Our World

Month: April 2026

  • Day 120 of 2026 – April 30th

    I have been a bad blogger for the last 17 days or so. Life gets busy, you hit a few roadblocks and all of a sudden the blog does not seem that important. I have been struggling with some health related issues again, and have been having some problems keeping my routine on a daily basis. I think some of this is resolved.

    Anyways, to catch you up on the last 17 days since April 13th…… I spent a few days in Chicago for a pretty large Home Automation System inspection. It wasn’t a bad trip and I managed to stay in a hotel that actually had walking and jogging capability outside and not on crappy hotel treadmills.

    I was able to finally get Climber to her second vet visit so her vaccinations are now all complete for another year or so. I have to make an appointment to get Res in. That will wait another month or so, he’s not due yet but we are moving them both back to VCA as we want them to have access to the 24 hour ER care, and I am tired of not having all of their medical records in one place.

    Speaking of medical, I had my cardiac stress test this past week, obviously they could not pinpoint the issue that has been plaguing me for months. Something happens with my heart rate when I work out for a long period of time. It is bad that they couldn’t find it, I was never able to get my heart rate to max out. I just don’t understand why the medical community does not realize that when you have a heart rate monitor that actually tracks everything you do, and you can narrow down the exact conditions that cause the issue, that for some reason they absolutely refuse to attempt to replicate them. A 8 minute walk, run on a treadmill at 30% incline does not equal 30 minutes into a 6 mile run. And, I think I am having afib but with a heart rate in the low 40s my watch can’t determine afib or anything else. Heart rate to low.

    As I mentioned I have been having issues with getting into a routine, this is primarily a routine in the pool with my swimming workouts. I have had real problems with the town rec centers, as great as they are, group activities and just general over-use has caused me not to be able to count on my swim workouts for the last month. I have had to be going back and forth between two centers and with one of them I have to change my schedule around to to swim lessons, teams, pool closures, etc. It has really been a distraction. So, I finally joined a VASA Fitness, a private chain of fitness centers that have pools. Today I did my first workout there.

    It’s a nice, 25 meter, 3 lave pool, but the lanes are wide enough that you can reasonably share lanes. Also, it was clean and the water felt nice and was not over chlorinated. It was a good swim, now to see if in May I can get my distances back up again. Of course I do have an upcoming business trip or two that may cut into my swim time, but that’s OK I can work around those.

    For April, I did have some wins with my workouts and fitness, it was overall a good month, with a few minor setbacks.

    62 workouts, 15 swims, 3 runs. A total of 42 hours and 127.5 miles logged. On the health side:

    I did see some progress on both weight and fitness. I think in the next month I should make my weight goals, the question is will I make my fitness goals. I really don’t know right now. My goal all year has been the start of the Mountain Lake Swim series. The first swim is a 2.5 mile swim up near Boulder, CO. I do have a concern that it may be un-wise for me to do this swim because of this stupid heart rate issue I am having. I am still going to train for it, but I am not sure it will happen. I really need a 5K swim to see if I can still do it, my max in the last year or so has been a 3.5K, I am short by 1500M. That is the goal this coming month, a 5K swim.

    Anyways, I think that is it for now. I promise I will try to post a little more in May. I was doing so good before this few week setback in April. Talk to you soon!

  • Day 103 of 2026 – April 13th

    Today starts off as any other day does. Up with the dogs, let Res out, let Res in, let Climber out, let Climber in. Give them their morning snacks. Put together mine and Jesse’s coffee. And start on my never ending email list. For some reason my Technical Support task list exploded over the weekend. I am not sure why, that will take me a little bit to go through.

    I did spend some time on maintenance on this WordPress site this morning. I finally broke down and installed the Redis caching server and it took me a while but I was able to get WordPress to recognize that. Maybe that will speed up the data base operations a bit. We will see. I also had a few security related items I needed to take care of and those are now done. Updates and stuff like that.

    I have decided that today will not be a swim day. I think I may have overdone it over the weekend. Tomorrow is another day. I was able to get out for a walk for lunch, I tried to take Res with me but he decided that he only wanted to go 1/2 way around the park and made me bring him home.

    After I was done for the day I took Climber outside for a while, thought she may want to play ball, but not really. She wanted to be in the sun more than anything else.

