Tag Archives: plan

Tossing the schedule…

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As the end of the year bears down on us like an onrushing bus, I’m strongly leaning towards temporarily abandoning the normal schedule.

I give it the good old college try to get a post up here every weekday of the year. With the exception of federal holidays that I sometimes forget are weekdays, I mostly hit the mark. You’ve probably noticed that at least a fair amount of what ends up on these pages is at least tangentially related to work. Given that we’re about to hit a two week stretch when work will be the very last thing on my mind, there’s likely to be a dearth of quality source material from that front. If I happen to also mostly ignore the news, well, there’s no telling what, if any, ideas might percolate. 

I don’t think I’ll be taking a two-week break – the chances of me shutting up for 17 days in a row is absolutely nil – but I do expect the final two weeks of the year will be a time when I toss the schedule completely out the window and let posts fall when and where the motivation strikes.

With all that said, don’t be surprised come December 19th if you don’t see a spanking new post hitting every night promptly at 6:00. I promise you’ll still get a healthy dose of angst and hostility over the ultra-long Christmas/New Year’s weekend, but I don’t want to commit myself to any kind of a schedule. It’s my longest break of the year, after all, and I fully intend most of it to be a true break from any kind of expected performance. 

A dream of osmosis…

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After nearly two full months, I can honestly say I haven’t loved my time in the guest room. I’m sure the bed is perfectly serviceable for a weekend visit or maybe even for a week or two. Because we all light up the front of our houses like good suburbanites, there’s also way too much ambient light bleeding in the front windows. I tend to prefer near total darkness for sleep. I’m sure that’s something I could correct with updated curtains, but I’m determined to ride this out as a temporary expedient that doesn’t require the addition of blackout shades.

I won’t pretend this temporary relocation has been all bad, though. What I have enjoyed is sleeping in part of the library. The guest bedroom, you see, does double duty as the holding area for my to-be-read nonfiction pile. It’s a few hundred books I want to read coving just about all the high points – and many of the low ones – of western civilization. There are absolute shit tons of wisdom stacked in those volumes. I know it won’t transfer by osmosis, but having it that close at hand through the night is somehow comforting.

I suppose this means there will be bookshelves making their way to the master bedroom sooner or later. It won’t happen immediately, because I don’t even want to think of laying in bookcases until I can arrange to have the carpet replaced. Believe me when I say that’s the kind of thing you want to consider in advance before picking a new spot to accumulate a few hundred pounds of paper and glue and binding. You don’t really want to spend your time moving stacks and stacks of books more than once if there’s any reasonable way to avoid it.

So, that’s now another couple of projects tagged on to a list of things to do that never seems to get shorted. Must be one of those joys of home ownership I keep hearing about.

Men plan and the gods laugh…

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My annual birthday week book buying spree was interrupted, as you know, by the long-awaited master bathroom remodeling project. At the time, I pinned my hopes to get back to the world of dusty, mote filled shops during the next block of leave I usually take during the first week of July. Then, of course, there was the repeated county inspection fiasco that set us back by a matter of weeks. 

That sad story brings us to where we are now – the first week of July – when I once again have vast sweeps of unallocated time that I planned to use for chasing books. Here, I am, though, tethered to the house while work in the bathroom continues.

This summer won’t go down in my personal history as the best use of vacation time I’ve ever experienced. Given how many small change decisions it’s helpful to be able to discuss and make on the spot, the only real alternative was to cancel out my leave this week and log in for another session of working from home. That thought was even less enticing than just pissing away 4 days of leave doing piddling odds and ends around the house. 

After last week’s water system blowout, I’d be wildly uncomfortable being away for any real length of time. I’ve snuck away for a few appointments during this process – those that have taken months to get and that changing ranked as too hard to do – but otherwise I’ve been able to be here throughout. As this effort drags on, though, I increasingly wonder about the sanity of anyone who stays in their home through a more involved renovation that isn’t just contained to one room.

I’m sure at some point this week, I’ll scour a few of the online shops I frequent, just to scratch the acquisition itch. Otherwise, it looks like a week of reprising those distant times of puppy training when all the creatures of the household piled into the kitchen. I suppose, spending a few days huddled up with books, tea, and furry critters isn’t really the worst bit of vacation time I’ve ever spent… but it wasn’t at all what I had planned.

A trip to Disney it ain’t…

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The first week of June is usually the point in the year where I start taking time off in bulk. The first half of the year is for slogging through. The back half is for maximizing days not tethered to a desk or laptop. Historically, this is a week allocated for sweeping through antique and book shops ranging from Philadelphia to DC. After two years of Plague measures, 2022 was supposed to be a return to normalcy. Except, of course, that’s not how it has turned out. At least not for this week.

