Month: April 2025

April 30, 2025 – The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventure

April 30, 2025 /

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook is the Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection for May 2025. I got a head start compared to my normal pace due to last month being a cookbook and setting our club schedule a little bit in advanced. I started reading this at the beginning of the month and got a good way through it on our back and forth to the east coast.

This is one of those rare books that our club reads that is not fiction, not a memoir and not a cookbook. It is culinary non-fiction. It reminds me a lot of the book Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker that we read in some of our earliest days of the club. It was so early that I didn’t have AltF4.co running yet and I never reviewed it here. But, essentially it is a story about Bianca’s quest to become a sommelier.

I cannot say what the exact motivation for writing this book was but it sure appears that the author Cook is very into mushrooms. The number of miles driven and time spent over the span of the story is significant. I suppose that is a mark of a good journalist to really get into the story, to get it right and not just phone it in.

Cook is from Seattle and most of the story takes place in the Pacific Northwest with a couple main characters. One is a mushroom picker and the other is a buyer/broker. They run up and down from Canada to California and from the ocean to Missoula as the parameters of their picking seemingly on an instant.

I would love to know more about personal mushroom picking. But, to tell you the truth I am scared to death of eating the wrong mushroom. I have have heard too many stories of mistaking the variety and either puking all night or even dying. I had no idea that there were so many varieties of edible mushrooms that grew wild here. According to the book, they happen most of the year.

The thing that I liked the most about the book is that the action was all around me. I kept reading and saying to myself ‘I know that place’ or ‘I had no idea this was going on around me’. In particular, there is a tiny town near the place that we have been deer hunting that turned into an Asian shanty town at the same time deer hunting was going on. The impromptu camp had a popup karaoke bar and pho restaurant. All this and I never even noticed.

Reading the book took me back to my youth. As the primary picker was a former logger, I got to thinking about the impact of the timber drought that began in the early 1990s. Once those mills stopped operating, loggers were out of work too. There was a whole genre of forest literate men but lacking transferable job skills. This in turn gave way to government assistance, poverty and drugs.

There is a 20 mile stretch between the town I grew up in and a reservoir that we water skied. There were at least four mills on that stretch. Now, there is one and it is a Weyerhaeuser mill. The biggest survived. It wasn’t totally an environmental situation as much as it was all the old growth was logged. Combine that with a US policy of conservation rather than production and only the companies that owned vast tracks of their own land survive. The good news for mushrooms is that second growth opened the door for a lot more production.

If you ask me, I would say a lot more of the mushroom harvest (written about) was more gray market. There was a lot of situational ethics in play such as ‘they don’t care about the mushrooms, only the timber’. Or, that No Trespassing sign is the result of equipment damage, sabotage and environmental damage. It doesn’t actually mean me who is not hurting anything. There is a lot of truth to that sentiment.

When timber comprised a significant portion of the economy, companies made a much greater effort to have a symbiotic relationship with the public. It seems like in today’s world that attitude has changed. I don’t remember a single locked gate growing up and now most private timber is access by recreational lease holder only. When you couple that with the vast amount of land owned and the semi-dubious methods by which it was acquired, it does seem like situational ethics are appropriate to a point.

I loved this book and thought it was fantastic. But the reason I did was because I could picture probably a quarter of the book. If you don’t live here, it may not hold some of the same romance. It doesn’t really tell you where to go specifically or how to identify mushrooms but that there is a whole cash based, gray market subculture feeding the finest and trendiest restaurants in New York as well as the Pacific Northwest.

End Your Programming Routine: Cookbooks are fine. The truth for me is that most of them I don’t get a lot out of. I am grateful that we step away and read something else, particularly something as fascinating as this. This late in the game, I won’t get into the storyline but the broker is still in business. I thought about e-mailing him and thanking him for participating even if it left his situation a little vulnerable. Part of me thinks that he won’t reciprocate or care. I don’t know but I sure admire his passion.

April 29, 2025 – He Who Smelt It, Didn’t Fix It

April 29, 2025 /

Bathroom fans are a dubious proposition. We want industrial hood suction with a consumer level price and engineering. I for one am somewhat skeptical on their effectiveness as it seems like fan off/on seem to have the same results. This particular fixture has always had weak lighting and now the fan has stopped working. It may be worth trying to diagnose but an upgrade in lighting is certainly in order.

