More Stuff

[Alkarii]

Just finished watching the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It's really good, focusing on Captain Pike and set before Kirk's command of the Enterprise. A couple of the episodes feel like the script could have been adapted from the original series (except with better acting, directing, and an obviously larger budget).

A common phrase in regards to Trek shows, is "growing the beard," meaning a Star Trek show has managed to hit its stride and the quality has improved... SNW had it from the first episode, in my opinion, though there is one episode where a single character just didn't sit right. Not sure, but I hope something bad happens to them in a future season.

I'm gonna look into getting Paramount+ soon so I can watch all the Trek not currently in my possession, as far as physical copies go.

[Alkarii]

Well... mom ended up going to Ohio today without telling any of us she was leaving until she got to Indiana. She's not been holding up very well over dad, and she hasn't been talking to me about it.

So it looks like I'm going to spend another week and a half alone in the house.

[Alkarii]

Well... it seems that in a few months, I will likely end up moving to Ohio with my mom. It will be the first time I've moved since the first week of July of 2005. I don't like this house, or the area, but, well... there's been so much of my life in this one house, more than half of it. I've buried so many pets here, more than at all our previous homes combined. We've had burglaries happen. We've had one of our own carried out of our house in a body bag on a gurney.

This house doesn't feel like the same place it used to be, and it will never feel like it used to.

I'll be able to get a transfer, and I may be able to take a leave of absence from work to do the complete move. The biggest concern is going to be moving the cats on a 12 hour drive.

[Dave]

This house doesn't feel like the same place it used to be, and it will never feel like it used to.

It's a cliche which is literally thousands of years old now: you cannot step into the same river twice. It's no longer the same river, and you are not the same person you were.

All you can do - all any of us can do - is move towards, as best as we can, in the world in which we find ourselves.

I'm sorry that your move is being brought on by such unhappy events... but perhaps making the move will help you find a new center of happiness in life.

[FreeFlier]

You might try not feeding that cats the day of the move until you're almost ready to leave . . . cats tend sleep after eating.

And putting butter on the top of their feet after you arrive is reported to help them adapt to their new home. Apparently it inspired a full-body bath that removes the scent of the old home.

--FreeFlier

[Alkarii]

It turns out that I may have an option that doesn't require me moving out of state. A few years ago, my parents bought a pole barn as a storage building, and it seems like we're going to move it to my brother's. We can have it turned into a tiny house, and I could live there. Most of my belongings would fit in there, and I wouldn't have to go far for familial company, since I'd be in the backyard. There wouldn't be as much paperwork that I would have to do, and it wouldn't mean the end of our D&D group, at least for now.

As for the cats, we could get a pet door installed on the shed, as there's already one on the back door of my brother's place, so they could follow me if they needed. The neighborhood is also cat friendly, as there are cats all over the place. Granted, I'll have three cats with me, and my brother has four of his own, so it'll get pretty crowded with fuzzies, but I'm sure we can adapt to that.

This house wasn't really that great of a home, to be honest. It isn't the best area, and there's too many bad memories, even if we've lived here longer than any other home we've had. In my case, I've lived here longer than all the other homes I've had combined. We moved into this house five and a half months before I turned 18, and my father died just a day or two after we reached 18 years in this house.

[Alkarii]

Once again, mom left for Ohio, and she'll be gone for about a week and a half.

I'm currently thinking that I'll just live here by myself, since all the bills together (including rent) total less than rent on anything better than a trailer or an apartment. Hell, the nearby trailer park charges more for rent than what I'll be paying here, anyways.

This means that I'll have to not take time off unless it's paid time off, at least until I've made enough to cover my expenses for the month. I also will likely not be going to my brother's for D&D anymore, because that would require either not feeding the pets that night or driving a total of a hundred miles over the weekend, and I don't want to do that. My brother said they'd be willing to come over here to play, but I somehow don't see that happening.

We also haven't played for the past four weekends in a row, and it seems this one will be the fifth. Oh well.

[Alkarii]

I just saw mom for the first time since she got back, sometime overnight. She's leaving again tomorrow, and I'm probably going to be leaving before she gets up in the morning.

I'm really not looking forward to the holiday/birthday season this year, as I suspect that I'm going to be alone for Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas, and New Year's.

