A Day in the Life

On Sundays, Nightingale meal preps for the week.  Her day starts with trips to Aldi, Kroger and occasionally Costco.  Meanwhile, I do her laundry.  I use to do all the laundry but I've found that it's easier to break it up over the week, especially since we all have our own laundry baskets, which we mostly keep separated.

On Mondays, I clean up the kitchen of anything that couldn't go in the dishwasher overnight.

Thursdays are usually pasta for dinner, and Fridays are pizza night, usually frozen.  Boris gets cheese, Natasha gets pepperoni, and NG and I share a Detroit-style.

I spent the lion's share of this week power washing the detached garage, among other things.  It looks good, but that won't last, but that doesn't mean you don't do it.  That is a direct quote from Nightingale In fact, I should do it more often.  

I'm slowly knocking off a lot of little things on the To-Do List.  I have a very short window before the weather becomes unbearable to do anything outside.  In fact, it seems to have gotten warmer sooner than in previous years.

I've managed to lose about 15 lbs, but  I don't recommend anyone do it the way I did.  I've cut back on fried food and eat more salads for lunch.  I have also managed to run three times since buying those expensive running shoes last month.  But the game changer that I don't recommend was a bout of food poisoning one Saturday last month ( before the shoe purchase).  I couldn't keep anything down, not even water.  It was 24 hours of misery.

Always Something to Remind You

I have a couple of email subscriptions that do me no good down here.  More specifically, I get emails from Binny's Beverage Depot, Peoria Packing Company, and the Polish Museum of America. I could easily unsubscribe from all of them (except the PMA because they are luddites and you to email them) but I choose not to.

I also get emails from Zillow, Redfin, and other Real Estate entities that tell me my house in PP is worth X more than when I bought and sold it.  

Finally, I get the Book of Faces Memories, which used to be called On This Day after they bought it from TimeStamp.    

Those hurt.  

I really miss my Chicago house.  Yes, it had some warts.  No Central Air conditioning, the bedrooms were small and the bathrooms needed some work.  But I had finally got my garage the way I wanted it.  

But I'm trying to see a positive or at least something to hope for.   In the late 80s, my mom took me out of college because she fell into financial ruin, and instead of making the smart decision to apply for what was then abundant financial aid, she decided to just take me out of college.  There's more to that, but I won't go into it now.  

 And I wasted spent a lot of the 90s trying to get back to that life.  I seriously, naively, believed that some of the people I went to Northeast Missouri State University with actually cared about me.  

Have you ever been on a Stealth Date

 Have you ever been on a Stealth Date?  A Stealth Date is when someone thinks you and one of their friends would be perfect together, so they get both of you to go to something with them, but then your friend either doesn't show or disappears.

It took me 26 years to realize I was on a stealth Date back in 2000.  Mostly because I haven't really thought about that morning or dwelt on it for 26 years.  It's also possible I've been on other Stealth Dates that I wasn't aware of, because it's right there in the name.  Plus, I'm naive, and we Neurodivergents tend to initially take people at face value.  

Winnie, Stephanie, and I were supposed to go to a Street Art Fair one Saturday morning.  We agreed to meet at the Ogilvie Metra Center because they would be taking the Metra downtown.  When I got there, Stephanie said that Winnie had called her earlier and said she couldn't make it.

I didn't think anything of it at the time.  Now Stephanie happened to have forgotten her wallet, so she may or may not have been in on the Stealth Date thing, but I didn't think much about it at the time.  I really only paid for the water taxi downtown and a cup of coffee; she didn't want anything else.  We also somehow skipped the Art Fair and just walked through Crate & Barrel.

The thing is, Stephanie had a boyfriend, so I wasn't even in Pursuit Mode.  I tend to stay in my lane, like that.  I only saw Stephanie one more time that year.  She came to a party I had at my apartment, but didn't stay long.  I don't remember her last name or much about her, so I cannot really look her up.  Winnie and I also didn't stay friends.  She was just a little too weird even for me.  

Has it been 17 years already?

This time of year used to make me Wiggy.  Yes, that's the technical term.  It was around this time of year in 2009 when Finance 1.0 left me abruptly.  As the years went by and Time did the Heavy Lifting, along with building a life with Nightingale, I thought less and less about it.  It's really only the Memories on Facebook and a specific Taylor Swift song that ever really make me think of those events.  

