The Anti Social

I’m a little anxious mess today, so I missed Friday but let’s celebrate with five things I’m happy for:

1. The past two weeks we have been fostering a boy we have known for a little over a year. The past two weeks have been like the ultimate sleepover, full of trips to Elitch’s, the game Gubs (best game ever), paddle boarding and more.

2. My father’s day started with Noah throwing my chicken Amelia Egghart to wake me. Alissa got me a wonderful Colorado cycling jersey I can’t wait to put on.

3. Last week while biking around, I came across some open space in Boulder county near a bald eagle nesting area. I saw three eagles in a single tree (they’re huge!) and one flying about 5-6 feet off the ground.

4. I installed ceiling fans in all the upstairs bedrooms. It has been a fair bit of work to figure out the wiring, but by the third (of three!) ceiling-fan, I got it. I used these braces and so far they seem steady!

5. Went to the Haymakers for Hope rumble in the rockies, to support a friend of mine who was boxing. I did not expect to enjoy a boxing event, but there was something super cathartic about watching a bunch of grown men try to beat the daylights out of each other! Would recommend.

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Sunset bike rides, especially on my e-bike, are one of my favorite things right now.

A little bit of exercise, a little bit of Colorado beauty, a little bit of wind in your hair, a little bit of speed, and a whole lot of fun.

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Life has been really busy, and I have not had a lot of time to post to my blog as I had hoped/intended. So here’s a dump of life updates!

We have an adult & high school graduate in the house! Noah turned 18, got a tattoo, and graduated high school. We don’t say p-words in our house, but we are really ROUD of him.

This is a bit older but I haven’t posted on the blog about this, we have 5 chickens! We got them when they were about a week old and tiny (so this pic with the cat is old) and they are probably about 10 weeks old now and beginning to really look like adult chickens.

We sadly had to say goodbye to our cat Lokie. I adopted him in 2004 and they guessed he was about a year and a half old, which would have put his birthday sometime around August 2002. 2002-2022, almost 20 years old. Lots of 2s. We had just celebrated 18 years together.

I knew his time would eventually come, and that’s quite old for a cat, but it is still hard when it does come. And I thought it would be rough, but honestly it was even harder to say goodbye than I expected. I think there are a few reasons for that. I was 17 when I got him, so I’ve had him my entire adult life, and more than half of my whole life. And I think there’s something intimate about a pet. He was there for all my highs and all my lows. No matter how my day went, I could always count on coming home and him greeting me at the door, and sitting on me when I sat down, and laying on or next to me when I went to bed. It’s jarring not to have that anymore.

He needed me when we adopted him. From his fearful behaviors with belts and brooms, he had been mistreated by his previous family. In 18 years, we never hit him with a broom, but he was always afraid when we brought it out and he never forgot.

And I needed him, too. My previous cat had just died and I had a hole in my heart and love to give. And he gave so much love in the years I got to spend with him.

It is hard to say goodbye and we have so much love to give and hated the sound of a quiet house without some furry creature in it.

So we got a dog. Found him at the same humane society I adopted Lokie from all those years ago.

We don’t know what kind of dog he is. His coloring is very Red Heeler, but he is the size of a Corgi or Dachshund. Maybe one day we will get a genetic test to see what he has.

His name at the Humane Society was Red, and it turns out they got 3 dogs together, and they named them Red, Solo and Cup. Poor dog named Cup!

We named him Stanley because that seems like a distinguished name (way more distinguished than Cup) and Stanley seems like a distinguished pup. He’s 2 years old and super well behaved. He has been a great addition to the family and has helped us grieve Lokie.

Other miscellaneous updates: I quit a job I loved and started a new job. The new job is a career pivot for me, in helping a bunch of companies adopt DevOps practices and helping coach engineering teams on how to improve and adopt both the cloud and DevOps. It was a really unique opportunity and it was really hard to decide to quit a job I loved (and had not been at for all that long) but an opportunity like this does not come around often, and I would have regretted not trying it. So far it has been really good!

We “ran” the BolderBoulder this Memorial Day. It was so nice to have this bit of normalcy come back after 2 years of pandemic. I have been going to physical therapy for a hamstring/leg pain, so I did not run it and walked instead. Turns out I enjoy walking WAY more than I enjoy running and worrying about my times. This is probably why I like hiking. I think I’m open to doing additional 10ks but only fun ones that are walkable. I just don’t like running, and the stress/worry about time just sucks all the joy out of it.

