Celebrate the small stuff....

We finally got rid of the RainSoft RO system tonight! Here's our new water filter, a General Electric system:

I don't want to be accused of slander or libel or anything, but if you google RainSoft you notice immediately they don't have a good reputation. So since caving to a high-pressure sales pitch a few years back, I was yet another dissatisfied RainSoft customer. But we got rid of the RO tonight!

Ironically, RainSoft products seem to work all right: but the people are just terrible to deal with. High-pressure tactics, terrible customer service, outright dishonesty ("You just add salt to the system every couple months, and you never need to do anything else" "Oh! this $200 service is just standard maintenance every three years! Didn't the sales guy tell you?"), you name it, the RainSoft people do it.

The whole-house water softener is going strong, and the Culligan guy said it's a good system, and working. So no need to replace it, but the RO is ungainly, huge, and doesn't work the best. Plus, RO is a great purification system, but we weren't meant to drink pure water... so our new filter is a better choice.

Good riddance.

I was so elated, I broke in my new Unibroue glasses. I bought these bad boys a week ago, and haven't used them yet:

Unibroue Glasses

I broke them in with a bottle of Three Philosophers.

Why break in Unibroue glasses with an Ommegang beer? Because my beer buddy doesn't like Three Philosophers, but he likes all the Unibroue offerings. So, it's not like cheating on him to drink an Ommegang.

Life isn't so bad some days.

Still here

Well, I haven't blogged in a long time, which is probably due to a lot of factors.  Not that there is a large body of people lined to read my blog or anything, but I still feel I owe both my readers some occasional updates.

The weather is balmy here in the South: mid-70s to mid-80s these days. Too hot for my northern system, but there you have it: it I don't like it, I ought to leave.

Of course, I've been <i>trying</i> to leave for 5 years or so now, and nothing's come of it, so what's a poor Canadian to do? Drink more beer!

Work's been plugging along, and suddenly we're trying to deliver an application I've been writing for the last year. Of course, when we sat down to run through it and figure out what needs to be changed or updated, it all blew up. Like, nothing works as it should. So here I am, sitting up late, re-writing pieces of this monster to make a deliery date that is suddenly way unrealistic.

Life can really take it out of you.

I bought a roto-tiller last fall, thinking to till up and replace my front and back lawns. Last time I checked, it was too early: now it's too late. What happened????? Every Saturday gets doled out to those who seem to lust so desparately after my time, and nothing gets done. At least I actually get paid for some of them...

Today it seems like I exist merely to get this stupid Chemical Engineering application done.

Life comes at you fast

I haven't posted to either of my blogs in a long time. It's just life: it gets you busy and gets you tied up, and suddenly you wake up and realize it's been weeks.

I've been working a lot: I worked 12 hours last Sunday, and 25--30 hours the weekend before that. That's billable hours, not actual hours. There are several in there in transit, waiting by the phone, etc. The joy of being a contractor is, your hours are billable, but you have to keep up with them.

We haven't been canoeing in a long time. And we'll probably not get out this weekend either. It's the wife's birthday this weekend, so we'll have family stuff going on. Not that there's a problem with that: it just means not a lot of time in the canoe. I may try and steal an hour or three sometime soon: maybe just with mhy oldest. She seems the most enthused about canoeing of the lot.

I got a new computer: a 17" MacBook Pro. My tax person was upset how few deductions I had for my self-employment tax, so I bought the new laptop. Wow! It's an awesome development platform, and a joy to work with. That's been a bright spot, although the price tag did make me gulp.

I've been investing more time in bagua and xingyi recently. I've gotten fat and I'm out of shape, so it's time to knock the rust off the martial arts, remember how to do pushups, etc. Hard, but it's worth the time.

So that's my life. Hopefully it'll calm down here soon.