    And then of course Res had to have his turn. He wasn’t all that energetic and just wanted to go out and smell around.

    And then back to work for a while for me. And then our usual afternoon stuff, their 1/2 mile evening walk, dinner for them, dinner for us, and that’s it for today. Not all that much exciting.

    See you all tomorrow.

  • Day 102 of 2026 – April 12th

    Day 102 of 2026 – April 12th

    A FaceBook memory from this morning. The pack 10 years ago. I think Ranger and Mindy would have loved Colorado. I don’t think they cared all that much for Florida. Mindy would have had me walking all over Aurora and probably the Front Range as well. She used to love her long walks.

    Photos of Lady, Peanut, Ranger, Leona, and Mindy 10 years ago.

    Someone asked me why I hold myself accountable for making these daily posts, especially since it is possible that I am the only one that reads them. Sort of a rude question, but a valid one. I am not sure how many people read them, I have them open for comments, but that has yet to happen with the exception of some spammers, and those get deleted. Here’s the thing, I do have family out there, they are not part of my life right now for a variety of reasons, but I like to think that someday they, or their kids, may like to know a little more about me. The other thing is, that there is so much negativity on social media these days that my posts, that are really just about life, may offset some of that. Why don’t I post directly to Facebook, BlueSky, Twitter, X (or any of the others)? It’s about advertising dollars. The social media platforms for years have made a ton of money from our intellectual property. It’s sort of the contract with them. They use your content, use your thoughts to stir up controversy that causes other people to click on like,dislike,love on your posts. Then they feed you advertisements. It’s in their algorithms. Well, if someone is going to use my content I want it to be linking to my site, where someday I may be able to get some advertising dollars directly on my own (not that I am holding my breath on that as Google has told me my site “lacks relevant content”). I do try and cross post to the other platforms, but my intellectual content stays on my sites.

    Anyways, Good Morning! I think I am going to write today’s post in parts today. Started off the day as usual, got up a little late, it’s Sunday – I’m allowed, dogs out, in, and snacked. Res is still being picky about his snacks, I am not sure what’s up with that but I wish he’d stop. I really think he is just bored with everything. I think Angel Ranger is up there at the Rainbow Bridge making the case to take Res’s Greyhound Card away from him. It must pain him to see all of these missed snack opportunities. And, since Climber has to loose 9 pounds I can’t keep giving her Res’s leftovers.

    Once Res and Climber had their food, I spent a few minutes doing some site maintenance on my WordPress block (this one), and I do need to go update the Learning Management System for work (Alpine Intel University) as I don’t like doing that one during the week. Too much risk for downtime when someone is actually going to be using it. Today some of the plug-ins had to be updated, then there was a security release to Moodle itself, and then there were some app upgrades for the Ubuntu back-end system. One of these days I probably need to do a distribution version update, but I try to avoid those like the plague….. the server is a VPS on Digital Ocean and I try to avoid the distribution updates until I really need to do them. The VPS that this site runs on is a little more forgiving, and I keep this one current more frequently.

    Res got his walk, he did well. We did 3.5 miles, a little over 5K. He wanted to go further but he has a little soreness on his pads that I am watching.

    Next is Climber’s walk. She did much better than yesterday in terms of pulling on my shoulder. She was actually pretty good. She did 3.48 miles, slightly less the Res, though I am not sure why. It could have been the walk back to a trash can that I had to do with Res. We did make a stop along the way so that I could submit a report of a water leak along Buckley.

    After a good breakfast/lunch/brunch I went over the to pool for an hour. I was planning on a 1 hour swim but was forced to take a 15 minute “safety break”. That is such bullshit, and it makes it impossible to get a good swim in, but I guess that is something I am going to have to keep in mind going forward. I am hoping they realize that the policy normally ignores those swimming laps. I am having a lot of problems preparing for my Mountain Swim if I can’t get an hour in the pool.

    After I got back from my swim I decided it was time to get the hydroponic supplies out of storage and get an inventor of where I am at with supplies this year. I also wanted to build the double buckets we are going to try this year for our cucumbers and maybe some other vegetables. We were planning on adding some additional raised beds, but I just can’t see that happening based on our current water restrictions. I think the better idea will be to do most of our planting in hydroponics where I can control water use and chemicals (fertilizer, food, etc).