I am amazed at the number of options today. When I was last looking at fans a couple of years ago there were a handful of choices. I didn’t buy one because the volume I wanted was on backorder. Those choices were largely based on fan volume. Today, there is a whole isle of bathroom fans. Later I learned that there was nothing wrong with the fan at all and what I thought was a bearing was a loose cover connection.

I have replaced this fan once before, so I am confident that this job is easier than it could be. If your fan is original to the house, your job is going to be much tougher as it is likely attached to the structure in a way that is not accessible from the finished space. This means that you will have to come up with a way to cut and chop your way through the fan body to get it removed.

I suspect that this fan overheated due to dust (or see below). The easiest fix would be to simply replace the fan motor. In our case, the light is so poor that we are going to upgrade the fixture. Replacing the motor is about an hour job, replacing the whole fan, box and all is probably an eight hour job including multiple days of finish work.

I did find out when I took the box out that a squirrel had made it’s way down the vent pipe and stashed a walnut in-between the flapper vent. For all I know, maybe that is what caused the fan to burn out. At the very least, this should help with heat loss and better ventilation for that matter.

Make sure the power is off. If you are confident that your wiring is conventional, then you should be able to leave it off at the switch. But, if you are not, then you will need to find the breaker. Next, remove the electrical connections. In this fan they are made underneath the plate that you see. That means that you will have to figure out how to disconnect the fan from the box. Detach the box from the framing so that it is only connected to the duct work. Finally, disconnect the duct and install in the reverse order.

Now is time for the pro tips. I did have to cut out my old fan box to remove it. I was not expecting that but it had to do with the wiring clamped outside the box. Second, I did have to modify the new fan. The first modification was that I cut the new work tabs off of the box so it would fit in the hole. The second modification I had to make was I had to disassemble the entire fan to make the electrical connections. There is no way to use a wire clamp (middle picture) when the box is in place. None of that is in the instructions. Finally, the new fan box is quite a bit smaller than the one that it replaced. That means that there is drywall repair to be done. I am still working on that as I type this.

End Your Programming Routine: I have to be honest, this job requires a lot of different skills such as electrical, HVAC and drywall finishing. If you could find someone to do the work at a fixed rate, you would probably time ahead unless you are pretty darn good. Since I had done this a number of times, I thought it would go quicker than it did. And even though I can handle it I found myself frustrated at points and sweating a lot.

April 28, 2025 – Is the Pope Controversial?

April 28, 2025 /

I am not Catholic, but I have a lifelong closeness to the religion. Today, I talk about how my proximity has influenced my life as well as some of the controversies related to the direction of Catholicism. Surprise, surprise even Dante gets into the discussion. This is about remembering Pope Francis and the impact the church has on inside and outside the faith.

April 25, 2025 – Revelations 21-22 and Conclusion

April 25, 2025 /

We have turned a corner here. We past the rapture and now we are onto the reward. Gleaming cities of gold and jasper etc. I wonder if this is where the ‘pearly gates’ descriptor comes from? It is described as the new Jerusalem for a new earth prepared for those that are worthy.

First, God cast out Satan forever. Then He prepared a new city. The tree of life was available for the first time since Adam and Eve. John was explicitly told to proselytize that this is a new world order.

Among the couple of things that I found interesting is that there is talk about no temple in new Jeruasalem. There is no longer a need for priests to act as the mediary between God and the people. For the uninitiated, there was a curtain called a veil in the temple. The priest was the only one that could go behind the veil because supposedly that is where God was.

It was the promise of Jesus, also called the ‘New Covenant’ that was supposed to break that requirement. This was allegedly authorized at the last supper with the bread and wine (what we colloquially call communion to memorialize the event). I guess I don’t totally understand why this is coming up now when I believe it comes up earlier.

I don’t think that you get to pick your truth, even when it is conflicting. That being said I would like to know more about the origins of the Bible. What books were stricken and for what reasons? Since the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have very similar accounts, your can reasonably assume corroborating facts are true. Revelations was controversial and it seems like for good reason.

