The ground was still snowy/icy in the coop area so instead of working on that dad and I put a gutter on the goat barn and got my water barrel setup on blocks next to the barn. It actually all went together pretty easily, and although nothing on the barn is square we got it level-ish and sloping the right way so the water won't sit in the gutter and let mosquitoes breed.

I had to remount one of the cameras as it was blocked by the new gutter but I actually think it's better where it is now. I'm going to let it ride for a bit and if it's really the right spot I'll cut a hole in the barn siding to feed the wires though so it's a little more finished (vs. just running them up through the vent).

The woman is off having dinner with another shrink (Julie) so I'm on my own for dinner. Not feeling motivated to do much after workout outside all day, so this will have to do:

The NUC is really sensitive to power fluctuations. The lights flickered just for a moment and it shut down. Even the oven/microwave clock is fine. Looks like it's time to invest in another UPS.

I ordered up a few more of the cheapie cameras with the intent of replacing the glitching one on the barn (and returning it in the packaging of the new one) and adding an additional camera to the main barn facing off into the the future shop area. Well... after dorking around it appears that the glitching may be the windows software and not the camera itself as in version 4.0 it directly supports this camera now and changing to that instead of the generic auto-detect stuff seems to work better. Seems odd that just one camera would glitch a lot and none of the others, but checking the build date they're not all the same. There is a way to upgrade the cams, but who's going to risk doing that? Not me.

I did make it to the pistol match in spite of the snow... and got my ass handed to me. There were a lot less people last night and without the cadre of old farts and chicks who can't shoot to pad the numbers, I'm no longer mid pack. Sigh.

Going nuts not being able to work out or go to Krav or anything, so the woman helped me get creative at the house. The mattress is my punching bag of sorts (just doing 5x 45 second rounds of rapid punching as a conditioning thing), I can do timed runs of squats, plan, push ups, jumping jacks, etc in the open spot.

Because I'm not hitting well in the pistol league, I need more dry practice and having the numbers/letters on the wall and the table acting as a barricade the woman can call out combos and I have to try to hit them. I'm using my old wheel gun so I can keep firing dry without racking the slide, and if I can get used to it's 12+ pound DA trigger then the Glock is going to seem like it's a good trigger when I switch back. I keep getting good first shots and then shitty second shots, so I need to slow down and learn how to control the recoil on these modern guns better. The Kimber just sorta sits there and does nothing, these fat plastic things jump.

Damn these snow days! When I left this morning at 6:30am it was sorta trying to snow and they said it wasn't going to do much but I switched over to the 4runner just in case and headed in. There were only 3 people in yoga so the instructor asked if she could "practice with us". I guess that means she does all the moves instead of just some of them? Anyway, it was nice to have her doing all of them because that way I could see what they're supposed to look like. After class, the snow was really starting to come down and everything was closing so I headed home.

The roads were fine, not really icy for the most part:

However, later in the day things got bad and the scary S curves by the house were particularly bad. There was a 5 car pile-up here that we missed, but one dumb kid tried to go through and put his bald tired Honda in the ditch. His friends came to rescue him, and they had a Jeep and winch and everything, but no straps, no tow hooks, and no clue. I helped them out with all 3 and we easily got the car out. What I missed was them trying to winch it out just using the Jeep while I had gone home to get the extra straps and tools. Winching on ice without an anchor? Funny.

Got a strange call from Kathleen back in Sunnyvale. At first I figured it had to do with me going to LAX again to talk to Skyworks (really hoping for that) because Skyworks bought a bunch of crap based on my last visit, but instead she called to tell me that Chris Wellington committed suicide. Marc Soulie, the gunsmith that built my 300WSM was dating Chris's sister so he also mentioned it to me since he knows I know Chris. I asked Marc if there was any chance it was an accident or some strange foul play and not a suicide but he said that Chris left notes for each of his kids, and wrote "encouraging statements" on the mirrors in the house (which sounds freaky as shit to me), and left a final note with his body. Chris wasn't a gun guy, so no idea how he actually did it. Kristen thinks he probably hung himself which apparently is the common way for guys to do it if they don't shoot themselves. Women use pills to OD, guys not so much.

So obviously this is throwing everyone in Sunnyvale for a loop. There are some people that if you told me they did this I wouldn't be shocked at all, but Chris is not (was not?) one of those people. He seemed to have a good home life, wife was able to stay home with the kids as he made enough to cover everything, had just gotten a promotion last year, etc. Ed Yee said that Chris had mentioned to him about looking to leave Netapp, and I knew that as well because Chris wanted to start his own VAR. That's not a reason to off yourself though, wanting to strike out on your own and start a business is sorta a positive thing. We'll never know.

