Adaptive Curmudgeon

Its been a roller coaster ride.

A month ago it warmed. Earlier than expected! Huzzah!

I started my dirt bike, gingerly squished through the icy mud, and rode to town for the ceremonial “first tank of gas for the season”. A few days later it got very cold. Then it snowed. It was nice while it lasted.

Things started thawing again but I had other tasks. I ignored the bikes and went on a 3,000 mile road trip. I expected to get home well after spring breakup. When I got back the planet was still dithering. It hadn’t made up its mind. Even so, all the snow was gone and the driveway was dry. Light at the end of the tunnel? I rejoiced. But then it snowed again. Hard!

It wasn’t just a flurry. It snowed until my tractor could scarcely handle the weight. It was a short wet sloppy whole ‘nother winter! I was exhausted.

It melted again… in fits and starts. Because of all that drama, the ground has had its fill. It’s as much liquid as solid. Yesterday my tractor’s front tire sunk a full 10” into a wet spot. I was hauling wood. It would be easy to get truly stuck and shred my already “questionable” lawn. Luckily, I was watching carefully. At the first sign of “quicksand” I backed out. Disaster averted.

Today the world dawned anew. It is April after all. It was nearly t-shirt weather! The driveway is battered but more or less passible. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I charged out to the garage, fired up my cruiser (Honda Shadow 1100), and made my way from our muddy homestead to blissfully clear pavement. It was going to be another “first tank of gas” day!

I planned to drop some mail at the post office; which I did. Then, as sometimes happens, the motorcycle refused to go home.

I though I’d ride a while and then find a coffee shop to do some blogging; another test of my pipsqueak Linux toy. Alas, every coffee shop was closed. It’s still winter season and it was late afternoon. God fearin’ folk were up at 6 am drinking coffee, not ambling around at 3 pm like a degenerate.

Not that I cared about the coffee. I wandered back country roads with no particular aim. The pavement is treacherous with winter’s accumulated grit so I rolled slow; which suited me just fine.

The landscape is still frozen. Lakes are ice (though the ice shacks have been pulled). But it’s achingly close to ice out. Nobody is dumb enough to be out there with a truck on the weak ice. (There’s usually some ass nugget who’ll drive a leased SUV onto a quarter inch of slush and sink it. But not today. The ice is so weak even the idiots received the memo.)

The grass is dead. It’ll burst forth very suddenly when conditions are right. They’re not right yet… but will be soon.

At my house nature is stirring. The wild turkeys are strutting about in twitterpation. There’s a huge Tom out there and he’s looking to score. He looks like a Thanksgiving piñata. The only cranes so far are a couple holed up in my swamp; and those two are incredibly pissed. They bet on the earlier warm pattern and lost. They’ll survive but they’re grumpy about their lot. Ruffed grouse have started drumming. Skunks are stinking things up. We had a trio of chipmunks invade our house!

As I rode, I was hoping to see more cranes. I have not yet mastered their migration pattern. I stopped at a wildlife refuge but saw none. I did see a bunch of snow geese. There are hints that the migration is started and some swans have shown up. But nothing migratory is here in full force. It’ll happen. Soon. Big birds will head north in a great armada. They’ll eat every invertebrate they can hoover up, reproduce, then flee south. Dinosaurs still rule the world, in avian form.

I ride through all this; contented at a level some may never know. Possibly because I’m paying attention to God’s creation instead of a cell phone screen. I witness the last bits of the season of death; not in regret over the cold but in joy at the rebirth. Winter is neither bad nor evil, it merely is.

Optimistic and bundled against the chill I grin at it all. I’m on my motorcycle. Even this simple fact is a thing I thought I might never attain. The odds weren’t good for it. It took me a long time to get one. I wasn’t fortunate to have such things in my youth. But I didn’t fuck up my life too much. In fact I did OK. I acquired one as soon as I had the funds and my wife was happy to see it. It felt late in life at the time but it’s long ago now. I freaked over financing “a luxury” but I needed it and could handle it.

Everyone (except my wife) thought I was nuts. What do they know? If you want to do something and are physically and financially able… do it. Don’t chain yourself to the level of other people’s fears. You are not them; exercise freewill.