Jesus told them to expect his return after crucifixion (remember doubting Thomas) but why this new development? Why a whole new purging of the earth and starting over? It does seem to contradict the whole premise of Christianity provides salvation with free will. The vengeful God was supposed to be replaced with the loving God post Jesus.

It would be very presumptuous of me to say that this book seems a little far fetched. But I am going to say it anyway. We can’t just ignore controversy because it is convenient. It seems pretty likely that John would have communication with God considering how close he was to Jesus. But just like the Fourth Turning, why hasn’t it happened yet? Surely a millennium has passed by now.

For all I know, it happened at or near 1000 AD. It is not as if recorded history was the best it could have been. What if it was the black plague in the 1300s? I don’t think Satan has actually been banished considering the state of the world. But, I would also expect humanity to be gone as well and we would all be living in New Jerusalem.

What that says to me is that there is something up with the interpretation. I don’t know exactly what that is aside from the calculation of time. If one thing is off, what about other aspects of the story? As a result, it is probably best to live as if the rapture could come anytime.

End Your Programming Routine: I always knew it but now I can concretely say what fascinates these doomsday groups. A strong faith and a strong fatalism combined with timing of the Julian calendar and who knows what will happen? This definitely wasn’t my favorite Bible foray, but it leads me to believe that I will do more because I have not read all of it myself. Next week is the introduction to “In the Gravest Extreme” by Massad Ayoob.

April 24, 2025 – The Tide Has Definitely Turned

April 24, 2025 /

I recently took my inaugural hike with my new pack full of all that shiny gear that has never been used. I am happy to report that I did not have any straps slip and everything was great. I probably need to add some more weight because I didn’t have anything representing food or clothing in my pack for realistic weight. A large part of this trip was also gear shake out so I wasn’t pushing distance or speed.

The day was a sunny, low seventies day. It was the first that I have seen here this year. I think that there was one in February that I was sick and in bed all day. There was also one last weekend when we were in North Carolina. But the forecast had low seventies all week long. The tide has definitely turned on the weather. It also appears that there is no frost danger in the forecast.

Along this trail system, there are several places marked as viewpoints. I set a goal to hike to the closest viewpoint testing my satellite communicator. I forgot my map so I wasn’t totally sure where it was. But, after a couple of miles I got a good view of Mt. Jefferson and the Three Sisters. I figured that this is good enough.

Mt. Jefferson is the second tallest peak in Oregon. I have grown up within view my whole life. Yes, Mt. Hood gets all the press as it is the tallest and closer to Portland than Mt Jefferson. But still it is an impressive sight. Typically, Mt Jefferson can’t be seen in the Summer or Fall due to air pollution, largely agricultural dust. We all know how many sunny days there are in the Winter and Spring in the Pacific Northwest. It is a special day when it can be seen.

Recently, I was sitting around thinking, I wonder how the mountain got one of the most coveted names of American history? Then it came to me, Jefferson sponsored Lewis and Clark. Of course, but wait they didn’t come through here they would have passed Mt Hood on the Columbia river. Jefferson wasn’t the first name of course, turns out that the natives called it Seekseekqua.

Lewis and Clark did see Mt Jefferson on their journey. The story goes that due to its distance and proximity to Mt Hood, they felt it held a reserved status compared to the other things that they have seen. Those in the know recognize that there is a Mt. Washington and a Mt. Adams as well in the Cascade mountain range. There are places in this state where you can catch many of these mountains from the same viewpoint.

The weather was great, my pack was staying put, how about the satellite communicator? The instructions say that it should be used in a clear and open area. How realistic is that in western Oregon? I wanted to see how would function under typical conditions. After all, how often is an emergency in ideal conditions? The things I was interested in are battery life and effectiveness.

My plan allows for both text messages and pictures as well as periodic bread crumb tracking. The preprogrammed messages are (paraphrased) 1. I am starting, 2. Checking in, all OK, 3. I am done. Those all tested fine. I also successfully sent several free form messages. I made sure that my phone was in airplane mode so that it was not mistakenly communicating in cellular mode.

The picture did not send. More troubleshooting will be necessary. Probably since messages went but pictures no I am thinking that the message size is a problem. I assume that the device will do what it is supposed to do, something that was more potentially concerning was the battery life.