    Take some 3 gallon square buckets, drill holes in the bottom of the top one, to allow fast drainage into the bottom bucket. Put a bulkhead type fitting into the bottom of the outside bucket, making sure it is low enough to let the other bucket sit inside of it, and then stack them.

    I have to give credit on this idea to DIY Hydroponic Gadens by Tyler Baras. We have done hydroponics for about 10 years now and I ran across this book one day when I was traveling to Portland, Oregon and decided to stop at one of my old hangouts, Powell Books, and I came across this gem. Lot’s of new ideas and some that will be an improvement of things that I have done in the past. Lot’s of new experiments this year. We have 5 of these buckets built.

    I still have to add the supply and return piping, but here is this years basic setup, minus the reservoir and the supply/return.

    The buckets still need to be put up off the ground. I am going to use a 2×6 on cinder blocks for this. I have the 2×6 and all I need is the cinder blocks. Once that is done I have to run my return line across the bottom back to the patio, the resevior will sit on the patio itself at the base of the retaining wall so we have natural drainage. I am going to use PVC from the buckets, I will also be using a horizontal PVC pipe across the bottom of the rails at the edge of the ledge. We didn’t have good luck with the hoses last year and I think I want to make a change in that regard. I also think I am going to be putting some valves into the drain lines from everything so I can better control the level of the water around the roots.

    Had a Salmon, Asperigus, and Shrimp for dinner this evening, and now we are having a relaxing evening with both dogs sleeping off their day.

    See you tomorrow!

  • Day 101 of 2026 – April 11th

    Day 101 of 2026 – April 11th

    I have been remiss in posting for the last two days, the bottom line is there was not much going on. Today, however, was a busy day. I didn’t get everything done I wanted to get done, but that’s OK, it was a Saturday. I started off the day with my normal get up, have coffee, let the dogs in and out, give them their snacks, and then wade through my personal email. do a quick check on work email – I always make sure nothing urgent.

    When Jesse got up I too Res on his morning walk, today was a lone walk and we did about 3.25 miles. It was a good walk until Res noticed that I was starting to turn him back to the house, then he changed speed from bunny speed to snail speed. He likes being out and about and when I turn back to the house he notices.

    When we got back home it was now Climber’s turn. I took her on a slightly longer walk because she walks a little faster than Res does and she needs her exercise, she needs to loose 9 pounds. We have cut her back on her food a bit. I am being a little stingy on her treats, and I am going to start figuring out how to start giving her more outside time during the weekdays. Anyways, her part of the walk was really good, except for something that I will describe after her walk gallery.

    I love our Prairie Dogs, the are cute, they are funny, and even Res and Climber love to watch them. They are harmless. They build their colonies in empty fields, they do not build in peoples lawns, and they have family units. So, imaging my surprise and horror when I see some asshole in the field next to one of the churches up on Tower Boulevard in the middle of the Prairie dog colony.

    What this idiot was doing was using a shovel to seal off one end of the tunnels and then he was sticking a long hose with a funnel into the other end of the tunnels and dumping something, I assume poison, down the hole and then sealing the colony into the holes. The way he was approaching it, he has done this before. As soon as I saw what he was doing and started taking photographs of him, his actions, and his license plate, he suddenly put his stuff away and got really nervous.

    I want to point out that there are so many things wrong with this. First, poisoning entire colonies of Prairie Dogs is wrong. Second, he did not mark the field so no one knows what chemicals he was using. Third, if another animal gets one of the poisoned Prairie Dogs they will die was well. Poison is forever. Third, this is baby time, this is the time the young ones are born and in the caverns. Given where he was, this apparently is a sanctioned activity by the Church. Perhaps someone should sit down and read a few passages in the Bible about compassion and all that stuff.

    I will be filing a formal complaint with all my photos to the State Wildlife Department, the Aurora Police Department, the Aurora Animal Control department, and the State Department of Licensing (wildlife control is a licensed activity and I somehow doubt this idiot was licensed.) There is nothing I can do for that colony of Prairie Dogs, but I can sure follow-up on this and make sure at least this idiot’s actions are seen and noted.

    So, after I walked back home from that little discovery, I sat down and had breakfast with Jesse. And then I decided I wanted to go swim. I got to the Central Recreation Center, and believe it or not, got a lane pretty quickly in the lap pool. Unfortunately that did not last long. I had just gotten about 300 yards in when there are kids jumping into the lap pool without looking. It turns out that they had to close the main pool because yet again someone had a bathroom accident in it. This is now two weekends in a row, and that means that the pools will be bad tomorrow.

