Weekly Ephemera #119

• I power washed the deck and spread winterizer on the lawn this week finishing the winter prep.  It was cold and windy when I washed the deck and I did a half-ass job on it, especially on the underside of the deck.
• An insurance field adjuster came this week and did a second inspection of the hail damage we got back in July.  He caught everything the first adjuster had missed and what we had asked for from the insurance company.  This is the same damage the desk adjuster, after looking at pictures, said she didn't see.  Not sure what was going on with the desk adjuster.  There was a heated discussion between the adjuster and my roofer.  Fortunately they smoothed it all out and shook hands at the end of the inspection.  The second field adjuster handed us a check covering the missed damage which made the Wife and I very happy.  The actual repairs will probably be done next spring once it starts warming up again.
• I deleted my Xitter account this week.  Since it seems I have to have at least three social network accounts at any one time I also opened a Bluesky account (@homerstravels.bsky.social).  I now have accounts on Discord, Mastodon, and Bluesky.  Most of the people I have been following on Mastodon also have Bluesky accounts.  While I don't really need Mastodon I'm probably going to keep it since I like to have a non-corporate run, multi server social network as a backup.
  
  I also switched from the free service IFTTT.com to the paid service dlvr.it to distribute my posts.  It is a little expensive ($99 per year) but it will post my blog posts to all three of my social media platforms and it does it in a nicer format than IFTTT could provide.
• I hiked two times this week.  We are in that rainy, windy, and cold period before the snow has arrived when walking is hard to do.  I was going to walk three times but an all day cold and windy rain kept me indoors for part of the week.  I walked a total of 25.3 miles (40.8 km) this week.  The second walk was over 15 miles (24 km) and was my longest walk since November 2022.  It nearly killed my legs.
  
  On that long walk my phone died.  The phone got stuck in some sort of loop.  By a strange coincidence I was only a couple blocks from my cell phone store and they were able to revive it. Phew!
• I spent some of the rainy days watching more episodes of "One Piece".  The Paul-Tyson fight resulted in us subscribing to Netflix a couple weeks earlier than I'd planned.  I will now start binging a few shows there this week.