Silicon Valley Redneck

Life remains largely unbloggable.

Much disruption in life, most of it not for public consumption.

Aside from everything else, there's this flu making the rounds... yeah.  Joy picked it up somewhere, maybe at the gym, and then I got it.  Not much fever, but a nasty persistent deep chest cough, and my throat got badly messed up from all the coughing.  We're almost recovered.  Almost.  Now I have a bad sinus headache on top of the lingering crud.

Not doing an actual garden this year, so it's a land-maintenance year - killing weeds, turning the secondary field into an alfalfa-rich hayfield, attempting to tenderize the soil in the middle of the main field by generous application of gypsum and further tilling, etc.  Probably plant the main field in clover sometime June-ish.

We're finally getting around to some long-delayed things, like getting electricity to the barn and a well to keep the pond full (though, for the third rainy season in a row, there hasn't been enough runoff to fill it).  Neither of those is done yet, but at least they're in the queue.  We'll also need to add a machine shed, out behind the barn, so the yard equipment can go in there and I can turn the barn into a proper workshop.

There are many swallow-type birds flitting around, and maybe helping rid us of wasps and such.  I think the ones I saw most recently were purple martins.  Maybe next year we'll get around to setting out a purple martin house to encourage them.

With the longer days and warm weather, the chickens and ducks are producing vast quantities of eggs.  Eat some, give many away, out out the no-longer-fresh ones for scavengers; maybe next spring, if we have the duck colony established down by the pond, we'll hatch another several of the duck eggs (or just leave them and see how the ducks do at hatching them).

Ah, well.  Time to do some chores, make a phone call or two (now that I can use my voice again, somewhat), and try to figure out what else I need to be doing.  (There are multiple to-do lists for work, one of which seems to have this-week items on it.)

Still here, but life is ever more chaotic

Life is dominated by non-bloggable stuff.  Joy is exceedingly busy.  I'm second-hand busy, as well as being busy with my own stuff (much non-bloggable) that I need to catch up on.

Things I can mention?

Huckleberry is mostly doing OK.  Other critters (other cats, four remaining chickens, thirteen ducks, many frogs, and one house-pigeon) are doing well.

I got the new feed shed sufficiently done to use through the winter.  Come spring, we'll take the tarp off the roof and apply more of a permanent (and less flappy) roof covering - the plan is to laminate on a layer of vinyl-coated aluminum sheet, since we have lots of it.  This calls for boring weather and a supply of low-grab construction adhesive.

I've made another start on getting the lab area in the garage organized, with a focus on clearing off one long table so I can put shelving above it for storing parts bins and such, and then using the table itself for SMT assembly stuff - solder-stencil machine, mini reflow oven, and eventually a junior pick & place machine.  This is taking a while (apart from anything else, the entire garage is severely cluttered).

Just before the current storm arrived, I threw together a little shelter for two duck feeders, so they can have a couple of days' supply of food available when we're having rain for two days straight.

Yes, we're having rain yesterday and today, and a bunch more over the weekend, and maybe a few inches of snow a week from now (actual weather is mighty unpredictable).  The pond hasn't filled much so far, but we should be getting plenty of runoff soon.

My Medigap card came in yesterday's mail, and I think the Part D card is on the way.  Now I need to figure out how to get myself off the old plan while keeping Joy on it - guess that involves a call to BCBS, in among all the other calls I need to be making, assuming I have an occasional block of undisturbed time to make phone calls.

I'm hoping the chaos will be under control by April.  Maybe that will happen.  Maybe.

Officially a geezer.

Yup, ASCII 'A' today.  The big 0x41.

Got a letter yesterday informing me that my Medicare card is in the works, meaning that I should be receiving the magic number needed to sign up for Medigap and Part D plans.  (Joy did a bunch of research on the subject, and this seems to make more sense for me than the Medicare Advantage approach.)

Mostly a mundane day here, dealing with the usual critter-tending and a modicum of tech stuff.  Little mini-party this evening.

Various nonbloggable stuff remains ongoing.  Probably have something about it by spring.

Short daylight, dry indoor air, and freezing nights: yes, we're going into winter.  Soon, I'll be needing to run household power out to the poultry pens for some heated water bowls / pools.  And, while the feed shed is very close to being usable, I didn't get the new, improved, bigger henhouse built.  Oh, well.

