Back to Movement Wrigleyville. Took it a little easy today, more like it was really hard, so I couldn’t do too much. Only took like a week and a half off? I paid attention to my footwork today, and turns out my shoes are fine, it’s just my technique is horrible. So I’ve got to work on that. Really enjoying Jupiter’s Legacy. Probably going to pick up the digital comics once I finish up the series tonight.

Was tempted to just skip exercising today. But powered through and did my indoor bike ride, core and push-up workouts. Tired though. Also trying out some homegrown cocktails, mostly with Kikori and asian flavors like lychee and Midori and ginger. No winners yet. Went ahead and bought all available collections of Jupiter’s Legacy, Circle and related series. Different than the Netflix series, but pretty interesting so far. Makes me sad it got cancelled. Feels like the Dante’s Inferno to Amazon Prime’s The Boys Volcano, or is it more Deep Impact to Armageddon.

Guess all I needed was a full night’s sleep. Felt nice and well rested for bouldering today, and went ahead and did core and push-up workouts as well. Had some chicken patty sandwiches for lunch. I’m a fan of them, on white buns with mayo and tomatoes. Got Jackson’s early soccer game tomorrow (7:45am), at least it’s not the early one. Lucy’s got her Chicago History Fair to go to tomorrow, and there was some interest in going to the global McDonald’s, but we checked the menu and there’s really only a handful of global items. Which is a little disappointing. I wonder how often they rotate so I know how often to check.

I actually cooked dinner tonigh, real dinner, and not just mac & cheese & keilbasa like I did last night. I went way back and cooked the Puff Pastry Beef and Zucchini stuffed Tomatoes. Had to do a bunch of shopping to get supplies, Jewel for most of it, then had to head to Wild Fork for the meat, and finally Whole Foods for the Madeira and demi-glace (instead of veal stock). Last time I made Treasure Island was still open on Broadway and I was living on Lake Shore Dr. Turns out I can still cook ok. Jackson won his soccer game this morning. Bookends the indoor season with wins. They were much better playing out of the back today. Good to see some progression.

Installed ChromeOS Flex on the old iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2010). Pretty impressive. Pretty snappy on 13 year old hardware. Would be curious to see how it benchmarks against the Chromebook Lucy uses for school. Not sure if I should bring it back up and put it on the kitchen desk again. I wonder if the kids could use it for school stuff. Pretty lazy day otherwise. Watching lots of Lost in Space (2018). I guess sci-fi is my favorite genre. I did manage to get out and get Jackson’s a trifold for his Living Wax Museum project. And started to help him typing stuff out.

I’m back to Pokemon GO again. Might have put it on a couple of weeks ago, and this time it stuck. Worked out well because I had a couple Rocket Special Researches stacked, so was able to knock out 2 of those at one time. Also just realized I can use Daily Incenses when I walk to/from Movement Wrigleyville. I ended up skipping exercise today, partly because it was raining, and partly because I was waiting for a Sapient Home service call. Turns out they’re coming tomorrow instead. Definitely stacked the issues for them to deal with, and hoping they can knock them all out in one go. Going to try to stop working/reading in bed before sleeping. I’ll move the charging cables for my iPads out tomorrow. Still undecided on moving the ChromeOS Flex iMac back to the kitchen desk or not.

Been staying up way too late the last couple of days. Need to have a good nights sleep for a change. Home lighting control is back to normal and hopefully the home speakers will be nice and stable after a service call from Sapient Home. Pretty much a firmware update visit, and the hoops required to do that. No internal upgrades necessary, or even recommended at the time, which was a little disappointing. Always nice having new things to play with. I still have to get on with putting in shelving for the hallway closet on the 2nd floor. That’s my home improvement project for the year. I’ve got 10 months left, so hopefully I won’t procrastinate for too much longer.

Was down between Belmont and Diversey on Halsted today, and there’s just so much to shop, eat or drink. I had an appointment at uBreakiFix]] for the old iPhone 6S Plus, and prices weren’t too bad for a battery replacement, and also for the iPhone 6S screen and battery replacement, so I went ahead and left those there to get fixed. Then checked out Binny’s, cause it was close. Would have eaten at 2d Restaurant]], but they were closed on Monday. Figured I was close enough to finally check out Dom’s Kitchen & Market (I had time to kill before picking up my parents). That place is pretty cool. They had napoleons as a pastry to just get. So I had to get one. Then went down to Fullerton to come back up and stopped by Mochinut and got some donuts and boba tea. All really good places, all in a little over an hour.