    I gave up and decided to drive over to the Utah Indoor Pool that just re-opened and everyone keeps telling me that I should try. It’s a 25 meter pool, a little longer than the 25 yard pool I have been swimming in, But, it’s about 6 miles from the house and takes me a little longer to get to. I was able to get in a nice 2000 meter swim. I was annoyed, but recovered. I haven’t swum in a 25meter pool in a while so it took me a while to get used to the wall that had moved (25 yards to 25 meters — do the math kids.)

    When I got home I decided to tackle putting the irrigation system box in place for the right side of the backyard, one more step to remove some heavy water use from the system (we are moving to drip and micro irrigation for anything that is not lawn area. It’s just not an easy thing to do as the yard is clay and I have to find the lines that I can disconnect and the ones that I need to tie into.

    Anyways, then it was time to take Res and Climber on their afternoon walks, and feed them, feed us, and relax for the evening. I managed to get the laundry done, well actually waiting on the last load to finish drying, but one less thing that I do not need to worry about tomorrow. On my list of things I really want to do tomorrow is to dig out all of my hydroponic planting stuff from the shed, figure out where it is going to live this year, and then I want to build the double buckets that are now sitting in the living room still packed. This will be a part of the hydroponic setup this year, and I think that should keep me busy most of the day. I may skips my swim tomorrow, not sure yet on that one. I will see how I feel in the morning. Nothing’s wrong, but I do want to get some stuff done around here at the house.

    Anyways, Res and Climber say goodnight and maybe we will see you all tomorrow.

    Don’t they look innocent?

  • Day 098 of 2026 – April 8th

    And I think with this post I am caught up. Sorry, but I hate to admit that I was behind by two days of posting and then also needed to get today’s post in. Today was a “at home” or “in the office” day after yesterday’s travels.

    Not all that much to write about today, I did get out to swim during my lunch break. I think I am going to shift my swim time a little later in the afternoon, to maybe 12:30-1:00pm start of my break. The pool is way too busy earlier and once again I was shoved up against a wall sharing a lane and I scraped the top of my right hand something awful. But, eventually I was able to get a lane by myself and finished my workout.

    I only did 1750 today, but I do have problems with other people in my lane, would not be bad if the lanes were not so narrow, but me being 6’3″ and I have a very wide breaststroke kick. I need to work on that, but that is the last of my worries. I need to increase distance.

    The rest of the afternoon was catching up on some other issues regarding tech support, processor support, and other related tasks. Finally I was able to finish at about 3:30pm MT and spend some time with Jesse and the dogs. Climber has a little bit of an attitude problem growing and we are going to have to deal with that. Jesse and I have always been about the dogs being dogs, but she is really pushing her luck recently. I need Mindy to make a visit and tell Climber to knock the crap off.

    Anyways, I am tired today, so it’s enough for today, we will see you tomorrow.

  • Day 097 of 2026 – April 7th

    And today I did have to go into the field and do an HVACi inspection up in Fort Morgan area.

    It was a residential property that had water intrusion, but it is a special property. It was one of those that the walls are insulated with straw bails. This is an extremely efficient form of insulation, but is time consuming and very expensive to build.

    Look at how thick those walls are, and you can see the straw “blocks” that are being used for insulation. I love seeing construction like this, unfortunately there was some damage to the property, but the owner was really nice to work with and very helpful. And, they will be able to fix the issues and it will all be good. My trip up there was just one step in the process.

    On my way home I was able to take a short “lunch break” and get my swim in. I have been trying to get a mile in every day during the week. I really need to try and get a 2 mile swim in one of these days, but during the week I am sort of tied to my desk, and on weekends I try not to take too much time away from things I would like to be doing here at the house.

    Anyways, that’s it for today, I will see you tomorrow.

  • Day 096 of 2026 – April 6th

    I have been slow in posting for the last couple days. This post is for April 6th, that would be Monday. Not much to write about today, basically the painters “finished” on the house and Climber had a well visit at our new vet.

