Thursday, third gear, a lean right ⚙️

On the SuperDuty it does the shifting for me unless I hit the button on gear shift lever. I am bringing my rain coat today to work, not because I think it will rain even though there are showers around, but the rain coat is a certain way to ward off the rain. Been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead, thinking of those days on summer vacation smoking and giggling at those lyrics. A Friend of the Devil is a Friend of Mine.

Went to the store last night, loaded up the bike with milk, eggs, flour, frozen strawberries and especially apple cider vinegar and road home. 🛒 They didn’t have the ACV the other day, and I find it hard to enjoy water without it. Plus I needed as much water as possible, along with fruits and vegetables to recover from that night of hard drinking and hot dogs at picnic. 🤧 But it’s so unsafe to ride your bike home drunk, but it was fun and I didn’t get a DWI or wreck my SuperDuty. I was completely out of eggs, 🥚 I could have lived without the frozen strawberries, though they are a nice treat. 🍓 I would get fresh but frozen means less packaging. I usually get fresh when I go camping, as it’s a nice snack for a change, and it’s not like I don’t have fires up when I’m in the woods so the extra packaging doesn’t matter. Plus keeping things frozen isn’t a thing camping. 🔥

Got home and noticed there was bugs in the spilled cornmeal and flour in the cabinet, so I cleaned that out and scrubbed it down well, didn’t see any bugs in the remaining open bags themselves, 🪲 so I put them in the fridge and they seem okay this morning, what’s a little extra protein. I made up extra pancakes to cook off the rest of the flour as I have that new unopened bag. I’ll just put the extra pancakes in the fridge. 🥞 And cleaned some parts of the kitchen. Bunch more of the door fell apart on my apartment last night, but I pull off more of the rotten wood, and it’s back working again. 🚪 But I tell myself, I could have bought that house next to my parents house, for less then $150k it was offered at as it sold for $130k, put a bit more money into and paid no rent. But I kind of like living in city. And in a few years when I loose my parents, maybe I’ll put in a bid to buy their house from the estate, or maybe I won’t. 🛖 I don’t know, for now I kind of like looking at the city, even if I am poor desprate renter whose door is literally rotting off the hinges and I have bugs in my pancakee flour. I kind of want something simple when I retire, that basic off-grid hunting cabin style residence. 🐐 Maybe I can have hogs and goats out in Westerlo, but it’s still a bit too built up to be burning a lot of plasticky stuff or shooting a lot of guns. Fucking New York, it’s all so built up as plenty of off-gridders in more wild states burn or bury everything with zero issues. 🛢️ Household trash isn’t nuclear waste. ⚛️

After cleaning up the bugs and kitchen, I found some where I had stashed those cans of PBR from last autumn, 🍻 that apparently won’t stolen by High Schoolers despite my extreme paranoia from the big of the SuperDuty. Sat out back for a while in the dark, didn’t drink any of the beer, 🌆 but before then I went to Five Rivers for a while on the bike. Still shifting and riding really good. 🚲 That sheep shit that Lyman Farms was spreading was pungent. 🐑 And I want to coat the bottom of my truck with lamolin. Read more of the book about bird conservation, looked at the wildflowers, ended up listening to some music, a podcast, and walking around a bit before riding home in the darkness. Not a bad evening, too bad the rest of the week looks to be cooler and maybe cloudy and raining tomorrow evening. Still hoping to ride both ways today. 😶‍🌫️

I think the blog tuning is going better, not sure if there is much I can fix beyond I have done enabling caching and opt-caching and fixing things. Most of the overhead is now just the core WordPress and not my queries, and I got rid of a lot of old posts and drafts. 🖥️ Using a lot more plug-ins and industry standards, SEO stuff, trying to get away from stuff I coded myself but maybe not the best stuff. But what really is making a difference it seems is cutting back the Maximum Execution Time for PHP from 60 seconds down to 5 seconds – there are few random calls the crawlers keep making on the blog, chewing up all of the threads I have, taking down the blog or slowing down things for other users. I am not sure if intentional DDOS or the web host is having capacity problems, but it sure seems like everything is running slower then it did in the past, despite all my efforts to cache and optimize. On the other hand, sometimes some pages are loading much faster. 🐇 Google says I still have a slow site, but whatever, I like it, and I will do what makes me happy. Some months Google Ad Revenue is better then others, but over the year, it’s still bringing in $1,000+ a year minus $300 or so a year for the cost of hosting and domains. All for my rants about the world of SuperDuty trucks, off-grid cabins, stinky ol’ burn barrels and little towns that smell like cow shit. 💩 I think some of it just is ad markets have changed and slowed down a bit, I was getting a lot of traffic for NY and PA School District Maps but those budgets are now done, so that traffic has dropped. 📉

Hopefully at this time next week, I will have the truck cap. 🚛 I don’t want to be a pain but I should call Andy Ruth up on Friday to see if he has any updates, as I’d like to know I can take delivery of the truck cap shortly after I move the money. This weekend I thought about camping, and indeed I have my hammock but I realized all the blankets are still in my old truck, so I guess I won’t be camping this weekend, ⛺ unless I swing by my parents house and get it out of Big Red. Whatever, it’s still going to be fairly buggy. I still need to order that relay box I want to use when wiring up the truck cap, along with deciding what dash cam I want to get to capture my trips. A lot of people want dash cams for safety, I just want one so I keep a record of my trips, capturing interesting and scenic parts to post to Youtube. 📽️ But it’s also good if I got into a creash or got pulled over on the road for documentation. Video does keep people honest. Oil prices ⛽ are back up, I guess Trump’s Iran War 🇮🇷 isn’t over, he just decided to declare victory 🏆 over the weekend until reality set in, which always does. Delusions can only last so long when you’re the nation’s leader.

I think the Nature Bus 🚏 is going to Five Rivers this weekend, so that ain’t an option to take to Thacher Park this weekend. I could obviously take the SuperDuty to Thacher Park if I wanted but not really. I’ll probably just ride somewhere this weekend on the bike, 🚲 hang out. Sunday I’ll hike in one of the local preserves, maybe Hannacroix Ravine again would be cool. 😎 Hoping the following weekend to be able to work on wiring up my truck, and depending on what dad wants to do, the Gas Up Tractor Festival 🚜 in Gallupville during Dad’s Day Weekend. And then maybe take off June 18th before the Juneteenth Weekend (Juneteenth is on a Friday), and head up to Piseco-Powley Road. Or maybe Speculator first for two nights then drive down to the Potholers. A lot depends on the weather. It be fun to float in the East Canada Creek on a tube, have a big fire. 🔥 Make sure it’s remote in case anything smelly goes up into smoke, lol. The Cannabis should cover the smell in my mind. I don’t know, I also want to do Burnt Rossman and Betty Brook but that might wait until later in the month, then I can hike Bromley Fire Tower 🗼 like on a Friday, ride the Catskill Scenic Trail 🚵‍♂️ and then swim at Mine Kill. 🏊‍♂️ Or float on Schoharie Creek. And visit the farm stands for fresh strawberries. 🍓 Summer is ahead!