Inside The Perimeter

As I write this it is a cold Friday morning, I am sitting indoors, watching the finale of season 5 of “The Great Canadian Baking Show” thanks to YouTube uploads, while drinking some cheap coffee. Did you know that there is also a “The Great American Baking Show” that was filmed in Britain? Seriously. The same YouTuber is uploading those episodes as well.

Yesterday’s “accomplishments” were getting a haircut, and spending money at Kroger and Publix buying things that are either essentials or were part of some rebate offer. I guess I can take credit for the three mile walk I did yesterday as well.

The census mail I mentioned yesterday appears to be authentic. Apparently my household was “randomly selected” for some sort of annual data collection survey. Sure, another survey for which I will receive no money… *eye roll*

This morning I will go down to the basement and mount the trainer for an hour. This should do well towards attaining my daily exercise goals, even if I don’t do any choring this afternoon. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of choring to be done in WLF, I am just not sure that I want to get into it today.

Starting tonight a cold front is supposed to blow through town; the predicted lows for the morning are in the 20s, with a windchill making it feel as if it is ten degrees colder. While the routine Saturday morning walks with Betsy and Bella usually don’t get delayed due to weather, the predicted temperatures may mean that we might take a break for a week. Though, tomorrow afternoon may be a hashing day. Yes, it will be cold in Newnan too, but hashing with temperatures in the 30s is not that unusual.

Sunday will most definitely be a hashing day because Black Sheep’s start is not far from the ITP Estate, and is also not far from the are in which Bonnie and I have laid trails in the past four months. The start may be too far to run over our trails, but it’s in an interesting part of town that I have looked at over the years but have shied away due to parking concerns.

Hope you have had a good week, and that a happy and healthy weekend lies ahead.

There is good exercise and bad exercise.

Yesterday morning I experienced the former by doing some hand sawing of limbs and then afterward taking a walk to Glenwood Park Kroger in order to buy a couple items.

Yesterday afternoon I experienced the latter. My first frustration was self-inflicted because I forgot to tell the Ibotta app that I bought the cheese for which I’d get the purchase price refunded. I have contacted Ibotta and am waiting to see if I will receive a refund. [update: I wrote that bit last night, as of this morning I have been informed that the refund has been processed.] The second frustration came at the virtual hands of the Girl Scouts. I was attempting to buy some cookies online. I thought I’d be brilliant by turning my $20 cream cheese gift card into $20 in cookies but the form required a name on the card; this was the problem I experienced trying to use the gift card at Amazon. Still wanting to buy cookies I decided to get them using my credit card, but when the form refused to correctly handle auto fill, it kept inserting asterisks for numbers in the credit card number field, I got frustrated and gave up. This is how I will lose weight, right?

Last night’s Betsy dinner was fake chicken enchiladas. No matter if you read that as “fake” chicken enchiladas, or “fake chicken” enchiladas you are correct because it was a non-authentic attempt at the meal using fake chicken meat as the protein. Even though I took liberties with the recipe, the meal was quite delicious.

I am amazed each time I try to check an eBook out from the library. No matter how obscure the title I wish to check out, there seems to be other people waiting for it. The title in this instance is “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” written in the early 1960s by a woman named Jane Jacobs. I discovered the book while reading another book called “The Columbus Anthology”. There is one copy of the book in the Dekalb Library system, it is checked out, and there are two other people ahead of me in the hold queue.

It appears that the woman who cuts my hair has either changed her mind about quitting the business, or has delayed her closure. Either way, I am seeing her this morning for a haircut. Woot.

Depending on what I hear from Bonnie about her plan for the evening I will most likely attempt to do a little more choring in WLF and then either tuck into some leftovers or make a pizza for dinner.

Hope that your week has been good and you are remaining healthy.

Oh yeah, a blog post. Not much to report today, just some status updates.

The emoji problem persists, and sadly it may be that all previously used emoji are going to look fucked, and all future emoji may as well. Certainly when I post my monthly update on Monday those will look shitty too. Overnight the site was automatically updated to WordPress 5.9, but when I tried a comment afterward the emoji was still fucked. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

My health is getting slowly better. The worst of the crud was Monday, yesterday I was able to do some limited physical activity, and today I could probably do the same if not for the fact that temperatures have dipped below freezing again. I’ll continue to take things slowly until the weekend. I had a nice walk with Bonnie yesterday, but in modern parlance I did not walk since I failed to record it on Strava.

WLF is mostly dormant due to lack of sunshine (the sun is low in the sky and doesn’t shine on the farm for very long; come spring I hope to have a solution to the leaves which block the sun through summer), wind, and very cold temperatures. If I make it out there today I will try to lay out two new planting beds and do some bed cleanup.