For June I’ve decided to go off social media again. At least on my phone. Tired of scrolling away my life. Tired of seeing how horrible people are, and how this makes me feel horrible about people, too. I did this earlier this year in March, and I am just not so sure social media was ever a good idea. I will try to spend more of my downtime working on projects I want to get done, and posting here. So if you care at all about what is happening in my life (it’s ok if you don’t! it’s fairly boring!), follow along here for the month of June. (for info on how to follow blogs, check out this post)

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I checked our electric bill the other day, and after so many sunny days and warm but not hot temperatures, our solar has generated a lot of excess power. We’re not running A/C yet, so we aren’t using that much power, either.

Well it’s an exciting milestone as we now have a negative electric bill:

These negative amounts get rolled over into a “solar bank” which we can withdraw from in future months when we draw more energy from the grid than we put on it.

Right now our meter is sitting at something like 210 kwh, and every day it goes down. Looking forward to seeing what the meter does when it goes negative. 😆

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Shawn Blanc sets a 5 minute timer to defeat procrastination. I have used this strategy a number of times to get through tasks I have been procrastinating on (tidying up my office, doing the dishes, anything I have been dreading/delaying) and highly recommend it.

It’s frankly embarrassing how many times I’m completely done with the task before the 5-minute timer even goes off.

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One of my stranger hobbies is thinking of what to name different groups of things. You know how people say that a group of owls is a parliament of owls? Or how a group of baboons is a congress of baboons? (which, supposedly, isn’t even true) Anyway, this is what I have come up with so far…

• A group of young boys is a mess of boys.

• A group of older boys is a trouble of boys.

• A group of girls is a drama of girls.

• A group of influencers is an entitlement of influencers.

What’s fun is that sometimes I will see a group of tween boys and sometimes ponder to myself, “ Is that a mess or trouble?” Or we’ll see a group of boys and go, “ There’s a trouble of boys.”

But my proudest moment was waiting in line at the local pumpkin patch when, I kid you not, an entire charter bus of Instagram influencers showed up. Picture 60 sorority girls with their sun hats, trendy boots and clothes, ready to do it for the ’Gram.

That was a real entitlement of influencers.

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I wanted to focus on five happy things from the past week:

1. Noah’s birthday. It is hard to believe we have an 18-year old in the house. He went skydiving and had a total blast. I will probably never do it, but watching the video was so much fun.

2. Bees! We got a box of bees. Literally a box of bees. And it’s been so fun to watch them explore their new home and fly around.

3. Spring is here. As I sit at my desk and work, I can see the beautiful pink blooms on our crabapple tree. Spring is such a wonderful season.

4. 7 days ago on my last day of funemployment, Alissa and I spent a couple hours at the Denver Botanic Gardens. It is so beautiful there, especially over spring. I think we are going to make this a tradition. I’ll bring my laptop and work for a few hours surrounded by nature.

5. After a minor set back a few days ago, my hamstring is healing and feeling better. Today it has not hurt at all, even after a walk. Praise be.

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For Christmas last year, I got Alissa a starter beekeeping kit. Today her first set of bees arrived.

When she ordered the bees, I was expecting a queen and a few bees. When we arrived to pick up the box of bees, it was literally a box of bees. They buzzed together.

Literally you pour the bees into their hive. Fascinating. So exciting. And so looking forward to our own honey!

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The weather in Colorado lately has been nothing short of spectacular. I got the mountain bike down and replaced the seat. Also got the road bike/acoustic bike out and took it for a quick 30 minute ride.

Being outside when the weather is gorgeous is really great for the soul. Get out there and ride, whether you’re riding an ebike, an acoustic bike, or a mountain bike.

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We saw Tristan last year wandering around the neighborhood, in our yard and neighbors’ yards. I didn’t know the neighborhood had named him, and we haven’t seen him since last fall. Good to see he’s back! Alissa saw him on a walk this morning, at someone’s front porch.

“I’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.”

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The single Ethernet cable makes this so sweet. Have a POE injector in the basement, and the cable goes through a conduit in the backyard into the garage and … magic internet fairy dust.

Crimped both ends of the cable and it all worked on the first try. 😯💪🏼

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😭 Two leaves, one right after another.

