Farm Sale Waiting / Chip in Daycare / Nicole in Physical Therapy / New Webserver
The family trust's farm sale we were hoping would happen so Nicole and I could finally begin house-hunting will hopefully continue on soon. Earlier this month we finally heard from the interested party and they said new contracts will be on their way soon. It's been hard to have to have such ambiguity hanging in the air but there's nothing we can do and we certainly don't want to pester the buyer. They hold all the cards and all we can do is simply wait. Their lease is up this December so they have from now until then to decide what they want to do. Nicole and I expected we'd be house-hunting by now so it's caused a bit of stress and friction.
Speaking of stress and friction, our dog Chip has been back with us nearly full time for the last month or so at this point. His separation anxiety has been a hassle to deal with and it's forced us to sign him up for a local daycare facility. For about $25/day, they'll watch Chip for about 10 hours. It gives us both the freedom to live our lives and it gives Chip some much-needed doggie socialization. It's an unforeseen expense, however, and I've been working longer hours at my workplace to attempt to make up the difference. Having him around three weeks out of every month will be difficult until we move into a real house. Once that happens, we're not going to give into his separation anxiety since we won't have people living below or around us. We just have to get into a house. Hopefully soon.
For decades, Nicole has had back pain issues. For someone so young, it seems so odd. I've got like six years on her and I've never had back problems, so it's a bit of a mystery as to why she does since she's never injured herself and wasn't an athlete. She has trouble sleeping most nights because of it and even sitting for too long in a chair is a struggle. Finally, I begged her to start seeing doctors and advocating for herself; she really needed to push this time. After x-rays revealing nothing, they suggested physical therapy. She's been going for a few weeks now and they appear to be a very optimistic group of doctors. They claim that they understand her unique situation and that it could be linked to posture behavior and habits that are going to be difficult to break. Every time she comes home from a session with them, she's in pain and worn out, but I think it will ultimately turn out to be a good thing. If she keeps up with the daily exercise and stretching routines that they laid out for her, she could eventually relieve this pain. They even claimed it's possible to relieve it entirely without surgery or medications. Just stretching--lots of it--and being mindful of her posture all the time. I hope it works and I'm glad that finally there's a team of professionals who understand what's causing the pain and are telling her they can help. It'll be an incredible relief if this does work. It's also nice to know that all the money we've put into new beds and mattresses wasn't necessary and that the pain she has isn't made better or worse because of what she's sleeping on. I just really hope it works out. We need a win on this.
I've been hosting my own personal websites for many years. It's fun to have control of my own webserver and host stuff for free. For years, I've used a full-blown PC to host the files but recently I've discovered that I want to be able to do other things with that PC which would cause it not to work as a webserver. A coworker of mine is a hobbyist electronics tinkerer and recently had to give away several Raspberry Pi boards, so I scooped them up. Raspberry Pis are very tiny, simple computers about the size of a credit card. They can't do much, but there's a wealth of fun activities and projects you can lookup everywhere online. One such project is making one into a self-contained webserver which would be perfect for my needs. I've spent weeks following tutorials and trying different pieces of software out but I finally solved the puzzle last night. As of now, all my websites are back online and being hosted securely with encryption end-to-end. It's not like I needed that since my websites are old and very simplistic, but one day soon web browsers might cut out any unencrypted site by default so I figured I need to be ahead of the game on that. The Pi is so small that I literally glued it to the back of my existing WiFi router and fed it the five volts it needs from a USB port. It's awesome to have it be so small and hidden. It also hosts faster than the PC since the PC had mechanical hard drives that had to spin up to read any data. It's wonderful. Now I can begin thinking about refreshing those websites if I feel creative.
Speaking of stress and friction, our dog Chip has been back with us nearly full time for the last month or so at this point. His separation anxiety has been a hassle to deal with and it's forced us to sign him up for a local daycare facility. For about $25/day, they'll watch Chip for about 10 hours. It gives us both the freedom to live our lives and it gives Chip some much-needed doggie socialization. It's an unforeseen expense, however, and I've been working longer hours at my workplace to attempt to make up the difference. Having him around three weeks out of every month will be difficult until we move into a real house. Once that happens, we're not going to give into his separation anxiety since we won't have people living below or around us. We just have to get into a house. Hopefully soon.
For decades, Nicole has had back pain issues. For someone so young, it seems so odd. I've got like six years on her and I've never had back problems, so it's a bit of a mystery as to why she does since she's never injured herself and wasn't an athlete. She has trouble sleeping most nights because of it and even sitting for too long in a chair is a struggle. Finally, I begged her to start seeing doctors and advocating for herself; she really needed to push this time. After x-rays revealing nothing, they suggested physical therapy. She's been going for a few weeks now and they appear to be a very optimistic group of doctors. They claim that they understand her unique situation and that it could be linked to posture behavior and habits that are going to be difficult to break. Every time she comes home from a session with them, she's in pain and worn out, but I think it will ultimately turn out to be a good thing. If she keeps up with the daily exercise and stretching routines that they laid out for her, she could eventually relieve this pain. They even claimed it's possible to relieve it entirely without surgery or medications. Just stretching--lots of it--and being mindful of her posture all the time. I hope it works and I'm glad that finally there's a team of professionals who understand what's causing the pain and are telling her they can help. It'll be an incredible relief if this does work. It's also nice to know that all the money we've put into new beds and mattresses wasn't necessary and that the pain she has isn't made better or worse because of what she's sleeping on. I just really hope it works out. We need a win on this.
I've been hosting my own personal websites for many years. It's fun to have control of my own webserver and host stuff for free. For years, I've used a full-blown PC to host the files but recently I've discovered that I want to be able to do other things with that PC which would cause it not to work as a webserver. A coworker of mine is a hobbyist electronics tinkerer and recently had to give away several Raspberry Pi boards, so I scooped them up. Raspberry Pis are very tiny, simple computers about the size of a credit card. They can't do much, but there's a wealth of fun activities and projects you can lookup everywhere online. One such project is making one into a self-contained webserver which would be perfect for my needs. I've spent weeks following tutorials and trying different pieces of software out but I finally solved the puzzle last night. As of now, all my websites are back online and being hosted securely with encryption end-to-end. It's not like I needed that since my websites are old and very simplistic, but one day soon web browsers might cut out any unencrypted site by default so I figured I need to be ahead of the game on that. The Pi is so small that I literally glued it to the back of my existing WiFi router and fed it the five volts it needs from a USB port. It's awesome to have it be so small and hidden. It also hosts faster than the PC since the PC had mechanical hard drives that had to spin up to read any data. It's wonderful. Now I can begin thinking about refreshing those websites if I feel creative.