When it happened, I told a very small subset of friends -- my inner circle if you will -- what had happened.  But I didn't share with the world until May 1st, 2009, which also was on a Friday.  Because somehow not telling anyone made it seem not really.  

From the time D and I broke up until I met Nightingale, I went through a "when I'm alone I want to be with people and when I'm with people I want to be alone" phase.

Edit from the Future:  who would have guessed that 5 years and a few days later, I would also be announcing on the Book of Faces that Nightingale and I were having twins.  

Down to Less Than Three Bucks a Day

Time to update the Cost per Day for the Drama Playset.  We have now owned the Drama Playset since January 14, 2022, or 1553 days.

Now the local cousins don't come over as much as they used to, but Boris swings literally every day, and Natasha joins him sometimes, especially when our pseudo third child is around.  So I'm going to keep using the previous formulas with some tweaks.

Conservative Estimate: I'm assuming that 2 kids using the playset on most days equals 1 kid using it daily.  Also, we have had an additional kid for most of the year.

So, using the Time and Date Duration Calculator to figure out the time between January 14, 2022, when it finally arrived, and today this year, I get 1553 days.  

That works out to $6000/1553 = $3.86 per use.

Slightly Optimistic Estimate: If we get more optimistic, we can assume that 3 kids using the playset most days equals 2 kids using it every day.

That works out to $6000/1553/2 = $1.93 per use.

If we take the average of these two values, we get the more likely CPU of $2.90.

Other Entertaining Outside Activities

So as we have now owned this for 4 years and some change, it costs $2-3 bucks a day to keep my kids entertained and off their iPads.

Got my First Troll on Quora

I answered a question on Quora, and at the bottom of the post, like many other Quorans, I said, "If you liked this answer, give me an upvote."  It seems to have worked because this is the most upvoted answer I've ever had.  It's likely more that it was posted to a very active space, and the question is getting a lot of answers.

Anywho, someone commented, "I block upvote beggars" and did so.  I went and looked at her profile, and as you can imagine, she has a whacky About Me which implies she thinks she's more sought after than reality would suggest.  

"And asking me to upvote and follow is the fastest way to earn a mute and block. Don’t be tacky. Earn your upvote."

As she blocked me, I could not reply to her comment.  If I could, I would say something like: 

I didn't beg, I asked.  Unless my answer got sent directly to you somehow, I didn't personally ask you for an upvote.  I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know about this rule of yours that you feel should carry the day,  especially since other Quorans do it all the time.  You could have just scrolled past or silently blocked me, and I'd continue blissfully in not even knowing you exist.  

But I guess that is the point, isn't it.  You want attention and the last and only word.  Well, go peddle crazy somewhere else, we're all filled up here.

Good Bye March, Hello April

 For almost the entirety of March, we were able to function with the heat and AC set to OFF.  We were even able to sleep with the windows open, and it was some of the best sleep I've had since the kiddos arrived!

There were 2 cold snap days, and a few mornings I needed to run the heat for an hour so the kids could defrost and get to school.  And toward the end of the month, we did have a few above-average hot days when AC was desired.  These were offset by us going out of town for a weekend and being able to leave the Nest set to ECO.  

Alas, the temps are steadily creeping up and I have a small window to do any outdoor/garage projects before the Southern Summer begins (in Mid-May). 

The Running Shoes  

As soon as I got home from dropping Moose and Squirrel off at school, I changed into my running clothes and went for what passes for me running these days.  It was my second run since buying the new shoes.  Anyway, I managed to eke out another 1-mile run, slightly faster than the first one.  More importantly, I ran longer than I walked.

Date Distance Pace Time

04-01-2026    1 mile 11:35   11:42 

03-23-2026    1 mile 12:04   12:22 

On the first run, it took a quantum of seconds to get the Strava App to pause, so the Time was probably at least 10 seconds faster. By the way I really hate the Strava app and website.  it is hard to navigate and it is constantly trying to sell you the pay version.  Since my data lives here, I'm stuck with it for a while.  If the running thing takes off and gets anywhere in the neighborhood of consistency, let alone what it once way, I'll look for a better tool.

