We got about six inches of snow on Sunday, 1/5/25. That was enough to cancel school on Monday through Wednesday, which meant extending the kids’ Christmas vacation for three extra days!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my snow blower to start… I’m guessing the issue is a combination of trying to use old gas, and/or its carburetor being, I don’t know, dirty or gummed up, or something. I don’t know if I have any real reasons to suspect that, but it’s what I’m going to go with. So, I’m going to try to replace the carburetor. I have YouTube videos that show how to take it off and put it back on, and ordered a replacement on Amazon for only $18, so I figure it’s worth a try. I’m choosing to view it as a fun project.
In the meantime, without a machine to clear our driveway (and no teenagers who knock on doors and offer to do it for us), I had to do it by hand. Well, by shovel. Despite losing a lot of weight last year, I didn’t necessarily gain much strength or muscle, so it was a pretty exhausting experience. I did wisely (if I do say so myself) split the task up into four batches, about 30-45 minutes each, so that made it overall fairly tolerable.
By Thursday they reopened school, but drop off and pickup lines were both quite a bit slower than usual. Then, overnight and in to Friday morning, another round of snow came, this one delivering another couple of inches, and cancelling school yet again!
However, now that we live in the future, our school district only permits three actual snow days per year, which meant that Friday was our first virtual school day since the good ole days of COVID-19. It went fine for everyone, with one special highlight: for FACS, my 7th grader got to bake brownies 🙂
One task that I have pop up every week on my Reminders “Weekend” todo list is filling in a weekly log note in Obsidian. In each week’s log entry I have a few headings pre-populated, for the general categories of things I try to write down that I did every week. These headings are:
ColdTrack – to write down either important happenings, or things that I did for the “jobby job”
QQQ – again, to log any significant work done there
Home – for writing down anything notable that I did around the house, or with the family
Watching – to keep track of what shows and/or movies I’ve watched
Reading – to keep track of what book I’m working through
I’ve found it a slightly useful exercise to spend 5 or 10 minutes every weekend sitting down to reflect on each of those categories. But, even more interestingly, now that 2024 is wrapping up, and I’ve got more than a full year of these log entries, I thought it would interesting to take a look at all of my entries for each of these categories, to give myself a snapshot view of what the year 2024 looked like for me.
The old adage proved true again this morning for me: Any time you have a plumbing project that starts by turning off a shut off valve, that you actually have two plumbing projects, the first of which is, replacing a leaking shut off valve…
Today I (re)discovered a potentially-quite-useful option in the IntelliJ debugger:
If you go into “More” when right-clicking on a breakpoint, then turn on “Evaluate and log” and enter an expression, it’s basically the equivalent of adding debugging print statements, but without actually dirtying up your code with them. When coupled with un-checking “Suspend” (e.g., making the breakpoint not pause the program’s execution), it’s kinda perfect.
I feel like i should be using this a lot more often!
Makes me wonder what the rest of this screen does. I have used “Disable until hitting the following breakpoint” before, to help avoid the dance of: set a breakpoint; run; break; resume; resume; resume; “is this the context i wanted? no? resume”; resume; resume; “oh crap, i missed the one i wanted! restart!!!“; resume; etc
We had a 15th birthday in our house this week. To celebrate, we made one of our favorite desserts: an Ice Cream cake. I think we got the recipe out of a kids cook book several years ago, and we actually don’t have a paper or digital copy. Instead, we just make it off memory, which works pretty well. Here’s my version of it:
I received a pleasant surprise delivery from UPS today: When I looked at the from-address on the label I realized what it must be: A “reward” packet from the good people at Relay.fm and St. Jude: A box of prizes for me, as their way of thanking me for raising a little bit of money ($1700, not so little? but not that much) for childhood cancer awareness month back in September.
Obviously, I didn’t raise the money just so I’d get an award, and I’d have said that I didn’t want one if I was asked (sorry, maybe they did ask and I forgot that I said “yes, please”?). But, I have to admit, this has really warmed my heart and made my day, getting these gifts. Thank you Stephen, Myke, and to everyone involved at St. Jude. It’s great to see the circle of giving continue, and this does motivate me to participate again next year 🙂
I had a pair of things to fix around the house recently, and I noticed a theme with both of them – that sometimes a simpler solution is the best one – despite the challenge that there might be in finding that simplicity. Perhaps that’s a version of “if I’d have had more time I would have written a shorter letter“, and it’s expected that something simple might be harder to come up with. Regardless of that, I wanted to collect and share those two stories here:
First, was the key for my 2013 Corolla. It’s the kind with both an old-fashioned metal key, and a built-in fob, or remote-control buttons on the base of the key. The problem was, that the plastic loop that allows the key to go onto a key ring had broken, so the key would fall off my key chain. I won’t go into details on my first attempted fix, other to say “zip ties and electrical tape”. Of course, I could have gotten a replacement, but doing that with the dealership, I assumed, would be at least a few hundred bucks, so I wanted to find a cheaper solution. I was able to find blank replacement keys on Amazon, but then there was the challenge of how to (1) get it cut, and (2) get the electronics reprogrammed. I reached out to a handful of locksmiths in the area, but not a single one gave a reasonable response to my inquiry. So I felt a little stuck.
