Personal

Grapefruit 🍊

You know I was thinking I haven’t had grapefruit since last winter. It’s usually cheapest in the winter months and a good treat through somewhat messy to eat. Not as popular as it once was due to how it interferes with statins that many older folks are on its both healthy and has a very distinctive taste.

Listening to the roar of traffic climbing the Molly Stark Byway out of Bennington πŸš™

I can understand why this campsite was available even if it’s small and right off the recently mowed Prospect Mountain ski trails that I figure I can wander around over the next few days when I have downtime.

After a hell of a week πŸ‘Ώ it’s nice to be out in the Green Mountains just chilling in the hammock. Cool day and fairly cloudy β›… with a breeze but I have the heater if I need it later and it’s good to be away. You just know the landlord is going to be grinding away at my apartment all weekend long πŸͺ“and it was such a long shitty week in so many ways.

Got the eighth gear βš™ on my mountain bike and the cassette is good. Riding well enough though I should do the crankset at some point again. That’s the more expensive part to replace. I’m going to get a chain πŸ”— stretch tool and make sure to be regularly checking that, have a chain breaker and chain in stock. I just put a lot of miles on it but I hate not having my bike working 🚲 especially on these beautiful autumn days when I’m running between the Menands office and downtown at the Plaza. The shuttle πŸš€ to the Enterprise is fine but it doesn’t always follow my own schedule and I’d much rather ride.

Rode about five miles today on some of the gravel roads in the National Forest. 🍁 I wish there was a bit more color – I’m sure there is in the Adirondacks – but I am thinking of Speculator next weekend if it’s decent out. That said next week looks cloudy and rainy 🌦️ not sure if I’ll be heading out of town then much less riding to work too much. Is what it is, I have the Pine Bush dinner on Wednesday so I won’t be riding that day for sure. Now that I’m committed to doing my own bike maintenance, I need to order some spokes so I have them handy. And maybe a trueing stand as my wheels are constantly in poor true after riding trail or even gravel and the shit roads that are everywhere.

I’m glad I’m out in the Green Mountains β›°. I plan to stay until Monday. I’ll let them know on Monday I plan one more day of remote work and then I’ll be in the office in person at least through Thursday and maybe be in person on Friday. Truth is I have to be careful about getting enough state hours in and keeping up with the state data services team. 🏒 But the campaign side of things has been keeping me busy.

Made it through the week and to a Friday ☺

It was a hell of a week but I survived it without too many scars. I’m a bit drunk, a bit high and wide awake from the caffeine shots I drunk for my drive out to Vermont, staying awake and alive on the road. I got dinged twice for hard stops on the Delaware bypass again by insurance app but I’m all giggles around the campfire with the Dire Wolf. Whatever, you got to live.

I was hoping for better autumn colors in Vermont 🍁 still it’s nice to get away for a few days. The views from the $65 million dollars expressway or whatever you call the Bennington bypass are dramatic to say the least. I always say that I should spend more time in Vermont then I actually do, I don’t necessarily have to go all the way up to the most remote parts of the National Forest to have a good evening doing some roadside camping πŸ•. I still hate driving 🚘 old NY Route 7 but Waze is good at finding ways around the traffic but the back roads it takes me on seem to have such low speed limits. Vermont is quite quaint place, an old place like so much of New England unlike a big urban, modern place like New York. That said, I do think the state is a bit too liberal for me even if I did volunteer at Bernie Sanders organization in Burlington back when I was in college πŸŽ“ at times.

In many ways it was a shitty week but I’ve learned it’s really best to do your own bike 🚲 maintenance if you want things done right and quickly for a reasonable price. At least I’m learning I tell myself. I got the replacement cassette on the bike 🚲 and it’s riding great except I didn’t realize I left off the high gear βš™ to install in the morning. $25 bucks and like five minutes installation but it’s working great. Especially when I remember to install the eight gear which I overlooked as it was in a paper package. Fortunately I caught it on the floor and didn’t toss it in fire πŸ”₯ tonight. Didn’t have a lot of garbage to burn this time as I was last out camping πŸ• last weekend. πŸ”₯ Funny how a fire makes burnable garbage just disappear.

It’s fine, I’ll chalk the experience up as a learning experience. πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ It’s fine the bike is back on the road after $75 for what didn’t need to be done immediately but would certainly be necessary once the worn out chain πŸ”— ground down the cassette to the point it. Maybe I was too proactive but truth is those cassettes at $25 or possibly less on the internet if you buy China πŸ‡¨πŸ‡³ crap. I wish chains would last longer but whatever I ride a lot of miles and it’s fun, serene and isn’t that much money πŸ’΅ compared to driving to work or even busing 🚍 it as was the case over the past week. I think bike maintenance is simple enough that I can mostly do it myself with the proper tools which are needed. And it saves time compared to constantly visiting the bike shop and handing them cash. Mechanical shit sucks, always breaks needs maintenance β›‘ and repairs. I shouldn’t be surprised, I watch a lot of farmer YouTube and if anybody deals with broken shit all the time it’s farmers. And bigger and more professional the farm, the harder the big equipment is pushed and it breaks a lot – and it’s mad expensive to fix. Good news was I could walk into the bike shop today, lay down my $27 with the tax and walk out with the cassette without the shop owner saying anything to me about not heeding their warning ⚠  about needing a cassette after letting. He pretended not to remember me in my walk 🚢 of shame.

