16 June 2024

We got in contact with the Tractor and equipment repair shop and he was confident he’d be able to help, even offered to come out the same day. There’s not much rush for it, getting the mower operating next week would be great, by then we’ll be done with our hosting, the baby will be back in daycare, and I’ll take some time to rest. This week is the daycare’s Summer break and as tiring as it is to be carrying the princess more, I think it’s good to get acclimated to caring for a baby all day long before the newborn comes. A friend of mine, just had his first kid last night. Once I get some rest we’ll start preparing for the new baby, there’s all sorts of equipment to pull out of storage, assemble and clean. This time around things seem easier since I know how they work now, there are so many little buttons that are partially hidden to avoid baby getting at them that were frustrating to figure out. There was also a pressure to not mess things up, where now I have confidence that I know what I’m doing, babies are a lot sturdier than I thought before having one. Yesterday we were back in the pool again and it’s amazing how quickly my daughter is taking to swimming. A couple days ago she was afraid to have her body in the water, now she’s sitting on the stairs half covered playing with her toys. With her floaties on she’s kept asking to go to the deep end, it’s fun for her and a little more work for me than where I can stand. It’ll be exciting to see her playing in the pool with her cousins this weekend, I’m sure they’ll be getting her riled up and she always like to show off for visitors. 

15 July 2024

We live in an old house, from a history of the county the original build was in the early 1800’s. We’ve had a couple people say the house is haunted, I’ve said if it is the ghosts like us. From the first days in our old house I felt like that place was cursed and since we’ve been at the new house there have been several lucky breaks. For example when I had been looking for a utility vehicle for weeks and one day I looked up from the kitchen and saw what I was looking for sale across the street, it worked out perfectly. Now in the middle of Summer when the grass was getting tall, my mower broke down. Things looked bad until we called the landscaper that used to mow at this property and he offered to come out the same day. Then we found a tractor and equipment repair shop three doors down the street, both are veteran owned. The landscaper got our place looking great and he charged the same price as the guy who mowed our old lawn once, even though this is at least 5 times the size. I was talking to him afterwards and he’s a fellow infantryman and we were in Iraq at the same time. We still have to talk to the repair shop, but I have faith everything will work out. After that I felt a lot better and we had a great weekend. The princess and I spent a lot of time swimming, she finally understood how to have fun in the water and even asked for me to put her floaties on. I also got some building done on an umbrella for extra shade around the pool and a power rack, basically a squat rack with pull up and dip bars. My pole barn gym has just about everything I ever wanted.

11 July 2024

It’s been 10 days since I last wrote and I’m feeling rough. Having my friend stay for five days was exhausting. Early on the podcast I read a Ben Franklin quote from Poor Richards Almanac that “fish and visitors stink after three days.” I love the guy, but the older I get the more set in my ways I become and I don’t want to do things that aren’t me. With moving to the woods I become more eccentric, so it took some time to recover from having guests, I’m still recovering. Having to take a week off from my normal routine means a lot of work gets backed up, then taking time to recover means more. While trying to rest I had been worrying about all the stuff I wish I was doing, so yesterday I got back to work mowing the lawn and my mower broke. One of the blades for the mower fell out, it was the one that got stuck with a big chunk of wood recently, so I’m suspicious that the bolt holding it in broke. I tried to replace the blade, but have no idea what I’m doing. There’s lawn mower repair places, but I don’t have a trailer to transport the thing, and the grass keeps growing. All that leaves me questioning why am I doing extra work like writing or the podcast, I don’t know if I’ll continue, but I’m tired right now, so I’m trimming the fat. These artistic endeavors are good because they create something new in me, nature is unforgiving though. In the meantime I don’t expect consistency in my art. 

1 July 2024

The dutchess has come and gone, it was a good weekend. The fourth of July holiday seems to have already started and I will be joining in on the festivities. There might not be a lot of writing this week as my Army friend is coming to visit today, he’s on his way right now. This morning I went to give the dutchess a tour of my property and my buggie was really struggling, hopefully it was only low on battery though it seemed like it had half a tank. This is the first time I’m needing to charge it, so I don’t know how it behaves when it gets low. Really I don’t even know if the charger works, hopefully the buggie will be back to normal by tonight. There was a heavy rain over the weekend and some trees on my boarder fell down, it seemed to have blocked the road since my queen heard chainsawing at 1 am the night of the rain. Currently there’s a team of workers cutting up the remains. Seeing a big tree go down is said, that area will look different when they’re done with it. Part of me living here is taking the land into a new age, there are lots of old tree here and they will be going down every year. The fallen trees need to be replaced and the large areas of grass need trees too. There’s always more work to do, but I pinched my back over the weekend and that will force me to rest as much as possible this week. Stay safe everyone.