Motorcycles are as fabulous as I dreamed they would be. Better even! I wish I could go back in time to a child watching Fonzie and reassure him. “Take heart young Curmudgeon. Your first bike will have twice the displacement of the Fonz’s Triumph. And Henry Winkler is just an actor with a nice jacket. He’s a pipsqueak that can’t even ride. You will ride!”

The bike and I wander post-apocalyptic terrain. Is that not what winter is? If you didn’t know about “winter” in advance you’d think the world was ending. In a way it does. Every year almost everything dies or goes dormant. Up north, it’s the way of the world. Our planet has an axial tilt. It is what it is.

Does every apocalypse seed the rejuvenation that follows? It feels like it might. I smell spring in the air and see it in the plants and animals. A frog hops across the lane and I carefully miss him. I’d never see such details were I hermetically sealed in an SUV.

Farm fields are thawing and smell of cowshit. The buildup accumulated during months of icy stasis is thawing all at once. It’s spread on the fields, returning to the soil from whence the cow’s feed came. Biology hasn’t had time to break down the material, but it will. In a few weeks, those same farms will smell sweetly of grass and flowers. Canadian geese will be prowling amid the corn stubble. My buddy the frog had better watch out. Thawing cowshit is the smell of commerce, of wealth, of another year when winter didn’t kill me. It means I’m where the food is made instead of where its consumed.

Eventually I turn back toward home. I stopped at a grocery store with a coffee shop in the corner. It’ll do. That’s where I’m typing this.

Enjoy your spring.

AC

I’m going to be “on the road” for most of the rest of the month. Last time I was so busy I only could make an occasional minimal check on my blog. This time it will be far more “chill”. (I hope.)

Wish me luck.

A.C.

Update: I just got a summons for jury duty. Yuck! Ya’ win some, ya’ lose some.

Propaganda works on you even if you know it’s propaganda. Our brains are wired a certain way. People and systems exploit this.

As intelligent adults, we must live thoughtfully; the better to retain our rationality. Do your decisions reflect our own agency? Have you recently done a “self audit” to check?

I pondered to what degree my mind has been captured by brand loyalty and inertia. I sat my brain down and gave it a good talking to. I’d been sliding down a few slippery slopes.

I’ve already made changes; mostly involving my personal technology. I will make more.

First comes computers; the ultimate “inertia vampires”.

I spent years stifled in a corporate’s IT straitjacket and haven’t fully shrugged off the bad habits it forced on me. At work, unknowable committees I never met decreed I must use only the software and hardware they allowed. Completely by chance, these options tended to shift money to whom they (whomever they were) wanted to shift money. Often but not always, into Microsoft’s pocket. This had nothing to do with me (or anyone) doing a better job.

One example among many; Word was the word. There’s a dozen equally excellent word processors. For most purposes, any word processor is fine. Many are “free”. But, within the cage naught could be typed but what Microsoft got a cut.

There’s a persistent idea that everyone needs to work on Word because only Word understands Word files. That hasn’t been much of a limitation for decades. (There might be situations where your entire staff is “on the cloud” but that wasn’t me.) I think systems use Microsoft Office mostly because they’ve always used Office. The head honcho is statistically likely to be of a certain age and highly risk averse. People who formed their impressions back in the time of CDs (or earlier!) and don’t like change really like Word.

All that matters is if it works. The tool is just a tool. You’re reading something I typed. Can you tell what word processor used? Is it Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Scrivener, WordPress’ GUI, my archaic bit shovel*, or a scanned piece of paper and OCR? You don’t know and you don’t care; which is the way it should be.

[Note: At this point I went off on a digression about mistreatment at the hands of corporate IT. My story is nothing special, we’ve all have suffered alike. I’m sure the magic word du jour “AI” isn’t going to improve things in the near future either. I meant every word I wrote but I was being negative. Rather than rehash old wounds, I deleted it.]

That’s all in the rear mirror. I’m a free man. I’m happily playing with Fusion 360 on my own computer for my own reasons. My computer [more deletions here] is vastly more powerful and laughably, obscenely, stupidly, remarkably cheaper than the gutless computers formerly foisted on me (all with Microsoft licenses and other similar “deals”).

