Irene and I had several ‘priorities’ regarding maintaining our new home from the day we bought it. Some were ‘mandatory’: for example, we had to replace the aging but still fully functional hot water tank in order to get house insurance. Others were ‘urgent’, and at the top of that list was the outdoors stairway to my office above the garage.
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I had planned on posting something new about our stairway construction by now, an upgrade that was already delayed from 2021. Unfortunately that still isn’t done despite being ‘in progress’ since the beginning of May.
Instead, I’ve decided to post some pictures from around the house and a few words about how the year has gone. Most of the pictures have already made an appearance on Facebook- apologies for folks who follow me there as well. But the words are mostly ‘new’…
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I’m configuring a new PC for Irene. I’d love to move her to macOS, but she has too much ‘history’ with Windows. So I went with this:
A neat little computer- the Msecore machines have a good reputation as a ‘no-name’ brand. But there was definitely some strangeness in setting it up, which ultimately I blame on Windows 11 and its ‘secure BIOS’ technologies.
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I’m still a few years away from retiring, but the years pass fast- and I’m definitely looking forward to it.
Retirement scares some people. What will they do, they wonder, when every day isn’t filled with the job that currently occupies their time? How will they define their value in the world? Some of these folks retire, then pass away a year or two later. Or sit in their house, watching sitcoms and gradually wasting away.
I don’t think I’m really like that. I’ve had things I want to do, things I want to learn and experiment with, for decades. Not to make money or ‘prove’ myself: that’s what a job is for in my mind, I guess. Just things that interest me, that likely produce little obvious value. I’ve even tried to work time for these into my life pre-retirement, but have never been able to balance them with my job.
So what’s on my list? Glad you asked…
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The snowfall this year in Castlegar has been a bit…much. I’ve given my lawn tractor’s snowblower a good workout.
But memory is a fickle thing: our brains edit and generate content to create a story. So I decided to post a few comparison photos of our new Kootenay winter life.
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The cold has done some mischief to our plumbing here.
The same laundry room pipes as last year froze up first. Not great, but increasing the house temperature from 20 degrees to 28 degrees C and setting up some directed heaters will (I hope) eventually unthaw that. But then we made things worse.
There were a few things we knew we wanted to improve when we bought our home in Castlegar. Irene and I identified replacing the outdoor stairs to my office (the suite over the garage) as being the most ‘urgent’ of these.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like getting these stairs replaced is in the cards for 2021. But at least I have engineering diagrams!
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Back in 2013 I began paying attention to my health metrics a bit when I started wearing a Fitbit Flex. I found I enjoyed ‘keeping track’ of basic data and I upgraded that to a Fitbit Charge HR in 2015 to add my heart rate to what I was collecting. None of this particularly encouraged me to ‘improve’ my health, but at least I was able to keep an eye on some basics. Along the way I started looking at the Apple Watch, but the Fitbit was working well enough for my purpose so I held off.
I started to notice some hiccups with my Charge HR this year: the battery wasn’t holding its charge very well, and there were some cracks appearing in the display. Nothing serious- it was still working fine. But I decided I’d take this as an opportunity to upgrade to the ‘next’ version of the Apple Watch. Apple shipped the Apple Watch 7 on October 15, and I got mine delivered on October 22. Now I’m drowning in data: my first impressions follow.
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Sometimes smoke really does mean fire. And in our case, it was an ‘interface wildfire’ that came within about a kilometre of our new home on July 1 of 2021.
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