Yesterday was still really cold and the ice wasn't melting so it wasn't a good day for working outside on the coop area, but dad did stop by and we dropped the trees the woman picked for the mushroom log project. The logs have to sit on the ground for 10 days while the nutrients go back into the truck and then I can whack all the limbs off and cut them into sections for stacking. The woman has to order the mushroom spoor plugs and sealing wax and then we can setup some mushroom logs.

Also yesterday I sold off that S&W .38 revolver I had. I got it in a trade last year, fired it once, loaded some ammo for it but generally didn't carry it and don't ever plan to carry it so in my "simplify" theme it made sense to sell it off. I got a really good price for it, but the guy didn't want to buy the ammo or brass at reasonable rates so I just kept those. The brass I gave to the neighbour today, greasing the wheels for future tractor work, and the ammo I'll give to Jessie greasing the wheels for future hunting opportunities.

Last night the neighbours from behind us came over for beverages and snacks around 8pm. They're not bad people to be social with, probably 5-8 years younger than us with 2 kids but they're not totally kid crazy. They do do things other than drive their kids around which is nice. They were open to the idea of us sharing their wifi and internet service so they're going to look into what higher speed options are available to them and I'm going to work on how to get the wifi signal over to our house.

Today I got grandpa's old EM1600 Honda generator running again. There was a service tag on it from 2009 so I'm guessing it was worked on but dad doesn't think it was run. I remember trying to start it at some point in the past and it backfiring and lighting the air cleaner on fire due to all the starting fluid, but I can't find that in the journal anywhere so I have no idea when that was. It was in the driveway in Milpitas though so it must have been mid-2000s. The fuel must have had stabiliser in it because it wasn't as horrible as you would think for 5 year old gas, and there was very little crud in the carb. The float bowl was empty so maybe it was drained before storage? The fuel line was so brittle it snapped, but Michael had some so I didn't have to go anywhere other than net door to get new line. He also had some random o-rings which I needed because the fuel filter assembly was leaking due to a dried out o-ring.

With those kids running along the back fence I want better camera coverage out there so I've ordered another camera to put on the main barn looking north, but also moved the second barn main cam a little so it faces more toward the back. You can't see the future coop area but that's not a big deal because at some point there will be a solid wall there and you won't see anything else. It's not quite right, no reason to see that whole tree on the left and it's crooked but I'll fix that next weekend when I mount the other new one.

Made it to work a little bit yesterday, but then they said it was going to snow so I came home around 2pm. It did snow for a while, but not much of it stuck... but then overnight temps dropped to 14F so we're going to get ice all over everything again. I'm going a little nutty being in the house so much.

Normally the deer are standing around in the yard waiting for breakfast, but with the cold they've taken to just sitting around waiting.

It's a sure sign of boredom when I'm randomly cleaning guns. I overdid the froglube on the LCP and it was all gummed up and not cycling reliably so I took the time to take it apart, use some nasty solvents on it and clean it all up then hit it with the hair dryer and re-apply the froglube. Should be good to go now, will have to try it next month when I go to the range (league night doesn't count, can't be playing with extra random guns on league night).

Just changed my sync scripts so now every time I publish something to the hosted site it also rsyncs over to the backup server as well. I could have cron'ed the thing but since I manually push stuff via script anyway I would rather it's done then so my RPO is essentially zero.

Now that I'm thinking of it more, I should setup the apache configs over there too in place (vs just stored in a random dir) and have a server running so if this system dies I just change where the router redirects port 443 and my RTO can be... wait, if I round robin between the two systems all the time (sine they're always in sync at the time of publishing) I can basically always be up assuming there is power. Ha.

OK hold on there. Dual web servers is a fine idea, except that this backup server will hold more than the web pages and the idea was that it was a secure place to backup to, not another outwardly accessible server running apache. Back to the original idea then, just a sync target.

Some pictures of frozen stuff from today. First, the deer in the yard this AM for their morning treat:

And then this soda at the cafeteria at Allscripts. It must have been sitting outside or on a loading dock before they put them in the machine because inside each bottle was a frozen slush ball of coke zero. I didn't think that crap would freeze.

And some even more useless pics from the security camera. Stray cat headed toward the deck for his dinner, and then way from the deck 8 minutes later presumably with it's fill of sawdust packed cheap ass cat food.

We've been on winter lock down all day. First ice storm of the season rolled through and although there isn't much on the ground as far as snow, there is a solid 1/2" of ice or more over everything. I managed to drive the 4runner up to the main road but it hadn't been cleared so I just turned around. We walked up later in the day and it had been cleared so I can get to work tomorrow. Bummer.

I used part of the day to redo the power in the safe. It was all sloppily run by the installers and I had never gotten around to redoing it. Now that I'm putting my spare pi board inside the safe as a backup it seemed to be a good time to clean things up. The wall wart for the lighting is pretty big as is the plug and cord for the dehumidifier so it's impossible to make a really small bundle but at least it's neatly wire tied away.

