January 17, 2025

Ichneutymon Prooimion

I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile but haven’t gotten around to it. I’d like to start doing a regular(-ish) feature on etymology and my love for words in general. My focus tends to be on those with Greek and Latin roots, of course, since I can break them apart and put them back together pretty easily. As it’s the end of the week, I’m too tired to come up with one for tonight, but this is forthcoming.

January 10, 2025

Frozen

CWs: physical health, food, errands

It was a busy week, like most are. I wasn’t feeling well over the weekend, and ended up calling out of work on Monday. I do not like calling out when I’m on phones, but I did not feel up to talking to people all day while having a sore throat. I’m mostly better now, thankfully. It was just a frustrating nuisance of a cold, y’know? Did my phones on Tuesday, then the rest of the week has been pretty chill since then. I had my meeting on Wednesday, per usual, which went well. Ever since getting the new car, which shows real-time information about tire pressure and othr fun stats, I found that the tire pressure is a bit low. All tires are recommended to be inflated to 42psi, and some were as low as 35psi. Low tire pressure can reduce performance, so I wanted to get that sorted ASAP.

January 3, 2025

Digital Estate Planning

CWs: death, morbid, finances

I’ve been thinking lately about contingency plans. Specifically, what to do with the remnants of my digital life if (let’s be honest, when) something happens to me. That includes taking down this server, deleting online accounts or transferring ownership, and basically closing everything out. My spouse is comfortable with tech, but I wouldn’t say they’re “techy.” I have them set up on Bitwarden at the very least, to help with stronger passwords, and that is about the extent of it as far as involvement with this server. But my stuff is all over the place on here, and on the internet in general. There are subscriptions that would need to be cancelled (Patreon, &c.), and accounts (like utilities, &c.) that are in my name. I have recurring bills each month, whether it be my bank account or credit card, often accessed via PayPal and such. All of that will just keep going, ad infinitum/ἐς αἰεί, until it’s shut off or my accounts run out of money.

January 1, 2025

Blue Holidays

CWs: holidays, depression, food

I am not great at coming up with titles for posts, but here we are. We have made it through the holidays, including New Year’s (Happy New Year, friends!), relatively unscathed.

We didn’t do a whole lot for Christmas. It’s just my spouse and I and the cats. Our families are on both coasts, so we usually just spend the holidays on our own, which is fine with me. I think I mentioned this before (forgive me if I have), but I haven’t spent Christmas with my own family since probably 2013, so I’m used to not being around them, y’know? I like our low-key little celebrations really. We had a nice time, and it was great to have some significant time off from work to recharge.

December 27, 2024

Automotility

Just a few stray thoughts. We’ve had our EV (a 2024 Chevy Equinox) for almost a month at this point. It’s lovely. We have a charger that can use 120V for slow charging (about 1.4kW/hr), or 240V for fast charging (I think like 11-12kW/hr, so much faster). We don’t have the 240V outlet yet, though, and would need to get a new breaker box for that to be possible, and it won’t be cheap. So for right now we’ve had to charge the EV for a couple of days to get it back up to 80%, where we ideally want it to be.

December 25, 2024

Surprisingly Warm

CWs: holidays, alcohol, food

I expected it to be super cold today. It will be cold tonight (probably in the 20s or so), but today has been almost 50F. I haven’t been outside much today, mainly to grab something from the shed out back and to take the trash and recycling out to the cans on our back porch. If you’re celebrating, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah!; if not, I hope you’re enjoying your day. We celebrate Christmas in pretty much the most secular way possible: it’s just a day to hang out with family (and kitties!) and a day off from work. I grew up celebrating Christmas with my family, though, and it was a big deal as a kid especially. Christmas Eve is when we had our big blowout dinner, and opened at least one present, saving the rest for Christmas proper. I realized today that I haven’t spent Christmas with my family in Oregon since 2013. Wow, that’s been a long time. In 2014-15 I spent Christmas with my spouse’s family, which was lovely, but definitely different being in the Florida sun and heat. Christmas at 75-80F is not ideal for me, ugh. It was still nice to be able to spend it with family.

December 13, 2024

Imminent Winter

I’m excited we’re almost at the start of Winter proper (we are, as of the time of writing, 8 days out from the winter solstice). My spouse is happy after the solstice passes, mostly because the days start getting longer again. I love it since it’s the shortest and darkest day of the year. Bring on the cold and gloom! I feel like the colder months pass too quickly, and just by the time I get used to having them around, we go back to warmer, then hot, days, and the bugs come back, ugh.

December 7, 2024

Surreal Novelty

CWs: food, drink

Our garage smells like tires. It’s a clean smell, but a strange one. Reminds me of when my dad kindly gifted me his Cadillac Escalade, which I kept for awhile, and he had a new set of special snow tires that he threw in with it. We kept those tires in the closet at our tiny 1-bedroom apartment, and the whole closet smelled like rubber. That was kinda unpleasant. But this is different.

November 27, 2024

Rebuilding This Space

I’ve been wanting to do a writeup on this for a bit now. I had a pesky IPv6 issue with my server, and thought, hey, why not just nuke the whole thing and restart from scratch? I first opened this server in August 2020, and installed YunoHost back then, so the installation has been around for awhile. As a result, lots of cruft built up over time, and somehow things went south with my IPv6 configuration, to the point where YunoHost kept throwing warnings about non-functioning IPv6. As I couldn’t figure out the issue, despite loads of attempts, I thought I’d rebuild everything and reinstall.

November 16, 2024

Iron Road

CWs: food

I’ve been thinking about trains lately in general. When I was a kid, we used to take the train from my hometown (Eugene, OR) to Seattle right around Christmastime, and did so for a number of years on and off. I don’t know how that particular tradition started, but I always enjoyed it. The corresponding drive is probably 6-7 hours, but the train trip took considerably longer, mostly since trains go a little slower, and unfortunately aren’t the only users of the tracks; as a result, passenger rail needs to yield to freight trains. I’ve never understood why this is, but I suppose that’s the downside of shared tracks for both kinds of train travel. We usually went with my mom, my sister, and often my grandparents; I think my dad sometimes joined us and sometimes didn’t.