    First, Climber’s well visit. Yup, she has officially been told she is overweight and needs to go on a diet. She needs to loose 9 pounds. Ooops, that may be my fault, but I also blame Res. We will work on it and maybe at her next vet appointment she will be back to the weight she should be. She has a build a lot like Lady did and she can put on weight before I even know she is.

    Then, the painters have wrapped up the outside of the house. Well, sort of…. they have a bunch of touch up to do as they were sloppy on their last day of work. But, we went from the brown trim to our awesome burgundy that we have used on other houses.

    Take a look at the difference:

    Anyways, that will be just about it for the 6th.

  • Day 095 of 2026 – April 5th

    This is going to be a short post today. I got up late, took the dogs for their walks, and really didn’t do much else for the rest of the day.

    The above is Res’s walk, we did what he wanted to do and by the time we were done it was about 3.66 miles. Not bad. He’s asleep now.

    Climber ended up doing a little bit of a longer walk, by about a mile, but that girl knows where she wants to walk and that is were we were going. No questions at all. I just sort of followed her, gave be a little bit of guidance when we needed to turn, and pressed the crosswalk buttons for her. The girl likes “going” but would go way too far, At least I got my steps in.

    Today was a “no swim” day for me. Not by choice, I got to the Rec Center and the lap pool was full. I think the trialtholon group was in it again. I was going to wait for a lone, but… oops, helps if I remembered my swim trunks, so no swim for me.

    Anyways, this one is short, I will see you all tomorrow, goodnight.

  • Day 094 of 2026 – April 4th

    Day 094 of 2026 – April 4th

    The photograph I am starting this post with showed up on my Facebook page today, it’s a set of photos I took 9 years ago when were in Florida. At that time we had six greyhounds, and unfortunately they are all at the bridge now. I firmly believe that I will be re-united with Mindy, Peanut, Ranger, Rambo, Lady, and Leona sometime in the future, hopefully far in the future. Missing from this photograph are three other Angel pack members: Raven (she hadn’t joined us yet when this was taken), Bracken (he was long gone by the time this photo was taken – he went to the bridge during a dental that I still blame myself over – I tried a newer vet, closer to the house that we should have never trusted with him), and Gizmo (she was hiding someplace). Sometimes Facebook memories are good, sometimes they suck. I think this is one of the better ones.

    Started off the day at close to my normal time, well…. maybe 30 minutes late because I just didn’t want to. Did my normal routine, let the dogs out, gave them their snacks, and got my coffee. I did sit down and just preview my work email real fast, I had some techs that I had excepted some responses from and I wanted to make sure I received them. I am glad I looked, I had one urgent issue that I needed to take care of. I also made sure that I caught up on the last two days of new technicians and got them added to Alpine Intel University so they could do their training. Note to self, I need to send out reminders next week to techs that have not logged in yet to do so before they get turned off.

    I do one of my normal “over the weekend” tasks, and that is to do my Moodle and system updates. I don’t like doing that during the week in case I have to shut something down, but over the weekend is always a good time to do Linux upgrades and Moodle LMS upgrades. Another one done and now everything is current. OK that’s it for work today.

    After Jesse got up I started walks. Saturday’s and Sundays are lone walks for the dogs. I think it is really important to remind them that they can go places and come home without each other. We also work on walking manners and get some distance in. Res always goes first, today we did a little over three miles because he did not want to stop. For some reason he really wanted to do the same walk I do with Climber, it was almost like he knew where she went lest week and he pulled me in that direction.

    It was a nice day for a walk and I listened to one of my Podcasts while we were out and about. He was a little slow near the end, but I think I finally may have figured him out. he likes to be outside and when we are heading back to the house he does not approve.

    Climber was next, now Climber is a pup on a mission some times, she knows exactly where she wants to go and she makes it very clear when she is unhappy about our directions. I got to the end of the part today and I wanted to turn left and go down the hill as I had a specific walk in mind for her. Nope, that was unacceptable, she wanted to cross the street, turn right, and do our walk past the credit union. Actually, think she wanted to go further, but I vetoed that as I didn’t really want to cross that intersection with her this week. So, she got part of what she wanted, just not all of it. She was a little stiff today as well and I didn’t really want her to be hurting so I did the best I could to keep her walk under 4 miles, we ended up with 3.7 miles by the time we got back to the house.

