Where should I start?

Wow.  It’s been a minute.  Or two.  But here I am.  So much to catch up on, so I’m probably going to have to split it all up into multiple posts.  But, here goes.

March 11, 2020 – The last day I spent working in the office.  That’s right, I’ve been a remote worker ever since, as has the entirety of my department.  I have to say, I have not enjoyed it.  It was well known that I didn’t care for working from home, even pre-pandemic.  Yeah, it was nice and convenient to be able to work from home occasionally if I had an appointment scheduled, the kids were doing something, or I had to be here for the furnace maintenance people.  But full time?  No way.  I’d go back tomorrow, but only if my team went with me.  Kinda pointless to go work in an empty building, after all.

So here I sit.  The commute has been shortened considerably, for sure.

Both of my kids fared positively, work-wise.  There was a reduction in hours for a while but neither of them lost their jobs outright, so that was — and continues to be — a blessing.  It’s been mentally challenging for them, myself, and likely every other human on the planet but I’m happy to say that, for the most part, we’ve come out the other side relatively unscathed.

I had been planning on a trip to Virginia in 2020 to finally empty out a storage space I’d been renting for several years, only to have the pandemic quash those plans.  Thankfully, however, we made it out there in July of 2021 and got the deed done.  It’s been really nice not having that bill every month!  In 2020, we literally went nowhere, which was really odd (yeah I know what you’re thinking: “Duh!”).  We finally got moving again in 2021, beginning with the aforementioned Virginia trip.  Since then, we’ve gone to Waco, Texas, Denver and Chicago.  I’m hoping for another trip to Virginia no later than next summer.  Guess we’ll see how that goes.

Tech talk!  First up: Home Automation!  I converted off of my Wink Hub and moved to Hubitat in May of 2020 after Wink suddenly began demanding a monthly fee to have services continue to run.  I might have paid the fees, but this “extortion” came on the heels of one of their many prolonged outages and I was not in the mood to pay actual money for something that didn’t actually work at times.  Turns out it was a good decision, as they’ve had a series of extended outages since.  How they still have users I have no idea, but I’m not one of them so that’s that.

I finally got my HD Homerun Flex 4K 4-tuner thing-a-ma-jig purchased and installed in September of 2021, and it’s been running seamlessly ever since.  I might do a write-up on it at some point in the future but I wouldn’t be saying anything radically different than all the other currently available write-ups say so my time might be more wisely spent doing other things.  As for a short summary, however, it basically allows me to pull over the air programming via an HD antenna into my network and onto my Plex server, where I can DVR it and/or play it live from any of my devices wherever I am.  It came in real handy during our travels, as I was able to view programming local to my home area from Texas, Colorado and Illinois, for example.  I can’t give the thing enough praise!

Let’s see, what else?  I finally swapped out all the 3TB hard drives on my server (there were 6) and replaced them with 3 brand new 8TB drives.  I had purchased the old drives refurbished and they had been running for over 4 years so I figured it was time.  I actually still have one of them in the server as an “unassigned drive”, and I use it when I’m doing video conversions/compression via Handbrake.

I’m getting ready to upgrade my laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.  That should be fun.  Not much else to say about that… yet…

Other than that, there’s not a whole lot to report.  I’ve lost a few close friends to Covid, but my family has been spared most of the brunt of it.  I know many people who have lost loved ones to it and it’s been a real drag.

That’s pretty much a really high level summary of what’s been going on here.  I’m going to try to be a little bit more active on updates but I guess we’ll have to see how that goes.

Thanks for reading!