Getting ready for work tomorrow packing my gym bag and I spent a few minutes shining my shoes and got the idea to cut some groves in the soles because they're so slippery on wet tile (and presumably ice). I then remembered that I bought two pairs of these shoes two years ago when I started at Netapp (more like 2.3 years I think). Anyway, the brand new pair is still in the closet. Probably don't want to break them in with the nasty weather, but at some point it's going to be time to swap.

So that's not good, the drive in my raspberry pi server died. Lost everything. Very scary. I think I've managed to piece the web sites back together based on old backups so that's good. I'll be automating those backups now though, don't want to rely on luck a second time. I still have to re-write some of my processing scripts, lost the code because I wasn't backing up my home dir at all. Doh.

The camera by the poop bin area trips a lot, mostly for glitches and squirrels playing in the stick pile I still need to chip up. This time however it actually caught some kids running along the back. No idea whose they are because the people who's yard backs up to ours without a fence have little tiny kids that aren't girls... so these two must have come from a long ways away as there are no breaks in the fenceline up to the main road as far as I know.

Saturday we cooked a huge portion of the day for mom's birthday dinner. We made pasta, a veal marinara sauce and a lemon chicken sauce, rolls, salad, butternut squash soup and spice cupcakes. The rolls were a new recipe and were somewhat of a disaster, everything else was just OK. I'm not sure if we're just getting used to fresh pasta and sauces or if these were just not our best efforts. Mom liked them all the same, and her sister visiting from Ohio didn't complain.

Yesterday before cooking we went out to Mebane and got some cinder block off a dude from craigslist, and then today we spent a few hours in home depot (and almost $800) getting lumber to build the chicken palace. It's going to be more than just a coop and run, so palace is a fitting term. Dad and I are going to get the main structure built and the siding, wire and roof up and then the woman can figure out exactly how she wants the interior finished up. I figure we're going to be in it $2500 by the time it's all done with the interior finished out, the lighting, water system, etc, etc. Oh, and of course 'coop cam'!

While I had dad here and working on stuff, we put in the second wall safe in the closet. I've had it in the garage for almost a year now, and finally it's installed. It went in much easier than the one we put in the wall in Milpitas. Here the studs were actually the right distance apart, and in normal places.

Writing the code a second time went rather fast, and the output is cleaner now. One thing I don't have is all my DNS files... so it's going to take some poking around to figure out what all the IPs in the house are assigned to. Sigh. More dorking around.

Ellen sent me a picture of her table setup for a dinner party she was hosting and I noticed some new artwork on the wall in the background. I had her send me a pic of that and it turns out that we have similar taste in art. She says mine is "so 80s" but will the kids in 2035 not be saying hers is "so 10s"?

I survived the trip to PHX, and could have used another day or two out there because I was actually starting to relax toward the end. Yea, even staying with the woman's parents by myself I was able to relax a little. Mostly the trip involved reading on the patio while feeding the random bunnies that came by, hiking, and taking a tour of the Frank Loyd Wright architecture school.

Saturday I took a CCW class so I could get my out of state AZ permit. It's not necessary, AZ fully recognises my NC permit so the AZ permit is sorta redundant. It also doesn't give me any states that I don't already have, so it's more of just a thing to do to take up some time. The laws are pretty much the same when you get right down to it which was surprising to me. I guess there are only so many ways to say the same thing at the state level, and since I don't qualify for "elite" status in either state I don't have to worry about all the bonuses the .gov gives to itself.

The class itself (beyond learning the laws) was about the worst class I've ever taken, ever. I'm pretty sure I could have knocked that guy out of the way and done a better job presenting his own materials. His 1970s vintage self protection talk was at some level funny, but at most levels just sad. People who take that class and think they're ready for anything beyond filling up some paperwork are sadly mistaken.

Liz and her husband each played $1 in the True Blood slot machine in my honour, and came up poorer for the effort. People do strange things in my honour.

Also, ispell, learn to recognise honor.

5:39am and I'm sitting in RDU. At least I'm not working and don't have to dress the part. Although, speaking of dressing the part... while in line to check my bag there was a dude in front of me that was pretty much just a taller version of me. Bald, 5.11 pants, cool jacket, checking in with a firearm. The luggage chick was already primed to deal with the extra form and already annoyed that she had to touch his gun case. I at least had my lock box inside my main bag (secured in with a cable around the suitcase frame so the lock box can't "accidentally fall out" into some union thug's hand in the baggage area) so she didn't have to touch it and make faces.