I’m perfectly happy with my setup. So, of course, it had to be enshittified.

Microsoft launched (inflicted) Windows 11, to universal scorn. The update has nothing to do with the user’s needs and everything to do with a system that views users as a cow to be milked and an an information node for creepy spying.

I’ve been through this before. Microsoft crows that “AI” has been crammed into the new OS. Well yippie! I don’t need or celebrate corporate buzzwords. There’s always a new form of Clippy. (I’m not saying LLMs aren’t useful. Only that rectally inserting them everywhere isn’t in the user’s best interest.)

For hardware reasons, upgrading my desktop to Win11 is a bitch. Plus, Fusion 360 is hassling me about sticking with Win10. It’s on-line but somehow wants me to have Win11 too? The downward spiral has begun.

I prepared to get bent over and pay for another generic Windows machine I didn’t really want. Then I thought, why eat shit?

The main reason I own a Windows machine is because former employers were welded to Microsoft. That’s over and Microsoft is being a winy little cretin. Why put up with that?

I was becoming a farmed revenue source. It happens to us all. It’s a shock when you realize they’ve done it again. Especially if you feel loyalty without excellent performance, that’s a red flag. The big tell is putting a brand in your identity. “I’m a Mac guy”, “Ubuntu forever”, “Windows is the default so embrace the suck”. None of us should derive “identity” out of the tool we choose for whatever computer stuff we do. It might be inherently logical to jump from OS to OS as one improves and the other enshittifies.

So, I didn’t buy a new laptop… yet. As an experiment I pulled a tiny old Macbook Air out of the trash. It’s now running MX Linux; I think it’s good for travel. As another experiment I tinkered with Mrs. Curmudgeon’s newer but still old Macbook Pro.

Macs cost roughly 3x the price of non-Apple hardware but the OS was OK. I briefly entertained the idea of becoming a Mac person. (Is there an initiation rite?) But the newly released Neo is a joke. Close but no sale.

Also, and completely irrationally, Fusion 360 is mostly on-line but perfectly happy with an old MacOS, cranky about an old Win install, and will break out in hives over Linux? Weird.

More experiments will follow. There’s no rush. Eventually, I’ll buy or build another number crunching heavy hitter. I have a 3d modeling hobby (and wrote a 500+ page book). I need more than a toy. Will it run Win11? Mac? Linux? I’ve no idea.

That’s how I know I’m being rational. I will find the solution by looking at performance and price. I’m also wondering about Fusion 360. If it’s making an ass of itself maybe I’ll just switch to a 3d Modeling tool that’s Linux friendly.

It would feel good to cut myself free of BOTH Mac and Win.

Whoops, I geeked out and went off topic again. I meant to expand on my theory that Windows is Jeep is John Deere. I might even blather about Harley-Davidson and Mac and  Honda and how my Honda PC800 is absolutely not a Goldwing.

But I used up all my time. I’ll try again some other time.

A.C.

*When I say “bitshovel” I mean word processors so crude they aren’t even true computers. I purchased an Alphasmart Dana in 2011 and an Alphasmart Neo2 in 2016. I paid $35 for the Neo2. It still works just like it did when I bought it. They’re now going for $186 on Amazon. I think I paid $25 for the Dana and it works too. I don’t see any left on Amazon.

If you want a bit shovel but absolutely must signal your social status, you can drop $700 on Amazon for a hipsterific Freewrite. It’s a pretty cool looking gadget! It’s easily cool enough to be worth $20 more than my Neo2. Is it $665 cooler? Not a chance.

Recent snows have been super dense. Tree branches normally high enough to be well out of the way sagged down to “tractor windshield” level.

I was as careful as possible but one branch got tangled into the gap between the cab and mirror. I didn’t realize it until I heard an ominous “snap”. Lucky for me, the branch broke instead of my mirror! It pretty much obscured my whole field of view. I had to drive a few yards practically blind just to find a place to park so I could get out and untangle the branch (and the huge pile of snow it was holding).

They say it’s April. I have my doubts.

The snow was so wet that parts of it were tinged blue. It was exactly the color I’ve seen on videos of glaciers. Very pretty. My snapshot couldn’t capture the deep glorious blue, but it’s there.