Thankfully, I scheduled my vacation for next week, which is great since we're expecting to get pretty cold weather around Monday. That gives me time to get a new zipper pull ordered and put on my favorite zip-up hoodie that I've had for years.

[FreeFlier]

We've already got cold weather here - 37F three hours ago.

--FreeFlier

[Alkarii]

Arkansas Game and Fish has confirmed that there is a mountain lion in Arkansas. Growing up, I kept hearing folks say they'd seen/heard them in the woods of central AR, but other folks would say that they don't live in this state... which is weird, now that I think about it. I hear about them being in most of the surrounding states, so why not this one?

[Dave]

Arkansas Game and Fish has confirmed that there is a mountain lion in Arkansas. Growing up, I kept hearing folks say they'd seen/heard them in the woods of central AR, but other folks would say that they don't live in this state... which is weird, now that I think about it. I hear about them being in most of the surrounding states, so why not this one?

Nice! The trail-camera photos I saw on the web article about this report are impressive - that certainly does look like a puma!

From where I read, there hadn't been a breeding population of mountain lions in Arkansas for over a century - they were hunted to extinction there. Hence, "they don't live in this state" is accurate in that way.

There have been quite a few "stragglers" on the other hand - individual mountain lions born in other states, who have traveled into Arkansas and been seen (and often killed). Juvenile mountain lions (males in particular) often travel a long distance from their birthplace, looking for an unoccupied territory with good hunting and safety to make their own. That could well be the case in this last sighting, as it probably was in the case in 2014.

So, there can very well be a scattering of individual mountain lions living in Arkansas from time to time, without them being close enough together (and with a good enough male/female ratio) to "live in the state" as a group capable of reproducing and maintaining a stable population.

We see 'em down here in the urban Silicon Valley from time to time... they come down towards the Bay, following the creek beds. One male was sleep-darted in Mountain View less than a mile from here a few years ago and driven back up into the hills. Another was spotted in several back yards up in Menlo Park this last summer. Gwen and I strongly suspect that it was a young juvenile male cougar that she saw in our own back-yard a couple of years ago (it jumped onto a deer sculpture and then glared at her) but we have no certain confirmation of this as there were no other sightings of it and we don't have photos or physical evidence.

[Warrl]

Gwen and I strongly suspect that it was a young juvenile male cougar that she saw in our own back-yard a couple of years ago (it jumped onto a deer sculpture and then glared at her)

I don't blame it for glaring at you. That was a mean trick to pull on a hungry young cat. And it had been so proud of itself for stalking the deer so successfully, too!

[Alkarii]

I'd seen a video of a bobcat taking down a deer. It didn't get it on the first pounce, and the deer kicked it in the face, but it jumped back onto the deer's head and held on. The video cut to later, while the bobcat was eating.

I'd also had a silly idea earlier: imagine if someone had managed to breed domestic lynxes, where they're just as friendly as house cats... now imagine, instead of a tuxedo cat, you have a tuxedo lynx.

[Alkarii]

Well... insurance wrote my car off as a total loss. I'm thinking that I may just use the insurance money to get another car just like the one I had, probably even the same year model, so that I don't wind up having to make car payments on top of everything else.

Mom has also already filed a change of address with the postal service, so officially I'm the only resident here, though she hasn't begun the process of moving all her stuff up to Ohio. As long as I don't take much unpaid time off, I should be able to afford all the bills with money to spare.

I'd narrowly avoided a housefire just before Thanksgiving, as the transformer in the heater burned out the circuit card and later blew. The heater has since been fixed, though, so no worried about staying warm.

Once mom has moved her stuff out of the house, I can pull all of my stuff out of our storage building and into the house, then I can set up one of the extra bedframes with a new mattress. After that, cleaning up everything will be much easier, as I can organize everything as I move into the master bedroom.

I'm not sure if I'm right, but I feel like if I manage to get this house cleaned up properly, I might be able to go out and meet the right person to help make this house feel like a home again.

[Typeminer]

Glad to know that things are going a little better for you. Maintaining a house is way cheaper than renting, and avoiding debt you can avoid is always a good plan. I've never borrowed to buy a car. Drove near-junk cars for decades and found later, when I had more income, that a good 3-year-old car with low mileage is a lot more satisfactory and doesn't cost any more in the long haul, if you have the cash.

