March 1, 2025 • 21 mins
It’s been a crazy start to the year, with a lot of big changes and challenges.
One of the hardest things I’ve gone through recently is losing my dad. He passed away from lung cancer in early December 2024 after a long battle. Even though it was a peaceful passing, it’s still been really tough on the family.
This winter has been relentless. We’ve had a ridiculous amount of snow since Thanksgiving, and I’ve spent a lot of time plowing. Now, don’t get me wrong—I actually enjoy plowing snow—but after doing it over and over, it started to wear me down.
One silver lining is that I inherited my dad’s 2020 Toyota Tundra. It’s been a solid truck and has come in handy more times than I can count.
On a much sadder note, we had a rough time with our beagles, Benny and Percy. Percy started getting aggressive, and on Christmas, he attacked Benny badly. After multiple incidents, including one where Benny needed stitches at the emergency vet, we had to make the heartbreaking decision to put Percy down. It was incredibly difficult, but it had to be done for Benny’s safety.
Thankfully, the weather is starting to warm up a bit, and the snow is finally beginning to melt. I had to put my flying on hold for a while because of all the stress, but I’m hoping to get back in the air this spring.
Around the house, I’ve been working on a few projects—running conduit for internet and electrical lines. Unfortunately, I had a storage tent collapse under the weight of all that snow. That thing is a total loss, so I’m making plans to build something more permanent to store my yard equipment.
Before wrapping up, I just want to remind everyone to stay subscribed and check out my website for updates. I also post daily facts on social media if you’re into that sort of thing. And who knows—maybe in a future episode, I’ll even talk about politics. (Or maybe not!)
Thanks for sticking with me, and I’ll catch you in the next one!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Whatever the
case may be. This is Mike, and this
is Mike Dell's World number 4 0 1.
What is the date today? Oh, it's the
March 1,
2025.
So,
since I haven't had an episode this year
yet, happy 2025.
(00:21):
So
my year got off to kind of a
crazy start.
Crazy
meaning, you know, a little stress,
a lot of lot lot of
big life change things,
happening.
So I guess I'll
give you kind of the rundown of what's
(00:42):
been going on. So I guess that's what
this is for. Thanks for staying for subscribed
and, following and whatever else they call it
these days.
Yeah. I do
consistently on,
Podcast Insider or somewhat consistently.
And, of course, this one's just,
once in a while.
(01:03):
But like I said, I appreciate you
staying subscribed. So
I don't know if I said anything in
previous episodes, but, my dad was having
a little fight with lung cancer. Not a
little fight, a big fight. And,
ultimately, he lost that fight
at the December.
(01:23):
And
he was doing reasonably well up until the
last probably month or so.
Something like that where, you know, he just
got to the point where he couldn't do
things he wanted to do. He wasn't in
any particular pain or anything, so
I guess that's,
that's a good thing. But,
anyway, we were all there when he passed,
(01:46):
the whole family. And
and, like I said, it was quite
peaceful, but,
yeah, always hard to take.
He made it to 79. He was,
about eight months short of his eightieth birthday,
which would would have been at the May
this year.
(02:06):
And,
along with that and, you know, I don't
wanna gloss over that, but, you you don't
wanna hear, you know, sob stories. You're all
familiar with losing people. So,
you know,
but as an upshot of that,
we had
a lot more snow this year so far,
and, it's still continuing a little bit.
(02:31):
It started snowing,
I believe,
right around Thanksgiving,
and it and it we had accumulating
snow just about every day up until last
week.
So it's been
maybe, well, week and a half probably by
now,
where we haven't had any major snow, at
least not enough to have to plow, but
(02:52):
I was plowing twice a day.
So I go out, plow my mom out,
and then, put the tractor on the trailer
and bring it in here
and plow out us.
And and then, the last couple of times,
my sister,
over, in Interlochen, which is not too far
away.
And I've been plowing her out as well.
(03:13):
Her snowblower broke, and I haven't got around
to fixing it yet.
I've been busy with other things, but
that was, that was one of the major
stressors this this season.
You know, it's just
snow's good. You know, I don't mind snow,
but this year, it was just so frequent.
