The bike is back!

Mar. 19th, 2026 03:33 pm
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[personal profile] halfshellvenus
The repair shop finished late on Tuesday, so it was gone almost a whole week. That's the longest I've been without a bike apart from vacations and when our garage burned up.

When I got it back, the seat post was jacked up about 3/4 inch too high. The mechanics never put it back after testing the gears, in spite of the blue painter's tape that shows exactly where to set it. The rear tool kit was also upside down (?), and they'd returned the handlebars to the neutral position. The shop had previously advised tilting them up a little to reduce the reach and the strain on the nerves of my left hand. I'd wondered if that had helped at all, but yesterday's ride produced numbness sooner than before, so clearly it did. I've restored the tilt again.

The ride itself was kind of brutal, due to the sudden jump in temperatures. I had to cut it short by 3 miles, and it was getting pretty tough by the end. It was only 87F, but that is a LOT until I start to get acclimated. My maximum temperature starts at 88F early in the season, and by August it's at 94F— and I will actually start a ride at 89F if it's not going to get too much hotter. But yesterday? Much too soon.

I finished watching Doctor Foster. Not terribly happy about the ending. Then I tried and rejected a bunch of BritBox comedies that were 1) unfunny and/or 2) too stupid to tolerate. One even had a laugh track. So I started Without Motive, a police procedural set in Bristol. Interesting mystery, but the characters are unlikable and it features a Welsh DCS who is incompetent and a drunk. May not finish it.

Bookwise, I've started Dungeon Crawler Carl. It was recommended to me, and so far so good. An alien species comes back to Earth to make good on the minerals/elements claim they filed (in a galactic office) 50 years earlier. All of the buildings/structures are flattened, so the only survivors are people and animals who were outside. They're eligible to play the Dungeon Crawler game, an 18-level challenge with increasing difficulty and reducing eligibility. The sole winner gets... to live? I think opting out (or not getting one of the limited admission slots) also equals death, so playing is advisable. Carl is accompanied by his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, for added fun. Also? Level 1 contains goblins. \o/

I need to line up my next book. I have some free Amazon thing, but the quality is never guaranteed.

Misery Train

Mar. 16th, 2026 03:12 pm
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[personal profile] halfshellvenus
HalfshellHusband is in the throes of prepping for a colonoscopy tomorrow. The process has changed, and I don't know why.

It used to be a day without solid food and a lot of fluids and laxatives to clear you out. It's similar now, but it starts 48 hours pre-op with a day of really restricted food choices (applesauce, chicken, rice, yogurt). The day before the procedure is 8 ounces of water every hour, followed by starting the laxative liquid stuff at 6pm the night before surgery. WHAT? That'll keep you up all night! Why not do that during the daytime?

HSH called Kaiser to make sure he couldn't start the laxative early, and they confirmed and made things worse: since he has an early morning surgery, they want him to stop the laxative liquid briefly tonight, then get up at 2:30 a.m. and start again before ending it at 4:15 a.m. How is that good for the patient? He'll be exhausted from sleep deprivation. :(

Right now, he's using his typical method of coping with misery/recuperation, AKA watching the LOTR movies. I expect more of the same tomorrow, after his procedure is done.

Taxes are done

Mar. 15th, 2026 01:07 pm
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[personal profile] halfshellvenus
A big relief, as always, and the California state returns are in a manila envelope, waiting to go to the post office. The combined federal and state returns are the size of a substantial pamphlet now. I mentioned earlier that we had significant capital gains this year. I don't know what gets into our financial advisor sometimes (though she's really good at her job), but every 5-6 years this happens and our AGI suddenly balloons. This year? We owe about $2500 in federal taxes and $2300 in state, and that triggered a need to pay estimated tax payments in 2026. What a pain! Note that if the government(s) owed us this much back, we wouldn't get interest on the extra withholding, so why the panic?

I tried to go to our company's website to adjust my W-4 instead, but none of the links were working yesterday. Might be under maintenance. I also wanted to use the employee benefits webpage to rent a car for our upcoming trip to San Diego, but it was misbehaving too. More crap deferred onto my never-ending TODO list!

I finished reading Terminal Chaos, the second book in the Station Eternity series. That was fun— and only took me 4 days, as opposed to the 11 days to read Adventures In Calamity Physics. I knew Calamity was taking a long time, but geez! And now I'm a third of the way through the second book in the How To Become A Dark Lord And Die Trying series. It's also fun, though with way too many footnotes. My main complaint is a common issue for a lot of male authors writing female main characters: the women are highly sexed and also bisexual. It's like they're fanficcing their own creation. \o?

My bike is still in the shop, where the earliest I could possibly get it back is late tomorrow. Feeling antsy! But I got some errands done Friday and Saturday that I would normally have to split across weekends. Friday, I bought Easter candy. Saturday, I took my broken violin bow in to have it repaired and rehaired, and saw that I was near a Home Depot, so I went there afterward. I bought some CLR for the hard water stains we get, some of which showed up about 4 months after we moved back into our house. I also got a new salvia plant for the one in the front yard that 1) Died last year and 2) Whose replacement the gardener killed with Roundup. Plus some morning glory seeds (to replace the plants near the garage we lost in the fire), and a houseplant to put in the clay pot our daughter hand-painted for me as a gift. That means I have some gardening to do this afternoon...

I've been staying up too late watching Doctor Foster on BritBox, because it's an addictive train wreck. Need to get back on DST newtime again.

mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

Suck. Age.

Mar. 12th, 2026 06:58 pm
halfshellvenus: (Yikes)
[personal profile] halfshellvenus
Well, yesterday's bike ride didn't go so well. :(

Newer bikes often have the gear-shifter and brake functions embedded in the same part of the handlebars. Pull toward you, and the bike brakes. Push sideways, and it changes gears. But... push just a tiny bit on the diagonal and it starts to chew through the derailleur cable.

So, I started to have trouble getting into the top gear a few days ago, and sure enough... I was trying to shift down for a hill yesterday, and there was a "zzzk!" sound followed by the bike going into the top gear and becoming a one-speed. :O

I had to stop and turn around, and then bike almost 5 miles home in the hardest gear. Worse yet, the bike shop is really backed up, so instead of getting my bike back today, they will not be able to even start working on it until Monday. That's forever! *cries*

I absolutely hate this handlebar design. I break a derailleur cable about once a year because of it, whereas the shift levers on my bike from 20 years ago never let me down. :(

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