You know who’s loving it? My dog. She has zero fucks to give about my hassles plowing the stuff. It’s a dog jungle gym, playtime fun, happy zone to her. The day included a good deal of zooming about.

And posing on top of piles.

And more zooming.

And investigating whatever critters are tunneling about in the stuff.

Dogs know how to be happy! I should learn to be more like my dog. Though there would be drawbacks. Mrs. Curmudgeons would rather I don’t start shedding on the carpet.

Every year technology gets more awesome.

Every year technology sucks more.

Both things are true.

I didn’t want to spend the scratch to buy a laptop. I’m typing this on a tiny discarded junk Macbook Air. I wiped it and swapped to a light variant of Linux. It works. It works well enough that you’re reading this.

Linux is awesome… except for when people make it suck. It does every basic thing I want. However, I always use a VPN and my VPN doesn’t seem to have a Linux install. I got used to a basic level of security. Now my bare ass is hanging out in the internet (figuratively). Also I can’t run Fusion 360 without some significant tweaking. I decided not to try the tweaks because this old junker computer would probably melt if I did 3d modeling on it.

Enshittification: The world could have developed into a place where a harmless law abiding nerd like myself wouldn’t need a VPN. It didn’t. It’s just a slow arms race between things technology can do and the evil purposes to which corporations and governments twist the “neutral” technology.

I borrowed Mrs. Curmudgeon’s much better but still old Macbook. It runs Fusion 360 just fine. Also, Bambustudio and a few other things. It also runs a software called Vellum. I didn’t want to need Vellum but I do. I tried very hard but simply couldn’t drag my book through the annoying typesetting process without software to help.

So, the good news is Vellum works. The bad news is it only works on my wife’s laptop. (And it wasn’t free!!!!) The scary news is that I’m using Mrs. Curmudgeon’s Mac harder than it’s ever been used.

It’s like I borrowed an old but shiny and usable truck; then I went  “full Curmudgeon” and used it to haul ten cords of firewood and a ton of horseshit on nasty dirt roads. What can I say? I use my tools! The poor Macbook cries out to be returned to the nice lady that previously used it for simple shit like surfing.

Also, I look like a complete loon carrying around a paisley print laptop bag with a computer that has a flowery artsy cover. (I will run a computer for a decade without anything more than an occasional sticker: ideally a skull.)

Enshittification: Of course Apple no longer supports the Macbook. No OS updates are forthcoming. That’s bullshit. I’m pretty sure I could install VPN but I think I won’t. I’ve already imposed plenty just borrowing it. I’d like to hand it back soon.

Neither enshittification nor awesome: My book “Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels” was written entirely in software called Scrivener. The software is a stone cold bitch to learn but it “digests” into Vellum. Scrivener works equally well in MacOS or Windows. I’ve run it in Linux but it was buggy.

So there you have it. Linux kicks ass but it only takes one piece of disagreeable software to derail it’s clear superiority. Windows 10 (on my desktop) was not half bad but I have hardware issues if I want to upgrade to Windows 11 (which everyone hates anyway). I could live with an updated (i.e. current and powerful enough) Macbook but paying more or less triple the cost for hardware will cause a stroke.

So for now, I’m in a three computer / three OS detente. Each one is OK. Each one sucks. I am loyal to no brand and no corporation; interested only in getting shit done the cheapest way possible.

Also, it’s all very well balanced. One is portable and completely under my control but weak. One is less weak but flowery and I don’t want to mess with it too much. (I still don’t have VPN on that one either.) The third is a computational processing beast (!) but it’s bolted to my home office wall and Microsoft is trying to strangle it.

I notice there have been “eras” or “phases” my abilities with technology. I remember assembling PCs with a screwdriver. (I had a used tape drive that I loved!) Little did I know that was the last bit of a “wild west” era.

Then I spent decades in a bureaucracy where IT ruled from afar; hassling us from what I can only assume was their stepped pyramid. The anointed ones of the high priesthood treated users as an annoying afterthought and they also somehow spent massively on computers that they computationally kneecapped into junk. Whenever I got my dirty unworthy worker’s mitts on them, the machine was already nearly useless.