You know, I enjoy going out and plowing
(03:36):
the snow. That was that's fun, you know,
with Big snow blower and a cab on
the tractor and, you know, you get to
to play with power tools. It's fun. But
it definitely
definitely gets old after a while. But,
yeah, I I think now,
the rest of the year, if we get
(03:57):
any big snow, it's gonna be once in
a while.
Of course, you know, we could potentially have
snow all the way up until June, really,
but doesn't usually happen that way.
Usually,
by April, it's, it's completely done with the
snow, but, there's always a chance.
But hopefully not a chance of snow so
(04:18):
big that we gotta go plow it.
So that's the hope anyway.
So along with that,
I inherited my dad's pickup truck, and
that's come in handy, you know, hauling the
tractor back and forth. Of course, my truck
was fine too, you know, but,
I did end up selling that because, you
(04:40):
know, I have two big trucks sitting in
the yard.
This one's a 2020 Toyota Tundra that didn't
have a whole lot of miles on it.
He didn't, didn't drive it a whole lot.
You know, I drove it a lot, but
he didn't put a lot of miles on
it, I guess, is the right way to
put it. So,
I got a pretty, whiz bang truck.
(05:02):
It's, you know, rather he drive it, but,
since that's not a thing,
I drive
it. So that works out pretty good,
that way.
And then on top of that, about,
it was around Christmas time, I guess.
Was it yeah. It was around Christmas time.
(05:24):
We had two beagles.
We had Benny, who we still have,
and Percy, which we no longer have.
And what happened was at some point on
Christmas,
Percy sort of snapped and decided he wanted
to kill his brother.
And we don't know exactly what happened, but
(05:45):
the, vet,
you know, the the well, first off, Percy
had epilepsy ever since we got him. We
got him as a rescue. He was a
year old.
And, you know, he'd have a seizure about
once a month and, you know, wasn't
super terrible or anything like that. And we
were just keeping an eye on it, keeping
track of it. Never had him on any
medication or anything.
(06:07):
So, anyway, he just
literally tried to kill the other dog. We
thought, okay. They just got in a spat
and it went too far.
You know, Benny got bit up a little
bit, you know, his ears, whatnot, and Percy
too. You know, they both sorta, you know,
just a normal spat. And they've had those
before, so I didn't think too much of
(06:27):
it.
And
maybe a week or so later,
they got into another one. And, I mean,
this one was terrible. I mean, I, you
know, I had to
hold back the dogs. And, I mean, they
were just
completely and utterly trying to kill each other.
And so
(06:47):
we figured out maybe they just need some
time apart. Kathy needed to go down to
her mom's house, and so she took Percy.
And,
so Benny, you know, recovered at home. He
had to get his,
spot shaved where he, got bit. Didn't have
any stitches on that one, but, you know,
they had to be shaved and healed.
(07:08):
And
so she was gone about
a week, ten days, something like that. And
we figured, okay. We'll reintroduce them. So we
were careful and
cut muzzles and reintroduced
them, and they got along fine for a
little bit. And everything was
copacetic.
And that night,
we're sitting there, and
(07:30):
one of the dogs let out a little
bit of a growl, and the fight was
on. And, I mean, it was that was
the worst one.
And it was, you know, the the Percy
was just trying to kill Benny.
And,
you know, at that point, it was like,
well, there's not a whole lot we can
do. We'll try.
So we separated them. So Benny ended up
(07:52):
going to the emergency vet and getting stitches,
and
and he was bit up pretty good.
So he lived in my office here, which
is a little separate building in my backyard.
And
we kept them apart,
for probably a week.
And after that week, we just decided, you
(08:12):
know, we we tried to
maybe, get some advice and whatnot. There was
nothing medically
wrong with Percy.
You know, we had two different vets look
at him and say, well, they figure something
must have just went wrong in his brain
because of the seizures maybe.
So, anyway, unfortunately,
(08:33):
Percy had to be put down. So that
was another stressor,
because, you know, you don't wanna pass your
problems off to another
person. You know? Like, we, you know, brought
him back to the the beagle rescue, you
know, who knows who else he'd snap on,
you know, and
and you just can't have a dog that
(08:54):
has that vicious tendency
around.
So that was that was extremely sad and
and stressful.
You know? And on top of that, we
still got the snow happening. I'm, you know,
I'm plowing every other day.
