life in the old lane

The new phone is almost 100% good to go. I have a couple of security apps that are tied to a specific phone. So, calls had to be made and complicated revalidations completed. But, I seem to be able to get into everything I need.  And, the phone and the watch decided to play nice all on their own last night. But, the phone still required a factory reset, so it is taking a while to get it back to the way it was. This is a totally first-world problem.

Spent a lot of time resting today.  I decided that this is a side effect of the Covid shot I got yesterday. 

Rain on the agenda for tomorrow. Another excuse to chill.

The pictures I took out my window look OK. But much more study is required.

What displeases me is that the Pixel 8 Pro refuses to acknowledge the existence of the old Pixel watch.  The phone keeps whining that “something went wrong”.  Now that’s really helpful. I went so far as to turn the old phone off to avoid any bluetooth confusion. I am going to leave that one for tomorrow. 

Got my New Improved Covid shot this morning. And while at the grocery store pharmacy, I spied Artificial Intelligence Coke. 

Think I’ll Google my phone/watch problem. And then tottle off to bed. Well, that didn’t take long. According to Reddit, many people are sharing my pain. Somehow, that makes me feel much better. 

It took about 15 minutes to get set to sell.  We sold all of the wreaths. I think we could have sold a few more. But, I doubt that we could have made any more.

---

Gratitude

The project was fun. Grateful that we made a nice chunk of change for the foundation. And really GRATEFUL that the project is finished.

---

We sold about 40 boxes. In fact, we had to make additional boxes to resupply our table. Fortunately, we could do that.  Just had to run upstairs and pick up some folding paper.

There is an unsettling amount of Covid around The Building. I will be going to get a Covid shot tomorrow morning.

What are we thinking? Nobody is going to pay money for scraps of paper. But, they might just because the money is going to a good cause. I got a little sad packing up the wreaths to go. My neighbor and I worked so hard on them. We wouldn’t mind giving them to our friends but we don’t want to see them go away.

Travel news. You all know that I love riding the train. And fortunately, I have the time and money to indulge myself.  Leaving Kona on Xmas Eve. Landing in San Francisco late that night. Then I have about 10 hours to get in the city where I catch a bus at 8AM Xmas Day and get up to Emeryville and The California Zypher to Chicago. Then the Captial Limited into DC arriving December 28. I would have liked to take Via Rail across Canada. But, it will be winter. And, my clothes will be summer. I know that I can make this journey with luck, summer clothes, and my raincoat.  In Canada, I might freeze to death. 

Help, I am stuck in Nap Land and can not escape. After doing a lot of walking and some working today I took a nap. But, I can not seem to get out of nap mode.

I knew it was going to be an interesting day when I found “my” database update process stopped at 6:30 AM by a “Generic JDBCException”. Which is to say: A GenericJDBCException is a type of exception thrown by the Hibernate object-relational mapping (ORM) framework when it encounters a JDBC-related error that it cannot handle more specifically. Which really means that the input data was completely FUBAR.  

Gratitude

---

Grateful to be enjoying an interesting dotage.

---

What’s a lot of walking? For me, 3.6 miles is a lot. And the database is getting better. 

 

Also, time to lecture the orchids. I put two of them on notice that if they didn’t bloom in the next 12 months they would become compost. I am more patient with the orchids than I am with most people.

After worrying about problems that I could not do anything about for most of the day, I did some “gardening”. 

Think next week is going to be busy. Think my primary objective is to not get Covid again before I make it to Kona. 

Last year the Monarch Butterfly landed on the endangered species list. And a couple of days ago it was removed.  Is this a good thing? Politics? Poor science? Or what? Lots of things I don’t understand anymore. 

A sure sign of coming winter in the Old Bat’s Cave today. The heating pad returned to the comfy chair. “Computer, heating pad on”. And the little fan retired to the closet for another season. 

Got Sonoma settled in on the Mac. I immediately raced around and made sure that it looked just the same as before.  And, all of my “important” software seems to still function. I checked on my work database. It’s still not playing nice with the system that feeds it. Fortunately. Not My Problem.

I now have 300GB of free space on the Mac. And, after giving it an entire year to settle out, I updated my password manager. I really hated doing that. I had all manner of backups. But, 1Password 8 is now happily installed on the Mac, on 2 iPads, and on my Android phone. 

Sometimes it fun to look back. What was I thinking in 2010? Day 5 of Fall Watch

Doctor says that I am OK. Except for the parts that aren’t. Meds tweaked. A couple of shots. A few more blood tests. Nothing dramatic or scary. But the Doctor and I did agree that while I am not knocking on death’s door, I am standing on the porch. This evening I shared the cocktail hour with a woman who will be 96 next week. Her daughter called to find out how she was after seeing her cardiologist. She said, “I am sitting down and having a drink with my rowdy friends”. Nobody is promised tomorrow. But, you never know…

Today’s big adventures included a rather serious database wrinkle at work. And while I was out having dinner, I let the Mac update to Sonoma. Earlier I had scoured the disk for files to offload since I was down to 90GB free. How exactly did I use up 900GB?

Girls and Boys. Fat Bear Week is coming to a close.

These are screenshots that I took from the various webcams. Give a look. After dinner on the East Coast seems to be a good time to catch bears.

Katmai Bear Cams.

No big surprise, my dentist is next door to the apartment I  lived in long ago. The dentist has 2 sons, so the practice will most likely outlive me. The teeth are “OK”. 

I ordered a new camera this morning. Actually, it’s a Pixel 8 Pro, which is also supposed to make phone calls. Since Google is my cell carrier, it makes sense for me to use a Pixel phone. My current phone is only 2 years old, and I don’t really need a new one. But I’m trading it in, and I hope to bring myself to dispose of all of my camera gear, except for the GoPro, before I go to Hawaii on Halloween.

The Twilight Zone

---

Getting rid of the camera gear is part of my death-cleaning process. There comes a time in life when it feels good to have things simplified and ordered.

---

The 8 Pro is supposed to have a better camera than my 6 Pro. 

Doctor tomorrow. 

I haven’t played with MidJourney in several months. They seem to have many new features. I’ll have to spend some quality time playing with it soon. 

There is absolutely zero going on in my world at this instant. And, that’s not a bad thing. 

Dentist tomorrow. Doctor day after.

Nine years. Not sad today. Just very grateful for all the wonderful years we shared. The dear man was my sea anchor. And he still is. 

I checked last year’s blog entry just now to see what I wrote 365 days ago. Strangely enough, on Oct 3, 2022, I resolved to get my end-of-life details sorted out. And guess what? I actually did that. Now I am feeling pretty smug with myself. 

Gratitude

---

Thanks, Carlton. For my life.

---

Today, I decided that I should get rid of all of my camera gear except for the GoPro. The phone doesn’t look very professional.  But, it actually works great. The only thing I might miss is being able to take long lens photos from the Old Bat Cave window. The US Capital may melt down any instant now. 

The outside “adventure” today was a walk to Trader Joe’s. I did not buy anything “pumpkin spice”. I did not need anything at Traders. I needed a destination to walk to. 

A couple more from the recent real adventure.

Walking around Pond Inlet aka Mittimatalik on a simply miserable wet and windy afternoon, I come upon a polar bear skin curing in a yard. And that made the entire journey worthwhile. I was somewhere I had never been. Never even imagined. 

I saw these bears through my binoculars. But Dom was armed with a 600mm lens and he was young and strong enough to handhold 600mm steady from a zodiac.