The Spammy OD Front Page and More Mundane Life Details

Opendiary really needs to do something about the front page.  40+ posts from bonnieloveinderpreet over the night turned it into an absolute mess.  It’s distracting, makes the front page look trashy, like this isn’t a legitimate site.   I sent a note to support — we’ll see if they do anything about it.  It shouldn’t bother me.  But it does — it’s kind of like having a nice journaling notebook that someone sprayed grafitti on.

It would be nice if they could restrict front page posts from the same account to like 2 or 3 within a 24 hour period.

Rant over.

When I first started writing in OpenDiary one of my goals was to document some mundane details of life — the basic everyday stuff that comprises adult existence.

One of those things has, lately, been trying to figure out what to do about a fence abutting my property.

It blew over last weekend.  I live in New England and we got hit with a big wind event last Friday and Saturday.  Prior to cold snap, the fence was already in trouble, showing an ominous lean toward my house, and then temps plummeted and the gusts got strong and well you get what we got here.

Variables in play:

• Neighbor doesn’t want to pay anything.  (Of course.)
• Insurance deductible on my home owner policy is 5k — the cost of repair/replace would have to be wildly higher than 5K for me to file a claim, I think…
• I have another fence abutting my house on the other side which is also in terrible shape
• Ground currently frozen

Some dude is coming over from a local company at noon tomorrow and we’ll assess options.  I want to do it as cheaply as possible but retain the look and feel.  An old friend of mine AG got into endless fights with a neighbor over fences .. it’s the sort of thing that neighbors fight about, despite the Frost poem about good fences making good neighbors (I never totally understood the intent of that poem… my best guess is that Frost was making fun of people who overvalued fences, as if we don’t need fences to divide us from one another.)  My old friend’s neighbor insisted that he wouldn’t pay a dime to fix a fence because it wasn’t technically on his property, which gave AG, in his head, free license to do whatever he wanted to do, so he put himself on the Executive Board of Fence Repair as the only member and changed the look/feel of the replacement fence from wood to that PVC plastic white stuff.  Neighbor incredibly pissed he wasn’t consulted for approval.  Things were never right after that.  Anyway the point of this is that I learned a lesson from this:  If you’re going to replace a fence, put up exactly what was there before, or as close as you can manage, if you care about avoiding conflict, which I probably do, as long as the price is right.

I guess if I’m going to look for positives here, I can be thankful that it fell on my property, so we’re not arguing about any damage to their stuff.

While we’re on the subject of mundane details, I’ve had an espresso maker for 5 years that finally crapped out yesterday too.  Won’t pressurize enough.  So I have to find a new one.  I make probably 8 or 10 a week, it’s cheaper, quicker, and more efficient to make espresso than coffee, which requires more grounds, more water, more energy, and has a longer brew cycle.   It broke three years ago but I was able to fix it by replacing a rubber ring — this time it’s worse, there’s just no pressure buildup.  Probably something calcified inside it — I don’t always use distilled water, which means that mineral buildup in the internals is inevitable.  I ran a few vinegar cycles to try to clear it but — no dice, this didn’t resolve anything.  When I get a new one — which will probably be today, I can’t wait that long, I am an Elite Master of Human Comforts and espresso is one of my daily comforts — I will try to be sure to use distilled water more often so the new one lasts as long as possible.   5 years is OK for an espresso maker though, I probably made 1500 of them over the years and the machine cost $200 I think so, not too bad?  I mean they’re $3 a pop at coffee shops nowadays.

I always feel bad about throwing stuff like this out though.  Sometimes I think about just how much trash I’ve generated on this planet during my 45 years here.  Probably enough to fill an entire high school pool if you count all of the food containers, clothes, etc.

I’m moving forward on the solar panel project, too.  Got a roof company to replace the shingles, which is a requirement before I get the panels installed.  Lots of money flying out of my ass this year — I hope that after fence and solar that I won’t have any significant home projects for years and years.

I get tired of doing projects like this.  Some people don’t seem to mind — some people take real interest in it.  My friend AG loves projects.

They wear me out — I do stuff that I feel has to be done for safety/security/efficiency and then I want to move on to other things, like killing zombies in a video game or finding a new book to read.

Tonight Jennie and I are going to watch a Troma movie called Class of Nuke Em High 2:  Subhumanoid Meltdown.  She is a big fan of absolute shit movies and I discovered Troma about half a year ago — they’re a production company that specializes in B movie low budget garbage — their most famous movie is probably The Toxic Avenger, which somehow became successful enough to spawn a cartoon show for kids, even though the actual movie is rated R and features bare breasts and decapitations.  The trailer for Subhumanoid Meltdown is pure madness — it promises eighty minutes of uncut cinematic lunacy and I can’t wait to see it with her to see what her reaction will be.

So I have that to look forward to after an afternoon of work at least.

Tomorrow is difficult — the way it’s lining up I have about six hours of meetings, plus the fence dude at noon, plus I will have to try to do my weight routine sandwiched in the middle for upper body, then in the evening at seven I have physical therapy, which will be weird because we’re trying some new thing to help my right knee — Blood Flow Restriction Training for the muscles around that area.  An artery will be constricted, less oxygen will be supplied to my quad and the supporting muscles, and then I will perform exercises in this state, and apparently the exercises will feel a lot harder to do and this should result in greater gains — and the the stronger muscles will eventually help my knee feel better because they will take pressure off the kneecap and joint.

Time to dig into programming and technical work for my job.