It's cold. It's you know, snow's building up.
It's just, you know, the the stress was
(09:16):
just,
you know,
all all the above. You know?
So
that was
that's been my, my winter. And now things
are calming down somewhat. Like I said, not
as much snow removal. The you know, now
we don't have two dogs trying to kill
each other, and,
you know, Benny's all healed up and, doing
(09:38):
good and
and all that, but, you know, just
those kind of things just drive
you crazy.
You know, and and and there's just you
know, you feel so helpless because, you know,
you're trying to reason with with a dog.
And, you know,
just all the stuff happening.
(10:00):
So,
anyway, that's that's been my, my year so
far.
But,
it is getting better and the weather's starting
to get a little better sometimes.
Last week, we had 40 and even one
day of 50 degrees and we lost probably
three quarters of our snow.
(10:20):
Traverse City, let's see what the current
snowfall
is because we did have some last night.
I got it here somewhere. Snowfall information.
National Weather Service in Gaylord, Michigan.
And let's see.
So for Traverse City,
(10:43):
season to date, 29.6
inches.
Normal to date is 84.7.
So we're a 53
of normal, which normal for the entire season
is 101
inches.
So we're not you know exactly on a
record setting year here because, the record was
(11:04):
in 1995,
'90 '6 snow season at a 91.2
inches.
I guess I remember that. I don't know.
It's been a while.
But,
so, you know, we've had way more snow
than than normal, but, again, you know, we
had that nice warm up last week, so
it knocked down the snow banks to a
(11:25):
reasonable level.
And
one bad thing though is it melted my
driveway down to gravel. So, plowing it isn't
gonna be as fun if I have to
do it anymore this year.
Same out at mom's place. So
I guess we'll, we'll make it happen.
But,
let's see what else has been going on.
(11:47):
Of course,
you know, I re re
how do you put it?
Reinvigorated
my,
flying.
Last couple of years I've been flying a,
RV 12
IS.
It's a light sport aircraft
over at Giving Wings Aviation,
(12:07):
and been having a lot of fun with
that, but, had to quit, you know, with
with the, all the stressors. I
I quit flying for a while here, so
I'll get back at it this spring when
the weather's a little better. Had a few
nice weather days, but,
I wanna get get back to it.
That's a a lot of fun, but, you
(12:28):
don't wanna be up there all stressed out.
So it's just as well.
Kathy's doing fine.
Health wise, we're both doing fine.
That's
all good. Work's doing fine.
Staying busy over at Blueberry.
You wanna check us out over at blueberry.com.
(12:48):
That's blueberry with no e's.
And, of course, they sorta sponsor this show
only because I get free hosting since I
worked there.
So,
anyway, so that's just a quick life update.
Sorry I'm not more
prolific here on this feed, but I do
appreciate you guys sticking around. I know I
(13:09):
say that every time,
but, you know, it is what it is.
And I didn't really
wanna get too deep into anything,
but, let let me know what's going on
in your lives. I know, I know a
few of you guys that are still listening,
you know, haven't really heard much, haven't really
(13:30):
said much, haven't really done much with this.
I
love
getting on the microphone, but, you know, sometimes
when you have way too much stuff going
on and you don't wanna,
you know, don't wanna overshare,
That's part of the problem.
You know? And then this time of year,
it's always it's always funny because, you know,
(13:51):
you've been cooped up, you know, or out
in the weather all the time. So the
weather's crappy. You can't do what you wanna
do. You got all these little projects
stacking up and and say, oh, I wanna
do x, y, and z. As soon as
spring hits, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna
do that. I'm gonna go do this other
thing. You know, get all these projects done.
And then when the time comes, you never
(14:12):
get the projects done.
Well, we'll see. I did get one big
project done before,
winter hit is I ran a conduit
from my office out here to the house
so I could run,
you know, my Internet wires.
And, I'm gonna run another power line out
here for
(14:34):
a ham radio amplifier that requires two twenty.
So I'm gonna run another two twenty power
line. But I did a three inch conduit,
three inch PVC pipe that goes, from
my, office out here into the basement.
