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 🏕. 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 🎓 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 ⚙ 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 🔥 tonight. Didn’t have a lot of garbage to burn this time as I was last out camping 🏕 last weekend. 🔥 Funny how a fire makes burnable garbage just disappear.

It’s fine, I’ll chalk the experience up as a learning experience. 🤷‍♂️ 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 🔗 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 🇨🇳 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 💵 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 ⛑ 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 💩 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 🍪 are amazing, I had two, so naughty but it was a stressful day working into the night 🌃 . 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 🖥 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 👥 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. 👍 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 🤪 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 🔥 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. 🔎 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 ⚖.

Working from home today 🖥 as I packed for the Green Mountains ⛰ 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. 👃 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 🅿 lot of the library with leaf blowers and crap running but necessary work got done, I got to shop midday, fix my bike 🔧and get out to the National Forest before dark and get camp set up.