Now it’s another phase. I can do whatever I want but the ‘net is so twisted that going without VPN is like walking the streets without underwear. Also I’m cheap so I’m blogging on junk and the simple expedient of popping open the hood and swapping parts as I can afford it hasn’t been eliminated but it has been curtailed.

Imagine all that. Back when all this started, for me it was the late 1980’s, I couldn’t possibly have predicted how it would go (I couldn’t even have imagined it).

I suppose that’s what makes life interesting. Now I’ll hit send on this post, then switch to fiddling with my 3d printer; which is absolutely science fiction except it works. (Speaking of enshittification, for every cool new thing I fix or build with the printer there’s some politician who can’t drive with a clutch but can bitch on Facebook trying to ban a useful tool that gives them the heebie jeebies. I guess it’s the ebb and flow of life.)

I’m pondering a “new project”. I have many irons in the fire, but an Adaptive Curmudgeon never stops considering new things. I’m reluctant to give too many details because I might drop the project in mid-tinker.

However the project goes (or doesn’t), I’ve already done some neat nerd stuff:

Step 1. Paper:

I began by acquiring the blueprint to an object. I’ll explain later, or maybe not. I haven’t decided yet.

I got the prints from a museum. It’s an object from 1939 and made by the Government. I think the plans are “public domain”. I found various digital images floating around the internet too. I tossed a few bucks at a museum because it’s a good cause and because I was looking for authenticity.

So now I’ve got the dimensions of a thing. In Fusion 360 modeling that would be called a “part”. Except the plans include multiple things meshed together. Fusion 360 calls that an “assembly”. I’m still a n00b so drafting “parts” into an “assembly” is hard for me. But hey… ya’ gotta’ learn somehow right?

Step 2. Virtual:

Vastly oversimplifying, you just draw shit in Fusion 360. You can also specify whatever dimension you need.

I could do this with the “parts” of my “assembly”. However, it’s easy to spend a lot of time specifying everything and then want to go back and re-scale a piece… which cascades through the system. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes it’s a mess.

Step 3. Parameterize:

In Fusion 360 you can specify “parameters”. Those are variables that represent a dimension. I can specify Fred = 5mm and Barney = 10mm. If I draw a Fred x Barney rectangle it’ll be 5 x 10.

If I later change Fred to 6 mm the rectangle will adjust to 6 x 10.

Step 4. Generalize(?):

I’m not sure the precise word for this step of my own thinking/processes but “parameters” can be “expressions”. I can set Wilma = 5mm. Then I can set Fred = Wilma and Barney = 2 * Wilma.

Then a Fred x Barney rectangle will still be 5 x 10. But I can change Wilma to 6mm and it’ll instantly be 6 x 12.

Remember all that high school math you thought you’d never use? This is it.

Step 5. Whip out the spreadsheet.

The plan is in units of feet & inches. I want it modeled to scale in mm. That’s not so hard with parameters and expressions but it’s a bunch of parts.

So I decided to dump all this “computation” into a speadsheet. I’m using LibreOffice Calc. It’s free. There are roughly a zillion free spreadsheets and virtually all of them are fine.

Only a bureaucracy run by clueless obsolete dipshits would pay fees for anything as crude as a spreadsheet. This applies to all Microsoft Office products. I’m looking at you NASA.

Step 6. Dump the spreadsheet into Fusion 360.

It’s pretty easy to export part of any spreadsheet into comma delimited file. It didn’t take long to figure out how to import it into Fusion 360.

If you think *.csv files are obsolete:

you, are, wrong
True, True, True

also

name, expression, value
Wilma, , 6
Fred, Wilma, 6
Barney, Wilma * 2, 12

Step 7. From virtual to real.

Imaginary is not real. Our society is almost completely driven mad by the confusion between virtual and real. Never forget what is just a construct! Ignore weirdos debating “politics” on X, teenyboppers mincing about on TikTok, AI slop everywhere, mentally ill freaks falling in love with LLMs, whores on Onlyfans, grandmas emoting on Facebook about shit they couldn’t find on a map, Trump blovating on Truth Social, the dwindling true believer woke masses on Bluesky, the redpilled on Gab, the talking heads propagandizing in the “media”, and the YouTuber’s desperately seeking your “like”.