So and then I put a rope through
it that's long enough to where I can
loop something on it, pull the rope through
(14:54):
to pull a piece of wire through, whatever,
or piece of coax or,
you know, some cat six cable. That's that's
the only thing in it right now. The
power line's buried elsewhere,
coming out here, but the new two two
twenty line's gonna come through the conduit.
So I did get that done. That was
(15:15):
wasn't a lot of work, but it you
know, dig a trench, you know, 30 foot
long trench. And,
you know, and at the office side, I
had to kinda make a a an s
turn and and, you know, put one of
those
capped,
you know, throughput and cut a hole on
the side and
all that. But, it's it's all done and
(15:36):
then now everything's all protect you know, at
least my Internet cable, I would
well, when I first built this place, I
put a
supposedly underground cat five cable
for the Internet and first year it crapped
out. So then I just ran another cable
and it was just laying across the top
of the ground. Of course, that one crapped
(15:57):
out after a while and didn't look good.
You know, it just wasn't a good plan.
So now this one I think will will,
stay working and even if it doesn't, it's
real easy to replace.
So I don't have to dig. I don't
have to do anything crazy. I just plug
the new one in and pull it through,
plug it into the router, and I'm good.
(16:20):
So a little technology there.
But,
yeah, so I've got,
gotta paint the house this year. That you
know, we've gotta do that every,
I don't know. It's been 10 probably since
I did it last,
but it it needs it.
You know, it's an old log cabin. It
was painted before I got here, so we
just continue to paint.
(16:43):
And this time it doesn't need a full
paint job like it did before. It just
needs, you know, some touch up here and
there.
And I got a rotten log I gotta
replace, which
sounds harder than it is. It's just doing
it
and
get that all
squared away.
And we had oh, yeah. Another another life
(17:04):
issue thing I forgot to mention. We had
one of those
tent garage things you get, you know, you've
seen them that people put in their yard
temporarily
sometimes or permanently sometimes.
We had one of those that we put
behind our garage,
you know, to store
yard stuff in it and just just outdoor
(17:27):
stuff that just needed to
be out of the way.
We had tore off a lean to woodshed
sort of thing off the back of the
garage and then this replaced it.
I didn't think about it. And, it's snowing
and snowing and snowing, and I'm not thinking
about that tent out there.
You know?
So
(17:47):
neighbor comes over.
She comes over periodically, and she walks in
the backyard. And as soon as she closes
the gate,
I had not it's had nothing to do
with the tent collapsing, but, the tent collapsed
because
it had a crapped ton of snow on
the roof, which I just absolutely
did not think about.
You know, had way more stuff on my
(18:09):
brain than that.
So here we've got a collapsed
tent in our backyard that's now covered with
snow.
We got a lot of the stuff out
that we didn't wanna leave out there and
put in the garage, but, a lot of
the stuff is still under the the tarp.
But, the worst part of it is we
had shovels and rakes and stuff leaned up
(18:31):
against the wall. Of course, that poked through
the
the,
tent material, so
it's not salvageable.
You know? Plus, it bent up a bunch
of the poles. It was a pretty heavy
duty thing, but, yeah. You gotta you gotta
knock the snow off of it.
My neighbor Nancy has the exact one. In
fact, we got them at the same time.
(18:53):
They had them on sale at Costco at
one point.
I got one for her and one for
me, and we put them up. But she
uses it as a garage, but she has
this broom out in her out in
hers that when it snows, she's, you know,
hits
the hits the,
in from the inside, knocks the snow off
because it slides right off. It's, you know,
(19:14):
slippery material.
And, well,
if we get another one. But I I
think I'm gonna replace it with a,
actual structure,
you know, kinda, you know, carporty
looking,
but just, you know, something I can park
the tractor under and
and, you know, lawn mowers and weed whackers
and whatever other accoutrement like that that we
(19:35):
don't want sitting out in the open if
possible or in the garage. I'd actually ultimately
like to be able to park a car
in the garage. That would be a novel,
but,
hasn't happened recently.
It's okay.
You know,
first world problems, I guess.
(19:56):
But, yeah, that was another,
interesting
event
this winter, the collapsing
storage tent.
So, maybe I'll just build
a a shed double the size of my
office.
That might be good enough
just to, like I said, park a few,
(20:16):
yard implements in
and and some light storage.
But, we'll see. We'll see.