The seasons go zipping by

Here it is, coming up on the end of November already, with a hard freeze in the forecast just a few days out.

I'm still trying to deal with a bunch of non-bloggable stuff, and running into strange obstacles.  And!  I need to figure out this "Medicare" thing before my birthday.

Currently building a feed shed out near the chicken pen.  It's somewhat slow going, and having such so few hours of daylight doesn't help.  I keep having to wrap it in tarps to keep rain out, and then take the tarps off to resume work.

After the shed, I'm supposed to be building a new henhouse.  I really wanted to get that done before winter, because it's supposed to be big enough that the chickens could stay their house, with food and water, on the really cold days.  This may not be happening.  Oh, well: we got them through last winter, though it was a lot of work.

There's still a backlog of stuff to hire people to do - drill a well so we can keep the pond full during the dry season; build a machine shed / farm garage; turn the barn into a workshop with electricity, plumbing, and drywall; various things around the house....

There are two more sheds on the agenda for spring; one, down by the garden area, is ambitious enough that I'll probably get one of the shed companies to come out here and build it for me.  Oh... and we should also set up duck habitat down by the pond, and that'll call for building a bigger, unified duck house (we currently have the original flock in a small house, and the additional birds in a bigger one).

And there are tech projects I haven't been doing.  Chicken-coop automation and monitoring, perimeter monitoring, all kinds of stuff.

Quick update

The hen that seemed to be doing well died not long after the last update.

We still don't have a real diagnosis for Huckleberry - his tests kept coming back either negative or ambiguous - but he got a big prednisone shot last week and now he seems to be doing much better.

Last Wednesday and Thursday: abundant rain.  Something close to 7" in two days.  Runoff!  The pond is noticeably higher!  Yay!

Last Friday: tail end of the hurricane.  Fair bit of wind, from random directions.  Some additional rain.  No big deal.

Meanwhile, within 20 miles eastward, there was a lot of storm damage.  And over yonder, in the mountains of North Carolina?  Vast destruction.

Friday, and over the weekend, there was enough runoff coming down the rivers to do a lot of damage in areas not particularly hit by the storm itself.  Douglas Dam was dumping water to avoid bigger problems, leading to evacuations along the French Broad River (one within a mile of here) and significant damage in some places.

We're 40 feet above road level, so safe against and plausible flood... but had the hurricane come that little bit west of where it actually went?  Some of the nearby neighbors might have had serious flood damage.

Anyway, that's how things are at the moment.  Much busy.  Abundant duck eggs.  Mad scramble to get various things done, with new things always cropping up.

Critter update

The ailing hen has made a full recovery, and is back to running around with the flock.

I've started leaving the gate of the pen open for a few hours a day, so the chickens can run around on the lawn.  (The duck pens are still mostly grassy; ducks seem to be less destructive of lawns, though they do make holes anywhere the ground gets muddy.)

Huckleberry seems to be doing somewhat better, between changed food and some meds we've tried.  He just had a followup ultrasound and a biopsy to try to determine whether he has small-cell lymphoma or just IBD (waiting on lab results).  Now we're supposed to start him on an anti-inflammatory treatment regardless.

Life remains busy, and there are so many distractions these days!

The months go zipping by

Seldom a normal day.

We still don't know what's wrong with Huckleberry, though a weekly injection of vitamin B-12 seems to help.  It sure appears that some sort of pathogen ought to be behind the slow-moving outbreak of cat illnesses that started last Spring, but all the tests (including some very expensive ones) are coming up negative.

And this afternoon another of the chickens suddenly came down very sick; we're thinking she's probably eggbound, though going from apparently normal to collapse in 5 hours seems awfully rapid.  Joy has been trying home treatments for egg binding, with no success (and hasn't even been able to confirm the presence of an egg).  By the time I noticed that she was in distress, it was already too late in the day for a trip to the regular vet, and taking a chicken to an all-night emergency vet (especially when I'm in no shape to be driving, given the late hour) doesn't seem like something we're doing.

Politics is ever a distraction this summer, and then there's the global outbreak of rabid antisemitism - I'm not sure how much of that is real and how much is rent-a-mobs and bots, but it's certainly worrisome.