Had my annual well visit (aka yearly physical) at One Medical. Funny, when I asked if there’s been any differences or changes after getting bought by Amazon, she just said they weren’t going to be a drop off point. Could have been handy. Anyway, I’m at the age when I got my first colonoscopy referral. So that’ll be fun. Otherwise, everything checked out. Labwork won’t get done until June, closer to my nephrology appointment. Just reminds me I need to get back on my exercise schedule again. I’ve been off it for a couple weeks now. Next week I’ll start it up again. Promise. Helping Jackson with his Living Wax Museum project, mostly with creative design, but I’m probably going to have to do some more work with him this weekend on it. Hopefully it comes together as planned. Also, old iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus are back in fighting condition. Guess that means I could really get back into Pokemon GO if I wanted to, although my interest is waning again.

Did the pickup/dropoff shuffle with the kids practices today. Drive up to drop Jackson off at soccer at Chicago Futsal Academy, then drive back home, get 15 minutes, then drop Lucy off at swim practice at Lakeshore Sport & Fitness, then drive all the way back up to pick Jackson up, and then home for an hour and forty-five minutes, before driving back down to pick up Lucy. And I didn’t have any podcasts to listen to, so my car music lately has been other country’s hip-hop playlists in Apple Music. Today it was Russian. Next up want to try some Ukranian. Don’t just have French, but Paris and Marseilles lists. Italian’s fun too. Indian’s a trip. Finished off Lost in Space (2018) . I thoroughly enjoyed it. Started Orphan Black up again, but then ventured off to try The Last of Us, mainly because I have a podcast in my feed with spoilers for the first four episodes that I want to clear out. First impression through the first half or so? It’s depressing. Not sure I can take an apocalyptic show right now.

Pretty lazy Saturday. Did finally exercise a little, got on the indoor bike trainer for a bit. Watched some Orphan Black and The Last of Us. Found some wireframe Windows UI templates to use for Jackson’s Living Wax Museum project. Steeped some Tanqueray with Earl Grey for Earl Grey Marteanini’s. Oh, trying to use Tdarr to convert Plex library to h265 to save some space. Currently just trying a sample show, and tried using a couple other machines (Windows iMac and a MacBook Air) and didn’t have any luck, the shares off the server didn’t hold up.

Went to Itoko for family dinner tonight. Drove down, because it was cold and drizzly, and we’re lazy. Got seated upstairs. Stairs themselves had a very short rise, or at least felt that way. Wonder if that was a Japanese style rise. Upstairs was nice and airy. Also noticed a couple other families with younger children than ours seated. Recommended to get 3 small plates per person. I went with an Ume Boy Traveller cocktail to start (ume and whiskey highball), while Tracy went with a Yuzu Dropoff I think (yuzu and gin). Kids got melon Ramunes. Started off with edamame. Ordered up a bunch of stuff, I think my nigiri pieces came out early, all very high quality, and quite tasty. The Waygu Tataki came out early too, and it was very tasty, heavy on the wasabi in the sauce. The beef just fell apart. Tracy got the XO Scallop hand roll (liked it so much she got it again) as well has half a King Crab hand roll (also very good but very expensive for quantity). Kids avocado and unagi cucumber makis were good size and good as well (they liked it so much they got another round at the end). We got an A5 Beef Maki, where Lucy and Tracy got the A5 Beef on the outside, and I got the salmon cucumber maki that was leftover. Still really good. Kids got ramen (good, but have had better). We also got the robata slider (like sausage in a bao bun) which I liked. The gyoza (filled with foie gras and pork) were quite tasty, some lattice of melted something on it. Good, but not amazing like expected. For dessert the kids got the brown sugar boba taiyakis off the kids menu and Tracy and I split the match semifreddo with donut and chocolate ganache. I thought Tracy would like it more because it wasn’t on the super sweet side, but still very good. Overall I really liked it. High quality at high prices. Definitely only a special occasion place going forward.

