Month: February 2025

–Went to Sac Eye in Folsom to pick up my new glasses (sunglasses are delayed). Pretty spiffy. Not as good at close-up as they are at distance; understandable I suppose.

–Stopped at Bel Air for milk, cream cheese, dessert.

–Took a shave and shower.

–Took Kenny in the BMW to pick up a couple of Pizza Guys pizzas. Tasty.

–Tried last night and today to get Kirill Yuzh to buy me a Rolex 1680 at the Tropical Watch site. After some email glitches he went silent. I don’t know what’s going on. Don’t know if I want the watch enough to pay tax on it.

–Clone Pose mokume fidget spinner came in. By every metric I can use, it’s identical to the genuine Pose. It even seems to spin a bit better–more balanced, maybe. Hard to believe it’s a clone, but without a COA it’ll never be worth much. COA’s seem hyper-critical, since few makers add branding to their spinners–and even if they do for this one, they don’t for that one. Strange business.

–My ankles seem swollen again, and I’ve gained weight, and I get winded really easily. Wondering about congestive heart failure.

–Cleaned up Cremina, Maximatic and ECM, took photos, and asked Great Infusions if they’d consign.

–Rode my bike to UPS to send off a Modusworks fidget spinner to Ted Rooney for refinishing. I am woefully out of shape–no surprise. Hope I can work back into something a little fitter.

–Went to UPS to pick up three Modusworks fidget spinners and one set of Modusworks tungsten buttons. Pretty spiffy. Also a Focusworks “The Thing” spinner, not so spiffy.

–Stopped at Bel Air for cookies.

–Boboli pizza for dinner.

–Another quiet day for Mr. Bill. Watched another episode of Reacher, season 3. Good stuff. Watched another episode of Tracker. Don’t know if it’s the comparison with Reacher, but I find Tracker almost unwatchable now.

–Went to the Sunrise farmers market for tangerines for Kenny and me.

–Kenny palmed off more plants on us; someone had left them on his giveaway table anonymously.

–Played a lot with WordPress sites. Tried a million different cookie consent plugins (again). Going back to Lightweight Cookie Notice.

–Picked up the Pose spinner with extra superconductor buttons at UPS. Nice.

–Got dessert and apples at Bel Air.

–Got a free plant (cutting) from Kenny; planted it.

–Walked to UPS to pick up (a) KAP tri fidget, blue ano–really beautiful and great spinner; and (b) Bull Carbo-Quartz knife, with gorgeous red scales. Knife was “cheap” ($1,800) because blade was off-center; I took it apart and put it back together in a way that should straighten the blade, and it worked: knife is flawless!

–Worked on WordPress Adsense sites. Realizing that premium themes are a total waste for me; WP by itself is extremely modifiable. Dizziness and Nausea will never make to Adsense (too medical), but Plan Retirement might have a chance. I’m playing it safe with no photos, no quotes. We’ll see.

–Slow day. Picked up Tipper fidget spinner at UPS. Got milk and cookies at Bel Air. Played with website privacy/cookies/etc.

–Took Grace shopping at Bel Air. Got caught in a minor bit of rain.

–Binance.us finally was allowed to link to banks (after 2-3 years), so I got back on and hooked up with Ally. Yay! As has happened in the past (I believe), I get an error message from Plaid when I try to add Heritage. Now to move everything from Coinbase, carefully, cheaply.

–Atorvastatin came in via Amazon. Also GAZ copper spinner (too heavy) and Unquiet Hands bearings (very nice).

–Took a shower and shave. Turns out the new Wolfman WR1 razor, with .48mm gap, is way too mild.

–The appointments keep multiplying: the recent biopsy is a basal, and Mohs surgery has been scheduled; Firoz’ office called to set up a follow-up (I think that’s what she said) televisit. Though evidence goes both ways, I fear it’s because I blew the clock question on my annual Medicare Wellness exam recently. Crap…

–Walked to UPS to pick up Tamsulosin and another spinner. This one is a crystallized ti tri, beautiful but too light for me I fear.

–Had the last Roncadin pizza for dinner, thank goodness.

–Walked to UPS to pick up a couple of fidget spinners. One (Tipper) kind of blah; the other (mokume Dark Vader) very nice, and a compelling spinner to boot.