Work is back, so I'm bashing on FPGA stuff, and interface stuff, and need to find time and focus to do some heavy pondering and documentation on firmware reliability/testability and distribution issues.

Oh, yes: multiple FedEx packages from my Labor Day shopping were initially shown as arriving yesterday and today; one of the yesterday packages arrived today, and it looks like everything else is coming tomorrow.  Maybe.  FedEx's tracking has been kinda optimistic today.

And now it's definitely past my bedtime.

Update, Friday evening:  The ailing hen laid an egg this morning... an unusually large turtle egg.  Lack of a shell might explain why Joy couldn't feel an egg, though I'm not sure how a squishy egg like that gets stuck.  We have a suspicion there's another on the way.  Anyway, she's doing better now, eating and drinking and walking a little.  I added some calcium citrate to the main waterer, so they'll all get yet another calcium supplement.

How is it Friday already?

That week went by in a hurry.

Huckleberry is still ailing, and we still don't know for sure why.  Probably needs another trip to the vet to get his sinuses flushed or something, and maybe some further attempt at diagnosis.  There was a suggestion of sending him to a specialist for a biopsy, but we're holding off on that for now.

Looks like we'll be building a small outdoor aviary for the house pigeon, as Joy seems to be allergic to him, maybe.  We can put him out next to the ducks.

Aaaand... that colony of cute li'l bunny rabbits under the back deck?  Seems to have turned into a colony of skunks.  Or maybe one skunk went down there and got into an argument with a rabbit, or a woodchuck, or some other critter-that-lurks-under-decks.  Phew!

(Now, where do I find several thousand gallons of tomato juice for washing under the deck?)

Another Monday comes and goes.

Huckleberry seems to be doing moderately better today - maybe the "just in case" antibiotic the vet gave him on Friday, or the appetite stimulant we've been giving, or Joy giving the pet-pigeon area a thorough cleaning, or some combination?  In any case, the vet is having a further test run on th blood sample from Friday.

The team of plumbers showed up bright and early this morning, put in a hard morning's work (both the old water heaters very well and truly sludged up, and refused to drain out the bottom drain ports), and now we're many bucks poorer but once again have a working water heater at each end of the basement, and shiny new water heaters they are!

The plumber recommends flushing them annually, so I've added that to my "sometime every August" list.

Joy's dental problem is partially addressed, and is out of semi-panic mode.

Chipzilla stock is not doing well at all, though for the moment it seems to have settled at a miserable new normal.  Just heard from my investment banker (or whatever his title is), wanting to make sure I was OK with that - well, I don't want to sell while it's down like this, now do I?  Fortunately, I don't see a need to sell off my remaining shares any time soon; maybe it'll recover, as it has a couple of times over the decades.

Work... well, it's mostly been pondering plus a string of e-mails negotiating what needs implementing and how to go about it.  I think the project is stabilizing.  I have the new source file started, and the framework kinda-sorta in place.

And, has WWIII officially started yet, or is it still in stealth mode?

Cat update

Huckleberry is not doing well this weekend - seems whatever his trouble is, formerly slowly developing, it's getting a bunch worse.

We just heard back from the vet.  Nothing exciting in the lab work; he should basically be fine, according to the tests - but the vet suspects maybe Cryptococcus.  After hearing that the cats have been exposed to various birds, he really suspects Cryptococcus.  Now we need to keep Huckleberry going until we can get an actual diagnosis, and, if positive, start treatment (which apparently is a whole bunch of Not Fun).  And... we'll need to get the other surviving cats tested.

Gah.  Tomorrow gets really busy: Joy has an urgent dental appointment; we have a plumbing crew coming to replace both water heaters (the less obviously corroded one having sprung a leak last week); and now there's the Huckleberry problem.  And there's some work I ought to be doing.

Additional:  Now we're wondering whether Cryptococcus might be triggering Joy's migraines and my sinus crud.

Huh. Missed my 20th bloggiversary!

First post on this blog was 20 Jul 2004.

I vaguely recalled the end of my last official job, and the beginning of the blog, having been in August, but I guess I was misremembering.  August of that year was filled with the first consulting gig, hiking, rearranging my home work space, and Linux World Expo - anyone remember that?

