Hard to believe this is the end
Big Red, September 14, 2011 - December 31, 2025.
Wednesday December 31, 2025 — Big Red
And this the end of 2025 ⌛
Did you think it would really end this way? Was it how you wanted to end? Years are gambled and lost like summer wages as Ian Tyson once sung.
It seems like it was just the end of 2015, not the end of a decade later. 🕒 Working a half day today, it’s just me and a single operator out of my team seven people, so it would be a busy day if it wasn’t the end of the year and things likely pretty slow. Then it’s to pick up a few things from the store, pull a few things out of the truck, go for one last drive with Big Red 🛻 and then this chapter of life will be done. Just memories. The plates go back on Monday at lunch time to the DMV at Empire Plaza and I will drop insurance that afternoon.
It seems strange that the year is coming to end 
in such a definative fashion. Red’s retirement puts a closure on the year, kind of unlike any in my memory. 
Tomorrow starts the car free life, which will last until at least late March but I’m not so set so in getting another big red (?!) truck right away, even I have been reading and studying up the various models available and scheming on how the best way to approach the buying process in a scientific way, to build the rig I really want. Maybe I’ll buy used, but it can be hard to compare used cars, not buy a lemon and get the vehicle you want. If you want a Honda Civic, then sure buy that 20 year old car, it probably still runs fairly reliable. I’ll start taking a serious look at trucks in Syracuse, Glens Falls, Newburgh, Bennington and Oneonta when March starts and work my way in-bound towards Albany. If I have to get a bus ticket to buy the truck I want at a good price and spend a day in North Syracuse, so be it. But first I want to become an expert at the car buying process, so I can get the out the door price on vehicles I’ve carefully studyed the ins and out, and then once I’m good with what I’m buying cement the deal but not a minute before it. 
It’s stupid to rush to buy a truck so I can camp in woods in middle of winter to smoke grass and watch some plastic burn. I can at least smoke grass at home or in the park somewheres, at least some things are legal in New York even if you got to pay $2 fucking dollars to the state and wait each time you want to buy ammo. 
And people are like, don’t you want to plastic house in suburbs with high speed internet?
I let slip in work that I’m retiring Red, 
oh and did everybody have advice on buying cars, mostly along the lines you should buy a 20-year old Honda Civic, they’re so cheap and frugal. Uses almost no gas you drive back and forth to the mall and suburban office complex. I guess if I was in that part of my career delivering pizzas for $5.15 an hour, and I lived somewhere I had to drive to the suburban office and needed to visit a dozen shops every day to pack full that 96-gallon garbage and woke plastics recycling dumpster every week, I’d go for the Honda. 
But the truth is I really hate driving in city traffic, though I admit probably those 20-year old Honda Civics everybody say are so amazing are easier to drive through traffic then a ginormous pickup with a Mini-Godzilla engine. Of course these are the people who love their plastic houses and can’t imagine anything worse then having a burn barrel for burnable trash and butchering your own livestock or putting down your sickly dog with a bullet. 
Man, do I love those cabins with tongue and groove and hate drywall and white walls to no end. Truth is with the amount of capital gains and income I have at this point, spending an extra $10k or $15k on the big pickup I actually want over a little Honda Civic, when spread over 10-14 years really is a pissy amount of money. It’s been a good year with the markets, 
I thought Trump was going to fuck us over with his buffoonery but ultimately the markets just plugged on, the world spun around 365 times and life went on. 
Trump is a disaster, but people forget how broken shit was before him, and things did need to be blown up, but maybe with TNT and not a nuclear bomb. 
Not having a vehicle I won’t ever have to think about the January weather except on the debate to ride my bike to work. 🚲 I guess in some ways riding to the store and using the bike does involve more consideration of weather, 🌨️ but at least I won’t have think about icy roads or washing my truck after today. 🚿 I can just stumble out of bed, 🛏️ and catch the bus downtown. But today I do have to clean the snow off Red one last time. It just seems funny to be saying that, one more time. It will be kind of nice, even if in some ways getting around will be a bit more challenging though not that much because I drive so little in the winter.