With a team of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians crawling around and under the house, stretching my legs like that is off the table this year. Sure, they’re bonded and insured and I’ve got cameras keeping an unblinking eye on everything, so I don’t strictly need to be here. Still, it looks like I’ll mostly be spending the week knocking around the house if only to answer random questions as they come up.

It’s not an ideal week of vacation, but after seven months of waiting to start, I certainly wasn’t going to delay further in the name of saving a cherished early summer tradition. Besides, I’ve got another tranche of time off coming up for the first week of July. This whole thing has been a bit of an exercise in delayed gratification. Why shouldn’t this be as well?

Fortunately, I’ve got a wall full of books I’ve been meaning to read and a list of odds and ends that need doing but never quite make it to the top of the list. There’s no time like the present to get after those things. Quite a few of those items got lined through today. If it all gets too tedious, I can always forgo a few vacation days, log in for telework during the tail end of the week. That feels like he worst possible option, but one never knows.

We’ll see how everything looks after a few days of just hanging out while other people stream in and out doing the heavy lifting for the week.

Running out the clock…

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With three days left in this grand 16 day weekend, I guess you could say the only thing I have left to do is run out the clock.

With a bit of a sore throat and a touch of post nasal drip, but no other signs or symptoms of crud, COVID, or anything else catching, I’ve laid in groceries and have no further plans besides three days of proper hermiting before work raises its ugly head and demands my time again. It’s celebrating this long stretch of days off by doing that which I most enjoy.

These last two weeks seem to be ending with more a whimper than a bang, but I’m not exactly complaining. Being holed up with the animals, rooms full of good books, food to cook, and vast quantities of tea and gin hardly sounds like a disaster. Who knows, I might even get crazy and watch something on Netflix or Hulu instead of just using the television as background noise.

All while in the back of my head rumbles the warning that Monday is coming. I don’t think any amount of time off will ever change how I feel about that.

The next long weekend…

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I started the latest in my ongoing series of very long weekends at 4:00 this afternoon. My out of office message is set, my laptop is packed away, and I won’t be sparing another thought about COVID, or briefings for industry, or taskers for the next five days. It’s a decidedly good feeling. 

I have no real plans to speak of. I’m sure there will be a bit of junking and book hunting in the mix, but for tonight there’s nothing that even passes for a plan. I’ll be going as close as I ever do to playing it by ear. I’m not sure my version would pass as anyone else’s idea of spontaneity, but I’m ok with it.

I usually try to keep the blog schedule moving along without interruption during these vacation days, but as always, for the next few days I’m reserving the right not to sit down at the computer unless I’m really feeling a strong bit of motivation. I really have no idea whether I’ll be posting for the rest of the week or not. It’s a total coin toss.

Not to worry, of course. Even if I’m quiet here for a few days, there’s not much chance at all of me shutting up on Facebook or Twitter, so you can always treat yourself to a micro-rant elsewhere on your preferred social media platform.

Change of plans…

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It turns out I’ve reached a point in my curmudgeonlyness, where I’m just not willing to stand around baking for six hours in hundred-degree weather, likely getting rained on, and surrounded by 30,000 potential plague carriers, even when the reward is seeing two of the bands I consider absolute pillars of rock music in the last three decades. 

Ten degrees cooler, not as likely to be soaked to the skin, or maybe even just a little less plague-y, and I’d have probably made different decisions. There were a lot of strikes working against the original plan for today. As it is, I seem to have woken up in a mood this morning that would only be exacerbated by any of those three factors. It’s all an almost iron clad guarantee that I wouldn’t have in any way enjoyed the experience. So yeah, I’m taking a pass on the Hella Mega Tour despite the two year wait and general excitement of the last few days.

I’m a little sad at letting this opportunity slide past, but there will be other, hopefully more favorable opportunities. In an effort to even the scales, I snuck off this afternoon to one of my very favorite used book shops and brought home a few choice bits by way of compensation. It’s not the full rock concert experience I was planning to have today, but it wasn’t a bad trade off as far as I’m concerned.

Lessons from Texas…

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There are lots of lessons about the debacle of the Texas electric grid.

The biggest, for me at least, is the confirmation that energy independence isn’t just about making the fuel we consume right here in the good ol’ U S of A, but also in having a bare minimum ability to produce some power or heat separate and apart from whatever grid happens to service your region.

