I'm burnt, y'all.

It was the annual Fabulous Fourth Weekend Float for my friends and I. This year our Summer came early, so the creek and river were lower than usual. This made it a little tough to go through spots, but it was still a fun float in the end.

How it started...

How it ended... Note that I put on two coats of sun screen, but still got royally burnt...

As usual, there were plenty of awesome dogs floating as well. I never get tired of seeing dogs in life preservers...

And there were a lot of duckies out too...

So... yeah! Another great float in the bag. Even though I'm so wiped from being out in the sun that I think I'm good for the year.

Not that it matters much given how low the river is.

The trailer for Dune: Part Two dropped today.

This may very well be the movie that I finally go crawling back to the theater to see. It would be the first in four and a half years.

Because... holy cats...

Today after work I put my living room back together. With all the mass-loaded vinyl, sound-dampening insulation, and vibration pipe clips in there, the sound of my HVAC return line is not nearly as annoying. When I have television or music on it's barely noticeable.

This past weekend I cleaned out my refrigerator because I had another Coke can rupture. Not explode... just a slow leak kinda thing. No idea why this keeps happening. I guess that cans are so thin now that they just don't have any structural integrity?

While I was at it, I consolidated my two cheese drawers into one big drawer...

That freed up a drawer that I can put all my nuts and dried fruits in...

Surprisingly, all my jams and sour creams were still within their expiration date...

All my condiments too...

And even all my salad dressings...

As if that wasn't awesome enough... my breads, pickles, eggs, and sodas were still good to boot...

All clean! Until next month when I have to start all over again.

Or earlier than a month if another Coke leaks all over.

I've started creating my own sauce recipes.

It all started a couple months ago when I made my usual go-to dip for veggie corn dogs... Dutch mayonnaise with honey mustard mixed in. But I didn't make it for veggie corn dogs, I made it for beer-batter onion rings. It lacked zing. I needed something with more kick.

So I raided my massive stash of spices and added red chili flakes, paprika, and chili powder. Then I added a dash of onion powder and some berbere spice (an Ethiopian blend that I obsess over almost as much as harissa spice).

It was incredible, and now I make it every time I have onion rings...

Awesome sauce!

Ever since then I've been creating my own oil blends. My own sauces. My own toppings. All using spices I've collected from around the world that get combined to make interesting flavors. It's been a lot of fun. But even better? It breathes new life into things that have grown old. Onion rings. Fries. Grilled breads. Fruit. Vegetables. Cheese dips. The list goes on and on. I'll create sauces for anything and everything.

Tonight I made a chip dip with cream cheese, mayo, lemon juice, and shawarma seasoning. It was so good that I licked the bowl after.

There is a down-side, however. I'm almost certain that I've gained five pounds since I started this madness.

In other news, my drywall guy showed up to patch over the hole in my wall...

Now it dries. Tomorrow he skim-coats and textures. Wednesday he paints.

One repair down, three to go.

It is remarkable how time just keeps blazing by me. Tuesday is wrapping up, tomorrow is hump-day, and then it's a race to the weekend again.

Which would be great, except my weekends are also blazing past me.

The weekend before last I was sick.

This past weekend I worked from morning until night trying to get my home put back together.

I started with my guest bathroom, which had a leak that caused a bunch of damage. As they were putting the bathroom back together, it was found that the leak had not been resolved, so repairs had to be put on hold. I hired an expert who only confirmed that "Yep, you have a leak" but couldn't figure it out. Then, without notice, the leaking stopped. But instead of tearing out the upstairs bathroom and more walls to find out what happened... or seal up the walls and hope it didn't happen again... I decided to build an access hatch in the guest bathroom ceiling...

There's a panel I'm building which will magnetically attach inside the hatch. That way I can put some water leak sensors up there and be alerted to when/if something starts leaking again.

Then there's my new HVAC system. The heat pump outside has a return line to the blower which runs up my living room wall and over to the garage. For whatever reason, the line is noisy as hell. Sometimes when the heat pump is running, the noise gets so ridiculous that I have to turn up the television.

And so... I tore out the wall... installed mass-loaded vinyl panels... secured the line with vibration-dampening clamps... then installed some pricey sound-absorbing insulation on top of it all...

And that was that.

Now all I have to do is wait for my drywall guy to come in and put my walls back together... then wait for my kitchen doors and drawers to arrive... then I'm going to halt home improvement for a while, because I want to live in a home that's not torn apart for a bit.

At least I hope that can happen. Just my luck something else will go wrong the minute I've finished up the current disasters.

Oh yay.

Horrific food poisoning again.

I remember when I was young and traveling the world that I had an iron stomach. I could eat absolutely anything and do just fine. And I ate at some truly dicey food joints because I didn't have the money for anything else.

I couldn't even consider doing that now-a-days.

I bought my mom the Toyota Corolla I'm driving in 2006. It's now 17 years old. I love not having car payments so much that I decided to drive it until it died, and figured I could at least push it to 20 years. I just had the brakes completely re-done last year with this in mind.

