Checking In

A catch-all, catch-up post

There are 1,133 posts filed in Checking In (this is page 1 of 114).

A look back at 2025, part 1

I see I have a blog here and think it might be fun to add something to it every now and then.

The page has now turned on 2025 and many are saying “good riddance!” This year, I don’t know if I share that sentiment. Sure, a lot of undesired stuff happened but there are some moments that deserve to be celebrated.

Twenty-twenty five was the year I threw caution to the wind and went on a grand adventure by sailing to Cuba. It’s notable that I did it without Kelly, with whom I travel nearly everywhere. It was a Guy Trip, organized my friend Ken Thomas and a small circle of his friends. None of us knew anything about Cuba and only I had any real sailing experience. The great thing is that it didn’t matter as we were all willing to dive into the unknown and trust that we would figure things out. And we did, beautifully. It was a huge confidence-builder to take a leap and learn that I have the skills to succeed. More blog posts on this to come.

Politically, America’s rot is now out in the open for all to see. Congress has abdicated its role as a check on the executive, with the Supreme Court siding with the billionaire class nearly every time. There is naked corruption everywhere. The government services we all need to keep a functioning society have been deliberately thrown into chaos. Republicans are doing their damnmedest to codify racism. All in all, things look pretty bleak.

But do they? People everywhere are finally waking up. Democrats are winning landslide elections in formerly Republican-safe districts. The President’s approval rating is far underwater. Yes, lawless thugs are running roughshod over Constitutional protections in our immigrant neighborhoods, but the people are having none of it and fighting back. Folks are getting organized, fast! While it would be nice if our institutions would stand up for everyone, it is heartening to see so many people willing to step up to fill the gaps. The American experiment is not quite dead yet.

Along these lines, I attended a few very large demonstrations in 2025 that really hit home. Never before have I felt so emotional at a protest than I did this past year. It gives me so much hope. So, though the oligarch-controlled media does its best to keep it hidden, there is significant pushback against the folks trying to shred our Constitution.

ICE raids Hyundai plant in Georgia

Trump is doing his damnedest to destroy our economy.

South Korea says ‘many’ of its nationals were detained in immigration raid on Hyundai facility in Georgia

The South Korean government said Friday it had expressed “regret” to the U.S. Embassy over the raid at a battery plant under construction at one of the state’s largest manufacturing facilities.

South Korea said Friday that it had expressed “concern and regret” to the U.S. Embassy over an immigration raid on a Hyundai facility in Georgia during which it said “many” South Korean nationals had been detained.

“The economic activities of our companies investing in the U.S. and the rights and interests of our nationals must not be unfairly violated,” said Lee Jae-woong, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry of the key U.S. ally, according to the Yonhap news agency.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-hyundai-plant-georgia-enforcement-action-rcna229148

Umstead hike

The weather this past week has been phenomenal; a real taste of fall with highs in the low 80s, lows in the mid-50s, and very low humidity. Kelly and I had been itching to get outside and enjoy it, so today we packed up the dogs and spent a few hours hiking around Umstead Park. We didn’t have real plans once we got there and just began hiking one of the loops, which turned out to be Sycamore Loop and took us almost 7.5 miles. It was just as pleasant in the woods as we’d hoped, so our hike was mostly enjoyed by all.

One of our hounds, though, seemed to run out of steam after about five miles, so the last bit of our hike became more of a drag. It did go to show us that we really need to do more hikes like this.

RSS update update

So far the RSS reader reboot is working well. I feel like I have more control over the media I get and the stories I read. I especially like rediscovering the blogs of friends whom I haven’t interacted with in a while. On Facebook, I long ago noticed that the service simply didn’t share updates from certain friends in my feed, even though those friends were posting regularly. It became obvious that my “friendships” there were being manipulated. This for me was the downfall of Facebook’s usefulness: when it began to heavily throttle the user to user interaction in favor of stuffing my feeds with unwanted “follow” posts and of course ads. I can still get a taste of that user-to-user by switching to looking at the Friends feed directly but any trust I once had in Facebook is long, long gone.

Hope you’re enjoying the updates here.

Back to East CAC duty for me

Since it seems 2010 is making a comeback in my life, it’s only fair that I am in charge of the East Citizens Advisory Council again. This happened today when the current Chair, my neighbor Jean, abruptly stepped down. As Vice-Chair, I’m now in charge for the first time in a decade.

I’d been working to mentor Jean in how to make things happen and made it a point to let her lead. As a fifty-six year old who’s had his turn already in leading this group, I feel strongly that it’s time the younger generation had a chance to try running things. My role was to be a coach and help get things running smoothly as we were starting essentially from scratch after the City of Raleigh abruptly disbanded CACs in February 2020.

Now I must spend time recruiting a new leader and reviving this organization on my own if need be. I have put in too much work in CACs over the years to let them wither, so I feel it’s worth a good push right now. Further, civic engagement is what this country so desperately needs at the moment.

I guess everything old is new again, eh?