Long Weekend, Short Sleep

This has been a busy but rough weekend.  First, on Thursday, we had to be in Oxford, Mississippi, for Natasha’s science fair. This required getting up fairly early to be there by 8 o’clock. The issue is it’s 62 miles away, and I didn’t get the best sleep that night.

The science fair was kind of weird. Parents and chaperones were not allowed on the main floor until the lunch hour, and the students weren’t allowed to leave the main floor except for one bathroom break and then lunch

Meanwhile, Nightingale was going to bring her father-in-law at lunchtime, thinking that parking would be a breeze, which it wasn’t. We wasted a good 20 minutes trying to find a spot to park, and so when we got back to the stadium, all the food lines were long. Luckily, we had snacks.

Today we’re in Huntsville, Alabama, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.  We were three years ago by ourselves, but this is a school field trip.

Bedroom is now complete

Instead of sitting around the house all day doing nothing much, I got us to go to Memphis on Saturday.  The reason was twofold.  

First, I wanted to replace the last remnants of the sectional that the cats have destroyed with this:

Second, I wanted to get some new running shoes.  I'm past my glory days of running piles of miles, but I think I can start doing a mile or two after I drop the kids off at school.

I went for a 1-mile run on Monday, so if I use the Anne Landers School of Thought, it cost me $130 for that run.  When I run another mile, it will be $65.  And so-on and so-on.  

It's interesting to note that the chaise lounge cost less than the shoes.  It was listed at $75, but I got them to give me a $5 discount because there was some scuffs.  At the same time, I sold something for my in-laws and the buyers offered me $200 down from $250.  Ca sara sara.  

Some meal favorites

 On the Book of Faces, I shared a post from The Onion about substituting ingredients in a recipe. The first time I try a new recipe, I strive to use all the ingredients and follow directions to the letter.

An exception might be that it calls for an ingredient I don’t have and don’t want to invest in. For instance, earlier this week I made česnečka soup but didn’t have marjoram (actually, we did, I just didn’t see it in the cupboard) so I used oregano instead.

Last night I made crockpot shrimp scampi. I made this a few weeks ago, but didn’t have any cooking white wine, so i used vinegar wine. BIG mistake. This needs either cooking wine or real white wine.
I did use lime juice instead of lemon juice but otherwise followed the recipe and it was delicious.

https://lowcarbyum.com/crock-pot-shrimp-scampi-slow-cooker-recipe/

Last Week I made česnečka or Czech garlic soup.  Forgot to take a photo but it was delicious.  

Work Friends, Colleagues and Acquaintances

Last week two former work colleagues reconnected with me.  I sent a text to Sasha* asking a simple yes/no/the color purple question.  A tad bit later she responded, ignored the question, and just said she was traveling back from Tampa Bay.  Date with Tom Brady?  I said no worries, we can chat/text tomorrow after you get some sleep.

* I don't remember what alias I use for her here.

So of course, she does the one thing that fucking annoys the hell out of me. She calls without first brokering a call, as if we are living in 1987.  It turns out her dad is going to have quadruple bypass surgery the next day.  

We talked for about an hour until the call started getting staticky.  i guess she was driving and got ot a place where the reception wasn't great.   I was also picking up my kids at this point, so I said let's talk tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a person I worked with at Big Audit 2.0 reached out to me on LinkedIn.  I like her, but I trust her as much as I trust gas station sushi.  She really straddled the line of being my work friend and also enabling my Office Nemesis.  Let's call her Veronica.

Veronica reached out, acknowledged that it has been 4 years since we last chatted. In fact, it was actually 4 years almost to the day.   I'm not sure if she was genuinely interested in what I was up to verses a fishing expedition but I took the bait.  We exchanged some messages and left it with maybe we will have another phone call soon.  

"no special reason to reach out, I was scrolling through LinkedIn and remembered out chats: I miss those! there is nobody left to chat with at work, I so do not fit the group I am in right now - it's really sad; there are no lunches, or after work drinks, everyone is sitting alone at home...and majority of people I came up with are gone and the group I am in right now is a lot younger than me so they are at a different stage of their lives; I am not on social media other than Facebook which I try hard to stay away from as it has become toxic; I will stay in touch here on LinkedIn for now, maybe we can chat on the phone one day? like dinosaurs we are :)

stay well and in touch!"