— Someone at Badger and Blade has been looking for a Charcoal Goods brass handle called “Stinger” (version 1) for a few days. I knew I had a handle with a bee on it, but didn’t think it was that exact one. Dug it out, and it’s that exact one. A commenter on the B&B WTB said “Well, you’d better be ready to spend a lot of money.” Guess that means I can sell it and retire now.

–Cleaned up the bird bath fountain yesterday and got the pump working (spurting periodically) and today it saw many visits from birds and squirrels. Don’t know if they’re drawn by clean water or spurting.

–Took Grace shopping at Smart & Final in Carmichael. Later she went into an enormous snit.

–Transplanted rosemary, thyme and dill into a large pot. Cleaned up the bird fountain.

–Watched to SNL 50th Anniversary show. Pretty lame.

–Got tangerines for me and Kenny from Sweet Tree Farms in Fresno at the Sunrise farmers market.

–Helped Kenny briefly, rotating the front wheels on his electric trike.

–Made pizza for dinner. Pretty good: used fresh mozzarella rather than thawed shredded “pizza blend” cheese.

–Went to Sacramento Eye for a checkup after cataract surgery. All good, great pressure in both eyes. No more Latanaprost. Put in an order for Flexon glasses and lenses for the Ray-Ban sunglasses.

–Lunch at McDonald’s–$15, and the soft drink machine has been disabled.

–Chicken pot pie + Kenny’s potato for dinner.

–Another windy, rainy day.

–Picked up Japanese pick mattox at UPS. Kind of large, but I think it’ll work.

–Also picked up Big Poe spinner, allegedly in titanium. Feels like aluminum, and doesn’t spin so good.

–Got dessert at Bel Air.

–Won a couple sets of spinner buttons at a Not Just Toy drop.

–Made pizza for dinner. Good one. Need to give more serious thought to cheese and sauce.

–Went to Pacific Skincare to see Olga Karaputa for a skin check. Many lesions frozen on face and head, biopsy taken of something on neck. Got a prescription for fluorouracil.

–Stopped at Bel Air to deposit the $1,480 check from Great Infusions from the sale of a Cremina. Picked up at UPS (a) a 608 spinner bearing that is .2mm too large and doesn’t fit the spinner; (b) some zircuti buttons from NJT that are beautiful; and (c) a Wolfman razor from Damn Fine Shave that is really nice.

–Stopped for gas in the BMW at Fair Oaks Arco, where the cheapest was $4.59. I swear it was $3.95 a few days ago at a no-name station on Sunrise a little farther north. Oh well…

–Video Medicare Wellness visit went okay, except I blacked out when describing a clock at 10:35: hour hand halfway between 10 and 11, minute hand, uh, not sure what the number is, halfway, 30 or 35 (they wanted to hear “minute hand at 7”). What a freaking joke.

–Picked up the Tri tungsten spinner from Hungary at UPS. Total joke: very high quality, but it must weigh 2 pounds. And it cost $575. Oh well…

–Stopped at Bel Air for milk and cream.

–Pizza for dinner.

–Picked up the Modusworks Thinamathing at UPS. It’s nice, and seems to spin freely, but doesn’t seem to spin for long.

–Stopped at Bel Air to get some Fish Oil for Grace.

–Took a shower and shave.

–Played more with the Astra theme at Dizziness and Nausea.

–Super Bowl Sunday. Chips and nacho cheese, Eagles clobbered the Chiefs, Red Baron pizza for dinner.

–Bought Astra WordPress theme. It’s nice, but way more than I’ll ever need and it’s another one of those naggers. Even after spending $280 for a theme you get nagged for add-ons, and when I opened a support ticket for a refund, they nagged for $4.08/month to get VIP service. Absolutely unbelievable. I finally (sort of) figured out how to get stuff out of the header and into the footer of Hemingway, so–given the small chance of ever getting one of my domains approved for Adsense–that should be sufficient. [edit] Took another look at Astra; managed to get the Pro plugin installed, which added a lot of functionality. Got the footer looking like I want now, so I guess I’ll stay with Astra and try to build an impeccable Dizziness site. Google still won’t accept it for Adsense (too medical), but the exercise won’t hurt.

–Walked to UPS to pick up another spinner. This one looks okay, but spins badly. After a lot of effort, I got it apart to learn that it uses the old-style 608 bearing, and a crappy one at that. Looked into 608 to R188 adapters, but that ship sailed a while ago, so I just bought (what I hope is) a nicer 608 bearing on eBay. We’ll see.