If it ain’t real… it’s not real.

I apply that to myself. As a bearded recluse who writes blogs, I check once in a while to make sure I’ve stacked real firewood for the real winter. Sometimes I fall on the ice while hauling it.

I want a real thing. Lucky for me, I own a space age robot machine that makes 3d models into real objects.

I dumped a test object from Fusion 360 to Bambu Studio, tweaked a few settings in the slicer, and sent it to my Bambulab A1 3d printer.

It worked!

Preliminary Results: Looks good!

It’s just “proof of concept. But every step did indeed happen. I made it all the way from a museum acquired blueprint to a perfectly scaled object on my desk. Wow!

I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m pleased with how far I’ve gotten.

Remember, unless you can touch it with your hands, it’s just a mental construct.

I’m still fried. All the miles wore me out. I thought I’d kick back and dedicate myself to recovery (notwithstanding my “bad dairy” stupidity). Unfortunately, new and exciting shit happened to liven my existence.

Spring breakup / mud season had mostly wrapped up in my absence. After a few day’s rest I thought I might get my motorcycle out again. Everything was puppies and rainbows. Then it snowed. And it wasn’t a happy light fluffy dusting either!

Given that the driveway is softer than a politician’s resolve, I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag a snow bucket across it. But I had the tractor out to haul firewood anyway. I plowed a little bit. I took great care not to gouge the shit out of my already quite trashed driveway.*

It’s a good thing I did! I thought the storm was over but woke up the next day to a lot more; an absolute shitload of snow. Wet sloppy nasty dense shit. Deeper than my best boots! The areas I’d cleared were deeply covered. The areas I hadn’t were just plain buried.

My tractor is solid but sometimes the math just isn’t in your favor. It was like plowing wet cement with your tires on a base of peanut butter. (I worked hard trying to think of an analogy and still can’t quite describe it. I guess you had to be there.)

With a six foot bucket, pushing two feet of snow, I could go about ten or fifteen feet before the wheels broke loose. (Often even less.) That’s something like 120 – 180 cubic feet of material… max. In normal conditions that’s nothing. I can usually push a lot more snow and shove it much further. In this temperature and with this water content every bite at the apple became a bucket full of nope.

Slow and steady wins the race. The tractor and I were at it for hours. Incrementally, shaving off a foot or two of navigable space at a time. I was extra careful because these conditions are a stress on any equipment.

I’d planned for this. I chose a tractor & snow bucket instead of a truck & plow specifically for the worst conditions. Tractors are built to handle loads, especially dynamic loads. (Like the stress of a plow digging into earth as the tractor moves forward.) Modern trucks are awesome but I think anything that can do highway speeds is sub-optimal for shoving great masses just in front of the steering geometry. I wonder how any truck can survive plowing on a day like this? (Obviously it works; most local “hired” plowing is done with pickups. The drivers make bank but also kill expensive trucks. I’m not sure about their “profit to nuked tie rod ends” ratio. Anyone fortunate enough to own a skid steer uses that instead of their truck. Farmers have it made. They have big tractors which can move big tonnage. My mid-weight tractor & bucket isn’t a common solution, but it seems to work well.) I’ll bet a few pickups with freshly blown transmissions wound up scattered around the area today.

It’s an unusual situation. Normally, it’s not freaking April! Even when it does snow in April it’s usually not two feet. It’s just a bad hand. We’re prepared for January snow, not April. In January the snow isn’t so dense and the base is rock solid and frozen. You may freeze your ass off but there’s traction and reasonable density. This was… special.

Oh well, I’m alive and so is my tractor. I cleared enough snow that I won’t completely lose the race should it snow more. Plus the cleared areas should be a little less “floody” when this shit melts (it is April after all).