Hopped on the bike trainer today, did my 20 min core workout and push-up workout. Tired now. Also did a quick walk to The UPS Store to do some iFixit returns since I did uBreakiFix for the iPhone 6S instead of trying to do it myself. Had a visit from Corey from Sapient Home to check out any upgrades or changes required, and I guess a couple of things are no longer supported, but they’re letting me slide without upgrading because I’m savvy enough to troubleshoot or find workarounds if necessary. But things like the video switch and streaming audio source hardware is end of lifed, so when they die, no replacements. Also just realized our TVs are all 4K (although from 2015), which makes the system change a little more palatable since new TVs aren’t required. Interesting.

Went ahead and did indoor bike trainer again today since we went to Jackson’s Living Wax Museum at Blaine. Pretty impressive. I feel bad I didn’t go to Lucy’s. Guessing I was going to the office at the time. Just took a detour and tried seeing if I mentioned Lucy’s Wax Museum project in the Memex, and couldn’t find one, but did read over March 2019, and wow, did I eat a lot back then. Full breakfast, lunch, and dinners. And I wasn’t really exercising back then either. Had some HomeKit issues this morning, eventually resolved by rebooting access points and home hubs. Very annoying though. Nice and stable for a pretty long time, and then, right off a cliff. Realized I need to start conditioning my hair on a regular basis. It’s long enough.

Went bouldering today after a short break. And yeah, paying attention to my footwork, and the feet tend to stay put more that I’m actively pressing more. Still can’t quite do most V4s, but I’m trying. Got the 2nd annual Irish Whiskey tasting coming up. Lined up the bottles today to make sure I’ve got enough, and I think I do. Just need to start buying ingredients for the foods. Slowly plugging along to The Last of Us. Hard finding time to site with Tracy in front of the TV at the same time. I’m plugging away at Orphan Black, and decided I needed something lighter to mix in, and started watching the third season of Mythic Quest. I also have Ghosts (US) in my currently watching section, I’m halfway through the 1st season I think, but a lot of it’s repeats for me since I did watch a lot while Tracy was watching it. Oh, moved HBO Max and TV up to the top row of the Apple TV interface, bumping Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video down. Besides those two, Netflix, Plex, and Hulu remain in the top row.

Went on the prowl for white pudding today. Didn’t find it. Got some good stuff at Dom’s Kitchen & Market. Wasn’t as busy today. Maybe because it was the start of March Madness? Or because the weather wasn’t nearly as nice as the last time I was there? Or maybe I was just early enough to avoid the lunch rush? Any way, I was able to park in the parking lot. But no white pudding. Tried Whole Foods, nothing there either. Tried Paulina Market, some blood sausage, but no white pudding. Did get some Irish bangers though. Will have to try Gene's Sausage Shop & Delicatessen tomorrow. Fingers crossed they’ll have some. Since I don’t have cable TV service, I couldn’t use the NCAA app to watch March Madness, so I signed up for YouTube TV, and that worked like a charm. Will probably cancel after my 2 week free trial, but now I know that’s what I should use. Wouldn’t mind a daily pass or a weekly pass even, so I could get the Super Bowl or the Oscars, or any other live event that I’d want to watch. But nice to know the option is only a couple click’s away.

Spent most of the day in and out of the kitchen. Started the Guinness Irish Stew at 8am. Double batch wouldn’t fit in the slow cooker, so have one batch there and the other from the range. They definitely came out different, so it’ll be interesting to try them tomorrow. Found some white pudding at Gene’s Sausage Shop & Delicatessen, along with some Kerrygold unsalted, actual Heinz canned baked beans and another Napoleon (I like it better than Dom’s Kitchen & Market. Finished making the cake too, eventually. Jackson was feeling a little under the weather, so he skipped soccer practice today. I also skipped exercising.

Yeah, not going to predate an entry to pretend I got a post in yesterday. Had an Irish Whiskey tasting last night at home, and well, had one too many. Been a while for me. So wasn’t even close to thinking about writing up a post. The Guinness Irish Stew was good, the Irish breakfast was even better. Definitely going to keep that one in the rotation. Also, thanks to Andy, have a lead on a Gold Spot. Although right now not really in the mood for it.

