Daily - 2025-11-21

Previously…

Yesterday recap

I woke up early and a had an hour to myself before the house started moving around. I didn’t do anything with that time other than write my daily post. I’m up early again today doing the same.

We had a small two-day install we were doing for one of our favorite customers. When we got there he had shortened up the area we would be irrigating, so it looked like no problem to get it done in one day instead of the two originally planned. When we got working I was able to use our mini-trencher (GeoRipper) instead of hand digging the area. The soil was easy to dig in, so the mini trencher got it all done in like 20 minutes. We had all the parts staged and had a plan, so we got busy. We were done in about 3 hours and it looked like we had never even been there.

When you are a time and materials contractor you get paid less for being really fucking good at your job. This went so fast because we popped in a few days before, measured, and got all the parts ahead. We already owned the right tools for this kind of install (mini trencher), had a plan, and two people with 20+ years experience executed it perfectly. What would take others all day took us three ours. So our bill was significantly less than what we had quoted. I know that is also an unfamiliar experience for folks who hire contractors, too. We got it done faster than we said and came in under budget, which the overall bill was 30% less than expected.

Came home and swapped the truck back to winterization loadout. I took out all of the sprinkler bins and some tools to clear out the truck as much as possible so when I get home I can take out the compressor and we will be ready to go for Sunday.

Spent the late afternoon doing some odds and ends. I balanced our biz books and looked at what our winter budget will be. Things are looking better and better. We are having a record November for sales, which we needed so badly. I updated yt-dlp and grabbed the new dependencies. Still works good, just need a JS tool on the system mostly. I installed Deno, updated yt-dlp and everything worked as expected.

I then worked on the Chromebook here and there throughout the rest of the day. Because of the Linux container on ChromeOS I keep running into all kinds of weird permissions issues I can’t figure out. Like, why I can read/write files on a shared folder from the host system, but when I run copyparty (as my user) it only has read access. For as much as I love this Chromebook, everything is a kludge. Everything has some weird workaround that has to happen. Yes, it works. But in the weirdest and most complex way possible.

Dinner, gorls bedtime, and then we finished Austin Powers.

Gratitude

• Finances are looking better than they did a month ago. We are going to make it through the winter.

How are you feeling today?

Meh. Not happy, not sad, and kind of bored. I would call this my most frequent mood. GERD is better today.

Todo

Chores

• I have 5 winterization stops and this day is going to be a PITA. All of these stops are folks from our commercial contract that the property management had to contact to schedule since they would never answer us. So the schedule is wack. I’m going to put in a ton of miles since they are all spread out unevenly and I have a couple of big gaps between stops.
• Clear out truck for the weekend.
• Take down our digital photo frame. Its actually an old tablet I made into a frame and it is mounted on the wall right where the Xmas tree will go. I don’t want it buried behind the tree for the next month.

Fun

• Watch Friday Night Smackdown with the fam.
• Game night with wife. I think we are gonna build one of those Dollar Tree Lego knockoff sets.

Projects

• Gonna write a separate blog post about this, just notes for myself later. I have been trying to figure out how to make a portable homelab with the components I have at the house. I like to keep my EDC bag minimal and I think that is what is getting in my way of getting this project done. I am mentally stuck trying to figure out how to keep a portable homelab small for this bag. Since I’m so stuck, it is time to switch tactics. Rather than trying to find the perfect solution, I need to start with the worst possible solution. Do that, see what I learn, make adjustments, and then I will find the perfect answer along the way.

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