Now the clear-coat is peeling off, it needs more work because the muffler is just starting to sound bad, and the engine is getting a little rough. But I figure the cost of having all that done is worth it if I don't have to buy a new car.

And THEN somebody ran into the car in the parking lot of my hotel last night. At least I'm assuming that's what happened because I never noticed the damage before today. I was able to get it popped out, but it's scraped up and a bit cracked. Which means even more money needed to sink into the car.

And so... guess I am ready to cut my losses and buy a new car.

Maybe?

Because I don't really want a new-new car. If I had a new-new car, I'd be paranoid about getting hit in a hotel parking lot way too much. And I'd freak out if anything happened to it. So I want a new-to-me used car. I thought... maybe I can get something relatively recent and decent and certified pre-owned for $15-$16,000. WELP! Even used cars are tragically expensive, yo. IN MANY CASES MORE EXPENSIVE THAN A NEW CAR! And if I can't get certified pre-owned, then there's the idea that something could go wrong with it almost immediately and I'd have to sink even MORE money into it.

Blergh. This blows. Why can't I be a billionaire who doesn't have to worry about things like this?

The Corolla only has 85,000 miles on it. Probably worth just having the work doen and coasting for seven years. At least I know the car was taken care of. I'm tight with the owner.

The older man was having a tough time retrieving the money out of his wallet. It was no big deal to me, but the sales clerk was clearly getting annoyed. She was drumming one of her hands on the cash drawer and acting like she would get paid more if only the guy would move faster.

After paying, the guy grabbed his bag then turned to apologize to me for being so slow. I told him "Don't worry, I'm in no hurry."

His response was "Yeah? The weather ain't what it used to be."

I have spent the rest of my day trying to figure out what that meant. Did he mis-hear me? Was it a metaphor for something profound? Did I mis-hear him?

I mean, he's not wrong... but in what way?

Yesterday I went to make a shopping list so I could plan a trip to the grocery store this weekend. As I opened up the Safeway app, I decided to roll the dice and see if delivery was available to my small city. Unlike the last several times I tried, delivery was actually available!

And so... I gave it a try. If grocery delivery is normal for you, then you already know how it works. But for me?

Ever since the pandemic started and the lockdown happened, I make one big grocery run the first weekend of the month (after payday)... then make little trips for perishables until the next month. And that's what I did when making my order for delivery. Which is silly, really. I signed up for a "free delivery" trial so I could get $30 or more in groceries delivered any time I want for one month. And since $30 barely buys anything anymore, it would be easy to hit that amount.

Habits, and all.

The nice thing about making an order through the Safeway app is that I get all the stupid-ass discounts available... Weekly ad, Just 4 U, Club Card... and whatever else they dream up to make shopping a massive chore because it's a crapshoot if the discounts actually get applied. Because a lot of times, at least one of them doesn't. But with the app, you see the discount on every item. And the grand total you pay reflects all the discounts you got. Refreshing!

Delivery fees vary by how big of a window you request. A one-hour window is $9.95. Larger windows cost less money... down to $3.95. But since I'm on a free trial, I was able to get a one-hour window after work for $0.00. Nice.

Safeway allows you to add a tip for your driver. They default to 5%, but I went up to 10%... which actually worked out to over 15% because the amount is calculated on the total before discount. I've seen the videos about the horrendous shit that drivers have to put up with, and it seems like the very least I could do. Especially since they are saving me a 20 minute drive to the store, followed by 30 minutes shopping, followed by a 20 minute drive home.

You're texted a link once your groceries leave the store so you can cyber-stalk your driver...

All my groceries arrived on time. Everything I ordered was there. Frozen stuff was still frozen. Cold stuff was still cold.

It was like magic.

I seriously felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

There was only one thing that made it not a perfect experience. The two small bags of salad I got were turning brown. Not expired yet. But far from fresh. If I were doing the shopping myself, I would have never bought them. There's $3 down the drain. The rest of the produce was great though.

I'm probably going to pay for the subscription for free delivery. It's $99 a year, but you get a $5 credit every month, bringing it down to $39. Then you get discounts and specials which will probably make it a wash. The only thing I'll be paying extra is the tip for my driver, which far, far outweighs the inconvenience and horrors of having to do it all myself.

And I could do with a little less horror right now.

My garbage output for the week usually consists of a shopping bag full of unrecyclables and a small bag of cat waste. It barely makes a dent in my trash can, which is the smallest one I can get.

And every two months I'm paying $80.44, which is to say I'm required to pay $40.22 every month for a trash can that I don't use very often...

I wish that we could may based on how much trash we produce instead of getting screwed over when we barely have any. I pay $482.64 a year. That's $9.28 a week. But if it takes me a month or more to fill up my trash can, shouldn't I be paying under $10 a month?

Paying by how much trash you produce would be a good incentive for people to waste less, recycle and re-use more. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe people like throwing money into their trash like this.

Ugh.

Another hump-day on the books.

And all I could think about all day long was this TikTok that greeted me when I woke up this morning (here's a link in case TikTok is being a dick)...

Has there ever been anything more relatable than this?