I wanted to go to Lowe’s this morning, but a warm bed won out over getting dressed and going outside.

Later today I will go to Aldi and Kroger, mostly to buy things for tonight’s Betsy dinner, but also to score some iBotta cash, use some expiring coupons, and buy essentials. It’s my turn to cook; I am considering making a pan of empanadas for dinner.

My financial world is still passable. Over the next few weeks I am going to attempt to eliminate some recurring costs which I deem no longer necessary; potential candidates are the landline phone, Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom subscription, Spotify, and Netflix. I also want to look hard at the T-Mobile “old person” plan to see if it will suit my needs sufficiently so I can cut my ATT cellular bill in half. If I can save $50-$100 per month that would be a nice raise to my current salary.

With a wealth of books amassed over my lifetime I am finally spending some time reading. In fact, it’s what I will do,for an hour once I wrap up this blog post. I am mostly reading for entertainment or gardening knowledge, I should really interject a lot more coding books into the equation.

Okay, that enough for today.

Be well, be happy, be nice.

Essentially spent the entire day and night on the futon yesterday. Exceptions to that were preparing food, cleaning up dirty dishes, and nature breaks.

I am feeling better physically, not 100% however. Today is supposed to be decent, so I am hoping I can get outside this afternoon to do some choring. WLF 2022 isn’t going to prepare itself…

I am feeling worse mentally today since I am angry and frustrated with the ways things are currently. I feel powerless to change them, but really know that for the most part I can, if I just commit to my decisions more honestly. That’s my fancy way of saying “shut the fuck up and do it already!”.

So I will.

Have a great day. Hope you are feeling well.

Tuesday Tale of the Tape: 187.6 pounds (+0.2 from last week’s weigh-in); not bad, all things considered.

It’s Monday again. This was a weekend of no hashing for me. (I’d put a mind blowing emoji here if I could) It was a weekend with a lot of walking/hiking, however.

On Friday I got a new security panel installed at the ITP Estate, all seems to be functioning fine. Afterwards I joined Bonnie for a walk from her house. We ambled down the south side Beltline and then back to her house, covering 5 miles in the process. We then walked to my house to eat dinner, and Bonnie walked home in the freezing temperatures.

I met with Betsy and Bella Saturday morning and we did our routine walk. In the afternoon Bonnie and I met and walked down to Red’s Beer Garden to meet with some hashers who came in from different activities. Saturday night was spent at home, eating dinner with Bonnie and watching the first half of the Packers game.

Yesterday started slowly and Wheelhopper quickly became an impossibility. Instead, after lunch Bonnie and I went to Sweetwater State Park where we did a nice hike. And, I finally wore one of the long sleeve shirts I bought, but eventually didn’t wear, for my Florida trip last November. On the drive back we stopped at Wild Heaven and picked up two four-packs of beer. From Wild Heaven we went to Bonnie’s house where she made us a lovely dinner as I watched the Bucs have one of the greatest comebacks in NFL playoff history only to incredibly collapse in the last thirty seconds of the game.

Two days of football on tv? Who am I, Paulie circa 2000? FWIW- all teams in whom I had the slightest of interest lost this weekend, so I am officially back to not caring a flip about the Super Bowl.

Yesterday I also tried to use my $20 gift card from Philadelphia Cream Cheese for an Amazon purchase, and it failed. I don’t know why Amazon couldn’t use it. I will try using it for an online purchase elsewhere to see if it’s accepted. If not, I will feel as gypped by Kraft Foods as I do by Jackson Associates these days.

I was hoping to spend a lot of time outside in the cold doing some manual labor today. My goals are to clean up some areas of WLF, and keep working to remove a privet stump from the WLF annex out front. I have about forty ideas of what I want to attempt to grow in the small 3’x4’ area I am in the process of clearing. However, I am not feeling my greatest this morning. I allowed the house to get cold last night and I woke this morning with a sneeze and am tired. It’s not COVID, I think it’s winter crud/stress like I used to get long before the term COVID was known to the world. Depending on how I feel later I will decide if I will make it to tonight’s hash. At the moment I am leaning toward “no” since I don’t know if more time out in the cold, even if it’s warmer than it will be this morning, is advisable. We’ll see.

Hope that you had a wonderful weekend.

Oh my, if I thought yesterday’s weather was raw, today’s is going to be rawer! A high temperature of 37°F? Inconceivable!!!

Yesterday was spent nearly completely indoors. I put in a very good hour on the trainer, made a lame attempt at following a coding tutorial, watched a lot of tv/videos, and spent a lot of time reading, hemming and hawing about things to purchase on the internet, and trying to reconnect with some former coworkers to try to figure out how I will get my tax paperwork from the now-defunct XYZ Corp.

