So Long, Ted Lasso

19:23 Thursday, 1 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 74.21°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 90

Enjoyed the series finale of Ted Lasso. Seems like they left enough hooks for another season sans Ted, though I don't know if that would be a good thing or not.

I love the series, the characters. I'm glad I was introduced to so many talented actors. I know I'll miss looking forward to new episodes, but I also know I'll enjoy re-watching it many more times.

It'd be cool if Trent Crimm's book, The Richmond Way, was a real book. I hope it is. Seems like an opportunity.

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In DC

08:14 Saturday, 1 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 74.71°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 3mph
Words: 77

Arrived in DC yesterday, very early after a 0300 reveille. The weather here is beautiful! We spent most of the afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery. Fascinating. Unsurprisingly, Trump doesn't have a painting in the gallery, he has a photograph. It's directly across from a portrait of John Lewis in a "justice" gallery, and I have to believe that was intentional (and delightful).

Wanted to get June launched in the marmot and Captain's Log. Mission(s) accomplished.

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Back In Florida

05:38 Sunday, 1 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 64.65°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 0mph
Words: 638

Yesterday started early. I was up at 0300 to meet the Lyft driver at 0400. I was worried whether or not I'd even have a driver, but one was assigned, and she showed up. One nice thing about the Lyft app, apart from the privacy implications, is the driver goes to the location of your phone, not the address where the mapping app says you are. That would have sent her to the neighbor's house.

About a 35 to 40 minute drive to Elmira-Corning airport, which is actually kind of charming. It doesn't have a "food court" or franchise food operations in the terminal. It has a snack bar. Nevertheless, it still has a jetway to walk down to the regional jets that fly out of there. They may handle larger aircraft, I don't know.

Relatively short flight from Elmira to Detroit, then hustle from Terminal B to Terminal A. The moving walkways run pretty fast, and then there's a tram to the south end of the Terminal A, so I didn't have to work too hard to make my connection. My achilles is still jacked up, so fast walking wasn't in the cards.

Not a full flight from Detroit to Jax, which was something of a surprise to me. Perhaps because Canadians are staying home? I had all three seats to myself, and there were several like that in Comfort Plus, including the row behind me, and nobody seated behind me either. So I reclined that seat as far as it would go, which isn't much.

Landed early in Jax, Mitzi picked me up and we went out for brunch because there was something of a surreptitious open house going on back in the 'hood. The HOA bars open houses because reasons. We'll see if we get reported. Hardly worth it, only two showings.

Of course, we're sailing into some strong headwinds. I guess we can't time everything right. I still think we're ahead of the curve, but I didn't think it was this bad. The lack of activity/interest is solid evidence though. I'm just hoping we close before September and we don't have any powerful hurricanes before then.

I seem to be missing a camera. It's unlikely someone walked off with it, so it's probably in New York in either the truck, or a bag I didn't empty completely. It's the black E-PL7 I was obsessing over back in March of last year. I had the silver one already up there and took it out with me when I went into Burdett for dinner last Thursday. I played with an Art Flyer (Vintage III) walking around a bit. Some results up at Flickr. I'm a little troubled, because I have a vague recollection of running out of room in camera bags, and deciding that I'd leave the black E-PL7 behind so I'd still have one "good camera" when I came back. But I may just be imagining that. Nothing to do for it now though.

Mitzi's worried she's not going to be able to bring everything she wants up to NY in the RAV4. We'll still have the penultimate shipment when we sell the house, but that may be some months off now. There are a few things I'd like to bring along as well, but I may pack some of them up and ship them instead of trying to fit them in the car. We'll see.

I turn 68 tomorrow. Caitie is going to come by and we're all going to the movies, then back here to "hang out" for a while (and cut my hair). On Friday the whole family is getting together for dinner out to say goodbye.

Meanwhile, there's more to put into storage, some stuff to sell and some stuff to give away.

The beat goes on...

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Act III

09:08 Sunday, 1 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 72.84°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 848

This is an interesting period in my life, in a good way, not in the way of the proverbial ancient Chinese curse. Its nearest antecedent is meeting Mitzi and later marrying here. A choice with a happy outcome.