I am not planning on taking a battery or charging capability. In my two hour hike, I used 3% of battery capacity of the inReach. This was leaving breadcrumbs once every 30 minutes. It also requires the phone app to compose and read messages and my phone was about 10% down after the hike. My next test will be just having the communicator on. I think that in order to make it a week, I am going to have to use them somewhat sparingly.

The last thing that I wanted to do was to check the breadcrumbs. Everything worked like it was supposed to. A position once every 30 minutes is not terribly helpful on a 2 hour back and forth hike. I might turn up the frequency just to see it work on the next hike. But, I can say that it works.

End Your Programming Routine: I am definitely checking things off. With Easter last weekend and family obligations next weekend, I have to find some time for some overnights. This weekend seems to be an opportunity that might be too good to pass up for an out and back. Then I can try out my new tent and actually cook as well as do my first consecutive days.

April 23, 2025 – The Anthem Of a Generation

April 23, 2025 /

Sometimes I get in a mood. It seems to be particularly on Fridays where I just want to listen to music and set the podcasts aside. I was thinking about the song Uninvited by Morrissette but I couldn’t remember the song name. So I started listening to the song catalog to figure out the right song. Of course I remember Hand In My Pocket but all of the sudden I wanted to hear it again.

Fresh off of the Fourth Turning and reading the lyrics of this song I realized why all of the sudden I liked it. It was the anthem of my generation. “One hand in my pocket, and the other one…” (doing something else). It was smack dab in the Generation X summer by a singer of the generation. In one way holding back and in another way moving on with what needs to be done.

I thought about picking and linking other songs for other generations. But, I am not sure that totally appropriate. I could certainly do that based on my opinion and impression of the generations. Then I thought about adding more songs that I think represent Generation X but then I thought why muddy the waters when I think this song just describes the generation.

Hand In My Pocket was never a song that when I heard it, I said “turn up the radio!” In fact if you would have asked me in 1995, I would have said that this is a ‘chick’ song. I would have been much more likely to crank up Tom Petty or Firehouse when it came on the radio. The music reminds me so much of the beat of Hootie and the Blowfish or Blues Traveler or even Beck in Loser. There were so many songs that had this pop-y, low key music.

I would call the 1980s more of Baby Boomer generation of music. There is a particular sound that when I hear it I say, that screams eighties. One song I like particularly is a-ha’s Take On Me. When I hear that song, my mind instantly goes back to what the eighties felt like. But, it doesn’t speak to my generation. There is no angst or uncertainty.

Don’t get me wrong, I could rattle off a whole list of songs from the 1980s that I think are great. But, I think that because we grew up with that kind of feel good, everything is alright music, it was a natural transition for Generation X to assume the culture mantle with music that more represented who we were.

I do think that the eighties sound influenced that 1990s music in two ways. In one way there was a whole Morissette/Hootie/Cranberries vibe in popular music that sounded very similar in the way that the 1980s sounded similar. But when I look at the top 100 songs of 1995 I see a lot of songs that shared other things in common. Coolio, TLC, Boys II Men was the shift of hip-hop assuming popular music. So the conformity of the sound was familiar but the divergence of the happy-go-lucky lyrics swung the other direction.

I know that I shifted over to primarily listening to country music at that point. I think the reason being is that hip-hop did not speak to me or my experiences. For that reason, I guess that I have to be careful labelling one song as a total overlay of a generation. But every population is a bell curve. College bound/educated, middle class seems like the peak of the bell to me for the time.

That was all great and all but 1995 was thirty years ago now. Looking forward I think we can still call Hand In My Pocket a generational anthem. As I have talked about multiple times in the Fourth Turning series, Generation X may be the generation that got skipped with the oldest Millennials now in their mid forties. In theory, Generation X should be solidly in charge now. But are they?

I see Generation X having one hand in their pockets and the other doing what needs to be done (for themselves). This is the very behavior that is going to let the Millennials assume leadership and supersede Generation X. And you know what? That suits me just fine.