Monday afternoon was my first private lesson with Molotov, the head dude at the Krav school. I thought I was going to be ready to test this next time around and these privates would just put the final polish on everything but apparently not. After my less than stellar performance on some of the basics he said I should wait. Sigh. He does push pretty hard though, I was close to either dying or puking or both by the end of the hour but it did help. At the regular class on Tuesday the instructor said I was showing a lot more aggression and moving with "much more purpose". Amazing what a little kick in the butt and an example of how it should be done does for a guy. The regular instructors let us get away with too much crap, and unless someone points it out you don't really realise what you're doing wrong.

OK holy crap, as I was typing this a 2nd clone of me showed up. This guy is freakin' exactly like the other guy, he's even wearing coyote colored pants and a green shirt like the first macro me vs. my tan pants and green shirt. They're both wearing north face jackets too. WTF? Creepy.

Duck house project complete. We got a strip of rubber matting at the used building supply store for $2 so they ducks wouldn't burn their feet on the hot deck, and I put a hinged "duckling ramp" on there because the woman was worried the little ducks wouldn't be able to hop back up onto the house. Wearing mom's waders the woman went out and measured the depth where she wanted it and then pushed it out and and dropped the brick anchor. Now we just need some ducks.

The neighbours had a magnolia tree they didn't want so they brought it over and planted it out back for us. I have no idea if it will survive the transplant but it didn't take much to plant with the back hoe.

I pulled some of the rotting railroad ties out from where the coop is going to be and started roughing in the area with cinder blocks. I ran out of blocks so I went over to the other side of the yard where I saw some and started digging them up. That was a 3+ hour mistake. Turns out the blocks were around a sand pit that the former owner used as a can dump. We spent a ton of time digging cans out of the sand; so many cans that we filled the recycle bin and still had a pile left. That's a lot of sand.

I used some of that sand along with broken bricks and concrete chunks to fill in the 3 large pot holes on the main road. I've been meaning to do that for a while and the sand and gravel just made it that much easier.

We also (and I think this is what was the most tiring project of the day) pulled out the last of that cattle fencing we found half buried in the back. The garbage can is already full so the woman will have to cut this stuff up and fill the trash with it over the next few weeks.

I was going to go to the range today but after 6 hours of work in the yard I was just not up to moving much at all, so I quietly passed on the range trip. At least I've got fresh cookies baked up from yesterday so the evening isn't a total loss. We've also got some of that funky beer the woman got at the store the other day, both of which are actually pretty good in spite of what I first thought:

Got some projects finished up yesterday, including finishing assembling the swing, putting the plates on dad's trailer and figuring out how dad's chipper works and blowing through a huge pile of sticks the woman had accumulated. His chipper is pretty nice, really easy to start 8 HP Honda engine, 3" log chute and a brush chute and fairly quiet as chippers go. Also, free! The only downside is that the discharge chute is toward the trailer hitch so if I had it bolted to the 4runner it would be throwing wood chips toward the truck, but it mostly discharges down which means you get a big pile you have to shovel out of the way fairly often. Kinda odd, it should be reversed and toss them out the back. Most front discharge ones shoot them out high to get them into the back of the truck it's tied to, not into the bumper.

Thursday I used one of my "volunteer time off" days from work to go to the capitol with Grass Roots NC, a pro-2A organisation (and a 501 non-profit so I can use my VTO days with them). With the new legislature starting up they wanted to just wander around to all of the reps and remind them that they're around and represent a huge number of voters and mostly just say "hi" in preparation for lobbying later in the year. My parents actually went as well, mom managed to get up and walk around in spite of her chemo. I was kinda shocked you can just walk around the capitol building and talk to the reps (if they're there). No armed guards, no metal detectors, no nothing. Totally not what I was expecting, and the secretaries we spoke to weren't douchebags at al. Mom really had a good time talking to people and wants to go again when she can talk directly to her senator. Appointments are easy to get, we just have to call/email and make it happen for her.

With the first 4 services baked into the price of the Prius it seems dumb not to take advantage of the "free" dealer services. I didn't want to go back to where I bought it because it's really inconvenient so I took it to the close dealer. They were about the same speed as the other dealer but these guys actually had to change the oil (changes every 10k). I spent some of my time in the dealership wandering around and talking to one of the sales managers, and part of my time in one of the lounges. They have a big one with lots of TVs and dart boards and whatnot, and then this other one:

Back in 2009 or so I got the idea to swap out the failing battery in my beard trimmer. I found a 2-pack of NI CAD AA batteries with solder tabs and installed one in the trimmer and tossed the other in with my random electronic parts. Today, remembering where that extra battery was I finally got around to replacing it a second time. If I really did get 5 years out of the battery then in 2020 I'm going to have to see if NI CAD still exists anywhere and order one up.

I put in February's ammo order. I sorta violated the rule and ordered an extra half case, but shipping on that extra 500 rounds was only $1 more than for the first cast so it seems dumb not to toss just a little extra in the box.