I love seeing your weekly readings. Always found interesting topics through your posts!

I’m currently embarking on Matthew B. Crawford’s “The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction”…super interesting ideas here.

Had a busy weekend, my brother was in town with his family so spent the last 48 hours with them. Love them, but they are pretty exhausting lol. This week at work is looking to be pretty chill, so all in all, not bad. Hope everyone has a fantastic week ahead!

loki (australian shepherd) ran four courses at an agility trial. and by that i mean he got in the ring, did a few obstacles, and rolled around on the turf every.single.time. silly boy. i guess this explains why he’s gotten most of his qualifying scores on the dirt courses, hah.

echo (border collie) passed her CGC evaluation! she’ll get her certificate and ribbon on thursday. she also came with me to the agility trial and waited quietly ringside. i’m planning to get her CGCA (canine good citizen advanced) title next, and i’ve also got her set up to start agility lessons with a different trainer next month. i love my current trainer, but i think she lacks teaching foundational skills, and we really need that.

i may be pet sitting for a well-known author’s brother in may, so that’s neat!

in non-dog news, i’ve got an appointment with a new primary care doc today to hopefully sort out whatever has been going on with my knee these past few years. it’s usually fine, but i biked ~30 miles last weekend and it flared up again.

I finished my new^2 NAS last week (for the most part). Everything has been gracefully moved over, and now I just need to tear the entire thing apart again so I can dremel out a PCI slot so it’ll fit a graphics card. I’m great at planning ahead. :D

Busy weekend, a Michelin star chef friend of ours dropped off a great little pig to add to our amazing decor, another couple from Ireland dropped off some rhubarb so Im making a conserve for sunday to go with the Southern biscuits. We finish up tomorrow with Taco Tuesday & a couple days off. Have a pork belly & skin in dry cure with toasted spices & brown sugar, got the piglet coming on Wednesday & start prepping for the Frogmore Stew & Pig Pick’n Sunday… gonna be damn good

I’m a little disappointed at myself, to be honest. I was supposed to have a hematologist appointment on Wednesday, but I rescheduled it for early next month. For the last few years, I’ve been fighting to get my chronic fatigued treated because its generating a whole tree of issues (its preventing me from progressing my life forward, I’m pretty sure its the cause of my depression, etc) - however no one has been able to figure it out because no one actually wants to take an in-depth look as to what it might be. They just run a simple CBC on my blood and say “Nope, looks all fine”.

Well, to be quite frank, I’m just not ready to organize leaving the house on Wednesday (I don’t have a car, so I have to get transportation scheduled from my insurance company) and expend all that energy, just to then be disappointed when the hematologist is 99% likely to say “There’s nothing wrong that I can see”, then I have to organize a trip to actually get back home. It turns what is a 15 minute appointment into a whole 3-4 hour ordeal. They don’t offer telehealth appointments, sadly, or else I wouldn’t mind at least talking to the doctor.

I only pushed it back a little bit till early next month, but I’m just not ready for the disappointment this week, it was causing me a ton of anxiety just even thinking about it over the weekend.

I know that I shouldn’t be disappointed in myself because at the end of the day its my choice and that I shouldn’t feel ashamed for it, but that doesn’t change the fact that its how I feel regardless - so in reality, I traded anxiety for more grief and disappointment in myself rather than disappointment in the doctors.

Upgraded my network to Wi-Fi 7, upgraded my NAS to 2.5gbe, reconfigured my torrent setup. This was all to distract me from the new girl who called and tried to break up with me on Sunday 😔 poly woes. I think I’ve figured out what I want to tell her next weekend but this really sucks because she said she wanted something serious and seemed interested but then I was maybe too enthusiastic? I dunno I’m really confused on this one

Started my first week of work since I got addicted to heroin and fell into a crisis a few years ago, finally back on track in a major and definitive way, and work is going very well, just wrapped up my second day!

On the work front, I absolutely had no motivation to do anything on Thursday or Friday. Like I just sat in my chair all at home, sitting on social media/news/games. I really try not to play games during the workday, but I was just completely sapped of all motivation. Idk what the deal was with that. Not like the first half of last week was a hard work, either. At least, I was able to find some motivation and work on some things today.

I finally bought a UPS for my homelab server. Only 3-4yrs after first getting the server and like 6mo since a momentary voltage sag from the wall/mains power caused the server to shutdown unexpected and corrupt one of my VMs (at least, that’s what I think happened). And this UPS even interfaces with ESXi to automatically – and ideally, gracefully – shutdown in case of a loss of power. I think I’ll test that this weekend.

Also did and filed my taxes yesterday (Sunday). At like 5am. Because what else is there to do at 5am on a Sunday, other than taxes? 🤷🏽‍♂️

Built a new PC for my wife and I, first I’ve done in over a decade. Mini ITX boards are wicked cute but it did start feeling a little cramped by the end. I also built a little egg washing station to hopefully save me some time cleaning eggs this year.