pounds over the last month. So it can be done. But you have to eat properly. And that’s a hard thing to do.

We did sign and send in the quote for the electric rework. 10k seems like a lot but it’ll be done by the book and have it inspected. Then we can get the insulation blown in to hopefully save some money over the summer.

Tomorrow is a federal holiday so I believe I have the day off. They didn’t really say and I don’t get paid for days off but I can’t work when they don’t? I don’t know, if there’s no mail I don’t have to be at work as far as I know. Also I may have been laid off on Friday, I don’t think so but who knows. I’m not going to sweat it and I’ll be back at it on Tuesday.

I didn’t make my steps yesterday and it wasn’t looking like I was going to do it today either but I took charge and got on the treadmill and knocked out 2.5 miles. It was enough to close all the circles. It was also enough to knock me out for an hour long nap. It was nice though.

The temperature made it up to 46 and we ventured out to Target, they had a 10 pack of t-shirts for like $22. It was nice to just walk around. We didn’t spend a bunch of time there. We’ve both felt really lethargic today, maybe it’s just the cold but it’s nice to have a down day.

It was also a fairly lazy day. We did make it over to see mom since she’s out of the hospital. It was nice, I sat next to her on the porch and we watched some buzzards pecking at a dead possum. It did sort of bother me that mom had to shout out to anyone walking by to leave it (buzzards, carcass, et al.). I guess the days of her having a filter are gone. I was able to live in the moment though and not think about the inevitable.

When we got home we jumped on the bikes and went for a ride over to the east side of Hurst. We were over by the shopping plaza at Pipeline and Brown Trail and stopped in for lunch at El Patriota #1, I believe we were the only English speakers in the place but it was nice. We split a large Patriota (Cheese, Pork, Chicken, Turkey, Pastrami, Mayoketchup, Lettuce, Tomate and Potato stix chips), we definitely enjoyed it and wouldn’t hesitate to stop back in.

It got cold while we were biking, a front moved through and you could feel it, from the time we left from eating lunch, to the time we got home the temperature dropped about 10 degrees and the wind was gusting to 20. We stopped by the Dollar General for Oxyclean and Shout and tore home to get out of the weather. Got the hoses drained and put the freeze guards back on them as it’s going to be cold the next week.

Happy to have Friday here. It was a rough day, I got up and started at like 5:30am but I’m getting damn close on the project I’m working on. There’s an issue that the HTML is being rendered in cp1272 instead of UTF-8 which sucks because things like the ‘right leaning apostrophe’ don’t display right. I’m close to figuring it out but I have no place else to test it except for the server at work. And I have to add the pictures. They’re not showing up now but I think that’s because we’re using the full URL, I think I need to change up the href so that the image is local and we should be good. Hopefully.

Still a little chilly today. We went to the mall at 7pm to do some walking and people watching. The younger crowd was out, just being young and stupid, wearing house shoes while shuffling around the mall, all that energy and they can’t even put on shoes.

Mom made it back to the house, we’ll go see her tomorrow. It’s supposed to be a 70+ degree day so maybe a bike ride is in the future.

Mom fell again, at least nothing is broke but she’s black and blue in the face. Old people falling is an epidemic that we need to address. I probably shouldn’t say anything else I’ll have it worse than anyone else. Roger died after a fall. Mom’s been falling more and more and she’s been extremely lucky but the next time who knows!

Kodi’s mom died this morning. And with Nichole’s passing fate is looking for a 3rd, although I think it’s going away, I mean I never actually met Kodi’s mom that I can remember. I hope it’s waning anyways.

So the property that Sarondy is about to aquire is going to be in court in a week. Well not the property itself but the guy who claims to own it. To that end he was served papers by a constable, from what Ron said, he went back inside, retrieved a baseball bat and proceeded to attack said constable. No wonder he had me get a PO Box.

I spoke yesterday of drinking half a gallon a day and I think I need to say more about that because I think that I like what it’s doing. I hate drinking water, there’s not much more to it than that. Kool-Aid, milk, juice, coffee, tea, gin, anything but water. But I think I’m getting used to it. I’m drinking 64 ounces in 16 ounce increments from when I get to work at 7am to 11 am. This also coincides with my 10 minutes walking every two hours @ 9am, 11am and 1pm.

I feel more fluid with the extra hydration, pun intended. I feel like I’ve got a little more energy too. Not sure I’m seeing the glowing skin and such but it’s also exercising my bladder, so far it’s not helping the overnight bathroom trips but there’s hope that it can once the body adjusts to adequate hydration.

As a side note, I had leftover rice and thought it would be tasty just reheated with some butter, as I was snacking on that a thought crossed my mind to add some sugar, no, brown sugar! I have to say I was impressed and will be doing that again.

So one of the wonderful things that happen when we age is that our metabolism goes to hell. So where as we could eat anything we wanted and not gain any weight when younger, that simply isn’t the case today. And all the times I said that fat people just needed to ‘eat less’ has come full circle and bit me in the butt.

I’m not a fat blob but I’m pushing 200 Lbs and that’s heavy for me, or was before the ‘new normal’ started kicking in. So now it’s time to start paying attention to it. I already exercise and I no longer smoke or drink, so watching what you eat should be easy right?

Not as easy as you’d think. I’m notorious for eating one meal a day. It’s a rather large meal at the end of the workday, we’ll call it old people’s dinner time. But I’m fooling myself into thinking that’s all I eat. I was peckish around noon and normally grab the Doritos and noticed 12 chips are 150 calories. I counted my chips and my normal setting is a lot more than that. Pretzels are the same way and then don’t get me started on my real addiction, candy…

So today, I had toast and peanut butter for lunch, then a pork chop cut up with rice and an egg. 150 calories of chips and one Pepsi. And I got my 64 ounces of water down too. Day 2 on that health conscious attempt.

It was a perfect day to not get out of bed. It was overcast and cold. I didn’t sleep well last night to boot and it made for a long day. Well not too long and I even got the news that we’re moving forward with the custom steps so we’ll get some things done and I’ll have work to do. While they can say that they can’t believe it’s that old, they’re working with UltraEdit and OxygenXML and both are almost as bad of a hindrance as not having anything, the latter can’t even see mapped drives, literally WTF. They’re just slightly ahead of nothing and pale in comparison to Notepad++ or VS Code. Both free BTW and a hell of a lot more useful than the aforementioned titles.

We had broccoli, rice and orange chicken. We actually cleaned off the kitchen table and had dinner together at the table. Aside from going out to eat, I can’t remember the last time we did that. It was nice.

Spent the rest of the evening sitting around resting. This working for a living is for the birds but I’m very happy to have this life of ours.