Category: Journal

Tiny Weekend

It’s time for another Getaway. After binging on Tiny House Hunters (“I need a 100 square foot house with a tub, a chef’s kitchen and a tanning bed”), Virginia had declared she would never live in one and I had declared I thought it was a good idea. Then, we realized we could never own a tiny house because we don’t have any family or friends close by where we could mooch off their land, power and water.

So, much like our earlier RV weekend experiment, we decided to rent one. Amazingly, there are a number of places to rent a tiny house around the Metroplex.

We eventually chose Getaway Dallas which is in LaRue – a few minutes from Athens, in the Piney Woods. So, a tiny house with the possibility of snakes and wild boars. I like Getaway because they have locations all over the place, so if this works, we can travel around for long weekends – and we could visit the Ohio location with the grandkids (one at a time, I would think) to give them a sense of adventure. For a flat fee, you can bring a dog. So, this will be another vacation for Rocky. As a bonus, I’ve always meant to visit Athens. (We’ve been to Paris and Italy, so we need to visit Athens and Dublin. European Vacation without ever leaving the State.)

We were going to do Memorial Day weekend, but they were sold out (you snooze, you lose), so it will be a couple of weeks afterwards. This should be interesting.

TexMex Mantras

Meditation is a very private thing – some people just use breathing, some people stare at various body parts, some chant.

If you chant, you generally chant a mantra. This can be a sacred text, a meaningless sound, or a phrase given to you by a guru (perhaps for a fee.)

If you grew up in Texas, you might realize that one religion is TexMex food and there are any number of mantras that can be generated using the basics of the cuisine.

One night, when I had lost track of my dogs (yet again!), I decided I needed something easier to remember for a chant. (For the record, the dogs are Bubba [RIP], Ripley [RIP], Sparky [RIP], Flower [RIP], Murphy [RIP], Max [RIP], Katie [RIP], Rocky.)

So, what is more important than pets? Enchiladas. Plus, there weren’t that many I could remember from experience. (I did Google it and there are many religious battles on enchiladas, mostly regional. I was worried about content.)

Here is the Enchilada mantra:

Beef
Cheese
Chicken
Spinach

It’s easy – you can picture them in your mind, so you have something to focus upon and you can get distracted by whether spinach should even count.

That kept me busy for a while, until my mind started wandering – mainly because chanting enchiladas is going to make me think of other TexMex classics.

At that point, I decided that the perfect TexMex mantra would be a combination platter just like in any good TexMex restaurant. I had to make a list, but after that, it’s easy – it’s like any combo platter, just choose three or four items and chant away.

Combo Platter Mantra Ingredients

  • Burrito
  • Chalupa
  • Chimichanga
  • Enchilada
  • Taco
  • Tamale
  • (don’t forget the rice & beans)

Last night, my mantra detailed my dinner from the other evening –

Enchilada, Enchilada, Tamale, Taco, Rice and Beans

(It was a very tasty dinner.)

Of course, if you meditate in the morning before you start your day, then thinking about dinner may not make much sense – although it may help you focus. In that case, instead of the Combo Platter Mantra, may I suggest the Breakfast Taco Mantra?

Breakfast Taco Mantra Ingredients

  • Bacon
  • Bean
  • Cheese
  • Chorizo
  • Egg
  • Potato
  • Sausage

For a Breakfast Tacos Mantra, just name the ones you order – bean & cheese, egg cheese & potato, chorizo and egg.

Start your meditation sessions with “Howdy!” and end with “Adios.”

OM, Y’all.

Conqueror Completions

For those who haven’t found The Conqueror virtual challenges, I have found that it is a good way to make you pay attention to how much exercise you are getting. I can walk a mile a day just by taking the long way around the house when getting stuff and two miles a day if I am in the office. My Apple Watch tracks my steps and the app reads them once a day – so every morning, I can check my progress on the map.

I’m waiting until the exercise bike arrives to try the longer challenges, because a mile a day isn’t very much! Still, it is much more than I was walking before I started the challenges, and that’s the point. This is 533 miles which is more than I was doing before I started paying attention.

The challenges with Galemeadow Castle means that my wife was walking with me – we pooled our steps. I don’t think she was as interested. So, on those races, I probably did about half the steps.

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A Marriage in Dogs

In my wedding vows, my wife insisted that I promise to have a dog. “A” dog. Over the years, I have kept that promise many times over. The chart doesn’t even mention Max, who was with us such a short time, he didn’t make it over an anniversary.

I will have to update this chart each year. I thought about it after I had to update the spreadsheet I have because Katie left us the day before my birthday in 2022. When you need a spreadsheet to track your pets, you have kept the promise to have “a dog.”

