It was a good day today. I hung out with Adrian last night and met up with him and Ronda and her mom at church to give them a hand cleaning stuff out. It was good to get out and talk to people and help. Adrian lamented that the church population is actually contracting and has been his whole life. It’s true, religion just isn’t what it used to be. But not much is I guess.

I then went and saw mom, she seemed well and Ron was doing good after having surgery on Wednesday. Mom isn’t driving and Ron said to me that he’s relieved that she’s choosing not to drive and thinks that her reaction time just isn’t what it needs to be. Honestly my reaction time isn’t what it needs to be to drive around here. 10 miles over the speed limit is the lower end of traffic flow, and regardless of how fast you’re going there’s some idiot tailgating and changing lanes like its Daytona. But that’s me changing the subject. Mom is in decline and it scares me. I don’t know what the future holds but how can it be anything than utterly devastating tragedy?

The other thing I did today was to jack up the RV to see what I could find with the phantom disconnected trailer break. Low and behold there was a disconnected wire. The 3 wire connector seems to be something I couldn’t get locally, it’s called IDC 314-BOX Wire Connectors and they’re waterproof along with a gel at the connection to keep water at bay. Amazon will have them here tomorrow and hopefully the brake issue is a done deal.

I feel bad. I finally talked Sandy into washing her car and she scrubbed a little too hard trying to get one of the stickers off her car and it left a pretty bad mark. I feel like I should have been a little more on top of that but I also don’t feel like I could/should be telling her how to wash a car.

I always got a feeling of doing something good when I washed and polished my vehicles and I was hoping she’d feel the same way. Instead, I just gave her a way to screw the paint up on her car. Seriously a case of no good deed…

We’ve kind of adopted a calico cat that kind of moved in under the shed after I built it, we named her Cali because, well it took no work.

We’ve even built a little hutch for her to winter in and it stores the auto feeder and camera we affectionately call the cat house cam.

Well, it seems that word got out about a free meal and we’ve been inundated with raccoons, well we only thought we had one and we were ok living with them until we caught on video they hit our cat. So it’s trapping time, I set out the trap and caught a raccoon, when I saw there were two it freaked me out a bit, didn’t really want to separate them but what else was I supposed to do? I’ll set the trap out again and if the other raccoon wants a ride to the same place they can hop on in.

It’s still amazing to me how quickly time is moving as I get older. 2023 is off and running and January is already over. I was over at Adrian’s for his birthday dinner and was saying my goodbyes and told Rick I’d see him at men’s breakfast and he said see you next weekend, I hadn’t realized that the month was almost already over.

Sandy is in Colorado Springs with Valerie handing out so I got to hang out all weekend by myself. It was kind of fun having a cheeseburger and pizza weekend.

I made hey when the sun was shining yesterday and the day before that by washing and polishing the vehicles. Today a cold front moved through, nothing major but it cooled it down. We managed to make it to the store to provision ourselves for the camping trip this weekend. $150 and it wasn’t really that much. I suppose 50 of that was the stew meat, ice cream and Sandy’s bread. Another 20 in drinks. Still stupid expensive and I am thankful that we can still afford it without worrying about how we’re going to pay for it. We’re blessed.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a light schedule at work and today and yesterday we broke records for the high temperature, 84 yesterday and 85 today. So taking advantage of the temporarily pleasant side effect of global warming I decided to wash and wax (polish) the Xterra and Truck.

I got the Nu Finish ‘once a year’ car polish, contains absolutely no wax. But it’s priced right, makes a good case for polish over wax and is easy enough to apply. I remember thinking that the Xterra was a big vehicle, the truck is huge. But it’s done and the truck is looking better than when I got it. Posting this so I remember when I did it.

It’s been a while since I blogged and there’s been a lot happening.

Now that the holiday’s are behind us I’ll hopefully get into more of a schedule when it comes to putting down my thoughts and memories. Mom is fine, getting better day by day. We went camping and managed to head to NYE at the Park’s while getting our picture taken in front of the tree in Sundance Square after having dinner at Razoo’s and after visiting Mom, Ron, sis and Zak.

I’m mildly optimistic that this will be a good year, actually I’m excited about the future, with a degree in my pocket, I’ve got a good run ahead of me. We’ve got some good things ahead of us.

So I got the news yesterday that mom fell. Grrr, I now know the frustration every parent has felt at some point when the kid does something stupid and the parent is like ‘what the fuck were you thinking, why did you do that’, it’s just now I’m saying it to my mom. Oh well, god knows I’ve put her through it enough times. This time she broke her shoulder and wrist, on opposite sides, she just has to be an over achiever.

So I’ve been here for two hours and she’s still not able to see people. I mean I’m here for her but it’s somewhat pointless if you can’t see them. I’d say I’m giving sister a break but Ron was here for that. I guess I’m just annoyed that I’m stuck here watching stuff in the lobby by myself.

It’s always sad when you complete/finish a video game you’ve been really into. I bought a PS5 with Horizon – Forbidden West when I still had about 4 to 6 months left of school and that was going to be my graduation gift to myself. Horizon – Zero Dawn was the first game I played (and loved) on the PS4 so it was fitting Horizon – Forbidden West would be my first PS5 game. Happy to say it didn’t disappoint but still when it ends, it’s like finishing a great book, you’re sad to see it stop/end/finish. Excellent game. Now it’ll be time to find the next one. I started the new spider man but it starts off trying to catch Rino and I keep losing him so it’s not much fun to start with, sure it’ll probably get better but I’m trying to decide if I want to commit that much time to another game. Maybe time to take a break and do other things:)

Notice that a watch isn’t mentioned because they still don’t know when I’m going to get it. I ordered it from Samsung, you think the manufacturer would know how many they have and how long it would take to get to you but noooo, they can’t seem to figure that one out so I just have the new phone. Loving the stylus though.

The compromise of getting a new phone and watch was that I keep the old laptop another year, it was built in 2018 but aside from the battery it’s doing everything I need it to do, so I just bought a new battery for it and put it in (16 screws btw). So with that in place this laptop should last me another couple of years, gotta love the Dell’s.

Review of the phone to come shortly and the watch if it ever gets here.