The,
you know,
lumber prices are are not terrible, I guess.
So
so I guess that's all that's fit to
report. I figured, why not throw out a
quick episode here,
(20:37):
let you know I'm still around
and,
still kicking it. So everybody have a good
however long it is, till the next time,
stay subscribed,
and,
go check out mikedell.com
for any latest anything.
You know, I'm not really on social media
either except for x,
(20:58):
under m g Dell
and
on Facebook too.
I've been doing these daily
fact of the day
posts on, x and Facebook.
For my birthday this year, I got a
calendar that has the fact of the day
and
fact of the day. And,
well, that'd be a good thing to just
(21:19):
post on social. I don't really post any
anything
too personal there. You know, sometimes funny stuff.
Memes. I like my memes.
So
and, maybe next time we'll talk about politics.
Yeah. That'll get everybody fired up.
Catch you later.
Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Whatever the
case may be. This is Mike, and this
is Mike Dell's World number 4 0 1.
What is the date today? Oh, it's the
March 1,
2025.
So,
since I haven't had an episode this year
yet, happy 2025.
(00:21):
So
my year got off to kind of a
crazy start.
Crazy
meaning, you know, a little stress,
a lot of lot lot of
big life change things,
happening.
So I guess I'll
give you kind of the rundown of what's
(00:42):
been going on. So I guess that's what
this is for. Thanks for staying for subscribed
and, following and whatever else they call it
these days.
Yeah. I do
consistently on,
Podcast Insider or somewhat consistently.
And, of course, this one's just,
once in a while.
(01:03):
But like I said, I appreciate you
staying subscribed. So
I don't know if I said anything in
previous episodes, but, my dad was having
a little fight with lung cancer. Not a
little fight, a big fight. And,
ultimately, he lost that fight
at the December.
(01:23):
And
he was doing reasonably well up until the
last probably month or so.
Something like that where, you know, he just
got to the point where he couldn't do
things he wanted to do. He wasn't in
any particular pain or anything, so
I guess that's,
that's a good thing. But,
anyway, we were all there when he passed,
(01:46):
the whole family. And
and, like I said, it was quite
peaceful, but,
yeah, always hard to take.
He made it to 79. He was,
about eight months short of his eightieth birthday,
which would would have been at the May
this year.
(02:06):
And,
along with that and, you know, I don't
wanna gloss over that, but, you you don't
wanna hear, you know, sob stories. You're all
familiar with losing people. So,
you know,
but as an upshot of that,
we had
a lot more snow this year so far,
and, it's still continuing a little bit.
(02:31):
It started snowing,
I believe,
right around Thanksgiving,
and it and it we had accumulating
snow just about every day up until last
week.
So it's been
maybe, well, week and a half probably by
now,
where we haven't had any major snow, at
least not enough to have to plow, but
(02:52):
I was plowing twice a day.
So I go out, plow my mom out,
and then, put the tractor on the trailer
and bring it in here
and plow out us.
And and then, the last couple of times,
my sister,
over, in Interlochen, which is not too far
away.
And I've been plowing her out as well.
(03:13):
Her snowblower broke, and I haven't got around
to fixing it yet.
I've been busy with other things, but
that was, that was one of the major
stressors this this season.
You know, it's just
snow's good. You know, I don't mind snow,
but this year, it was just so frequent.
You know, I enjoy going out and plowing
(03:36):
the snow. That was that's fun, you know,
with Big snow blower and a cab on
the tractor and, you know, you get to
to play with power tools. It's fun. But
it definitely
definitely gets old after a while. But,
yeah, I I think now,
the rest of the year, if we get
(03:57):
any big snow, it's gonna be once in
a while.
Of course, you know, we could potentially have
snow all the way up until June, really,
but doesn't usually happen that way.
Usually,
by April, it's, it's completely done with the
snow, but, there's always a chance.
But hopefully not a chance of snow so
(04:18):
big that we gotta go plow it.
So that's the hope anyway.
So along with that,
I inherited my dad's pickup truck, and
that's come in handy, you know, hauling the
tractor back and forth. Of course, my truck
was fine too, you know, but,
I did end up selling that because, you
(04:40):
know, I have two big trucks sitting in
the yard.
This one's a 2020 Toyota Tundra that didn't
have a whole lot of miles on it.
