My Bonus Day Off
At 10:00 Friday I was in the back seat of my own car while @UtahJoe was driving us north to Rutland, and I got on a daily call with the Engineering team to discuss what was on tap for the day. Over the course of about 30 minutes, it was revealed that we had Monday off. "Are you for real?" I asked. After the call I confirmed it was true, and for the remainder of the weekend I was wondering what I would do on my free day. When I saw that @JDurk had ridden Wharton, I decided that this is what my plan was going to be. Weather looked good, trails were good, I had a day off. Everything lined up perfectly.
Then we got back to New Jersey, and as happened about 25 times in the past year, when I get back home the weather goes to shit. So I scrapped the idea.
I still woke up at 6:30, but instead of getting out of bed and getting ready to drive south, I laid in bed and read a bunch of chapters of the Bobiverse 2 book. At 7:30 I finally woke up, made us both some tea, oatmeal for breakfast, then cleaned up the kitchen of the dishes we had avoided for the past few days. I then sat down and edited the Pico Day 1 travel blog post from above, then published it. I also posted it here and on Facebook. I am going to see what source gets the most redirects. So far, Facebook is at 10, MTBNJ is at 7, and WordPress reader is at 5. This also ignores that there are currently 23 people that are subscribed via WordPress, plus whatever number of people have added the RSS feed to a different RSS aggregator, which is not something I think is easily done. I don't care that much to jump through hoops to make it happen.
As @slingblade_uhhuh mentioned, I was then off to get some Costco samples but first I had to stop at the hardware store for a light fixture for the basement. $2.49 later I was on my way, only to be reminded that at 10:00 am, they don't have samples out. This is the cruel reality of being early & efficient. I'll need to work on this when retirement comes. Timing is everything, they say. I guess maybe they're onto something. When I got home I wired it up, and now the dark corner of the dungeon has light again.
Then I did more laundry and made lunch, which was salad.
I got on the bike then, in the basement, as the weather wasn't getting any better. Originally they said it was supposed to be almost 50 today and dry. At some point I looked outside in the afternoon and it was snowing again. I did 2 hours of moderate nothingness and started watching The Wire. I got 2 episodes in over 2 hours. My legs were kind of tired from the weekend, so just aimless spinning was all I had today. I probably would have taken today off but a) I am off work and b) I am going to Austin for 2 days this week which will tank those days.
This afternoon @jmanic mentioned that the image above was crapping it, this mainly because Google Photos is a rich load of dog shit as a free image hosting service. After 817 permutations to get this to work, I decided to go with Imgur, which seems to have no limit. To step back, you can link you Google Photos account to WordPress, which is super convenient. And since Google Photos is free and unlimited, this is a win-win, right?
Wrong. Every Google Photo you use on WordPress uploads it to the WP library also, and it goes against your storage limit. As of February 18th, I am almost at 10% used just on these few trips. So other than cover photo which will show on the main page, I will not be loading anything to the WP library. Imgur is free, and it works for now. So then I went back to fix the images in Pico Day 1, but only the ones that were broken. I downloaded Firefox to test a non-logged in user. More may break, probably will break. But I'm not made of free time here.
After this I did some bike work, this time D's cross bike which was mangled when her hanger broke. I disassembled that, cleaned up the BB area, then went and ordered her a new hanger. I just hope this RD is not destroyed, as it took a bit of a beating when the hanger broke. The cage is bent for sure, but I was able to reform it a little and I'm cautiously optimistic it will still work. Normally I would just buy her a new one but we are in DI2 land, so we are in a higher price range here.
Back to the blog next to fix Pico Day 2 pics, linking them all to Imgur this time because I don't want to have to deal with them breaking tomorrow and fixing them. I then edited the post and changed a bunch, and have not decided if I am going past or present tense, so I decided to use both. Screw it, you know?
D texted around 7:00 that she was done with the gym so I made a salad and some tea, then we ate dinner and watched White Dragon, which seems interesting after 1 episode. I stopped it after 1 episode because she needed to work and I wanted to read a bit to get my 10 pages of the Vietnam book in. This is a paper book, not the Kindle book I read when I woke up. I often have 2 different books going at once. Once I did that, I edited Pico 2 again then edited the parent Vermont/Pico page that ties them all together, not unlike the rug in The Big Lebowski.
Then I wrote this in 1 sitting without editing it so it will read fairly choppy. But it is pretty much 10:00 pm now so that is all I have left in me. So that, my friends, is how I spent my day off.