In the video realm I finished the latest season of “Letterkenny”, watched multiple episodes of “The Great Canadian Bake Off”, and the first episode of a show called “The Mick” which was recommended by my brother.

I keep trying to decide if I want to purchase a soup thermos, a new-to-me invention. If I can figure how to add my $20 gift card courtesy of Kraft Foods Philadelphia Cream Cheese to my Amazon account then I think I will buy one for myself.

On the tax paperwork matter I tried, and failed, to log into the Human Resources app we used at XYZ Corp. My fear is that my login is my XYZ Corp email address, which is now dead, so I won’t be able to receive a password reset email. Ugh!

It’s Friday already? Geez Louise!

I had considered going for a hike today, and you are probably thinking I won’t because of the cold weather. Well, yes, but yesterday I was reminded that I have an appointment this morning to get the ITP Estate’s security system upgraded to 5G. The appointment window is 08:00-10:00, so I am expecting the technician to arrive around 09:59.

With the bitter weather predicted and no time pressure to get out and lay trail tomorrow, Betsy, Bella, and I have agreed to walk (okay, Bella has no vote) but we may wait until later in the morning to get out.

Sunday is supposed to be a Wheelhopper day, but a cold Wheelhopper it will be so I am still on the fence on whether or not I will attend.

Hope you make it a great weekend. Stay warm, remain healthy, be happy.

Good Thursday morning all.

Yesterday was spent mainly doing some early morning choring, and then trying to close my exercise rings.

As I mentioned, I did a boatload of laundry yesterday morning. During the past two years of not going to an office I haven’t generated dirty laundry at the same rate, but tend to wait at least two weeks to do my laundry, instead of doing it weekly.

My brother and I had a good chat on the phone as well yesterday morning. We may not have solved our problems, or future problems, but it was good to speak.

Because of the weather forecast for the next few days I couldn’t sit inside and squander my final gorgeous day this week. I went out for a 3.5 mile walk, wander really, and listened to some of an audiobook.

Last night I went over to Betsy’s where she used the air fryer that had been delivered thirty minutes before she started using it. In the air fryer she made crispy tofu, then broccoli, and then garbanzo beans. These were served with some rice and a tikka Marsala sauce, and salad. We watched episodes of a show called “Travel Man” starring Richard Ayoade, best know for his role in “The IT Crowd”. In “Travel Man” Ayoade and a guest go somewhere for a weekend and do an assortment of activities. The cynic in me believes this is filmed over a handful of days and made to look as if it takes only two days, but I could be wrong.

Even though the rain will may have stopped by the time you read this, I will most likely be spending my day indoors. I hope to do a lot of coding, and spend an hour working out on the trainer.

On the blog front, I went back to look at a post I made in December, only to see that all of the emoji in the post was completely fucked. I don’t know what software change has ruined the emoji, but it irks me to no end since it’s not like iOS devices are niche products so the emoji they use should be supported.

Hope you are high and dry, having a good week.

Yesterday I spent a few hours puttering around WLF, mostly surveying wilting plants and burning brush to clean up and generate some ash.

Because I’d not gotten sufficient exercise and I was feeling very antsy, I went out for an hour-long walk in the afternoon. The weather was perfect for the activity and I counted four Christmas trees, all too far from the ITP Estate to be dragged. I considered walking to a grocery store to buy some carrots, but in the end just made a large figure eight that went nowhere in particular.

Last night’s dinner was a stew concoction. At first I was going to follow the recipe Instant Pot Quinoa and Butternut Squash Stew verbatim but then, well, I wanted to use some of the vegetables still remaining in WLF. Remarkably the butternut squash used in recipe was from WLF! It was one of two small ones I successfully grew. In addition to the squash WLF supplied gnarly small carrots, a daikon radish, and about five broad bean pods.

Jackson Associates is on my shit list again. I assumed that I would be a shoe in for surveys after they took away my $60 gig a few weeks ago. Last night I got all the way to the last question on a desserts when they bumped me from participating. Dangen! I also seem to get fewer opportunities to earn money from them than Bonnie. I know, completely different demographic, but still.

Because I haven’t been thrilled with the ghetto laundromat I am trying to return to the Waschsalon in midtown. I thought I had learned my lesson, arriving fifteen minutes after the posted opening time, but alas have arrived to find it dark. Having seen the erosion of the quality at this place wants me to give up on it completely and if I could find another laundromat nearby that accepts credit cards I’d stop coming here forever. 7:25am opening, the attendant was apologetic, but we all know that this of far from his first offense.

I have a busy day ahead today. After I get my laundry I will be calling the mysterious Bill/Ronnie to talk about some family stuff.

My attempt at returning to the coding lifestyle went poorly yesterday, so I need to push myself harder on that front.

And tonight is a Betsy night; at least it’s her turn to cook.

