Daily - 2025-11-20

Previously…

Yesterday recap

Out the door at a decent time for 3 winterizations for work. First stop was the most difficult. I was working backwards, starting up in Steilacoom then through DuPont and into Lacey. Steilacoom stop was a new (to us) customer up the street from one of our best customers. When I got there I realized in the first 30 seconds this new person was a jackass.

First, he had a real attutude for the work. He kept saying things like, “Well, this isn’t rocket science. I could do it, I just have the money to pay someone else.” He would go on and on basically about how dumb people do this work and he’s not dumb, that’s why he lives in a nice, big house. Then he started telling me about how he’s the president of the HOA and I should see this as an opportunity to get more work. But, then he told me that basically no one will work with them. They keep hiring people and then they stop responding. Gee, I wonder why.

There’s a sizable section of the world that is condescending and belittling to contractors and blue collar folk. Not only do I experience it in person, but I see it all the time online. Lots of folks referring to us as “professional screw driver turners” and complain about how much it costs to hire us for how dumb we are. At this point I’m used to it since I’ve also worked in marketing and everyone likes to shit on marketing, mostly for things that have nothing to do with what marketing actually does.

Last two stops were much easier and I was able to get home at a decent time. Which then I needed to unload all the winterization stuff and load up for our mini install for tomorrow and Friday. This install is for one of our favorite customers who is an amazing person and has an awesome name. I wish I could share, but… ya know.

After I wrapped up all my work stuff finally, the mail came and dropped a letter from my oldest to the gorls. The oldest has been mailing the gorls all kinds of notes, origami, little crafts, etc. and its been an awesome experience for the gorls. The mail person had to hand deliver because the envelope was too thick and couldn’t go through the machines, so I had to pay a little extra postage when it was delivered. The gorls have been making little crafts and mailing them back, so it has been a fun exchange.

Spoke to the boy about his monitor and he indicated he will handle the mount himself. This means he will continue to leave it leaning against the wall for months until I get a chance to sneak in their one day and build it for him.

It has been colder the last few days (no cloud cover) so everyone spent the evening just lounging under blankets on the couch. Gorls got ready for bed and then wife and I started Austin Powers.

Gratitude

• Even though my oldest is busy, she is making time to keep in touch and have a great relationship with the gorls. There is a big age gap and I know being a young adult can be overwhelming and keeping good contact with siblings can be put on the back burner. She is doing a good job. I’m imagining her sitting at the table at lunch writing and drawing a little book to mail to her sisters.

How are you feeling today?

Pretty much the same as yesterday. Mentally doing okay. Physically my GERD is out of control.

Todo

Chores

• Trenching and plumbing at this new mini install. No rain today, so should go fast.
• Guess what? Take the new install stuff out of the truck and put winterization equipment back in. I won’t be back to the new install on Friday, instead doing 5(!) winterizations while my partner finishes up the install. I need to pull everything out of the truck. We aren’t working next week since it is a short week (US Thanksgiving), so I don’t need anything in there for a while. I am going to completely empty because this weekend we are getting our Xmas tree. The u-cut farm we go to opens the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Fun

• Still don’t know. I’m basically bored with everything at the moment. I mean, how many times can I rebuild the same 3 laptops? I don’t feel like playing any games and even then I don’t have that much fun playing games. Its not that there isn’t things to do, I just don’t feel like doing any of them.

Projects

• Saw that Mickey’s Christmas Carol was posted on YouTube by Disney, so need to grab that for my own library. I know yt-dlp has some new dependencies so need to figure that out, too.
• Not getting a lot of traction with selling the Chromebook. So, I’ve been digging a little deeper into running containers in the Linux VM to see exactly how far I can push this little thing. Can I create enough of a “real laptop” out of it? I saw a good idea of using Kasm containers for full Linux desktops. Gonna play with that on the Chromebook. Basically create a Kasm desktop then access with Chrome on the localhost. If you are reading this and know about running Docker in the Linux container on ChromeOS, see this post on my Mastodon. I need some help figuring out permissions for the docker user to write to shared dirs.

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