Normally one would think of vacations as relaxing affairs that soothe the mind, body, and soul. Mine don’t feel like that as there’s a bunch of walking, hiking, swimming, and such. As noted, I broke the step record on this trip too!

This one is for the most floors. I live in Texas, it’s flat, I mean really flat and there isn’t really anywhere I can go to walk up. I guess there is a stair machine at the rec center but you’d never catch me on it. To be blunt I hate stairs, or more specifically, I HATE the way my legs feel going up steps, super painful.

So today, Sandy and I conquered the trails around the resort, well the vertical ones anyways. Beautiful views and lots of stairs. My old record of 38 floors set on our fall 2022 vacation in Georgia on 9/20, this one if 50 floors. Long live this record!!!

Yesterday I logged the highest recorded steps at 28,033. This surpasses the previous high mark of 27,110 set on June 18, 2022 which was Brittney’s wedding. So aside from Sandy being with me for the records being set, Mike and Shelly were there too!

Today has been a little more chillax than yesterday. I was also moving a bit slow and sorely from the record breaking walks yesterday. I’m really digging the breakfasts here, they’re buffet with bacon, sausage, potatoes and fruit. Normally I don’t do breakfasts but if it’s already paid for and there I’m on it.

When blogging, creating a draft does not mean you will actually finish it and publish it.

Started capping off the sprinkler system for the dig. Skid steer will be here Friday for a week. Hoping that most can get done over this weekend.

Today is my dad’s birthday and today he would have been 81. So it’s almost been 10 years since he passed. In his case, he truly was not suffering anymore but it’s hard for me to think about what the last months must have been like. He was damned and determined not to have to go to dialysis like my uncle did. I think in the end it was renal failure that was the ultimate cause of death. One of the regrets I have by not having him here is the health narritive that he could have provided, insights as to what I have in store for the future heathwise. I try to make comparisons but I didn’t know much of dad when he was 50. I’m sure I sent him a card and he got a call, I’d have been in the process of failing out of my first try at college at Clarion but about all I remember of him from the time was a care package that included a carton of Marlboro 100’s.

I hope that in some way he’s been able to see the good highlights to what I’ve done since he left. Stopping drinking and smoking, buying the truck and the RV, going back to school and most recently paying off the house. We were kind of annoyed at each other while he was here, him at me for not living up to my potential and me at him for not being much of a father. I always faulted him for being in such poor health, he hurt and couldn’t move and I didn’t understand it. I mean I hurt but I still move. I think it was the depression that got to him mostly, wether that was his own doing or chemical imbalance we’ll never know and is pointless to think about.

Today, I’ll just try to remember good times. My earliest clear memories are in the mountains of Colorado when we lived in Denver, I remember listening to an 8-track, and an earlier time on a motorcycle driving to a lake, and the lake seemed to have paths through the bushes all around it. I remember driving throught he mountains and seeing cars that had slid off the side of a hill and him saying it was too dangerous to retrieve them so they just left them.

I don’t hold much hope of an afterlife, I always felt that if there was a possible way to get a call from the other side it’d be from dad, that maybe because he never said goodbye that it wasn’t really goodbye… And who knows, maybe it isn’t. Miss you dad, happy birthday!!!!

Just post to let you know that I’ll be upgrading the hard drives and migrating the OS to RHEL over the last quarter of this year. Should you hit a bookmark and nothings there, just wait, it’ll be back up better than ever shortly…

So with the new phone comes a chance to start new. I hate that when switching phones they want you to bring everything over from your old phone. No!!! It’s time to start fresh, if it’s your favorite app, just get it again, or better yet, is there one that does it bigger, better, faster, cheaper?

That goes for content too, every phone has a SD micro card slot. Mine will accept a terabyte of data. Yes 1TB. Friggin thing costs $150 but now I have a terabyte that will be with me at pretty much all times. And yes it’s great for storing those high def videos but what else? For me, I’ve put my music collection on it. This is every piece of music I’ve every bought and then some. That is 210GB or 21% of the drive. Next time someone asks for that obscure song we listed to 30 years ago, got it and all the others too.

I’ve got 500 or so music videos, most from a time when MTV actually played videos, 20Gb, so not much there but literally days worth of music videos. That will keep you entertained on a plane and with a playlist and HDMI cable, it can be the life of the party.

How about movies? I currently have 1473 movies on my Plex server. Over 3TB, but I picked my top 25, something there for everyone and that’s just 50GB. Throw in another 100GB for audio and I’ve got about 500Gb of entertainment at my finder tips with room to grow.