The End.
At 10:00 Friday I was in the back seat of my own car while @UtahJoe was driving us north to Rutland, and I got on a daily call with the Engineering team to discuss what was on tap for the day. Over the course of about 30 minutes, it was revealed that we had Monday off. "Are you for real?" I asked. After the call I confirmed it was true, and for the remainder of the weekend I was wondering what I would do on my free day. When I saw that @JDurk had ridden Wharton, I decided that this is what my plan was going to be. Weather looked good, trails were good, I had a day off. Everything lined up perfectly.
Then we got back to New Jersey, and as happened about 25 times in the past year, when I get back home the weather goes to shit. So I scrapped the idea.
I still woke up at 6:30, but instead of getting out of bed and getting ready to drive south, I laid in bed and read a bunch of chapters of the Bobiverse 2 book. At 7:30 I finally woke up, made us both some tea, oatmeal for breakfast, then cleaned up the kitchen of the dishes we had avoided for the past few days. I then sat down and edited the Pico Day 1 travel blog post from above, then published it. I also posted it here and on Facebook. I am going to see what source gets the most redirects. So far, Facebook is at 10, MTBNJ is at 7, and WordPress reader is at 5. This also ignores that there are currently 23 people that are subscribed via WordPress, plus whatever number of people have added the RSS feed to a different RSS aggregator, which is not something I think is easily done. I don't care that much to jump through hoops to make it happen.
As @slingblade_uhhuh mentioned, I was then off to get some Costco samples but first I had to stop at the hardware store for a light fixture for the basement. $2.49 later I was on my way, only to be reminded that at 10:00 am, they don't have samples out. This is the cruel reality of being early & efficient. I'll need to work on this when retirement comes. Timing is everything, they say. I guess maybe they're onto something. When I got home I wired it up, and now the dark corner of the dungeon has light again.
Then I did more laundry and made lunch, which was salad.
I got on the bike then, in the basement, as the weather wasn't getting any better. Originally they said it was supposed to be almost 50 today and dry. At some point I looked outside in the afternoon and it was snowing again. I did 2 hours of moderate nothingness and started watching The Wire. I got 2 episodes in over 2 hours. My legs were kind of tired from the weekend, so just aimless spinning was all I had today. I probably would have taken today off but a) I am off work and b) I am going to Austin for 2 days this week which will tank those days.
This afternoon @jmanic mentioned that the image above was crapping it, this mainly because Google Photos is a rich load of dog shit as a free image hosting service. After 817 permutations to get this to work, I decided to go with Imgur, which seems to have no limit. To step back, you can link you Google Photos account to WordPress, which is super convenient. And since Google Photos is free and unlimited, this is a win-win, right?
Wrong. Every Google Photo you use on WordPress uploads it to the WP library also, and it goes against your storage limit. As of February 18th, I am almost at 10% used just on these few trips. So other than cover photo which will show on the main page, I will not be loading anything to the WP library. Imgur is free, and it works for now. So then I went back to fix the images in Pico Day 1, but only the ones that were broken. I downloaded Firefox to test a non-logged in user. More may break, probably will break. But I'm not made of free time here.
After this I did some bike work, this time D's cross bike which was mangled when her hanger broke. I disassembled that, cleaned up the BB area, then went and ordered her a new hanger. I just hope this RD is not destroyed, as it took a bit of a beating when the hanger broke. The cage is bent for sure, but I was able to reform it a little and I'm cautiously optimistic it will still work. Normally I would just buy her a new one but we are in DI2 land, so we are in a higher price range here.
Back to the blog next to fix Pico Day 2 pics, linking them all to Imgur this time because I don't want to have to deal with them breaking tomorrow and fixing them. I then edited the post and changed a bunch, and have not decided if I am going past or present tense, so I decided to use both. Screw it, you know?
D texted around 7:00 that she was done with the gym so I made a salad and some tea, then we ate dinner and watched White Dragon, which seems interesting after 1 episode. I stopped it after 1 episode because she needed to work and I wanted to read a bit to get my 10 pages of the Vietnam book in. This is a paper book, not the Kindle book I read when I woke up. I often have 2 different books going at once. Once I did that, I edited Pico 2 again then edited the parent Vermont/Pico page that ties them all together, not unlike the rug in The Big Lebowski.
Then I wrote this in 1 sitting without editing it so it will read fairly choppy. But it is pretty much 10:00 pm now so that is all I have left in me. So that, my friends, is how I spent my day off.
The End.