Still not Blaugusting like I wanted

Back when I posted about Blaugust, I submitted this blog’s info to the official Blaugust list, hoping to let people know that I’m still here. So far I’ve gotten no response and my blog is still not part of the Blaugust OPML list. Sad.

I’ll have to rely on posting more cat photos if I want to gin up traffic to this blog, I guess. And I suppose I need to get a cat for that.

Putting my posting money where my mouth is

I had to leave Twitter when Twitter became X (motto: we put the X in Toxic!). I first hopped over to Mastodon but found it too technically challenging even for me. Then Bluesky opened to public use and I set up an account there, happy that posts weren’t being throttled/algorithmized, etc.

Lately, though, even BlueSky isn’t scratching my itch. I am just done with 300-byte conversations. This world absolutely needs context. It needs depth! You can’t explain anything reliably in 300 characters; you can talk past people but you can’t make a point with any reliability. Trite sound bites are what has gotten us the distracted world we now find ourselves in.

So last week, I posted to BlueSky how I was going to dust off my RSS Feed Reader and start consuming news again without any billionaire nor algorithm telling me what to read.
BlueSky post from markturner.net, saying 'I am dusting off my RSS feed reader to take back control of what stories I see. What are your favorite RSS news feeds?'
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I am the Costco cart master

Saturday afternoon I made my weekend trip to Costco. Walking into the store, I pulled a shopping cart from the stack as one of the employees – a young kid – struggled with a full stack of carts pulled from the cart corrals.

As I was walking out of the store a little later, the same kid was struggling in the hot sun to fetch another stack of carts. The kid was really busting his ass. I unloaded my cart and returned it to the cart corral, where my OCD kicked in yet again.

The shitty part-time job I had in high school at the Dart Drug in Sugarland Plaza in Sterling, Virginia taught me a lot about working in retail. I will forever remember how to run a register and I will forever remember how to track down errant shopping carts. Needless to say, when I’m at Costco or other stores with carts, I can’t help but want to put them away the right way. It’s a combination of my engineering mindset, a dash of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder thrown in, and a tip of the hat to the young, hard-working store employee I once was.

Thus, on Saturday I could not just carelessly shove my cart into the corral. A full string of carts were parked in the middle of the corral, mostly stacked. I added my cart to the end and then took a moment to shove the whole stack to one side, making room for twice as many new carts to be added. It’s just what I do.

Just as I tamed the cart corral and was walking away, I heard a shout from across the parking lot. The young Costco kid was standing up from the shelter of the store’s shadow and was cupping his mouth and looking at me.

“THANK YOU, SIR!!” he bellowed across the lot with a smile.

We gotta look out for each other. I gave him a big smile and a thumbs up as I walked away.

COVID-free again

Well, I am fully on the other side of my very first COVID infection. I was still testing positive on Monday morning, though I went into the office (masked) for a meeting with my manager. By Wednesday I tested negative, which would have been 11 days after being infected at EncounterQuest. According to the science stories I posted recently, a fully-vaccinated COVID patient such as myself is normally only contagious for an average of four days. Almost no one is contagious after 8-11 days from symptom onset.

I had blocked off my work week to work from home with the goal of not spreading this to my colleagues. Though I am feeling much better, I have opted to continue working from home this week.

So, was COVID fun? Not really. I was really, really tired the first two days of symptom onset. My brain felt fried all last Tuesday night and I was sweating at night, pulse racing as my body responded. Last Wednesday I began taking Paxlovid and my energy quickly returned (though the side effects of diarrhea and a bitter taste in my mouth were not fun). By the end of last week, Kelly and I were comfortable with not masking around each other.

Fortunately, there was no real pain. No fever. I was in a stupor for the first few days but once I was sleeping better (Paxlovid?) my brain function began to return. And I never lost my sense of taste or smell (though the bitter taste was a temporary add-on).

Good to be back to the land of the living again!

COVID finally caught me

COVID positive

Well, my remarkable streak of avoiding COVID came to an end this week as I finally tested positive Tuesday morning. It seems I brought it home as a souvenir from this weekend’s EncounterQuest event. Four years of successfully avoiding it came to an end.

The biggest clue was the fatigue I got Monday afternoon, that and the stomach cramps that hit me all day. I finished my work day and fell asleep on the couch, conking out by 6 PM just wiped. I went to bed early Monday night (by 8:30) and felt better in the morning. Kelly noticed my cough and suggested I test for COVID. I laughed at this suggestion but tested anyway and was flabbergasted to see it come back positive. At that point we both masked up and the COVID routine began in earnest. I wrote my VA doc and by 2 PM I had a dose of Paxlovid waiting for me at the Durham VA.

There were some earlier, subtle clues that I had caught something. Monday night as I was trying to sleep I had quite the runny nose. I chalked this up to having mowed the yard Sunday without a face mask, inhaling a bunch of dust and grass. I also had aching joints Monday, making it a little challenging to go up and down stairs. And there was a bit of dizziness Monday, too, as I stumbled around the kitchen making breakfast.
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