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I’ve gotten into a metrics kick around our energy use. We have used a bit more energy in this house then I expected based on our Xcel bills, and with the solar system and time-of-use pricing coming soon, I wanted more data on what’s driving our energy consumption.

I looked at a couple options. The one I’ve seen most frequently advertised is the Sense monitor. It has built in machine learning to try to detect which devices are which when they flip on. Pretty neat. But the solar monitor is the most expensive, and for our setup I’m not completely sure if it will work quite right. (our solar is tied into a sub-panel on the garage, so there’s no breaker that exclusively has production)

I discovered the Emporia Vue 2 monitor and almost immediately purchased it. It’s a bit more bare bones and doesn’t have the fancy-smancy machine learning built in, but for only $150 it includes 16 sensors so you can see the power use broken out across 16 different breakers, and it has solar detection built in. The sensors you attach to your main power lines have directionality built in so it knows when you’re pulling power from the grid and when you’re sending power to the grid.

I found it fairly easy to install myself, and I’ll post more about the installation another time. I have had it running since the beginning of February and it’s helped me discover some interesting things. Like we have a breaker labeled “heat” that I thought our furnace runs off of, but so far has never drawn any power at all. 🤔 Instead, we have discovered that the upstairs bathroom and furnace live on the same circuit, which is fascinating to me. Old houses…

When I first set it up, we had to go without the mains power sensors because our model of electrical box is integrated with the meter and there isn’t enough space to get the included 200 amp sensors around the bus bars. And this is nerve wracking because you can’t turn those off, they have live power at all times. 😬

But Emporia sells different sensors, so I got the Thin Profile sensors for $40 and installed them about a week ago. They just fit. (Emporia also sells another option but I wanted to avoid having to wire them in if I could.)

I reset the Vue so it would properly detect the solar array but most of last week it was comically wrong, attributing all our solar generation as if we were pulling from the grid. I had gone through their set up calibration process where you turn off generation and run a big appliance, I think so it can properly detect the directionality of power. But it still incorrectly showed that we were pulling a comical amount of power from the grid when our solar array was awake and generating a lot of power.

Late last week I tried the calibration process again, this time in the evening when our dryer was running (the biggest power draw we have) and everything was dark so we weren’t producing any power. The 2nd calibration seems to have done the trick.

Look at how it shows you how much power you pull from/contribute to the grid! Super awesome to see this data.

The selector on the bottom can show you the data based on live (seconds), past minute, current hour, current day, current week, current month, and current year.

You can see as of right when I took this screen shot, “balance” is what isn’t detected by the sub-sensors, and it’s green which means we’re contributing to the grid instead of pulling power from the grid. Our solar array is on a 100+ amp breaker, so the 50 amp sensors that came with the Vue don’t detect this power, which is why it shows up as a “balance”. (“balance” shows power to/from the 200 amp sensors to the meter that’s not picked up by any of the individual 50 amp circuit sensors)

I think the only thing I’d improve is to change the selector at the bottom. For instance, I’d expect “day” to show me the past 24 hours of use, but it actually shows today’s use from midnight on. I’d expect week to show me the past 7 days of use, but it shows me all that I’ve used since Monday morning.

Other than that, a neat little product to help you optimize your energy use.

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When we bought our new house last year, it didn’t have a garage so we added one in the backyard. (a whole process, another blog post in itself) And we decided to do something we have wanted to do for a long time: go solar.

Here’s what it looks like under a whole bunch of snow:

We had the panels fully installed in a single day in October but ran into delays getting the net meter installed. (one of the delays: Xcel didn’t have any net meters. Then they finally did, and they came to install it, but couldn’t because we had locked the gate to our backyard. But did they leave a note, or call us, or email us, or send us a smoke signal? No, because why would they do anything convenient like that. We finally called them and found out 3 weeks later.)

Anyway. So we finally got them turned on in January. 🎉 Very fortunately for dry Colorado but not for our solar generation, this has been one of the snowiest few months we have ever experienced. Just last week, the panels were covered under several inches of snow, and it took 3 days for it to fully melt, so we missed 3 days of wonderful sunshine.