It was an interesting project building the spreadsheet, because most of the past twenty-two years is a blur, and all the dogs seemed to be here at once. I really couldn’t tell who knew whom or shared the house. So, I put together a spreadsheet with approximate birth dates (i.e. the date we told the pharmacy for their prescriptions), the date they actually joined the household, and the date they crossed the bridge. I then added a function to show who was in residence on any given date. That’s how I built this table.

We know Bubba’s actual birthdate because he was a wedding gift. We know Flower’s because my Mom-in-law got her from a breeder. Yes, mistakes were made. All the rest are rescues, so birthdates were approximate. Flower was actually older than Bubba, but she didn’t move in to the house until my mother-in-law moved in with us.

AnniversaryBubba
Elvis
Gilhooly		Ripley
J.
Gilhooly		Sparkplug
Ulysses
Gilhooly		Flower
“Pot”
Pesce		Murphy
James
Gilhooly		Kaitlin
Renee
Gilhooly		Rockford
J. Gilhooly
2/11/2000 (Wedding)
2/11/2001Bubba
2/11/2002BubbaRipleySparky
2/11/2003BubbaRipleySparkyFlower
2/11/2004BubbaRipleySparkyFlower
2/11/2005BubbaRipleySparkyFlower
2/11/2006BubbaRipleyFlower
2/11/2007BubbaRipleyFlowerMurphyKatie
2/11/2008BubbaRipleyFlowerMurphyKatie
2/11/2009BubbaRipleyFlowerMurphyKatie
2/11/2010BubbaRipleyFlowerMurphyKatie
2/11/2011BubbaRipleyFlowerMurphyKatie
2/11/2012RipleyFlowerMurphyKatie
2/11/2013RipleyFlowerMurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2014RipleyMurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2015RipleyMurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2016RipleyMurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2017MurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2018MurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2019MurphyKatieRocky
2/11/2020KatieRocky
2/11/2021KatieRocky
2/11/2022KatieRocky

Not Immortals

(Originally posted in August. Updated.)

RIP Charlie Watts.

We saw the Rolling Stones in Houston in 2019. It was the first time I had seen the Stones live, which is just insane, except I was really a Beatles person growing up.

We had tickets to see them in Dallas this year, but we actually skipped it. I wasn’t into it (see below) and my wife really wants to avoid crowds, so we just stayed home.

A couple of weeks before Charlie passed away, the Stones had announced that he was sitting the tour out. That was disappointing, but health comes first.

Now, we’ve lost the chance that he would change his mind or have a miraculous recovery.

I’m a lot more upset than I thought I would be over hearing that Charlie passed away. He was 80. Anyone in a rock band that lives to be 80 has lived a good life. However, these guys were supposed to be immortal.

Between the Beatles and the Stones, John Lennon died at 40, but it wasn’t his fault. George Harrison died at 58, but it was cancer. Brian Jones died at 27, but that was a rock and roll death.

This one hurts. I miss Charlie. Even if the Stones have had multiple incarnations and “Keith and Mick ARE the Stones”, it just wouldn’t be the same without Charlie.

Even though I was a Beatles person, I listened to the Stones, and they grew on me. I think you have to be a certain age to actually get the Stones, I think. I know I appreciate the Beatles more now, as well.

However, as much as the Stones records grew on me, I learned in 2019 that they are really a live band. They tore up the stadium in Houston. As much as I enjoyed Sir Mick prancing around and Keith banging away, the most compelling member of the band for me was the quietest one (with the loudest instrument) and that was Charlie.

  • Mick Jagger, fresh out of heart surgery, running around the stage.
  • Keith Richards, leading the charge, playing fifty-year old licks that never age.
  • Ronnie Wood, playing the licks Keith can’t remember.
  • Bill Wyman, at home, because he retired from the band 26 years ago.
  • Charlie Watts, a quiet gentleman, looking bemused behind a drum kit and apparently enjoying himself.

I thought that night that he had surely discovered the secret to a long life in rock and roll – never really believing you were doing what you were doing.

I am so glad we made the trek to Houston to see the Stones live. The trip actually got postponed once when Mick had heart surgery and I thought, “I hope we didn’t miss our chance.” When they rescheduled, we drove down again (we had gone the original weekend anyway because we had so many side trips scheduled.)

It was like being a teenager again.

We had dealt with Mick’s age a month or so before, but now they were ageless.

This year, we dealt with Charlie’s age, and now he’s timeless.

I may regret not going to see them in 2021, but I will always have 2019.

The Grand Consolidation

This was the year I finally started looking at my website costs. Ouch. I have managed to try a number of services over the years, and there really is no consistency on pricing. Also, I tend to leave sites in place years longer than they need to be.