He didn't, didn't drive it a whole lot.
You know, I drove it a lot, but
he didn't put a lot of miles on
it, I guess, is the right way to
put it. So,
I got a pretty, whiz bang truck.
(05:02):
It's, you know, rather he drive it, but,
since that's not a thing,
I drive
it. So that works out pretty good,
that way.
And then on top of that, about,
it was around Christmas time, I guess.
Was it yeah. It was around Christmas time.
(05:24):
We had two beagles.
We had Benny, who we still have,
and Percy, which we no longer have.
And what happened was at some point on
Christmas,
Percy sort of snapped and decided he wanted
to kill his brother.
And we don't know exactly what happened, but
(05:45):
the, vet,
you know, the the well, first off, Percy
had epilepsy ever since we got him. We
got him as a rescue. He was a
year old.
And, you know, he'd have a seizure about
once a month and, you know, wasn't
super terrible or anything like that. And we
were just keeping an eye on it, keeping
track of it. Never had him on any
medication or anything.
(06:07):
So, anyway, he just
literally tried to kill the other dog. We
thought, okay. They just got in a spat
and it went too far.
You know, Benny got bit up a little
bit, you know, his ears, whatnot, and Percy
too. You know, they both sorta, you know,
just a normal spat. And they've had those
before, so I didn't think too much of
(06:27):
it.
And
maybe a week or so later,
they got into another one. And, I mean,
this one was terrible. I mean, I, you
know, I had to
hold back the dogs. And, I mean, they
were just
completely and utterly trying to kill each other.
And so
(06:47):
we figured out maybe they just need some
time apart. Kathy needed to go down to
her mom's house, and so she took Percy.
And,
so Benny, you know, recovered at home. He
had to get his,
spot shaved where he, got bit. Didn't have
any stitches on that one, but, you know,
they had to be shaved and healed.
(07:08):
And
so she was gone about
a week, ten days, something like that. And
we figured, okay. We'll reintroduce them. So we
were careful and
cut muzzles and reintroduced
them, and they got along fine for a
little bit. And everything was
copacetic.
And that night,
we're sitting there, and
(07:30):
one of the dogs let out a little
bit of a growl, and the fight was
on. And, I mean, it was that was
the worst one.
And it was, you know, the the Percy
was just trying to kill Benny.
And,
you know, at that point, it was like,
well, there's not a whole lot we can
do. We'll try.
So we separated them. So Benny ended up
(07:52):
going to the emergency vet and getting stitches,
and
and he was bit up pretty good.
So he lived in my office here, which
is a little separate building in my backyard.
And
we kept them apart,
for probably a week.
And after that week, we just decided, you
(08:12):
know, we we tried to
maybe, get some advice and whatnot. There was
nothing medically
wrong with Percy.
You know, we had two different vets look
at him and say, well, they figure something
must have just went wrong in his brain
because of the seizures maybe.
So, anyway, unfortunately,
(08:33):
Percy had to be put down. So that
was another stressor,
because, you know, you don't wanna pass your
problems off to another
person. You know? Like, we, you know, brought
him back to the the beagle rescue, you
know, who knows who else he'd snap on,
you know, and
and you just can't have a dog that
(08:54):
has that vicious tendency
around.
So that was that was extremely sad and
and stressful.
You know? And on top of that, we
still got the snow happening. I'm, you know,
I'm plowing every other day.
It's cold. It's you know, snow's building up.
It's just, you know, the the stress was
(09:16):
just,
you know,
all all the above. You know?
So
that was
that's been my, my winter. And now things
are calming down somewhat. Like I said, not
as much snow removal. The you know, now
we don't have two dogs trying to kill
each other, and,
you know, Benny's all healed up and, doing
(09:38):
good and
and all that, but, you know, just
those kind of things just drive
you crazy.
You know, and and and there's just you
know, you feel so helpless because, you know,
you're trying to reason with with a dog.
And, you know,
just all the stuff happening.
(10:00):
So,
anyway, that's that's been my, my year so
far.
But,
it is getting better and the weather's starting
to get a little better sometimes.
Last week, we had 40 and even one
day of 50 degrees and we lost probably
three quarters of our snow.