Another thing to look at, living alone, is whether you need to heat the whole place or can zone it, and how cool you can keep it and still be reasonably comfortable. I live in a 1910 3-story brick rowhouse with oil-fired forced air and keep the thermostat at 60 F, because thermal underwear is a lot cheaper than fuel oil. A heated blanket helps.

[Alkarii]

I forgot to mention: I'm stuck here because the rent here has always been $600/mo, and the couple who built it (and own it) never raised it. They said they checked the homes in the area, and the trailer park a few miles away charges $700/mo, and they'll double the rent for the mext tenants.

[Alkarii]

Welp, I'm wrapping up my last day of being 35. I made a nice roast that turned out great. I used both beef and pork in it, along with potatoes, baby carrots, and two kinds of mushrooms... it's going to be dinner for most of the week.

[Sgt. Howard]

Welp, I'm wrapping up my last day of being 35. I made a nice roast that turned out great. I used both beef and pork in it, along with potatoes, baby carrots, and two kinds of mushrooms... it's going to be dinner for most of the week.

I wish I was that young- I will be 70 in August. Many happy returns on your 36th year of life- eventually, things will calm down. I wish you good fortune and fair company in the coming year.

the Old Sgt.

[Dave]

Aging is tough. We all do it, it's inevitable, but the consequences can bring some real hurt.

I lost a good and close friend this weekend. Scott was 82. He'd had a severe stroke a couple of years ago, and survived only thanks to some urgent surgery by just-the-right-doctors at Stanford. His speech was affected but his thoughts remained sharp. Over the past year or so he'd developed congestive heart failure and was finding it difficult to walk as much as he wanted, but he never gave up working at it. He'd been going downhill over the past six months, in the hospital several times to deal with the heart failure, and had told me he thought his time was short.

He passed away quietly in his sleep on Saturday morning, at home.

Scott was the senior architect, builder, and maintainer of the ham-radio repeater system at our local hospital. We met not long after I get my ham licence in 2001 and he'd urged me to join the repeater association as they needed someone with software expertise to program the new hardware. Over the last couple of decades we worked together on the system, testing and installing and improving and debugging and repairing it, climbing on the hospital roof to service the antennas, and eventually moving the whole system to a new building at the hospital.

We trusted one another, we could talk about anything, and had many long and enjoyable conversations in person and on the phone. My wife declared him a "nerdy Santa Claus", probably the best 3-word description possible.

He'd spent the last thirty years or more working on his "new house"... a two-story home built around the remnants of an original 1920's-era brick cottage on his property in the woods. It sat unfinished for many years after his divorce, but he got back to working on it about fifteen years ago (doing most of the work himself) and got it inspected and approved for inhabitation about five years ago. I was really glad that he and his second wife Barbara were able to make this their home for several good years - it was a beautiful place to ride out the COVID lockdown.

I learned an intense amount from him over the years, and was able to share some of what I know in return. He was always willing to teach, discuss, critique, and appreciate. We had a lot of fun figuring things out to solve practical problems. Putting together a strange lash-up of old signal generators, wires and cables and hand-wound coils and transistors and an old Android tablet to make a locator probe so we could find where roots had blocked an underground wire conduit in his garden was one particularly enjoyable example. He'd then used the same setup to figure out where his contractors had accidentally driven a drywall nail in the wrong place and shorted out some wiring in his wall.

The world is poorer for his departure, and I'm really going to miss him and his "Hello, Mr. Answering Machine!" phone calls.

[Typeminer]

I wish I was that young- I will be 70 in August.

I hear ya. In 28 days, I'm turning 39 again (for the 32d consecutive year!), myself. And parole from the publishing gulag has been confirmed, effective February 1.

Dave, my dad had congestive heart failure, kept going right to the end but knew it was coming, and pretty much had a what-the-hell attitude the last few years. There are worse things, and most of us have probably seen them. Scott sounds like he was a lot of fun to know.

Alkarii, you should have plenty of tread left, and life can surprise you. Ya screw around and fuck things up every day for years on end, and then all of a sudden they say you're the local expert! Also, cooking what you like and liking what you cook will carry you through a lot.