So I don’t think our production numbers are all that impressive yet but I am super excited about the production we have had the past few days. Here’s a chart from today:

A few weeks ago, between snow storms, our peak production was 15.0 kwh. Two days ago, we beat that with 15.3 kwh. Yesterday we did 16.2 kwh. And today we produced 18.2 khw. 🙌🏼

I’m sure we won’t increase production every day by 1-2 kwh, but we do have some cool factors working in our favor going forward:

1. Until 6/21, every day is going to get just a little bit longer. So a little more sunshine every single day.

2. See that peak in the morning and then the dip through noon, until another sustained peak around 2pm? That dip is because our neighbors have a HUGE tree just south of our garage which shades the array for several hours. There’s no leaves on it yet, so I think as the sun finds a way to shine between branches you see occasional short-lived peaks even throughout this time. As the year goes on, the sun will move a bit more over head, and the shade from the tree will be less and less an issue.

3. Our array faces due east, so the more the sun moves higher in the sky as the year goes on, the array and sun will be aligned and our efficiency will go up.

I’ve got our production website loaded on my laptop and I check it everyday. Fun to see our small contribution to the planet.

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One great upside of social media sites like Twitter and Instagram, once you sign in, you get a whole view of all the people you follow. Unfortunately most of these timelines use algorithms, so you’re likely to find the most clicked but controversial content bubbling up to the top. And I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to like a friend’s post, but The Algorithm didn’t show it to me until 3 days later and I didn’t want to look like a stalker. Awkward.

That’s why I’m excited to get more people blogging. But how can you keep up? Fortunately, all you need is an app, the url to your blog, and you can periodically check in on all the blogs you’re interested in.

I use the Reeder app on my iPhone/Mac/iPad. But there are other apps for Android. The technical term for these apps is “RSS reader”, and there are a bunch. Here’s a good run down of some of the most popular.

Finally, while it’s fun to read and keep track of your favorite blogs, which will hopefully include mine 😊, it’s even more fun to participate.

Sign up for a free blog at Wordpress.com, or wherever you want to blog, and send me an email. I’d love to follow along with you.

My email is aj at bourg.family. Would love to hear from you!

Happy anti-socialing! (social networking, that is)

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We have a corn plant in our living room. I’ve had this plant since at least 2013 but in the past 2 or 3 weeks it’s started to flower. It has never done this before and I have no idea what took it so long or why it’s suddenly decided to flower, but this thing is fragrant! The whole house has a nice lovely light flowery smell to it.

That’s probably why the scientific name is dracaena fragrans.

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One of my little quirks is that I’m cold a whole bunch in the winter. I need my heat!

Alissa likes to keep the house cold and I like to keep it warm. Except not really because I’m cheap and all I hear when the furnace is running is the sound of my bank account emptying into the gas company’s accounts.

Cue black and white late night infomercial, there’s got to be a better way!

I’ve got a heated mattress pad, a heated blanket — a combination for my bed we call the waffle iron. I set both to max and it’s rarely warm enough for me but at least it’s a start.

A couple Christmases ago Alissa got me a shoulder heating pad. Great on the shoulders. Small enough I’ll keep it in my lap when I’m on a Zoom meeting to keep my hands warm without any of my coworkers any wiser.

The newest addition to my warmth family is a towel warmer. Did you know you can BUY a towel warmer? 🤯 I didn’t either, and drying off with a piping hot towel every day is HEAVENLY.

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There’s a saying that you need to be really careful when dating or you might accidentally marry into a family that runs 5ks on Thanksgiving.

We were on a good streak of running 5ks for Thanksgiving but then Alissa’s parents moved away. And a pesky little pandemic happened.

So we haven’t done a lot of Thanksgiving 5ks lately. But another tradition in Alissa’s family is, instead of giving gifts, everyone participates in a fun activity around Christmastime.

Since marrying in, we’ve seen several plays, or gone out outings to places like the Botanic Gardens. But this year I had the idea to go dog sledding.

We found a place outside Leadville. And when Alissa’s parents came back to Colorado in January, we went. It was so fun. Each person got the chance to “drive” the sled which mostly involved standing and letting the dogs do everything. And after that, you got to ride in the sled which was the warmest part of the experience. And then the rest of us would ride a sleigh towed behind a snowmobile so we could watch the dog sled.

If I were one of the dogs I’d be pissed that people had the technology to ride around in the snow without me pulling them. But these dogs seemed to really love it.

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