I think of all those news shows that blast scenes of everyone panic buying bread and milk and eggs when it snows in Virginia. It seems so silly from my situation. I’m relieved to have “access” but flouncing off to the store to buy fixings for French toast is at best unwise and at worst completely impossible. I plowed access to the county road (and my mailbox, which understandably hasn’t received mail in several days). When the driveway is mush I’ll often just walk that distance on foot. But the truck could manage it. This means, if I really needed to, I could drive for town. But the county road is more theoretically passible than demonstrably so. I’m a good driver with a beastly machine. In 4×4 low range my truck can handle it. A normal SUV (which lacks low range) is probably OK if one were a careful driver. Anything smaller would risk winding up either high centered or ditched.

Did I mention it’s April? In a week, all this will probably be gone. Another reason to just hang tight and let events play out. But… no motorcycle for a while.

A.C.

*I have an untamed dirt driveway that’s getting worse. Normally people buy truckloads of dirt periodically for such a driveway. They’ll often hire someone to grade it too. I’m cheap so I don’t do either. I’ve been trying to maintain it with a rear blade on my tractor. That works until it doesn’t. In 2025 things went too far and I just couldn’t smooth it out. I messed with the blade and made it worse! It’s rutted and patchy… really sucks. I think the solution is a thing called a “land plane”. It’s a leveling implement that costs a little over $1000. That’s a lot but probably less than a couple cycles of dirt delivery and professional grade jobs? Theoretically my tractor could pull it. I sure would like to have a more civilized driveway. I’ve been putting off the expense for decades but it is what it is. I might have to buy one this summer. Or, I can just continue with my current approach; denial.

Last year was rough. I responded by being extra careful with my health. (Not an unwise choice.) This year I’m feeling a lot better (though far from prefect). A trip I’d been delaying “had to happen”. Mrs. Curmudgeon and I spent what seemed like a million hours hurtling through “who gives a shit” at the “speed of Dodge”. We’re beat. Even the dog is exhausted. (My theory is that anytime I’m not on an airplane or a motorcycle I can travel with the dog; so we do.)

Unexpectedly, the exhaustion and mental strain has a side effect. A bit of the “old Curmudgeon” has emerged. All men secretly think they’re a bad ass just this side of Chuck Norris and I’m no exception. In times before last year I often did crazy shit simply because “why not”?

I’m not saying it’s good. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s situational. Apparently my road-exhaustion overwhelms my new-ish resolution to take better care of my health. I keep looking at sketchy food and saying; “Fuck it, I’m too tired to pursue a fresh salad or something. I’ll eat that thing right there and see what happens”.

Last week I needed a sip of something to take some medicine. The tapwater wasn’t very tasty so I opened a “fridge of mystery”. It was an adventure. There was unlabeled Tupperware, things wrapped in paper which I couldn’t identify, and something unholy called “oat milk”. I was hoping for a can of Coke or whatever. Instead, I found a half drank bottle of cran-apple juice. It was the best I could do.

New Curmudgeon is supposed to say “oh dear, that’s sketchy” and motivate his ass to the grocery store. It’s not rocket science to buy something in a sealed container. Current Curmudgeon was in a reckless mood. Down the hatch! Later, I realized the juice had an expiration date in January. Oh well. I didn’t notice anything. Cran-apple is pretty harsh, it probably killed any microbes.

Yesterday, I was home (finally!) but completely poleaxed. I made some coffee and opened our own fridge. We had 90% emptied it before the trip but there was an opened bottle of cream. I wanted cream for my coffee. The important part here is that Mrs. Curmudgeon was elsewhere. I was, therefore, unsupervised.

I sniffed it like a drug detecting dog. It seemed fine. I observed it as it poured, sniffing carefully all the way. As far as I could tell it was fine. Why fret over such a small thing? Am I not a harried and mentally fried Curmudgeon? The coffee was delicious. See? Everything was fine.

Three hours later my organs exploded.

I hate that! I just can’t tell. Mrs. Curmudgeon identifies such things by pheromone and therefore never gets caught off guard. As a person who never misses a trick she’ll leave anything in the fridge knowing that only an idiot would eat certain things. I’m just that idiot. Neandertal that I am, a dairy product can have evolved into a new life form and I just can’t detect it. Mentally damaged? Maybe. Insufficient senses? Certainly. Sick all afternoon, definitely. I was meaning to lose weight anyway.

