• Vote

    I voted a month ago, so I didn’t get a fancy sticker. I did wear my blue work shirt for good luck. 💙💙💙

  • Pizza Night

    Friday nights are usually pizza nights during the summer. Now that the weather is cooling, pizza nights are getting numbered. It’s taken a lot of practice, but I think we’ve perfected our homemade pizza. I make the dough from scratch, and the sauce is even made with tomatoes from our garden.

     


  • FreshRSS

    Last night I was banging my head against the wall trying to get a cron job for FreshRSS running. I have no idea what I was doing wrong. I should have just quit right away. I wasted so much time. This morning I tried again and bingo, I got it working right away. Everything always seems to work better after you sleep on it.

    Yes I still live in my RSS reader. There are so many good RSS feed readers nowadays. The best ones tend to have a subscription fee. I was a subscriber for many years, but about a year ago I was feeling subscription overload, so I started hosting my own with FreshRSS on my home server.

    I hate the UI of all of the self hosted RSS feed readers. Luckily my favorite reader app Reeder works with FreshRSS, so I don’t have to deal with the crappy UI.

    Now I’m running a FreshRSS instance on my home server and one on my remote server. I’m trying to decide which is better. I have a feeling the remote server might be more reliable because it’s not running in my house and I won’t be constantly messing with it.

  • Keychain

    For the Christmas before I turned 16 my Mom gave me a Denver Broncos keychain to use when I get my drivers license. Well, 34 years later and I’m still using it. The Denver Broncos logo as long since warn off, but it’s the only keychain I have ever had or used.

  • 27 Years

    27 years ago today I saw the Foo Fighters for the first time at the Fargo Civic Center. 6 months later I would get a job in Fargo and move here.

  • Goodbye

    So I was going to blog about how great my Dad was doing in hospice. Those nurses were so great. He was doing so great that they sent him home. We were going to have Easter dinner with him at home.

    Then on Good Friday he suddenly passes away.

    It was a little shocking. We thought he had a little more time since he was doing so well. We spent Easter weekend planning his funeral.

    While funerals suck, it does feel good that we gave him the exact funeral he would have wanted. He was in the navy so he had a full military funeral. It was pretty great actually. One of his shipmates gave the eulogy. It was so great and almost bummed me out that I didn’t join the navy. The camaraderie that fellow shipmates have is something else. Lots of great stories are now lost with my Dad. We had a police escort to the cemetery. Seeing the cops and navy personnel saluting my Dad was something else. It was a really great way to say goodbye. I miss him, I’m proud of him, and we said goodbye the way he would have wanted.

  • Snow Update

    Bird feeder update: still covered in snow. The snow bank along the street is over my head. It warmed up to 14° today though, so it’s days are numbered.

  • Dad Update

    This past weekend was my first weekend home in a while. The previous two I spent with my Dad in the hospice center in Sioux Falls. His original prognosis was 3-10 days, so I wanted to spend as much time with him as I could. Now they are saying 4-6 weeks. I thought it would be good for both of us to have a weekend to ourselves. He’s been having a ton of visitors and they kind of tire him out. As of now my plan is to spend every other weekend there. If he happens to pass in between my time there I would be ok with. I feel I’ve said my goodbyes. In fact I’ve said them too much. It kills be every weekend when I have to head back home. I am looking forward to being back down there this coming weekend.

  • Orphan

    Yesterday I got that call that I’ve kind of been expecting these last few years. I got the call that my Dad is going under hospice care. My Dad’s health has really gone downhill these last few years. He had multiple myeloma and had a stem cell transplant seven years ago. While the transplant bought him seven more years, they weren’t the best of years. If it wasn’t only thing it was another. He seemed to be constantly spending time in the hospital. So while it’s horrible that he is in his final few weeks, it will be nice to not see him suffer too.

    Tomorrow we are heading down to see him. I’m kind of scared to see him. I don’t know what to say to him. How do I leave him for the last time? I think it was almost easier with my Mom. By the time we got to the hospital she was just being kept alive by machines. I didn’t say goodbye because I assumed she didn’t know we were there. I was the one that had to tell the doctors to turn off the machines. That was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. I don’t know what to expect this weekend.

    2019 will be my orphan year. Shortly I will no longer have any parents or grandparents left. I already feel lonely even through I’m surrounded my family.