It was shitty without the bike this week πŸ’© and the data work was overwhelming this week but lunch catered by Cardona’s on Thursday was good even if I over consumed it and it was so greasy like all American fare these days. 🍲 I feel like I’m getting fat after this week but assuming next week isn’t too wet I’ll ride to work many days next week. Those big Cardona’s cookies πŸͺ are amazing, I had two, so naughty but it was a stressful day working into the night πŸŒƒ . Beats taking the bus 🚍 and then the shuttle over to the spaceship on Enterprise if you know what I mean. It was nice working from home today even if the nosey but elderly painters all day were working on the building and in the morning they were grinding at the unit next door. Looking sweet in a modern urbane trendy white wall and trendy dark colored vinyl siding way though but I know it’s coming closer to my eventual eviction and the similar gutting of my unit 🏦 as my neighborhood keeps gentrifying. What do I care, I’ll move out and keep the unbroken stuff I care about and find useful and move on to the next step in life and leave it to the landlord to cart to the dumping grounds in Rensselear. I have too much crap already even if I try to avoid buying shit.

So many data jobs this week πŸ–₯ but most of them went smoothly as the R scripts that tie things together are now quite reliable and catch most mistakes and only need small tweaks to run properly along with inspection of the outputs before the data is sent to the mail house and all other users πŸ‘₯ of it. It was kind of dramatic week – they ended up firing this one political director that had brought in from Wisconsin just last year but turned out to be a disaster as he never got the culture having not grown up and gone through the institution from the ground floor up. There’s a lot you can only learn by being a part of an institution for decades. Or at least being connected in some ways to the people inside it. I’m glad for my hire I ultimately settled on the recommendation of a staff person who had a friend who knew about what they were getting into. I mean I worry about group think and I also like hiring diversity but good employees understand the institution and defend it (often not publicly but through their every day acts) even if they don’t personally believe in all it does. People don’t understand why I’m so loyal to an institution and fight so hard for even if I don’t necessarily agree with all it does. It’s not just about the money but also the people it represents even if politically if we ever sat down and talked about our personal beliefs we might not always agree. πŸ‘ Maybe it’s just a reminder in my mind how all things are so fleeting but I tell myself I would never screw up do badly and ultimately it’s about saving the institution and our own asses.

I’ve gotten such a fascination this week about paranoia and schizophrenia πŸ€ͺ after watching a Joe Rogan clip where he was talking to a doctor 😷 who believes that marijuana is truly dangerous in how it makes a small part of the population truly mad by focusing on the already somewhat delusional and paranoid trends in their brains 🧠. I’ve long had many fears – like my housing situation and my job and the overbearing government regularly featured on the news – but I don’t think they truly paranoid thoughts and they’re not delusions as they are somewhat grounded in reality – at least in the sense of reality the news media presents to us. When you’re not colored or poor, you’re unlikely to be treated by the police or society that way. Because like it or not, society is terribly racists and bigoted against the poor. I’ve never had much paranoia after smoking 🚬 pot but I always do it in a fun kind of way around the campfire πŸ”₯ in the wilderness in moderation. 🌲 I’m not willing to pay for anything but a positive experience recreationally. Cannabis really helps with focus for good or bad. πŸ”Ž You can’t control where your lead to but in the right setting like next to a babbling brook or a fire it can make it all so beautiful which is why it should be legal βš–.

Working from home today πŸ–₯ as I packed for the Green Mountains β›° somebody nearby was smoking some nasty ass skunky weed. 🦨 Don’t get me wrong, I like smoking pot and good stuff when you pass it by smells quite pleasant but that stuff was pure acidic smelling skunk. Yuck. The kind of nasty shit High Schoolers 🚸 smoked in the bathroom 🚽 next to the piss children left on the floor back when it was illegal. I get why during prohibition people had such negative opinions of alcohol when it was essentially windshield washer fluid and rubbing alcohol people were drinking 🍻. In many ways cannabis is like silage – good silage smells heavenly in the autumn but rotten, spoiled crap can even make a hardened dairyman who lives in the barnyard gag. πŸ‘ƒ Why smoke crap when you can get such quality these days for not a lot of money? It was also kind of noisy working in the parking πŸ…Ώ lot of the library with leaf blowers and crap running but necessary work got done, I got to shop midday, fix my bike πŸ”§and get out to the National Forest before dark and get camp set up.

Why is discussing smoking pot not considered polite conversation when it’s now legal?

Nobody questions going out to the bar or dinner with a glass of wine. It’s fine to reflect back on an evening of drinking and the fun times, as long as no damage was done and you got home safely. But still despite being legal, discussing your cannabis use still remains taboo.

A lot of people still think cannabis use is a mental health disorder or an addiction. A sad thing, a person’s life spinning wildly out of control. For some it is, just like some are addicted to alcohol. But still something about cannabis use is seen as more sinister, like you’re breaking the law or frying your brain, though these days as an adult with current laws none of those things are true anymore.

I guess technically its federally illegal and admitting your use opens up the possibility of federal charges though rarely does the federal government prosecute you. But that’s silly. When is the last time you actually saw a federal police officer? Why is smoking pot still considered something so taboo?