Today, the coffee was fresh and the cream had been replaced by Mrs. Curmudgeon. She wants me to live! It was delicious! I drank it all. I mean the whole damn pot. I’d been craving our house’s coffee. We don’t skimp on coffee grounds and the coffee we make at our house tastes better than anything I ever found on the road.

Several hours later (just now in fact) I was once again… unsupervised. I wanted more coffee. But I didn’t want to waste the grounds for a whole pot. I decided to make an emergency Keurig. Our Keurig has been collecting dust forever. I literally keep it for “urgent coffee emergencies”… including the once in a blue moon need for decaf. In any other situation I’ll percolate in leisure or use the regular coffee maker.

I washed off the dust and found our Tupperware sealed box of K-Cups. Inside the Tupperware was a still unopened box of Death Wish K-Cups. I popped one in the machine. I’m drinking it right now. It tastes OK. Certainly better than the shit I drank while on the road.

However, I just checked the box. It is “best by October 29, 2019″!

2019?!?! Good grief, that really is a Death Wish cup of coffee!

That said, I’m not too worried. Who knows what unnatural things are stashed in a K-Cup? It’s not like there’s a vegetable in there or anything. I’m guessing it’s pure chemical mystery that has nothing to do with actual “food”. It’s likely just as good as the day a factory excreted it onto an assembly line.

Or, maybe in three hours, my organs will explode? I’m kinda’ open to either scenario.

I think it’s time to go on a rampage and throw expired shit out. I need “day zero”… the day when the fridge (and old K-cups) were ruthlessly eradicated. But first, I’m sipping this delicious coffee.

A.C.

Update: Tomorrow, to atone for my sins, I shall percolate a pot of coffee manually. Fresh grounds and a warm flame. I will also bake a loaf of bread. After all that time on the road and eating at McDonalds and similar poisons of modernity, I need to get back on the bandwagon. I shall stop rolling the dice!

My current trip (which isn’t over yet) has been a mixed success. I went to where I had to go. I did what I had to do. I’m en route back home. Can’t bitch about that.

Also, the “Linuxed” Mac is working well. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have typed this and you wouldn’t be reading it (though the text won’t go live in real time).

Less positive is that I’m exhausted (trips sometimes do that). My exhaustion activated my truck’s “Chrysler Circuit”. My theory is that I own an absolutely excellent Cummings diesel engine, but through some tragic madness of our strange universe it was mandatory that it be crammed into a Dodge. Further, somewhere in the rat’s nest of electronic cruft surrounding the good engine in a fair body is a circuit that sounds an alarm whenever douchebags in Detroit feel I’ve gone too long without a tithe at their altar. I call this the “Chrysler Circuit” but who knows who really benefits? (I gave up trying to figure out who owns who in the Stellantis ecosystem of inbred auto making.) Anyway, the “Chrysler Circuit” seems to know when I’m most vulnerable to mechanical bullshit. I swear it reads my mind.

Shit went down of a non dangerous manner but I chose to pull over. (Which was wise.) The good news is it’s nothing big or complicated or hard to diagnose. Presumably (?) I’ll get it fixed tomorrow. Despite my Chrysler Circuit ramblings it’s something that would happen to any truck and I can’t really claim any particular vexing issue… this time.

Regardless, my wings were clipped. I landed where I didn’t want or plan to be; a few hours after everything was closed. Isn’t travel fun?

I found a good hotel and ate an OK meal (which is a big deal when traveling). I kicked back and started to snooze but then a handful of elephants moved into the room above me. OK so it’s a semi-good hotel. They only pause their stomping long enough to do what sounds like working up to a bar-room brawl. OK so it’s a tolerable hotel.

I’ve been listening to the commotion from the room above me. I give it an hour. There’s either going to be fucking or fighting… maybe both. It’s an annoying hotel.

Oh well, it’s not like I live here. I’m reasonably optimistic I’ll be back in motion tomorrow. By sunset I’ll be in a different State. Today was just a minor hiccup; all trips have them.

I’ve been on the road five days. The little spud of a computer has done well. (One hotel had no WiFi, can’t blame that on the computer.)

I didn’t have much time to reply to comments. I’d forgotten how little “down time” one has while in motion. All I’ve been doing is driving.

Anyway, a Linuxed obsolete Mac has been good so far.