I want to do a lot of reading in January, 📚 and I need to get my monthly borrows out on Hoopla before the clock strikes midnight. ⚡I’ve also been thinking about getting my soldering iron out and doing more electronics projects, maybe some more writing code, and other things to pass the time at home, though work consumes so much time and it goes by so quickly. I can’t believe Big Red is being retired tonight, and that he’s more then 14 years old now. 👴🏻 But then again, I never thought I would be so gray at age 28.
I put John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High on the record player, I mean the Mp3 player and pause a minute.
He was born in the summer of his 27th year
Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before
Left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again
Might say he found a key for every door
When he first came to the mountains, his life was far away
On the road and hangin’ by a song
But the string’s already broken, and he doesn’t really care
It keeps changin’ fast, it don’t last for long
It kind of way a profound thought 🎂 to think that 14 years from now I’ll be 57 years old and quite possibly retired from my state job to focus on my off-grid homestead 🐐. But then again, I was 28 years old when I bought Red, and that seems just like yesterday. Things were different back then, and will be different again in 2040 which is what 14 years from now will be. Maybe I’ll find more direction in life by then, less confusion. I just don’t see myself buying a Honda Civic or a plastic-coated, drywall house with High Speed Internet and weekly garbage and woke plastics recycling service. 🗑️ Even if it smells like cow shit. 🐮
For the good times…
Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over
But life goes on and this old world will keep on turning
Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together
Don’t say a word about tomorrow or forever
There’ll be time enough for sadness when you leave me
Money is gone once you spend it 💰 👉 🗑️
One concept I find very hard to understand is the professed way of economics, as I am very schooled in American way of thinking – you spend money, it is instantly gone, and then you dispose of it at landfill. Be it buying a house or vehicle or any appliance. Once you spend money it is instantly turned into trash, there is no value in used material things, depreciation isn’t a real thing.
Do people actually resell their trash? Well, I guess much trash has some economic value, as people buy used cars and used houses, and get paid for scrap metal, but neither has any real value in my mind except for the utility it provides. I think there is too much focus on the value of used items – instead you should think of it is at trash – and if you get any value of an used object – it’s better then paying to dispose of it at the landfill.
Onions The Reliable Money Maker
With the amount of onions I eat, usually 5-10 lbs a week, they are something I would want to grow when I have my own land.
Visiting the UP Next Year
I planning on taking a road trip next summer to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. And ultimately visit the “Sand County” , Aldo Leopold Shack and Farm in Wisconsin and the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, after spending sometime exploring in the UP after crossing the Mighty Mac Bridge, hopefully not in bad weather. None of those places are necessarily the highlight of the trip, but I’m giving them as well known examples so you can plot them on your mental map.
Honestly, I get very little pleasure out of visiting “well known” tourist places. It’s like my deep aversion to both the High Peaks of Adirondacks and the St. Regis Canoe Area. Yeah, I admit both places exist, and I may have once gone there, but it’s not exactly a place I strive to visit as much pass through. Such places are fine, good for the official tourist bureau post cards. And maybe the tourists in their SUVs.
I’ve been considering for some time doing trips out west, and people will argue that UP and Northern Wisconsin aren’t the west. Which I don’t disagree with based on map, but it’s further west then I’ve been to before. I thought about taking an airplane and renting a car, but for the UP isn’t not that far to drive from Albany, especially if I spend an overnight in a state forest in Chautaqua County, NY. Only 7 hour drive from there to Huron National Forest in Northern Michigan. Then the next day I could head up to the UP.
The truth is the places I am most interested in exploring aren’t well documented in National Tourist Bureau brochures, but are more off the beaten track, mostly known to locals and those who have been there in the past. I have a real aversion to National Parks, and parks more generally, though I will stop at a National Park or some well-known landmark if it’s not far out of the way and too not expensive if only to snap a photo or two and say, see I went there, and give people a frame of reference of where I was in my travels.