I'll probably send a volley to her, seeing if this is a Genuine Offer versus Conversational Device.  I'm 0 for 3 with recent phone calls and that doesn't include Sasha.  She actually did ask me how things were going when we talked the second time.  

Hello March - a bit late

 It goes without saying that I have done a terrible job of keeping up with this blog.  It's probably a combination of laziness, not having an audience, and having a boring, mostly uneventful last remaining years of life.

Trespassers

As a Stay-At-Home-Dad (SAHD), I don't get out much.  I take the kids to school, maybe run some errands, try to get some stuff done around the house, and then pick the kids up.  It's hard to tell what day it is, unless there is something that I can anchor to.  Certain Substacks I follow come out on specific days.  Same with some TV shows that we watch.

Pepper Sandwiches for the Lent I no longer observe

I'm very isolated down here with no local friends.  My attempts at having standing phone calls with people have not worked out.  People like to talk, talk, talk but not ask me anything.  

March definitely came in like a Lion.   We had: 

• Daylight Saving Time, 
• Spring Break, 
• Friday the 13th, 
• Pi Day, 
• Ides of March, 
• International Women's Day (I think)
• St Patrick's Day.  

And also March Madness and the Oscars for those who are into that sort of thing...and I'm not.  Oh and America (at least the MAGA part) declared war on Iran on the first day of Ramadan.  

We also had me puking my guts out all day and night last Saturday.  I couldn't even hold down water, which sucked because I was getting dehydrated.  I barely got 4 hours of sleep.  We thought it might be a virus, but since no one else in the household got it, we are attributing it to food poisoning.  

The good news is that the next morning, I felt better and could drink water again, though I craved soda pop like no one's business.

The next few weeks are not gonna be any less easier.  There are field trips and science fairs.  And who knows what else from the unhinged, unrestrained, lying, petulant, insecure, thrice married, serial wife-cheating, porn star-banging, blue collar-worker-stiffing con artist in the White House.

More Catching Up

 I did something to my shoulder and cannot bring it full circle without the ibuprofen.  Even with the meds it still hurts a tad when I try perform some basic function that involves my left arm, like typing.  I have a lot of things I want and need to do around the house now that the weather is warming up, but I also know that if I overdo it, I will injure myself further.  So with great frustration, the great garage cleanout reorg is delayed again.

The Saturday after Martin Luther King's Birthday, a good part of the country, including our neck of the woods, was hit with a big ice storm.  We knew it was coming in the sense that it's not gonna pass us by, be mild, or be short-term.  We knew the kids would be home for at least a week.  

It turned out to be two weeks.  The first week was declared an emergency and doesn't need to be made up, but apparently, they are still figuring out the second week. The kids had to give up President's Day as the first make-up day, hopefully the only one

Sidenote: our county does this thing where if there is a holiday during the week (typically a Monday Holiday) garbage pickup is shifted one day.  This usually isn't a problem but remember that It's Definitely Coming Storm!  Everyone whose pickup is on Friday had to wait two weeks until theirs got picked up, as well as the rest of the county for the following week.

I get the Holiday Day Shift, but they ended up doing it again in the second week, so it would have been better to somehow get all the pre-storm garbage collected.  

Meanwhile, the storm allowed Nightingale to "help" the kids get their science fair projects completed.  They would have been due Jan 27 but were extended to February 11th and we used each weekend we were home to move the project forward instead of wait until the last minute.  Yay Nightingale.

Chicago Bears wrap up

I'm way overdue for writing this post.  So now that the SuperBowl is over, I will wrap up the Chicago Bears posts until next season.  Anyone who pays attention to football knows that the Bears not only went to the playoffs but won the Wild Card round against their archrival, the Green Bay Packers in overtime.  

Katness and I often text each other during Bears games, and for 3 quarters the messages can be summed up as "WTF?" followed by "how did they pull that off" when they win the 4th quarter.  Same with that crazy wild card game.

In the divisional round, they also forced overtime.  It really came down to one bad play that turned the momentum to the LA Rams, and our season ended.  

Had they won against LA, how would they do against the Seattle Seahawks?  No way of knowing.  We were playing with House Money on Borrowed Time.  This season seems to have been the Sam Darnold Renaissance story, so they might have held in but not won.  