Much of my life before my divorce was kind of "accidental," perhaps. I didn't feel a particular sense of agency in my life, or in my choices. And some of them were, well, unwise is perhaps the best way to put it. But they all led to me becoming the person that I am, good and bad. Mostly good, I think.

It was, in fact, my divorce that really marked the beginning of my sense of personal responsibility for my happiness, or lack thereof.

Steve Mako linked to a post by Om Malik. I subscribe to Mako's feed because he surfaces interesting links from time to time. I don't read all of them. I'll never read anything by Seth Godin, for example. I gather he's still popular for, if nothing else, his witty aphorisms. I just recall the slide he chose to use at a talk he made at Google to illustrate that his audience wasn't exactly the center of anyone's universe. The text was "Nobody cares about you," and the illustration was an obese man in an overstuffed chair wearing a sleeveless t-shirt with junk food in his hands and on his shirt.

I thought it was an odd choice to illustrate "everyone else" for his audience. That this somehow was the image he called to mind when thinking of everyone. Anyway, I never cared for his "purple cow," or his gospel of marketing and I formed an intense dislike of the man, and I just ignored him from then on. I only mention him now because Mako included him in his list of links, and it's decidedly not one of the ones I would find interesting.

Anyway, I clicked through to Om's piece because of the title, "Designing a Life," because that's kind of what we're embarking on now, in Act III of our lives.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we're "designing" our lives. There's some vision, a definite intention, but there are a lot of unknowns. There will be a lot of learning as we go, and the mistakes that inevitably accompany learning. But there is intention. We're doing this on purpose.

We live in a gated community, governed by an HOA (homeowners association), where conformity is valued, and there is no higher value than members' property values. The surroundings are attractive, if sterile, monotonous and crowded. There are organized activities to promote social interaction. It's kind of like living on a cruise ship, I imagine. And I've said before I'll never be one to go on a cruise, so perhaps I shouldn't make that assertion.

But everything is constrained. People report on each other for "violations" of the rules. You can paint your house, but it has to be from the approved pallet, and it must be approved by a committee. You can't grow food, but there is a club, if they have an opening, where you can get a little raised bed to grow a modest amount of food.

It's very comfortable here. I've met some wonderful people. But it's suffocating.

This is it, the final act of our lives, and we're going to do it conforming with the rules, playing card games and pickle-ball, taking our walks on the sidewalks past the manicured lawns?

I can't do it.

Yeah, the hurricanes are the proximate cause for making me want to flee Florida. I'd still want to get out of this state even if we didn't live in an HOA. But living in this bubble is another compelling reason.

It's too hot in the summer. The government is corrupt and there is little chance it'll ever be one that reflects my values in almost any dimension. I'm too old to "recover" from a manmade "natural" disaster.

I have anxiety in both places. I'm wired that way. I see risk everywhere, and I try to plan for it, mitigate it. I kind of expect the worst, maybe as a self-defense mechanism. But in New York, I also feel excited. The landscape inspires me. It's not "wild," but it's definitely not "manicured." It's more organic, more authentic. More diverse.

With a more flexible mindset, I suppose I could "embrace the suck" of suburban HOA living and have a meaningful Act III here. But I'm not equipped with one, and I'm not motivated to try and acquire it. I'd rather just get the fuck out of here and embrace the suck of starting over near the end of my life.

Check back here in about five years and see if I feel the same way. I'm optimistic, but I know how easy it is for things to go sideways. But I'd rather do this than spend the rest of my life in this bubble wondering what might have happened if we had made our escape.

That would be an unforgivable mistake.

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New Month

07:26 Monday, 1 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 52.02°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 3.47mph
Words: 976

Because it's hard to think of titles for everything.

Here is a reasonable corrective to the AI hysteria that seems to be swelling. Siting data centers, and powering them, is challenge. But it's not one that's exclusive to AI.