For websites, I love WordPress as a development and content management system. You can use the commercial version and pay to have your domain routed, pay to have ads removed, pay to have email, pay, pay, pay.

You can pay GoDaddy to host WordPress for you – it’s not the commercial version, so there are not as many options, but it’s cheaper. It’s just you have to do much of the maintenance yourself. This should not be a problem because I am in IT, but I am also busy.

You can pay Namecheap to host WordPress for you – it’s cheaper than GoDaddy and WordPress, and they keep the software updated. You do have to do something about spam yourself.

So, I’m migrating to Namecheap, site by site. The other advantage is that their website charges are less, as well.

Now, I’m trying to combine all of my WordPress sites into one, and just point to the individual sites from the different domains. That’s the ultimate goal.

I have written a lot of crap over the years. Keyword: crap. Still, I think it should be saved for posterity – if nothing else, as a warning to others, or for bloggers to learn by example, because a bad example is still an example.

Stay tuned.

Migrations

I really do have to stop moving the Pub every couple of years. Most of the time, it’s for cheaper rent, but it is always a pain. There is no telling what I forgot this time. Still, WordPress is fairly forgiving on imports and exports and most of it is standard (moving from WordPress.com to a managed WordPress always breaks a couple of things.)

So, this is the new home. The domain is moved. The website is moved. The SSL certs are moved. The email is moved. The subsidiaries are moved. It’s the first time in a long time all the services were under one metaphorical roof. We’ll see what happens in about a year.

Musings about The Kids’ Table

I was originally going to register this domain (actually, it was the-kids-table.net but that domain was replaced) and give all of my cousins email addresses that I could remember. That never happened. Then, it was going to be a place to have everyone meet – like a virtual conference room. That happened once, and I keep forgetting to schedule another. The in-person meeting has been in progress for over ten years, but I’m sure it will be scheduled any day now.

So, I have a domain and very little to show for it. For now. And, yes, I’m still at The Kids’ Table.

RIP

There are many phrases I never thought I would write, and one of them was, “Well, now I’ve been to a funeral on Facebook Live.”

My cousin Joey Koch died from COVID-19 this week and his funeral Mass was in D’Hanis this morning. There were actually more people at the service than I expected. Most of the people I talked with weren’t attending, and they were family. I find this tragic, but not surprising in this times.

His was not only a COVID case, it was a Facebook case. On January 21st, he posted that he had been fighting COVID for eight days. Two days later, he posted that he was in the hospital. By February second, his blood pressure was low and he was on a ventilator. He seemed to rally, took a turn for the worse, and then he left us this week. In the midst of all this, he had his fifty-seventh birthday.

So, this morning, Holy Cross Church live streamed his funeral. Without this, I wouldn’t have attended. His sister sent me the link to the livestream during the rosary. I was crying in my recliner. I hate funerals, but I really hate funerals through a small lens that somebody in the back of the Church remembers to adjust randomly.

At the end of the rosary, before Mass, while everyone was readjusting things, the camera panned around the front of the Church, and I saw Joey in his coffin with his Texas A&M cap beside him before they closed the lid. I am not sure this was helpful for me.

Watching one of my cousins’ funerals online was a very strange occurrence. Usually, a death in my Mom’s family implements the same drill. Call or text relatives you haven’t spoken with in a while. Coordinate arrivals in Hondo or D’Hanis. Assume you will meet at least some of the mourners at Hermann Sons the night before the Mass. Attend the reception after the services, and somewhere in the afternoon, realize you are probably laughing quite a bit more than proper at a memorial.

However, this is the time of COVID-19. When we talked online during the drill, I think we were each waiting for the other to say, “I don’t think I’m going to attend.”

Finally, my brother suggested we have a Celebration of Life (a memorial where you’re expected to laugh) some time this Spring, when people are vaccinated and everything is back to normal-ish. This way, nobody had to feel badly about skipping the funeral.

That’s when I realized we’re also celebrating the one-year anniversary of the two-week lockdown. Everything is probably never going to get back to normal-ish.

This morning, I realized I still felt badly about skipping the funeral.

So, now I actually know someone who died from COVID. I have friends that have recovered. I know people who lost relatives. I know people that know people. This one was close to home.

I hate funerals. I hate saying “Goodbye.” I don’t like endings that I don’t control. However, I don’t like skipping funerals even though it was the right thing to do from a safety standpoint. I never thought I would regret not going to a funeral, but this one is close.

I really don’t like endings that were pointless. Joey’s ending was pointless. His ending was pointless because he died of COVID-19.

Joey was being cautious. He had mentioned on Facebook that it wasn’t just about you, it was about the people around you. If someone in your household is in a high risk group, you’re in a high risk group by default.