And that also might be evidence that the NFL isn't fixed or rigged, or whatever. I'm not saying they aren't in bed with online gambling (the muffed extra point in the Houston - Steelers game), but I've said it before: if the NFL were rigged, NY, LA, Dallas, Chicago, and DC would be in the playoffs every year.

So what's next?  First, I have to get through 162 games of Cubs Baseball, of which I will only watch a fraction.  Then I have to see if this season was a fluke or if the Bears build on what they have.  Caleb Williams is a franchise QB.  I'm not skilled enough to know if our offensive line is fine or could use one more better player.  However, our defense, while showing flashes of brilliance, still needs some help.  

So we wait until the Draft and Free Agency 1.0 and 2.0 are over.  

Catching Up

 We had a warm Christmas week.  It was so nice that the kids could be outside and we could have fires.  After the Michigan in-laws left, the weather cooled.  That Sunday (December 28th), we had a storm.  Sometime in the night, the winds blew down this tree.

I thought about renting a chainsaw from Home Depot and cutting at least the fallen part down myself.  But my lawn crew, ever eager to make a buck, offered to do it for me for $1500.  They actually offered to do it for $2600 back in Sept when the tree was still standing, but being unemployed, I opted not to, so I guess my cheapness saved me $1100.

As I get older, I've learned to outsource as much as I can possibly afford.  This same lawn crew offered to plow my driveway for $200.  My driveway is at least one football field long, maybe two, and it would have taken Nightingale and me hours to do it by shovel.

Because of the once a year bad weather, the kids have been home all week, and likely into next week.  Nightingale had Monday and Tuesday off, but had to use PTO for it.  She is also home on Friday for an unrelated to the storm reason. 

2025 Bears: We both went 11 and 6

The regular season is over and we Bears fans have one playoff game to look forward to.  With the way they played the Lions on Sunday, we fans aren't exactly holding our breath for a playoff win.  

They ended the season the way they started, by losing two games.  But in between, they won 11 games and that was good enough to win a division where every team had a winning record.

I had them going 9 and 8 but my prediction of how they would do for each game came out to 11 and 6.  

Of the 17 games they played, I was able to watch 12 of them.  It would have been 10 but I was in Chicago for the game against Pittsburg and I also have the streaming service the SNF game against the 49ers was on.

The Bears were mostly fun to watch this season and I said at one point, this team reminds me of the lucky 2001 team that also won the 2nd Seed (when it had a bye week same as the number 1 seed) and then went on to lose it's first game to the Eagles.  

This year the Bears play Green Bay in the Wild Card round at Soldier Field.  The Packers are banged up and lost 4 in a role, which makes them dangerous.  IF, if the Bears can get past them again, they could face the 49ers again, the Rams, the Panthers or the Eagles.  

Welcome 2025

I didn't even get a chance to start my annual first post of the year before things went bad for us in the United States of America.  We attacked Venezuela over the weekend and are about to annex it, at least temporarily.  

Every year, I revisit what to do with this blog.  It takes more effort than it use to for me to write posts that even I'm interested in, but I also like the archiving feature of looking back on things I have pretty much forgotten about.

So on to it. Last year there was a noticeable decline in recruiters reaching out to me.  I still got some interviews and even had a job that lasted not quite a month (I  need to finish the writeup on that one).  But I think it is safe to say my Document Management SME career is over.

 The holidays turned out better than expected.  My BILs and I didn't have any clashes or agenda arguments.  It's not just that we were on our best behavior, but I think it's also because we are older geezers now and it's just easier to find a way to get along.  

That's not to say it was perfect, there were still some remnants of the old: talking over one another/struggling to be heard.  Trying to find the best way to achieve a desired outcome.  But it was a lot easier than in the past.  Confederate Jethro even tried to bond with me but his misogyny made it hard for me to go along with it.  

After the Adamas got back to Michigan, my wife and her sister talked.  Apparently I annoyed my BIL by putting too much cardboard on the Solo Fire Pit we "borrowed" from the Father-in-Law.  Now keep in mind I'm hearing what was told to my wife by her sister.  I'm sure BIL was annoyed if I put too much cardboard in and created too much ash.  But I wasn't the only one doing it.  And he likely said it more in a making conversation with his wife -- who still tries to pick fights with him whenever she can  -- way, than a pissed off way.  

Also, as he didn't talk to me about it, I really cannot be bothered to be upset about this information.  I have bigger things to worry about.