End Your Programming Routine: I spent the day listening to all kinds of music that I pretty much forgot about while I was writing this. It is funny how a song can transform you back to a time and place. This song puts me squarely in my dorm room as a sophomore wondering what 2025 would look like:

[Verse 1]
I’m broke, but I’m happy
I’m poor, but I’m kind
I’m short, but I’m healthy, yeah
I’m high, but I’m grounded
I’m sane, but I’m overwhelmed
I’m lost, but I’m hopeful, baby

[Verse 2]
I feel drunk, but I’m sober
I’m young, and I’m underpaid
I’m tired, but I’m working, yeah
I care, but I’m restless
I’m here, but I’m really gone
I’m wrong, and I’m sorry, baby

[Verse 3]
I’m free, but I’m focused
I’m green, but I’m wise
I’m hard, but I’m friendly, baby
I’m sad, but I’m laughing
I’m brave, but I’m chicken shit
I’m sick, but I’m pretty, baby

April 22, 2025 – Bear Chili

April 22, 2025 /

Tennis season is in full swing. This means that every Tuesday and Thursday until mid-May are scheduled for tennis matches. My son is a senior and our exchange student is also playing tennis. The matches start at four PM and end when they end so I am going to try and make meals that require zero preparation after we get home. Out comes the crock pot.

I don’t know if we are weird or just didn’t get the memo but we are usually the only parents at most matches. I figure, you watch football, basketball, wrestling and even track. It is odd that parents generally do not come to their kid’s tennis matches. Fortunately, I am done with work with plenty of time to travel if I have to. Maybe it is a match timing thing? Ultimately, no matter how good they are, we support our kids and that means meal planning.

Chili is on the menu today. I would really prefer to use a tough cut that I cut down to a smaller pieces. The other option was hamburger. When was looking into the freezer to figure out how I wanted to proceed, I thought that I did not want to spend the extra prep time to start with a solid piece of meat. I saw this package of ground bear that the neighbors had gave me several years ago and that was the ticket.

I thought that I was saving it for something special, but then I realized that I had no idea what that was, hence it had been in the freezer for several years. My mom didn’t like game meat and she always tried to ‘disguise’ it in highly spiced meals. There were a lot of Elk burritos in my day.

I am no expert in game meat. From what I have heard, all meat is a reflection of how it was handled. You can imagine that an animal shot in early Fall and out in the field for four or five days may not be the best. People I listen to say that ‘gamey’ is not a flavor of the meat but an indication of meat spoilage.

I think that this bear was shot in late August. I could not detect any off flavors in the chili. But, I know that my neighbors ate the meat all year so I imagine that they got on processing it and handling properly. As far as usage, I just substituted one to one with beef.

Conventional wisdom says that a fall bear is a fatty bear. But, because I live in a very temperate climate I don’t think that they do much hibernating which means that there is no need to fatten up before a long winter. This meat had almost zero fat on it.

Most game can be treated exactly like domestic meat. With bear, you do need to use Trichinosis protocol. The means it has to be cooked well done to prevent parasites. Nearly every single bear has it and it is no joke. Apparently, unlike pork (which almost never has it today) freezing does not kill the parasite.

Trichinosis is a parasite that is transmitted by eating dead animals. While the fear of pork having it is real, factory farmed pigs have no access to eat dead animals which is why that fear is largely overblown. I have heard that freezing pork for five days will take care of any potential contamination which I almost always do anyways. Best to be safe and just cook to well done.

The recipe got no special treatment. I wish that I had a super secret recipe but I don’t. I just followed a Food Network recipe that exactly matched others I saw online, so I know that it is kind of tried and true. My wife insists on kidney beans in it. I really would rather use something like pintos instead. But then again I don’t have a super secret recipe so I go with what pleases her.

All the planning was great. What I wish I did better was taste for seasoning. I was very hungry and sat down for a meal when we got home. It needed salt in a major way. It definitely could have benefitted from more depth of flavor, so it needed more seasoning as well. But hey, dinner was ready when we got home.

End Your Programming Routine: We try to plan every meal. What gets us is always the day after a big meal or busy day where we went out to eat. Tennis puts an extra emphasis on that planning unless we want to eat a nine PM. Expect a lot of crockpot cooking in the next month. With that, don’t be afraid of something that you don’t see everyday, like bear meat.