28 June 2024

It’s early morning and the princess is still asleep, so not much has happened today. I’ll tell you about my blunder last night while editing. We recorded the podcast at noon and I was able to edit the video at night after the baby went to sleep. It was about 40 minutes long and I had done some cool new techniques I’ve learned since there was a moment where Flizo, who was recording in his car while vacationing with his family, turned off his car and it started beeping, I had to edit out the noise. There was another scene about 30 minutes in where I edited in an image we were talking about. After I was finished I wanted to cut off the last literal second of the video, I pressed delete to remove it. Apparently I had the wrong section highlighted and deleted the last 10 minutes of the video, because I was tired and wanting to be done with it I exported the file. At that point I can’t do edits to that video anymore, if I had noticed before I clicked export I could have hit undo and saved myself some headache. The situation is resolved now, it just meant I had to go back and re-edit the last 10 minutes, then I had to make a new video that put together the 30 minutes with 10 minute ending where I ran into some more problems. I couldn’t upload the ending since it was too large a file, there was another route I could take, that’s the great thing about computers is they can do anything you want it’s only a matter of knowing the different paths. Finding that new path was a learning experience and I learned a lot, like to be patient and triple check.

27 June 2024

Last night the queen and I used the pool for the first time officially. We’ve gotten in the pool already, that was before it was clean and the chemicals figured out. Additionally the water is fairly warm now where it’s been a little chilly anytime we got in before. Chilly water and uncertain of it’s cleanliness made it less enjoyable, now I can jump in without a care. As the pendulum swings good, it will swing bad, I was messing around with the pool remote and turned the light on. The light was on all night and attracted a lot of bugs into the pool, so this morning I had to spend some time cleaning them out, not that bad. My Army friend who’s coming to visit for 4th of July called yesterday to discuss his travel dates, I’m glad he called since I thought he was coming at the end of the week and he’s arriving on Monday. This is the beginning of our Summer activities, I don’t think there will be time for anymore prepwork, guests will take the house as it is. We might be recording the podcast in a couple hours as one of the co-hosts is traveling, we’ll see. My brain is scattered right now trying to keep track of what needs to get done, what needs to be prepared, and what I’m currently doing. I need to shave before recording and I’d like to do some pull ups as my daily exercise. Over the last couple weeks I’ve been introducing exercise into my routine, it’s been going well. This week will hopefully have five days where I’ve done something, though for now the exercising is small, I’m mostly concerned with the habit.

26 June 2024

The grass got mowed and the screw I was concerned about got lost. There’s a cover for the pulleys on each side and each cover has two screws, I even tightened all the screws before starting. In the comments I saw loctite will help, I also thought about getting a nut on the other end. For the time being I removed the cover on the problematic side since I’m not going to continue losing screws and with only one I worry about the cover rubbing against the pulley. Luckily the belt is inside the pulley and doesn’t get touched, I would get crazy if I had another belt break so soon, but it looked like the pulley was rubbing the cover and metal on metal is never good. Some riding mowers are built without any covers so it’s not the end of the world, just part of the long term relationship with my mower. The work bench got moved to the poll barn without any trouble, I’m still astonished at how light that thing feels since it didn’t always feel that way. My muay thai heavy bag also got delivered yesterday and that gave me more difficulty to move. The queen and I were joking that it was a body bag since it’s 6 ft long and 150 lbs, getting it in the buggie felt like weekend at Bernie’s. After everything was moved I assembled a stand for my dumbbells, which are 90 lbs each. I used to have the 52 lbs dumbbells, this is why the old feels lighter, the weights I deal with regularly have gotten heavier and the distances I need to travel have gotten longer. Looking at the next couple weeks, things are going to get pretty hectic, people will be visiting almost every week. Once we’re passed all the visitors a new chapter begins, count down to the new born.