So I think I might be getting sick. Maybe whatever Jackson has/had. Feels more like just congestion, dry throat. Not sore, no fever. Maybe I’ll test for Covid for the fun of it tomorrow. I did manage to go bouldering this morning. Not my best work, but doing work. Walked all the way over to Paulina Market from Movement Wrigleyville to get more Irish Bangers. Since I used the ones I got for the Irish Breakfast, needed to get more for bangers and mash (already got the mashed potatoes and onion gravy from last Friday). And then after that stopped by Jewel to get a couple other things. It was a lot of walking. Did about 3 miles today. That doesn’t seem like much though.

Yeah, think I’m sick. No fever, more head cold sinus congestion. Been a while since I’ve had one of those. Been wearing a mask though when I was out and about today. Went to Apple Lincoln Park to get Lucy’s Beats Solo3 Headphones repaired/replaced (the right side stopped working). Went to Whole Foods and picked up some breakfast pastries. Picked Jackson up early from Ten Pound Cake so he could go to soccer practice. Picked up Gold Spot from Binny’s after dropping Lucy off at swim practice. All times I wore a mask. Been a while since I did that too. Actually felt pretty good to wear a mask, good for whatever thing I’ve got. Even had a cup of tea (thoroughly enjoy the steam off the cup). No exercise, and will try for an early bedtime today.

No real chainge in illness. Been using lemon steam to help a bit. Just trying to loosen up the head congestions. Wanted donuts this morning after dropping Lucy off at school this morning. Didn’t want to wait until Dip and Sip opened at 8, so just stopped at Dunkin on the way home. Hoping I’ll get a chance at some point though. Working through the leftovers in the fridge. Making good progress. Otherwise, no real updates.

Feels like the illness is on its way out. Post nasal drip coughing is occurring, and that's usually a sign it's ending. It's usually the most annoying part though, so I slept on the couch last night, to sit up more, and so I wouldn't annoy Tracy while sleeping. Got Lucy's Beats Solo3 Wireless headphones back from Apple Lincoln Park; just a complete replacement. Funny enough, the price if it had not been under warranty is just about the same price they cost on Amazon. Go figure. Typing this update on the iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2010) in the kitchen running ChromeOS Flex. It's coming in pretty handy. Pretty speedy for all my Gmail and web browsing needs. Getting Jackson squared away with soccer camps. We got him and Hudson signed up for the FC Barcelona Soccer Camp (https://camps.fcbarcelona.us/), and also another week at Blaine Summer Camp. Lucy's going to a Nike Swim Camp, this time to Wisconsin at Lawrence University for a change. And she's doing junior lifeguard camp again. And her new team is doing two-a-day practices over the summer, but not sure if she'll manage that.

So definitely the tail end of the sickness, but this is the part where I cough so severely that I feel like I’m going to vomit. Hopefully it doesn’t last too much longer. Doing the lemon water steam breathing (makes me think of the scene in Crocodile Dundee with the cocaine. Maybe I need to do that (with the towel over the bowel, instead of just a measuring cup and my hands. Upgraded some more IT infrastructure at home. Finally got a color laser printer, a Brother HL-L3210CW Compact Digital Color Printer with Wireless. Prints fine from ChromeOS. Don’t have to restart it after every print job. Also got an OWC ThunderBay 8 disk enclosure. Using it as JBOD, right now with a single 16 TB drive. Should future proof Plex storage for a while? Need to make sure telegraf is running properly on the server and sending drive stats to influxdb for display in grafana. Would have been nice to see drive space usage over time. Also feel like I really need to setup Mastodon. Keep hearing good things about it.

After thinking I was on the tail end of whatever this is, it’s turned back into a dry cough. Not sure if I need to drink more water. But I’ll try. I do enjoy the lemon steam head baths. Quite nice. Would be nice to just be finally over it. Got Stan’s Donuts for breakfast this morning after dropping Lucy off at her last Stingrays swim practice. I’d forgotten how big they are. I think I’m fine with Dunkin and maybe Dip and Sip for the occasional changeup. Managed to pick the kids up from Northwinds SC tryouts without my wallet or house keys. Managed to get gas and snacks using Apple Pay on my watch. Had instant ramen for dinner. The heated liquid feels pretty good. Think I’ll do an egg drop soup tomorrow, or maybe that container of Dom’s Kitchen & Market that’s been in the fridge for a couple of weeks now.