We finished watching For All Mankind the other night. It feels like they really leaned into The Expanse. That's ok, I guess. I'm mostly watching it out of inertia these days. There isn't a single character I'm really invested in, and that feels like it's by design since each season leaps forward by about a decade. And the sets still look far too antiseptic. But whatever. I thought the season finale was pretty good. While the sets may be antiseptic, incinerating a bunch of people wasn't. Overall, I'd say this season was better than the last one.

Then I watched the premiere episode of Star City and immediately decided it wasn't for me. Too depressing in the KGB storyline. I think the sets are far less antiseptic though!

I'm going to spend time with Chapter 2 of John Siegenthaler's Modern Hydronic Heating & Cooling. It's the one that covers calculating heat loss. Maybe I'll play with one of my programmable calculators and party like it's 1984.

Housing construction is one of those things we take for granted. It's not the kind of thing that gets covered in the popular press. Although it's likely the most expensive purchase any of us make in our lives, most of what gets written about in "popular" media covers fashion trends, not the nuts and bolts of how a house functions as a shelter system.

That seems like an enormous gap in our basic knowledge, and I don't know how we might go about filling it. Maybe secondary school curricula need to include system dynamics with housing as a case study of some kind.

All that is to say that, the more I learn about it, the more convinced I am that we have gone about heating, cooling and ventilation (and domestic hot water) all wrong, because energy was "cheap." In the case of fossil fuels, natural gas for example, we're burning a fuel at over 3,000°F to raise the air temperature in a home 30 or 40 degrees!

Because fire!

And we use that energy to heat or cool air, and then blow that air around the house through large, leaky ducts that gather dust as it transports air and dust around the house. It's inefficient because air has a very low heat capacity compared to water.

But most of this is "out of sight, out of mind," until it stops working. Maybe we're aware of tax incentives for upgrading devices to be more efficient, but we just sort of take blowing air everywhere as the best way to heat and cool a house.

I associated radiators with antiquated technology. How would we ever have Bruce Willis crawling through the Nakatomi Building if they used hydronic heating and cooling?! (You still need to move air for ventilation, but the quantities and velocities are smaller and likely too small to crawl through.)

Heat pumps still get a bad rap from a lot of people, you see it in the YouTube comments. If people are experiencing poor performance from a heat pump, it's because the system wasn't designed properly. Either it's too large or too small. If you have a leaky old house, then you probably lose most of your heat just through convection, air movement from the outdoor environment to the indoor. Many of those old leaky houses have oil or natural gas boilers that heat water to send to radiators. ("Emitters is the preferred nomenclature, Dude.") Modern cold weather heat pumps can produce water at 158°F. The question then becomes are your emitters properly sized and located? Perhaps not for using a heat pump. So it may not be a simple matter of retrofitting a heat pump in lieu of a gas boiler.

And sizing is critical. Too small and you can't move enough heat fast enough to overcome the heat losses. Too large and you risk short-cycling the compressor on the heat pump and shortening its working life by years. To say nothing of paying for capacity you simply don't need.

So it's a more intellectually demanding exercise to design and install a hydronic system; but it's simply not the case that "heat pumps don't work." They do, but they're not a one-for-one swap with a boiler. Sometimes they can be, but probably not in very old homes. You may need a buffer tank, which takes up space not formerly needed, to prevent short-cycling.

Anyway, the point is that understanding how to maintain the indoor environment of a home, including its air quality, demands a far more thoughtful approach than what we have heretofore been able to get away with. It's unfamiliar to customers and it's often just as unfamiliar to the trades who do this kind of work. Not a recipe for success.

I'm grateful that we have the opportunity to kind of do this "right." We hope, anyway. In addition to the unfamiliarity with air-to-water heat pumps, the thermal performance of ICF construction adds some uncertainty to the size determination. The effect of thermal mass on heat flow is not well characterized. Our ICF R-30 walls get their R-30 rating just from the EPS foam. It will likely perform like an R-45 to R-50 wall in practice, due to the thermal mass of the concrete retarding the movement of heat from the interior to the exterior of the house.

I'll run the numbers with three R-values and see how they affect the overall heat loss, which is one of the factors to determine the size the heat pump we'll need.

Anyway, time to crunch some numbers.

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