(10:20):
Traverse City, let's see what the current
snowfall
is because we did have some last night.
I got it here somewhere. Snowfall information.
National Weather Service in Gaylord, Michigan.
And let's see.
So for Traverse City,
(10:43):
season to date, 29.6
inches.
Normal to date is 84.7.
So we're a 53
of normal, which normal for the entire season
is 101
inches.
So we're not you know exactly on a
record setting year here because, the record was
(11:04):
in 1995,
'90 '6 snow season at a 91.2
inches.
I guess I remember that. I don't know.
It's been a while.
But,
so, you know, we've had way more snow
than than normal, but, again, you know, we
had that nice warm up last week, so
it knocked down the snow banks to a
(11:25):
reasonable level.
And
one bad thing though is it melted my
driveway down to gravel. So, plowing it isn't
gonna be as fun if I have to
do it anymore this year.
Same out at mom's place. So
I guess we'll, we'll make it happen.
But,
let's see what else has been going on.
(11:47):
Of course,
you know, I re re
how do you put it?
Reinvigorated
my,
flying.
Last couple of years I've been flying a,
RV 12
IS.
It's a light sport aircraft
over at Giving Wings Aviation,
(12:07):
and been having a lot of fun with
that, but, had to quit, you know, with
with the, all the stressors. I
I quit flying for a while here, so
I'll get back at it this spring when
the weather's a little better. Had a few
nice weather days, but,
I wanna get get back to it.
That's a a lot of fun, but, you
(12:28):
don't wanna be up there all stressed out.
So it's just as well.
Kathy's doing fine.
Health wise, we're both doing fine.
That's
all good. Work's doing fine.
Staying busy over at Blueberry.
You wanna check us out over at blueberry.com.
(12:48):
That's blueberry with no e's.
And, of course, they sorta sponsor this show
only because I get free hosting since I
worked there.
So,
anyway, so that's just a quick life update.
Sorry I'm not more
prolific here on this feed, but I do
appreciate you guys sticking around. I know I
(13:09):
say that every time,
but, you know, it is what it is.
And I didn't really
wanna get too deep into anything,
but, let let me know what's going on
in your lives. I know, I know a
few of you guys that are still listening,
you know, haven't really heard much, haven't really
(13:30):
said much, haven't really done much with this.
I
love
getting on the microphone, but, you know, sometimes
when you have way too much stuff going
on and you don't wanna,
you know, don't wanna overshare,
That's part of the problem.
You know? And then this time of year,
it's always it's always funny because, you know,
(13:51):
you've been cooped up, you know, or out
in the weather all the time. So the
weather's crappy. You can't do what you wanna
do. You got all these little projects
stacking up and and say, oh, I wanna
do x, y, and z. As soon as
spring hits, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna
do that. I'm gonna go do this other
thing. You know, get all these projects done.
And then when the time comes, you never
(14:12):
get the projects done.
Well, we'll see. I did get one big
project done before,
winter hit is I ran a conduit
from my office out here to the house
so I could run,
you know, my Internet wires.
And, I'm gonna run another power line out
here for
(14:34):
a ham radio amplifier that requires two twenty.
So I'm gonna run another two twenty power
line. But I did a three inch conduit,
three inch PVC pipe that goes, from
my, office out here into the basement.
So and then I put a rope through
it that's long enough to where I can
loop something on it, pull the rope through
(14:54):
to pull a piece of wire through, whatever,
or piece of coax or,
you know, some cat six cable. That's that's
the only thing in it right now. The
power line's buried elsewhere,
coming out here, but the new two two
twenty line's gonna come through the conduit.
So I did get that done. That was
(15:15):
wasn't a lot of work, but it you
know, dig a trench, you know, 30 foot
long trench. And,
you know, and at the office side, I
had to kinda make a a an s
turn and and, you know, put one of
those
capped,
you know, throughput and cut a hole on
the side and
all that. But, it's it's all done and
(15:36):
then now everything's all protect you know, at
least my Internet cable, I would
well, when I first built this place, I
put a
supposedly underground cat five cable
for the Internet and first year it crapped
out. So then I just ran another cable
and it was just laying across the top
of the ground. Of course, that one crapped
(15:57):
out after a while and didn't look good.
You know, it just wasn't a good plan.