Next show Tracy and I are watching together? Station Eleven. Guess we have a type. Took care a small handful of tasks around the house. Sometimes it’s nice to mark some things off a todo list. One thing I’m super happy that I finally figured out: how to make the checkboxes appear on the client organizer our account has us fill out for taxes (and yes, I haven’t completed it yet). But go figure, I needed to install the Wingdings font (manually copied from a Windows machine to iCloud and then installed with iFont via a device profile. But instead of jumping through a bunch of hoops, saving or printing the pdf to pdf to get the checkboxes to be visible as I fill it out on my iPad, I just had to install a font. Jackson lost a tooth today. Feels like it’s been a while since he lost one. Not too much tooth fairy action going on here.

So I think I’m going to go back and setup abando.social mastodon server. I think you can just do it without setting up without an email service on the backend. It’s just going to be my account anyway. But it’s interesting, reading through a social network again. Not sure if I’m getting anything out of it. Can’t say that I am. Not sure if I’m going to keep it up or not. Maybe it’ll come and go. Like a curiosity. All that’s left of the sickness is really this dry cough. I’m definitely drinking my share of hot tea, trying hot water steam breathes over the stove top. Nothing seems to change it up, just short respites. Whatever, I’m done with it. Might try exercising tomorrow, and see how I do with a cough.

So yesterday the passenger side headlight on the car stopped working. It’s LED and steering responsive (headlights turn when you’re turning). So can’t just replace the bulb. So I went out this morning to get it checked out, and have to get the whole unit replaced, which is $$$$, and they didn’t even have the part in stock, so couldn’t get it fixed today. So hopefully they’ll get it in and we can get it fixed before Spring Break. And since I was up in the neighborhood, picked up some Jolibee fried chicken. Just realized it’s all thighs and legs. No breasts or wings. Go figure. No options for sides either with a 10 piece bucket, just 2 containers of gravy. It’s like they finally realized what the people always chose.

Keep thinking it’s 2 days in the future. Yesterday felt like a Thursday, and today maybe like a Friday, or even a weekend since the kids were off school. Throwing me off. Spring Break next week is probably the cause. Still got my cough from post nasal drip or draining sinuses or whatever it is that I’m dealing with. It might have been a while, but I’ve definitely been through this before. I even remember trying to work through it in college. Always annoying. Would really like to be able to sleep through the night as well. Maybe that’s what’s causing my week day detachment. Not sleeping well for a week or so, that could be throwing me off.

Okay, finally figured out how to create one, well, how to use the Marketplace at Linode to create my own Mastodon server at https://abando.social (). Which means I have my own account which isn’t going anywhere. That is until I break it, or don’t use it enough to justify running an instance. But yeah, kind of nice. A little weird though, I’m still wrapping my head around the fediverse, and how when I moved my account from @eabando@mastodon.social over to @eric@abando.social, and I imported my following list, I didn’t just get all the posts I had been following. Figure there’s got to be a way to back populate those. Oh, realized another way I might stop running my own instance: too expensive because it’ll eventually get too big. Thanks to Rick, realized I had to reboot my Plex server this morning. It was all wonky after the macOS update. Only have to get Lucy’s devices updated before I can do the Home Upgrade of the underlying architecture. Probably should wait until after we get back from spring break though. Don’t want to break anything.

Got the call this morning that the dealer received the headlight assembly, so I brought the Crosstrek in to get fixed and serviced. Nice and straightforward. Also nice they had availability all day for service. And definitely going forward will call in to get an appointment, since looking online shows the next available appointment is 4 weeks away. Anyway, all good now. Good timing since it was raining today when I drove Hudson and Jackson to soccer practice. All the thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches were just that, as it didn’t actually rain too hard, at least in our neck of the woods. Finally got this website into git, didn’t realizing I’m still running Resilio Sync on the server. But I’m not running it anywhere else, so kind of useless. Will take me a while to figure out how to get it back up and syncing to another machine. Not sure if I want to do that. Also, my Linode instance has been up for over 2 years now. Been a while, and might actually be time to revisit it all. I fell down this rabbit hole because I needed a header image for my Mastodon profile, and wondered if I could reuse one from this website. Turns out I’m still using super old gif in old school banner sizes. Then I started looking into vector art applications for the iPad, although I think I used Photoshop to create those original header images. But just now I wondered if I could create them using SVG. So another rabbit hole. Down I go.