When I mentioned to people last week that I was thinking of taking at trip out west, the first reaction I got was, oh, I bet you would like Utah. They have some good National Parks there. Aren’t you excited about the possibilities of visiting Byrce Canyon or Zion National Park? Those were the same kind of people who were sure I would enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park. Both were fine, I did part of the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, and it was fine, but I got to say neither one was particularly appealing even if it made for some nice photos. Too developed, too unnatural and unwild for my tastes.
Truth is I like to visit places that are remote and do not cater much for tourists. I’d rather be driving winding mountain roads, camping along little dirt roads in the back country, a long ways from anywhere else. Visiting “known-by-few nationally” landmarks that are scenic and wild but don’t get many tourists at all outside of locals. Deep, vast forest lands, remote country, in the sense they don’t involve parking lots full of cars and concession stands or mowed lawns. Places that when you tell people you want to visit – they respond with a blank stare – and ask why? Is there anything even worth visiting there? Places that are just a blank spot on the map.
I’ve also been thinking about taking a trip out to badlands of Western South Dakota and also the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri for a few years now. Those places also evoke a lot of confusion. Moreover, I am not looking per se to stay in motels or developed campgrounds there either, but to explore the back country of National Forests and other public lands there, away from the developed recreational areas. I’m not so against staying in a campground or motel when necessary for a night or two, or even visiting a well known park, but I’m hardly enthusiastic about the possibility either. Even if I had to take an aeroplane due to reasons of time, I’d probably pack a hammock for forest camping and rent a car so I could get away from the cities and developed areas as quickly as possible.
I am sure there are similar opportunities like that in the Rockies and even Arizona and Utah. Actually I know there is, they are called BLM and Forest Service lands. And there is a whole activity called boondocking. But despite the vastness of Western US, I am also aware how popular many parts of the West, and how unaccessible many other parts of West are once you get far away enough from the popular tourist destinations and big cities of West that bring out the crowds to back country. Plus one of goals of these trips is to find out where I want to build or buy my off-grid cabin – with the high housing costs and limited privately-owned rural land in West – and fire danger I’m really kind of turned off by the West. The Western US is vast but the population overwhelmingly lives in cities and their suburbs, at even higher rates then much of the rest of the United States.
While I’ve been talking about it for some time – vague notions of visiting the Ozarks or South Dakota or maybe Idaho – truth is that I haven’t really made any serious plans on a route or destination. It’s a bit hard to plan such things when you want to avoid motels, campgrounds and popular tourist traps like the National Parks. Aeroplanes are expensive, as is renting a car, plus it seems werid to spend so much money if you’re not planning to visit the aforementioned places already photographed a million times and widely known. And most I’m lazy.
With a car or truck, and planning to spend much of your time in back country, you have a lot more flexibility then having to follow a train, bus, or aeroplane schedule, and you can bring much more gear and supplies. The only thing you have to rush against is daylight and the end of the trip.
There is a lot more to figure out. What good places to visit in the UP and Northern Wisconsin? It would be so easy to take an airplanes out Utah and go to designated viewing spots and stay at the designated motel at Zion National Park or wherever the tourist bureau insists I should visit, but I’m honestly not interested in that kind of trip, as I think you miss a lot by following a set agenda and visiting places that you can just watch a video from home on the internet. While scenic, my impression of Shenandoah National Park was boring and frankly quite pedestrian. And there is a lot more of America to see beyond what the experts think you visit.
A 53-week long year in 2026 📆
Most years have 52 weeks.
Next year (2026) has 53 weeks rather then 52 weeks. The last time that happened was in 2020.
2005, 2009, 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032 are 53 week years.
This only happens on years when New Years Day is a Thursday, except when it’s a leap year and New Years Day is on a Wednesday.
Addicted to dill weed 🌾
My mom bought me a jar of dill weed to use in rye bread. And now I’m hooked and not just in rye bread. I had to buy a bigger jar.
Now I get how get addicts get started. It’s always that sample they give you for a little taste.