For the average homeowner or renter, even a tiny, portable generator could power a modest electric heater – enough to keep a room warm and a lamp on as a shelter of last resort. For an apartment dweller the calculus is a bit different. Even so, there are indoor use options powered by propane or denatured alcohol that would provide welcome heating in a survival situation. The catch to all of those alternatives, though, if you need to have thought them through a bit before the “oh shit” moment arrives.

I’ll be the first to tell you that even the best generators aren’t foolproof. They need regular service and rely on a steady supply of your fuel of choice. Here at Fortress Jeff, that fuel source is a 500 gallon propane tank buried in the backyard. At best, on the day it’s filled, that tank will contain 400 gallons of propane – or a little more than six days of 24/7 run time for the average sized generator. Since most days that tank is sitting somewhere between full and “empty,” I work from the assumption that I can keep things fully up and running for half that time and maybe even less since the water heater and furnace both draw from the same tank. If it looks like a long duration outage, off and on cycling will buy me a few more days of keeping the place at least habitable.

Beyond that point, we’re at the mercy of the delivery service and the expectation that both the generator and HVAC systems keep working as advertised. That is to say, it’s not a zero risk plan that I put together. There are certainly scenarios where a deep snow or ice, and downed trees could prevent delivery or repair should an event drag into multiple days or some component fail. I assess the relative risk of that happening as being fairly low based on the historical record for the geographic area I currently occupy.

Even feeling fairly secure in my ability to operate independently from the grid for days if necessary, when the time comes to replace the current 21 years old tank, I’m planning to upgrade to a 1000 gallon model. When it comes to fuel on hand, I firmly believe the old logistician’s motto that “more is better.” On days I’m feeling particularly aggressive about my own personal energy independence, the thought of adding a wood stove also sounds awfully appealing. Without a fireplace of any kind in the house, it’s more of an undertaking than I’d really like to get involved with just now, but it’s on the radar for sure.

As for Texas, well, it’s just one more reminder than when shit really gets dicey, you’d better have a plan to get yourself through the worst of it, because the cavalry isn’t always going to ride over the hill and rescue you in the nick of time.

What I learned this week?

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I’m not usually one for buying into the wisdom of movies, but I’m a life-long watcher of people.

Back in 1997, Tommy Lee Jones played a no nonsense agent keeping the world safe from the aliens among us. He said “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

Watching my fellow Americans “planning” and “preparing” for COVID-19, the zombie apocalypse, or TEOTWAWKI, basically confirms that his lines ring out across the ages as the most truthful words ever committed to film.

You’ll be glad you did…

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You can’t miss the funny, funny toilet paper memes. I got it. Large numbers of people pummeling each other in the grocery store isles is good humor, I don’t deny it.

I’ll be the first to agree with you that panic buying is stupid. With that said, I think it’s stupid for reasons different than “coronavirus doesn’t cause you to die of shitting yourself.” For me, the rolling of eyes is triggered more by looking at people who don’t already have a “safety stock” of items essential to keeping a household running for a few days, a few weeks, months, a year or more depending on what your risk tolerance and budget will support.

I know some real, honest to God end of the world prepper types. I’m not even close to being in their league. I’ve got no interest in taking it to that level. They’re legitimately trying to be prepared for the collapse of civilization. It’s not out of the realm of the possible, but I’m not entirely convinced I want to hang around for that party. My personal cognitive bias tends towards the belief that over time, things will trend towards that status quo… that tomorrow will be more or less the same as yesterday. I could also be 100% wrong about that assumption.

I’m extremely comforted in knowing that if, for some reason, I needed to button up Fortress Jeff for a period of a few weeks or a month or two, I could get along without any significant impact on my standard of living. We could probably hold out a bit longer than that if I did a little rationing. It’s the level of insurance and peace of mind that I’m comfortable with maintaining over the long term.

Because I’ve done a little advance planning and bought extras a few items at a time, there’s no need for panic buying. My regular shopping trips involve simply replacing what I’ve used from week to week to maintain the baseline – usually a few canned goods, some fresh mean and vegetables, dog or cat food, and so on. Keeping a bit of extra on hand just makes good sense. When everyone else is panicking and buying up 54-packs of Charmin, you can smile, make another cup of coffee, and get on with your day.

Next time you make your weekly grocery list, add a few extra items that are good for long term storage. Buy stuff you know you’ll use anyway. Try having a little bit of a plan that extends beyond the next three to five days. At some point, because of flood, fire, snow, or pandemic, you’ll be glad you did.