April 21, 2025 – Know Your Facts

April 21, 2025 /

It is easy to get into a groove and seek validation with sources that meet your bias. I am just as guilty of this by listening to things like talk radio and podcasts. I do this sometimes because I wonder how or why some event is going to be spun. It was years ago that I was listening to Glen Beck and he announced that he was no longer going to talk about Obama as well as pray for him. I thought, what a novel idea. Someone that lives by values that he proclaims to oppose the establishment. We should all make up our minds with facts rather than siding with people we largely agree.

USA Today: Inflation eased in March but Trump’s tariffs could still bite despite 90-day pause

Reuters: US consumer prices post first decline in nearly five years

April 18, 2025 – Revelations 8-20

April 18, 2025 /

He has risen… again? At least that is what the prophecy of Revelations claims. Since Easter is this weekend, I want to be the first one to wish you a happy Easter. Unlike Christmas, this is a true Christian holiday. A day of salvation and redemption for all that seek it.

Today is actually Good Friday. This is the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. The day that he was nailed to the cross and hung to die. But it is also the day that mankind’s sin died as well. So while it is bittersweet for Jesus, that was his purpose on earth and a victory for eternal salvation.

From what I have gathered reading these chapters, this is the rapture. As soon as the seventh seal is broken, the action begins. One third of the plants, water, animals and sunlight. Then, god sends down the devil and locusts.

Something that I found kind of interesting when I was reading some commentary on Revelations came up. In Chapter 12, it says that Satan was thrown to the earth. What? I thought that he was already condemned to Hell? Yes, but no. Apparently, Satan has the ability to go back to Heaven in order to lobby for his case. Meaning that if he sees some soul go the opposite direction, he can appeal to God.

Remember, this is a vision of the Rapture. This has not really happened yet according to Biblical belief. So if that is really true, then that means that Satan currently has the ability to appeal for souls. Interesting.

Revelations 13 is a good one. This is the chapter that identifies 666 as the mark of the beast. I remember the first time I ever heard this concept back in the early 1990s. My scoutmaster affirmed that if we were ever to get some sort of tattoo that was the mark of the beast. Now, I am not totally sure about just any tattoo but I am a little bit conflicted.

You may have heard of people embedding RFID microchips into their skin so that they can just wave their hand over some sort of scanner to check-out in something like an Amazon store. I am not sure where we are with that experiment at this point but I think that this is coming much closer to the mark of the beast than a tattoo.

I will not make comparisons between Amazon and Satan. But, I do have to say that permanently forfeiting your sovereign humanity at the expense of convenience is starting to tip the scales. I don’t think that Amazon is pure evil but they are surely not benevolent either. RFID implants is definitely a step too far for me.

Much of today’s readings focus on what happens during tribulation, particularly when you have accepted the mark of the beast. Chapters 19 and 20 finish that and see Christ’s second coming. Satan and the False prophet are cast off the earth forever.

I think that there are two things that come to mind reading Revelations that are somewhat puzzling. The first goes back to Revelations 10. John is instructed to eat a scroll of judgement. This has two purposes. One is so that he can ‘ingest’ the real sins and the vision as it is revealed. The second goes hand in hand with not revealing the details of the vision. How is it that John is writing this book of the Bible if he promised God that he would not reveal the vision? That seems in direct violation to something the John holds so personally.

The second is God’s promise of judgement after a millennium. By our time measurement, we have seen at least two since the prophecy. This of course added extra significance to the Y2K hoopla. I have often pondered the Biblical accounting of time. This is particularly true with Noah living 900 years. He wasn’t the only one but he was remarkable at siring children at such an advanced age of 500.

I do believe that miracles are possible through God. I just wonder about some of the accounting. Further more, why? What is the purpose of Noah living 950 years? Did it really take that long to establish a flawed, human civilization? It almost seems like the early Bible was trying to fill in the gaps of known time versus known people because in the New Testament people seem to have more typical lifespans.

This is all to say that I have no idea of what measurement a Millennium really is. I tend to think that because this is New Testament text, it is more similar to our modern calendar. But then again, I don’t understand the rhyme or reason to the Christian calendar either. As a person that is pretty good with patterns and algorithms, how is it that Eater changes every year? You try to understand it so you can explain it to me.