So now this one I think will will,
stay working and even if it doesn't, it's
real easy to replace.
So I don't have to dig. I don't
have to do anything crazy. I just plug
the new one in and pull it through,
plug it into the router, and I'm good.
(16:20):
So a little technology there.
But,
yeah, so I've got,
gotta paint the house this year. That you
know, we've gotta do that every,
I don't know. It's been 10 probably since
I did it last,
but it it needs it.
You know, it's an old log cabin. It
was painted before I got here, so we
just continue to paint.
(16:43):
And this time it doesn't need a full
paint job like it did before. It just
needs, you know, some touch up here and
there.
And I got a rotten log I gotta
replace, which
sounds harder than it is. It's just doing
it
and
get that all
squared away.
And we had oh, yeah. Another another life
(17:04):
issue thing I forgot to mention. We had
one of those
tent garage things you get, you know, you've
seen them that people put in their yard
temporarily
sometimes or permanently sometimes.
We had one of those that we put
behind our garage,
you know, to store
yard stuff in it and just just outdoor
(17:27):
stuff that just needed to
be out of the way.
We had tore off a lean to woodshed
sort of thing off the back of the
garage and then this replaced it.
I didn't think about it. And, it's snowing
and snowing and snowing, and I'm not thinking
about that tent out there.
You know?
So
(17:47):
neighbor comes over.
She comes over periodically, and she walks in
the backyard. And as soon as she closes
the gate,
I had not it's had nothing to do
with the tent collapsing, but, the tent collapsed
because
it had a crapped ton of snow on
the roof, which I just absolutely
did not think about.
You know, had way more stuff on my
(18:09):
brain than that.
So here we've got a collapsed
tent in our backyard that's now covered with
snow.
We got a lot of the stuff out
that we didn't wanna leave out there and
put in the garage, but, a lot of
the stuff is still under the the tarp.
But, the worst part of it is we
had shovels and rakes and stuff leaned up
(18:31):
against the wall. Of course, that poked through
the
the,
tent material, so
it's not salvageable.
You know? Plus, it bent up a bunch
of the poles. It was a pretty heavy
duty thing, but, yeah. You gotta you gotta
knock the snow off of it.
My neighbor Nancy has the exact one. In
fact, we got them at the same time.
(18:53):
They had them on sale at Costco at
one point.
I got one for her and one for
me, and we put them up. But she
uses it as a garage, but she has
this broom out in her out in
hers that when it snows, she's, you know,
hits
the hits the,
in from the inside, knocks the snow off
because it slides right off. It's, you know,
(19:14):
slippery material.
And, well,
if we get another one. But I I
think I'm gonna replace it with a,
actual structure,
you know, kinda, you know, carporty
looking,
but just, you know, something I can park
the tractor under and
and, you know, lawn mowers and weed whackers
and whatever other accoutrement like that that we
(19:35):
don't want sitting out in the open if
possible or in the garage. I'd actually ultimately
like to be able to park a car
in the garage. That would be a novel,
but,
hasn't happened recently.
It's okay.
You know,
first world problems, I guess.
(19:56):
But, yeah, that was another,
interesting
event
this winter, the collapsing
storage tent.
So, maybe I'll just build
a a shed double the size of my
office.
That might be good enough
just to, like I said, park a few,
(20:16):
yard implements in
and and some light storage.
But, we'll see. We'll see.
The,
you know,
lumber prices are are not terrible, I guess.
So
so I guess that's all that's fit to
report. I figured, why not throw out a
quick episode here,
(20:37):
let you know I'm still around
and,
still kicking it. So everybody have a good
however long it is, till the next time,
stay subscribed,
and,
go check out mikedell.com
for any latest anything.
You know, I'm not really on social media
either except for x,
(20:58):
under m g Dell
and
on Facebook too.
I've been doing these daily
fact of the day
posts on, x and Facebook.
For my birthday this year, I got a
calendar that has the fact of the day
and
fact of the day. And,
well, that'd be a good thing to just
(21:19):
post on social. I don't really post any
anything
too personal there. You know, sometimes funny stuff.
Memes. I like my memes.
So
and, maybe next time we'll talk about politics.
Yeah. That'll get everybody fired up.
Catch you later.
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