However, caution does not beat stupidity. It is rumored that he contracted the disease at work. Someone in his office went to Florida to visit family for Christmas and someone there was showing early symptoms. His coworker came home and just went back to work. No mention of any disease. Oops.

COVID-19 is the idiots’ disease. Not that idiots contract it, but that idiots spread it. If you travel somewhere, self-isolate when you get back. Not because it’s the law, but because it’s just common sense. If you think you’ve been exposed, get a test. If you think you’re sick, warn the people you’ve been around. If you don’t feel well, just stay home. If you don’t, you may find yourself feeling better just in time to bury someone you knew.

Happy Accident

My Brewsy kit contained three airlocks, so I can have three bottles of wine or cider fermenting at a time. Plus, my half-gallon glass bottles arrived from Amazon this afternoon. Virginia wanted to try black cherry and the basic advice from Brewsy (which I ignored) was to do cranberry first, so I had ordered RW Knudsen Just Black Cherry and RW Knudsen Just Cranberry – both 100% juice. The slight problem with the juices is that they are only available in 32oz bottles, so I needed two of each. (A Brewsy packet will process between 1.5 quarts and 1.5 gallons, but I’m not going for volume, yet.) The bottle size issue is why I did apple juice first – the Kroger juice is a 64oz bottle, and it is processing in the actual bottle.

I don’t really have to obsess about 100% juice, since some of my co-vintners are fermenting Hawaiian Punch and Dr Pepper, but I haven’t been that brave yet.

This was going to be the same simple procedure as yesterday, and I was going to do Cranberry, since that is supposed to be your first project, and I was running back and forth, checking the Sweetness Calculator, and trying to learn how to use my hydrometer, and measuring sugar and a lot of other steps. Plus, the added “complexity” of fermenting in a bottle other than the bottle the juice came in.

The process still went well, I don’t really believe the specific gravity reading, but I will ask for help on that later. I’m pretty sure I did something wrong or I can’t read. I really need to remember to get large print everything from now on.

So, everything mixed, sugar measured, juice measured, magic packet added, dogs tripped over, and it’s in the closet, ready to become wine. Whew.

Then, Virginia said, “Hey, you used one bottle of Black Cherry and one bottle of Cranberry!”

She was drinking the juice I had left out to leave headspace, so I said, “Wait! What juice are you drinking?” She said, “It’s cranberry and it’s tart.”

So, we have a mistaken mixture, or what a vintner would call a “blend.” It is 32 ounces of Black Cherry juice and 18 ounces of Cranberry. I call it “Happy Accident”, because I don’t think I should put “Dammit!” on a wine label.

So, I have sugar measured to make Cranberry semi-sweet, when 2/3rds of the source is actually Black Cherry. This is going to be interesting.

5 Feb 2021 9:45pm

Source Juice: 32 oz RW Knudsen Just Black Cherry (100% juice), 18 oz RW Knudsen Just Cranberry.

I followed the Brewsy “semi-sweet” recipe from the Sweetness Calculator, based on Cranberry juice. We’ll see what happens.

  • Removed 14 oz of juice from the bottle – later had to figure out which bottle it was from
  • Added 229 grams sugar
  • Added one Brewsy packet

Proposed Schedule (updated with actuals):

DateTimeStepCompleteComments
Fri Feb 59:45pmFermentation Began√Here’s hoping for a happy accident
Sat Feb 6 Morning
11:55am		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√Bubbles – had to swirl the bottle to wash some yeast residue back into juice
Feb 6Afternoon
7:10pm		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√A bit late! Bubbles – still some yeasty residue on bottle, another swirl
Feb 7Evening
4:15pm		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√Bubbling happily
Mon Feb 8Afternoon
11:00am		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√Slowed down but still bubbles
Feb 89:45pmEarliest End for Fermentation(Will probably need more time) – Decided to leave it until morning, at least
Feb 8 9:50pmEarliest Racking after FermentationPostponedRack before Cold Crash
Feb 8 10:00pmEarliest Start for Cold CrashPostponedRemove airlock, replace cap, into fridge
Tue Feb 91:35amTaste Test√Wee bit boozy. Think I will leave it until morning and then cold crash.
Feb 99:25pmRacking √Prior to cold crashing
Feb 99:30pmCold Crash√Into the cold
Wed Feb 10 MorningChecking√Some sludge developing, will rack this evening
Feb 10EveningRackingSkipped
Thu
Feb 11		3:05pmRacking√Not too much to filter
Feb 119:30pmEarliest End for Cold CrashWe have wine!
Feb 11 9:35pm Tasting
Checkpoints – Wine-making