Well, after breaking down and taking a prescription I was trying to hold off on taking unless necessary (like the doctor told me to do), I have made a turn for the better. Still not quite 100% but definitely much better than I was. Finally slept through the whole night last night – first time in four nights. Hard to get well if you cannot get the rest. I was coughing so hard I got a raging headache plus my diaphragm hurt really bad (no…not THAT kind of diaphragm; and, I am a guy…). At least I am now stocked up on cold meds; I had issues finding meds last year when I was sick so I stocked up this time while I could find them.

I am hoping to get back into cooking some more the next few days. Being sick I have not really had much motivation (or energy) to cook, especially since I have some food in the freezer I already cooked but I do miss cooking. The chicken noodle soup I made turned out good and has been really nice to eat when sick.

I did get a little motivated and did a few things around here today. Only three windows left to clean!

The weather has been weird the last few days. Warm, then cold, then warm again tomorrow, then cold again with a chance of precipitation through the weekend. I have been using the wood stove during the day to heat the house and then letting it go out so the furnace kicks on overnight to keep both the basement and the living area warm. It seems to be a pretty good system doing that as it is still saving a lot of energy during the day. I think I have cut back around 50% on the propane bill this year and that is huge. The electric bill is definitely cheaper as well.

I finally gave up on finding internet for here. Not many options and some are very expensive. When I went back to Verizon for my cell I get better signal here so I am using my phone to get my Mac Mini online.I’m already paying for my cell so might as well make the best use of it that I can and save some money while still being able to get online. No, it’s not fast or a perfect setup since I only get two bars, but it’s working okay for me. Plus, and I have not tried to do this yet, I think I can hotspot my Apple TV to my phone and stream, but I am not sure about that. Yet.

When I got my new Mac Mini I did not transfer anything from my old MacBook Pros – I wanted to start from zero and get rid of the clutter to only have on there what I absolutely need. Using my cloud account I don’t have many things stored locally but I still have some things in there that I need to delete.

The main reason I got the Mac is that basically all my pictures were stored in the cloud, meaning I had no physical backups of my pics anywhere (my music library was on an external drive for space). I like tech but I know it is not perfect; if something happens with the cloud storage I have I can replace music but not the pictures. To reduce any losses, I want my own copies of pictures on my computer, just like my music. Then, I have a backup drive hooked up that backs up my entire Mac, giving me two physical copies of everything.

I am glad I got my Mac and even happier that I finally got to do some work on it today after getting the internet to happen. I had to get iTunes straightened out between my devices so I finally got everything to sync as I wanted. I don’t need everything on every device; I’m not syncing music with my iPad (not necessary if it’s all on my phone). or movies onto my iPhone (not watching a movie on a phone). It is so nice to work on a desktop again. I bought my iPad Pro to replace my MacBook Pro but as I stated in a previous post it just was not an….um, er…Apples-to-Apples equivalent (hahaha); it’s more a huge iPhone than a computer. I need to get to looking at flights to book with my miles (and some other personal business things I need to do) but it was too tedious even on the iPad. Now that I got this all straightened out today I can get to work on doing that.

I took the Mac someplace where I was able to get high-speed access and downloaded OS updates plus a bunch of movies & TV series I have purchased onto it. I have not hooked it back up to the TV yet to watch anything, but I have about 450GB worth of purchased content on it now (“Part Unknown” series alone is 99 episodes!). That will get me through for quite a while. I have put the desk in the bedroom, but I think I will move the desk back in by the TV so I can just hook straight into the TV again. Plus, that 50″ screen makes a heck of a monitor! Bluetooth keyboard and track pad next to the recliner and I. Am. Golden.

My truck has to get back in to the shop again. Nothing major for now, but if I don’t take care of it sometime soon it definitely could be a problem. The CV joint boot on the front axle, the one I replaced last year (and it was a pain in the arse), has gotten torn up somehow (the same reason I replaced it LAST year…). The part came today so when I go do errands at some point when I feel I am not contagious I have to swing by the shop and see when it can get in for repair and make sure it’s the right part.

There’s also a few smaller things I can do myself to save money, plus they are not that difficult. I had a weird code pop up on the dash and when I researched it I found it’s potentially just a faulty ground. Yeah, it might be worse, but it is the first step to try for this problem. I try to stay on top of things and as soon as I find an issue I try to deal with it early. It’s my only wheels, plus I am going to travel more.

I find it rather odd that, given EVs are all electric, the carmakers light them up like it’s the Las Vegas strip and fill them full of electronic gauges and such. Wouldn’t those precious volts be better suited for, oh…GOING FURTHER DOWN THE HIGHWAY?! It just makes no sense.

That’s about it for this post. Thanks for having a read.