–Took Grace to Green Acres Folsom for plants, then Brainy Zoo for Amelia gifts.

–Played with OceanWP and Astra WordPress themes. Impressive, but 100 times more functionality than I’ll ever need, and expensive ($280). Might keep looking at cheaper ones. I mainly just want easy placement of menus and links in header and footer. We’ll see.

–Pizza for dinner.

–Got turned down by Adsense again. Finally dawning on me that I’m unlikely to ever get a site approved: original content, lots of traffic, etc. etc. The irony is that I finally got icsb-2006 up and running at Spaceship. Lotta good it’ll do me. My best bet, if I were a completely different person, would be to get the transmission/limescale sites going with a couple of youtube videos. Right. More likely, I suppose I should try and do something with Plan Retirement. Still the traffic issue will plague me. I don’t need to spend $5k to have some know-nothing SEO shop wave their magic wand and say their magic buzzwords to get visitors. I don’t know…

–It gets worse: after doing some reading, I learned that most Adsense requests are turned down, and that the the bar is set extremely high for certain areas like health (Dizziness and Nausea) and finance (Plan Retirement). These are known as YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) areas, and unless you’re a physician or Vanguard employee, your blog just won’t make it. FML, as they say.

–Sun came out; nice day.

–But not for me: played with hosts and websites all day. Found what I thought was a total winner i hosting: Porkbun. As it turns out, they have their own quirks: forcing all prefixes (FTP, DB, etc.) to some bizarre thing like llldxcdffftymn. They also haven’t responded after 6 hours to a query asking them to use a simpler name for DB prefixes. Soooo, looks like I’m moving everything back to iWebFusion for now. They’re cheap, fast, no quirks–it’s just that dang whois privacy thing that grates on me. Oh, and further: I finally got FTP set up at Porkbun and Spaceship. The directory they point to is empty; putting a file in it doesn’t show up in the hosts’ file manager; trying to move up or down a level in FTP goes nowhere. I have no idea what those cPanel-generated FTP sites are. If I can’t access public_html etc., what’s the point?

–Finally got some real rain today.

–Went to Costco for dessert (muffins), toilet paper, pizza.

–Registered the icsb-2006.org domain at Spaceship; it’s in the process of transferring.

–Messed up my WordPress journal trying to clean it up (changing database wpnq prefixes to wp). It looked good, but blew up when I tried to add a new post. So I used the WP installer at elidol.com to create a new blog, then moved the old posts into it. All seems good.

–Gave up trying to get Plesk to work at Hustly, so closed the account and got a refund. Will use iWebFusion (for a while, anyway) for the WordPress moneymakers (Dizziness and Nausea, Plan Retirement, Limescale, maybe Drywall (though it screams for a youtube implementation)) and Spaceship for registering/installing the link juice sites (icsb-2006.org, maybe waterseer.com, etc.) so the links come from a different IP. Might like to move away from iWebFusion at some point, as they are the only hosting provider I’ve seen that DOES NOT provide a free whois privacy service–resulting in many phone calls, emails and texts from wannabe site designers.

–Spent all day trying to get Journal and Dizziness working at Hustly. Unbelievably frustrating. Gave up and went back to elidol.com. Don’t know what I’ll do about Hustly.

–Picked up a couple nice fidget spinners at UPS, then milk and cream and pizza at Bel Air (Grace burned her dinner to a crisp).

–Gray day, but dry.

–Vacuumed my bedroom.

–Looked into web stuff. Seems I could move my sites from iWebFusion to Hustly (say) now, and later (after the IRTP block has lifted) change registrars from iWebFusion to Hustly. Don’t know if it’s worth it–as opposed to waiting two months then moving everything to Hustly (including registration).

–Another drizzly day–way less rain than was predicted.

–Took Grace shopping at Bel Air.

–Graffeo coffee from San Francisco came in. Dark like Peet’s. Not bad, but not a long-term brew.

–Negotiating with a guy from Georgia (USSR) on purchase of icsb-2006.org. Asshole wants way more than is reasonable.

–Drizzly day.

–Picked up Zeiss/Contax 50/1.4 at UPS. Nice example of the lens, but (N of 1) not too different ffrom 50/1.7 or Summicron 50/2.

–Renewed UPS box.

–Made pizza for dinner on pan, not in Erie skillet. Store-bought sauce, mozzarella, wilted basil leaves. Pretty good.