Personal

I’m on my way home on this Friday evening… 🏡

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No rush, I figure the landlord is probably banging on something or digging big holes trying to fix the diapolated building. The whole process kind of scares me as I look at the rabbit hole or buying or building my own home. While I pay my rent always on time and truth be told I haven’t trashed my apartment much beyond ordinary wear and tear over the past 17 years it’s still pretty awkward when you’re somebody else’s bitch. And I’m the director at work.

I needed to stop and check my email at any rate, 📧 as after a relatively quiet day working on some IOICODEs for work shit 💩 started flying at four o’clock as the communication moratorium got underway. Pretty much finished my code though for campaign committee label 🔖 jobs. 230 lines of R. Making good work of pipelines and the coalesce command and the bang bang operator. I’m getting damn good at Data Processing with R. My code does everything from handling absentees, new voters, filtering and householding. I’m proud of my work.

Its a nice evening 🌃 but the sun sets so early this time of year. Maybe I’ll go to Elm Ave Park 🏞 after dinner but at this point I don’t think I have time to go to Five Rivers 🐸. I should read 📖 a bit this evening but to ensure quality sleep 😴 I should be lights out by nine o’clock and up at five o’clock. I don’t think of myself as a morning person 😦 but I feel so much more rested 🛏 when I rise and shine at five o’clock especially in the winter.

I think it’s funny Gundry MD is advertising on my blog 🍅

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One of the great luxuries of this time of year is fresh tomatoes and I have been taking advantage of that the past few weeks. Some tomatoes freshly sliced, but also lots of tomatoes run through the food processor and used as a sauce with eggs and fried zucchini. I think the anti-lectin diet is silly, and if anything encourages people to eat junk food.

Good morning, Happy Friday. 🌅

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Still pretty dark out but the sun is rising. It should be interesting to see how large the hole is next to my apartment when the landlord decided to dig up where my kayak is normally stored to fix a broken waterline as part of the renovations. He did pressure wash some of the mold off the building and looks like he is fixing some of rot around my door which is good I guess.

I was actually surprised 🤨 to see them working into late into the evening, especially now when I would think Mr. Preska would be bailing hay and chopping silage but maybe not yet. 🐮 I just wonder when the project will ever be done and when I’ll get new neighbors or face the inevitable eviction notice.

Yesterday was surprisingly quiet, 🖥 though I keep volunteering for more work and making my data processing work more complicated then ever was done in the process. But I want to do it right, provide value added services to my employer so they can maximize the value of the data they have. 🍬 I don’t normally eat candy or processed sugar, but those M&Ms, fudge bars and diet soda at campaign committee were pretty damn good. 😋

The way I look at it is I’m becoming a damn good R Statistical Language programmer, 🤓 good at manipulating and processing data for what it’s worth. I know that and a buck fifty will get you on bus, and that R Statistical Language isn’t a real programming language, especially if you aren’t using it for scientific purposes. But it’s damn good for processing and manipulating reasonable-sized data like the state voter file broken down by Assembly distirict. Or spatial data and GIS processing. I know Python and Pandas is more popular and probably somewhat faster but on the whole I think R is a better tool.

The left channel of my ear buds broke again 🎧 but I was looking online at what Walmart and saw that now they have low-cost ear buds that aren’t wired between the ears, that won’t have the issue of the broken cables, or any cable for that matter running between the ears. 👂 Wasn’t all that long ago when headphones were simply just wired. I have to admit I’m not the most up on technology, but I like listening to music at work and when I’m home. 🏡

Tomorrow I might take the Nature Bus 🚍 to Thacher Park for a while before the rain starts, especially if they are continuing to dig and work on the apartment on Saturday. Going to rain in the afternoon, ☔ which will be a good opportunity to read and look at various properties on Zillow.

Off to work shortly, 🏢 one more busy day in the office before the moratorium sets in and then I can focus on more long-time projects for next year. Plus maybe work remote sometimes on Fridays and even Mondays when it’s quiet so I can do so from camp or the library. 🖥

How the Adirondacks remind me I still have reason to hope 🏡

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I get tired of the endless number enormous, complicated and thoroughly modern houses I see on Zillow. But when I get to a more remote place like the Adirondacks and look around I know there is reason for hope. Most cabins, especially seasonal hunting cabins aren’t wrapped in plastic or are enormous though some certainly are. I really don’t get the appeal of modernity, the smart television in every room with high speed internet. I am pretty sure the house of future, as sold on television will come with a mandatory 30-yard dumpster with the amount of waste we are told is normal by the television.

I think home should be a sanctuary away from it all. Simple and not needing constant repairs or buying new shit to keep it in good condition. A simple cabin, with as few electronics and as little technology as possible. Maybe some electric lights, but not much beyond that. While I could see the benefits of having a propane heater as a backup when I’m away for an extended period of time, a wood stove, with as little space to heat as possible would be best. No washing machine, no dish washer or fancy appliances. Just a very basic propane stove, an energy efficient refrigerator, a place to charge my cellphone. 

Maybe to live a life like that I have to build it, as few houses on the market truly are like that. But there are people who live that way, as witnessed by the Adirondacks. Not all houses are spacious and “modern” or covered with vinyl siding and full of white walls. Shiplap and board batten are common options in cabins, white drywall ain’t the only option. You also don’t have to have a 2,000 foot square house. Maybe such things are normal in suburbs, along with the mandatory 30-yard dumpster for all the things you get in Amazon on a daily basis, but I find it all so repulsive.

The truth is I like thinking more about smoking pot then actually smoking …

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Maybe the best part of being high, is thinking about how much fun it is to be high. To read about other’s adventures about getting high and learning about genetics and strains of cannabis. To learn about the health pros and cons to smoking, to read the debate over cannabis and how legal it should be. Often it seems dreaming about doing something is a lot more fun then actually doing.