Until I spent some time looking at the key and taking it apart. What I eventually realized was, that the base of they key is essentially a two-piece shell – one which has the key embedded into it, but the other, the back, is just a simple plastic case – and both pieces of the shell have a loop on them. So the simple solution I came up with was, to order a blank replacement, then take it apart and use its simple back to replace the back from my original. So I could keep using my original, and just have a working loop again, via the loop on the back case from the replacement. No locksmith or dealer needed. Simple.
My second story is about my wife’s iron. She has a very specific one that she likes, but a few months ago, the lid on its water tank broke, so she couldn’t use it, without water leaking out of the tank. Apparently this iron is discontinued, and after much searching, I was able to find just one site that still had it in stock – so I ordered a replacement. But, after just a few weeks of use, it started “shorting out”. I’m not sure if that’s the proper electrical term – but essentially it would start working fine, however, when moving the cord (which is inevitable when using the device) it would loose power and turn off. It was basically unusable.
At this point, I thought I might be able to disassemble the new iron, find the bad electrical connection, and fix it. I wasn’t sure if I could find it, and even if I did, if it would be safe to use after the repair. Regardless of my doubts, I started taking it apart and looking closely at all of its component parts. After several minutes of fiddling with it and thinking about it all, eventually I noticed that the water tank itself was a component part that could be removed. That’s when I remembered that we still had the old iron with the broken water tank lid, and then the solution was obvious: I just moved the tank from the new iron (with a good lid) to the original iron (with working electronics), and voila, we have a Frankenstein’s iron, but 100% functional, and totally safe, because it isn’t based on me fixing any wiring 🙂
Having both of these stories come up within about a week of each other struck the same chord in my brain, about how I was originally looking for some kind of bigger or more complicated solution to a problem, but in the end, simpler solutions were available to me. I feel like there’s some lesson to take from this, though I don’t quite see that bigger picture yet.
I’ve been near-sighted since I was about ten years old. But here in my mid 40s, now my up-close vision is starting to falter too. I tried progressive lenses a few years ago, but didn’t really like them.
Anyway, one of the main things I have to hold farther away from my face to see all the time, is my iPhone. So, a couple days ago I activated the text-size setting, bumping it up just one level (110%), and boy, it’s a really nice quality of life improvement. So glad I’ve done it. Time to do the Apple Watch next.
I used to buy some box of frozen mashed sweet potatoes. They had some kind of sweet something mixed in them, and a crumbly pecan topping. They were so good! But I haven’t seen them at the grocery store for like a year or so, which made me sad.
But at the store this weekend, my little Vanessa saw all of the sweet potatoes that they had out for Thanksgiving, and she asked what they were, saying that they looked strange. So I grabbed one, knowing that I like them, but not knowing how I’d prepare it.
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Now when I was a kid like she is now, I didn’t like sweet potatoes (for some reason!). My mom always made them very well, but they were a taste that I just didn’t like. Lucky for me though, I did somehow acquire a taste for them as an adult.
Anyway, I just googled for mashed sweet potatoes, and it was pretty easy to make one: I peeled it and cubed it, then boiled it for about 15 minutes, until I could smash it with tongs. Then mashed it with a fork, mixing in a little milk, butter, and (real) maple syrup. Then I made a little crumb topping with melted butter and brown sugar, and voila!
It was so easy, and pretty much just as good as the frozen ones I used to love, so I think I’ve got a new regular menu item for cooking. Which is nice.
The Overcast app (my podcast player of choice) got a new feature last week: The ability to show you how many hours you’ve listened to each of your shows over the past year. Here’s my top-9, in a fancy image that Overcast produces:
I feel it’s my duty to correct an entry I made here a few weeks back, re: my electric kettle’s stay-warm feature oddly “breaking”… turns out (and maybe this isn’t a surprise to anyone who knows me well), it was just me that “broke”. Somehow, after using this kettle for something like six months, on the day in question above, I randomly forgot how to use the stay-warm timer. Instead of clicking the button and then turning the dial to increase how long it should stay warm, my brain decided that morning, to repeatedly press the button. Which isn’t ever how it worked.
Anyway – good news – my kettle keeps my coffee water hot for as long as I like now – so my second cup comes out faster during my working days.