End Your Programming Routine: I am sort of getting the gist of why this book is controversial. From the Jewish standpoint, they are waiting for the first coming and the Muslims have already had the second. The best policy is to be faithful just in case. It might not be the rapture but it might be a sudden car wreck which has the same result as a religious cleansing. Next week we will close the book on Revelations. “He has risen indeed.”

April 17, 2025 – It’s Been a Good Run

April 17, 2025 /

I read an article recently that said that the iPhone Xr (10th generation) was not going to support iOS 19. The current operating system version is 18.4 which means that it is still a viable product but I wondered what that meant to me. I remember vividly December 7, 2018. That was the day that my iPhone 6 just stopped working.

I remember it because I was on call for my job. I had received a call about midnight and worked several hours to resolve the issue. I tried to call back stating my position on the issue and my phone didn’t work. Several hours later, my phone was still not working. Several hours later again, a trip to the Apple store confirmed that my phone was bricked. The answer was some phones just do that when they get old. What a crappy answer.

The next day which was a Sunday, I picked up a Red, iPhone Xr that I have used every since. I was still on-call until the next Thursday but at least I had a working device. As a result of running around I decided to skip the company Christmas party due to lack of sleep and a lot of frustration. It didn’t take a lot for me to not want to go to the party but my wife was very disappointed. This was her Christmas bonus for putting up with me travelling on a dime and being on-call every three weeks.

In retrospect, I was being a little cheap and didn’t want to pay the extra money for the smaller Xs model. I regretted that since the day that I made the decision. One of the primary drivers I wanted in a new phone was a smaller format. I am tired of the the bulk of large phones. I have other devices to watch video and or type. But, it turns out that Apple discontinued the smaller format phones with the 13 model.

Of all of the latest iPhone 16 models, at least the 16 and 16e are the same size as my old Xr. It turns out the more expensive models are larger than what I got which is the 16e. So, I couldn’t get a smaller phone but at least it is not any bigger.

Let me tell you that I think I am fairly tech savvy. I run my own website, I am a software programmer by trade. Swapping data from the old phone to the new phone was not easy. Neither my iPhone nor my wife’s Galaxy were able to activate and required going to the factory store. Fortunately, I took a back-up before I started doing all of the work so I was able to start from ground zero.

Since my iPhone Xr was running iOS 18, most everything seems familiar. There is one feature that I wish I knew a few weeks ago however. It turns out that since the iPhone 14, they have the capability to make satellite phone calls in case of emergency. This relegates my brand new, not even activated yet Garmin inReach significantly less valuable.

Don’t get me wrong, the inReach is not obsolete. I have decided on the plan that I want and the strategy that I want to use. It will allow breadcrumb style tracking as well as periodic messages and pictures included in the plan. But, one of the primary justifications for buying it was ‘In Case of Emergency’.

I am probably not a typical user. I barely touch social media and my phone remains almost charged most days. I can typically last two days without charging due to minimal use when travelling. As a result, my phone has lasted six and a half years and was running fine by all accounts. My kids and wife in contrast have all had at least two phones each since I got this phone in 2018.

The one thing I have noticed lately is the battery draining much quicker. I blamed it on the other devices connected. It seemed to me the battery life started to drain much quicker when I added the Garmin Instinct 2 watch. Then when I paired the inReach it was if the phone would lose about 5% per hour. My quick research on the subject seems to debunk that theory so maybe the battery is just losing steam.

For a lot of people, getting a new phone is a status symbol and not an obstacle. My little observations today may seem ignorant, putting me as a technological rube. Notice I didn’t get the most high powered device that I see so prevalent when I am out and about. That is OK because to me it is a tool that I applied my requirements before purchasing and size was more important than the best camera and the most storage. I learned my lesson from the last time and would have gladly paid more for a smaller format if available.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not a iPhone snob but I have used both Apple and android. I much prefer the iOS experience to android. Since my wife has a Samsung phone, I frequently have occasion to use that operating system. As a result, I have made my preference. I wouldn’t be surprised if my next phone is an iPhone as well. Look for an update in six plus years if things hold true this round.