 

Meanwhile, here in East Tennessee, we've had a rainy week in addition to the hot and humid weather.  The plants like it.  The grass likes it so much that some areas I'd omitted to mow for a couple of weeks had gotten tall enough to stall the mower if I went at them at anything like full speed.

Chickens and ducks are doing well.  We took Huckleberry to the vet on Friday - he's been having a case of the wet sneezles, and seems to have low energy lately.  X-rays didn't turn up anything unusual, so now we're waiting on blood work.

Ah, well.  Time to go fetch the mail, check the eggs, and maybe mow a few more walkways and/or lawns.

Google Wallet/Pay, again....

Last used in 2012, by Joy.

So it was set up with her name, old phone number, and old address - all for a 99¢ app purchase.  Had my credit card (long since expired) as payment method.

Looks like there's no way to treat it like an actual wallet, and put in a modest amount of cash to cover random small spending.  So, set it up with a credit card with a low limit - it's not like I'll be using the fool thing to buy capital equipment.  (I guess another option would be to link it to a bank account that never had much money in it, but that would be a nuisance.)

Why now?  Well, most of the parking in and around Knoxville nowadays is scan-to-pay, with a QR code for the URL for the payment site, because nowadays everybody has a smart phone and a credit card.  I assume Google Pay can be used with this, to avoid digging out a card and entering the number every freaking time (so far, Joy has been the one dealing with this, digging out a card every freaking time and trying to avoid having the number saved by either the site or the browser).

I may end up using it for other things, too, now that it's set up again.  Or maybe not.

So here we are, half past July.

Ongoing non-bloggability remains, for now, non-bloggable.  I expect to catch up on those events before the year is out.

As for July so far....

My favorite cat, Southmoon, died at the beginning of the month - she had a sudden recurrence of last year's gastrointestinal trouble, only worse, and just crashed.  Buried in the orchard with some of her favorite toys (but no 21 bottle rocket salute).

We had family visiting for the holiday week, which went better than it might have.

Lots of fireworks for the Fourth - we had a bunch, various neighbors had some, and the family across the road put on their grand spectacle that's usually a day early but this year was on the actual holiday.

The Venerable Prius is in the shop.  It was in a local shop a couple of months ago because rodents had (again) munched the fuel line; this time it was rodent munchage of something to do with evaporative emissions, the wire from the right rear wheel speed sensor (the one nearest the other munched things), causing the BRAKE and ABS lights to come on, and, since this was a trip to the Toyota dealership, I'm having them replace the right front power door lock actuator, which hasn't worked right in several years.

Just to add to the fun, as I was on my way to the dealership  (in unscheduled drizzle, which made the presumed ABS malfunction somewhat worrisome), the master caution light came on, with the big red PS indication.  Which, according to the Internets, does indeed mean power steering trouble.  But!  That seems to have cleared itself.  Might have been the week aux battery (the old one is currently in the car, while the newer one sits on the battery tender in the garage, and the car hadn't been driven in a week, so I had to jump-start it when I checked on it yesterday evening).

Anyway, time to put out the rodent bait again, and see if the critters will eat the yummy vitamin D enriched rodent chow instead of my wires and fuel hoses.

Guess the planet!

It's hot and humid, and the vegetation grows absurdly fast.  Also, there are bugs - lots of bugs.

I must be building fences and chasing ducks in the swamps of Venus!

And not just working on fencing and dealing with poultry - I also need to replace the dehumidifier.  The one that was in the basement when we got here lasted another year or so.  The one that replaced it lasted two years.  The one that replaced that lasted one year.  Having 80% humidity in the basement is Not Good; while native Venusians may like living in a sauna, it's not at all good for stored things.

At least we're starting to get some rain again.  The weird weather pattern that brought the heat wave also deflected the rain, so we were having heat and humidity but the yard wasn't getting watered.

Oh, well.  Back to pushing bits around while waiting for outdoors to cool off enough to resume work on the fence projects.

Ongoing non-bloggability is ongoing.

You'd think that life aboard a flying saucer wouldn't involve much running around after wayward ducks, but that's been a big feature of my days lately.

At least the duck containment field is now upgraded, so they mostly don't get loose at random times.