Hope you are remaining healthy and happy, and that you find all of your businesses open when you arrive.

Screw Omicron, there is a whole lot of chili going around. I mentioned Bonnie bringing some over on Sunday, then Barb mentioned having some too. Therefore I had to make more, and an odd pot I made! I had a box of Carroll Shelby’s chili mix in the cupboard so I used it, a can of tomato sauce, a can of kidney beans, a can of PBR, and a combination of Beyond ground beef and Impossible sausage for the meats. I wasn’t done going batshit crazy however, as I added some chunks of pan-fried potatoes (think “home fries”) that I had baked earlier in the afternoon. With this chili I ate some cornbread (yes, to use the oven to add head to the house), and drank an ice cold beer that I stored in a Canadian refrigerator, aka “outdoors”, for a few hours. What a delicious meal it was, especially when I added some sour cream, cheese, and Fritos to the chili. Woot! Look at me cleaning out the cupboard, refrigerator, and freezer, and, I have enough leftover for at least three more meals.

This digression into poor eating was allowed since I put in a hard 45 minutes on the trainer yesterday afternoon. It was a perfect day to sweat indoors.

On my day off from choring, or caring about anyone except yours truly, I also finished reading the book “The Thursday Murder Club” in preparation for moving onto the second book in the series “The Man Who Died Twice” when it becomes available from the library or I buy as an ebook before the estimated eighteen-week wait expires. This series is written by a man named Richard Osman, who I’ve come to know by watching British tv shows on YouTube.

I mentioned yesterday that I lost a tray of seedlings to the wind which knocked over one of my little greenhouses. I’m still bummed by this, and need to take note of the plants I was growing. Honestly, I planted the seeds about a month ago (I’ll know exactly if I can still read the writing on the popsicle sticks), so I am not 100% sure of my intentions in planting them. I think they were mostly lettuces. This year I intend to be far more attentive to what and when I plant things, and ensure that the identification labels are legible when it comes time to referencing them months after planting.

Theoretically the City of Atlanta will be picking up garbage and recycling today. They’ve not picked up recycling in weeks, and my trash pickup was pushed a day due to yesterday’s federal holiday.

I really need to start adulting today, though I will spend some time outdoors working in WLF to get some exercise as well. This being Tuesday means that it will be a night at home. Who knows what sort of batshit crazy dinner I will make tonight? Oh wait, I do, but you will have to return tomorrow to find out.

Hope you are remaining happy and healthy.

Tuesday Tale of the Tape: 187.4 pounds (0.0 from last week’s weigh-in); not bad, considering I have not been dieting at all.

Well, well, well, two outta three ain’t bad, right?

I went to the Southern Comfort hash on Friday night. Well, I went to the end of the Southern Comfort hash on Friday night for the Christmas tree burning. Beforehand Bonnie and I decided to go out for a walk to get exercise. We walked three miles down the south Beltline, which meant a six mile walk was in order. Well, we then decided to walk to My Friends Bottle Shop, adding another two miles to our journey.

Saturday’s hash went well, we had over fifty hounds. Well, more like fourteen. Most people seemed to like the (5.5 mile) trail even though they had some difficulty solving our checks and some people were hoping for harder shiggy than we went through. I thought our trail had a good amount of runnable shiggy and interesting scenery to be a good Atlanta trail. The On After was at Arches Brewing, but I was not in the mood to be out any longer so I headed home instead.

And then the snow arrived on Sunday!

WLF experienced its first snow! (Yes Bill/Ronnie, this is enough to be qualified as “snow” in Atlanta) The snow and cold will put the final nail in the coffin for some of WLF’s crops. I’ll let whatever is going to die die, and deal with some cleanup next week.

The high winds caused the power at the ITP Estate to go off/on about ten times yesterday morning. When the winds died down, the snow started falling.

After being outside on Saturday I was worn out and couldn’t convince myself that going out in 35°F, wet weather by attending Black Sheep was a good idea. From what I’ve seen on Instagram it appeared that the pack who did go out (perhaps even more hounds than we pulled in on Saturday) had a blast. Instead of going out I allowed myself to be a lazy slob and do nothing. Bonnie walked over with frozen chili and we dined on it while sharing some beers and watching tv.

Today, well, it’s MLK Day and I have the day off! ???? (fuck, emojis are really gone for awhile; you are probably pleased by this…) Last year I joined hashers in picking up trash. This year, I am not sure. The weather here is supposed to remain cold, which will mean that the snow may or may not melt. [update at 7:30am — I just peered through the window as day is starting to break and see that most of the snow has already melted!] Because of the cold I won’t be hashing tonight, even though the start is at 5pm. I will try to jump onto the trainer for awhile in order to get some exercise.

Hope all is going well and that you are remaining healthy.