    She did give me a little bit of a hard time on the way back up the hill next to the park as we were headed to Power Line Trail. She did that the last 3 weekends. She is fine once we get past that spot, but for some reason that area is not good for her, and I am not sure why. She’s curled up asleep now, maybe I wore her out? Nah. Not a chance.

    After Jesse and I had a late breakfast, I decided to take a chance and go swim. Why take a chance? Because the pool is a nightmare on Saturdays, it has way too many people and the lifeguards work real hard to make sure open swim in the general and kiddie pool does not spill over into the lap pool. Anyway, I was able to get in 2700 yards in a total time of 57:50 minutes. I should have tried for 3000 yards and done the hour, but I just didn’t feel like it. I think tomorrow I need to work on pace rather then distance, it may be an hour of so of 100 yard swims. If I can do 25 of each of Freestyle and Breaststroke I would be happy. But, let’s start small and see if I can even do that.

    I am happy were I am at with swimming right now, but I really need to get some of my times closer to the 1:30 per 100 yard pace and down from the 2:00/100yd. I am pretty sure I could do the 2.5 miles needed for the Mountain Lake Swim, but I do need to improve my pace a bit. I also need to, for pool swims, not make a fool of myself when I work on my flip turns. Yeh…..I’ll think about it. Maybe.

    Onto other news, we ordered the Droplet Water monitor from Hydrific Water and it showed up today. It clamps on the main water pipe coming into the home, after the meter, but before any splits and you train it to recognize what fixtures are being used and what fixtures are not being by identifying what is running over a few days when it is showing water flow.

    Droplet Water Monitor Installed on a pipe

    I think it is a little confused on it’s first day and hopefully it will get much better at this. It is currently showing that we used 9.58 gallons today with a shower at 5:45PM this evening. There is just one problem, nobody has showered today yet, that happens in the evening, and more recently I am showering at the Recreation Center after my swim. I think it may have gotten the washing machine right, and I think some of the other appliances, but the shower???? Not really. Maybe that will fix itself in a few days.

    Jesse and I are a little concerned about this Summer when our water use normally increases. Our water department, Aurora Water, has us under drought restrictions. This means that we are going to pay a surcharge per 1000 gallons over our Winter water use. We use an average of 2000 gallons per month during the Winter months. This changes drastically in the Summer when we start to irrigate the lawn and gardens. We have already made some changes to the irrigation system that will help, but we got a ways to go. As you can guess it also varies a lot with my travel. On weekends after I come back from a trip we have more heavy laundry. On weeks where I am traveling the daily usage is lower. We are also going to do a lot with hydroponics this year for our vegetable gardens and greens. So, I will keep you all posted on what’s happening with that.

    Anyways, it’s time to wrap up today, I will be back tomorrow, I am going to sit back, relax, recharge my Garmin watch, and sit here read and watch TV for a bit. There is probably another 100 things that I need to get done, but I just don’t feel like it. Anyways, goodnight and talk to you tomorrow.

  • Day 093 of 2026 – April 3rd

    I think the best way to describe today is “quiet”. I got up this morning to some very urgent dogs, both of them were in a hurry to go out for their potty breaks and then they wanted treats. It was a cooler morning, probably around 35 degrees, I forgot to look. After they had their snacks and stuff I went to go get my coffee. Ooops, I forgot to set the time last night. A 15 minute wait on that coffee.

    I was able to get out to the rec center today to swim, it was a shorter swim then yesterday as I do not want to hurt myself, and I also needed a recovery day after my long push yesterday. I did 1700 yards. My goal was to get my mile in, and I did it.

    The rest of the day was busy with work. Hang on, I have one more email I need to answer. Anyways, today’s stats:

    • 8 email requests for file reviews
    • 2 tech support incoming phone calls
    • 10 pricing requests / 4 of them commercial electrical
    • 14 Cause of loss determinations
    • 14 New tech support requests, all of these handled, 11 of them already complete
    • 12 Older tech support requests handled and closed.
    • That leaves me with 3 in progress, and 3 sitting in my “need to discuss with management team.”

    I think a good day overall.

    Now I am going to spend some time with Res and Climber. Res is being a bit of a crate baby tonight so I am wondering what that’s about. He grumped at Climber a little bit earlier, again not really sure why, in this case she was innocent. Not that the grumping wasn’t deserve red for past actions.

    Anyways, goodnight all. I will talk with you tomorrow.