Category: Information

January 27, 2026 – What is Radon?

January 27, 2026 /

It’s been a long time since I have gone total science. I will keep it really high level today since I know that most of you first won’t care and second probably don’t have the chemistry background to truly understand. But, I will do the best I can to keep it approachable. I think the Wikipedia article is pretty good if you want to go deeper into this.

You have for surely heard of Helium and Neon they are elements arranged on the farthest right hand column of the periodic table. Because their elemental properties are all similar, they get the nickname ‘noble gases’. A noble gas is an element that is very non-reactive due to its atomic structure. Radon is also a noble gas.

That is not all of the story. Being non-reactive doesn’t mean that elements live in perpetuity. There is something called a half life and it is what it seems. It is the time that it takes for half of the total molecules to degrade into something else. We typically refer to that as radioactivity. The farther down the column you go of noble gases the shorter the half life or the more radioactive they are.

Even though Radon is very stable from a reaction standpoint, the half life is only a couple of days. What that ultimately means is half of Radon becomes another element (radioactive Polonium) in a couple of days. Further to that, the half life of Polonium is only three minutes until it becomes radioactive lead. This continues for twenty some years until that Radon becomes elemental lead and is considered safe.

Where does this Radon come from? Believe it or not, Radon starts off as Uranium in the soil. I think that we are all aware that Uranium is radioactive. That is what the bombs are made of, it is what powers the reactors for energy. Is it any surprise then that it decays into Radon for a short period of time? I will spare all the breakdown beginning at Uranium since I can sense I have pushed things to the edge already.

Don’t be scared, this has been happening since the beginning of time. It’s here and we just don’t know it. Since radioactive elements have a habit of increasing cancer risk, it is definitely something that would be best avoided for prolonged exposure. The worst part about it is that when we build homes, we trap the natural air and put ourselves in the middle of a concentrating environment.

We didn’t choose to have a radon test. It is certainly something I have wondered about throughout the years but you know how things go, out of sight, out of mind. Looking at the projected maps, I was a little uncertain about how we would fair with the testing and ultimately would prefer not to spend money on a mitigation system. But that would not be the case. The main house was fine but the ADU got a result above the action level.

You should know that radon testing is not required and neither is doing something with the readings in Oregon. Strictly speaking, we could have ignored things but my wife wanted to act. Putting in a mitigation system was not terrible. I am pretty sure that there is a lot of margin in the work, four hours, six inch PVC pipe and elbows and an inline fan makes $2500 look like a pretty good living. That cost also included a retest, a $200 value.

The way mitigation works is that it starts with coring a hole in the slab. A pipe is placed in the hole and any gaps are sealed. From there the pipe is directed outside. Add an inline fan and you are done. The principle is that the fan is going to suck on whatever ground is under the slab and the air that comes up is going to be blown into the atmosphere. Testing is done in the living space.

This by the way is the same type of mitigation that is also done with dry cleaner or fuel contaminated soils in a place that cannot be dug out. For several years I did this kind of work on superfund sites. In those cases, the plume can move underground with the winds so to speak. Our job was to map and monitor what that plume looked like via test results.

I could tell that something was happening because there has been a distinctive stale grease and mustiness smell when I walk in the door. We have not cleaned the place up since the tenant moved out other than some really high level sweeping. It really is not required for selling a house, the standard is reasonably clean. I have done it plenty with every tenant turnover so I am taking advantage of not having to do it. After the fan was installed, the place smelled much better.

After running the fan for a week, the retest was started. Since we were just barely above the action level in the first place, I am not surprise in the least the testing showed that we had half of the amount of radon than we did before mitigation. You would call this a success.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not here to say that Radon is not a problem. In our house, we should definitely look at any kind of weird and foreign potential causes of disease. I will say that I am a little bit skeptical that it is something to worry a lot about especially when right at the action level. If the potential buyers were never to wanted the test, we would have never known.

June 17, 2025 – Vacation Break

June 17, 2025 /

This is a short note to say that I will be off the next three days. The Friday entry is already made for chapter 17 and my conclusion of In the Gravest Extreme. It is just time to do what matters and that is spending time with my family.

The next book is Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. I have already read a good portion of the first part. That would be six chapters. I anticipate that we will be back on schedule next week. But as always, that could change. There are some medical tests scheduled for next week.

The dirty little secret it is what has happened in preceding weeks that has caused this break. Often times, I try to cue up articles so that you wouldn’t even notice that I was gone but social obligations have had me so busy that I haven’t really had time to do the normal things that I do. So, we will break.

Until we meet again. Brandon

April 3, 2025 – Gone to Carolina

April 3, 2025 /

My nephew is getting married this weekend in North Carolina. They actually moved cross country to Charlotte right after Christmas this year. We are going on a lightning trip to be there leaving tonight and back on Sunday. Charlotte was the closest city to when we lived in South Carolina at only 30 minutes away. In some ways, it seems like our second home even though I haven’t been back since leaving our driveway in 2004.

But, we aren’t going anywhere close to Charlotte. We are going to western NC in the foothills of Appalachia. It is definitely a beautiful area but not home (#2). That’s OK because we are not going to have time to do anything fun or reminisce anyway. I have already looked at the weather and we are going to get some typical Carolina spring warm, wet and humid.

There is a chance that this will effect Altf4. Although I am very much ahead on things, there is a possibility that some kind of unforeseen situation will happen. It is also likely that I will get some good ideas from this trip so I am excited. Flying into Asheville, I expect that we will see firsthand damage from Helene as well.

I’ll be back in a couple of days. Tomorrow will be normal with my conclusion of the Fourth Turning which is already written. I have decided on how I want to handle Revelations. Week 1 will be books 1-7, including introduction. Week 2 will be books 8-20 and Week 3 will be books 21 and 22 with conclusion. I want to wrap that up around Easter, then we will be onto something new, likely Ayn Rand again.

We keep moving along. Just to make things interesting, I ran across this the other day. It is thought provoking. So, I will leave with this.

January 3, 2024 – I’ve Got Nothin’

January 3, 2025 /

I was expecting to be finished with one book yesterday and begin the Fourth Turning series today. This post is more to inform that I haven’t even started reading yet. I do expect to begin the Fourth Turning next week, I am just unprepared at the moment.

This has been a season that I am ready to move on from. It is hard to explain but it feels like I have been waiting all year to get ready for the next thing only to find that I am still waiting and having things get in the way. That is a frustrating feeling for me and it doesn’t bode well for the upcoming year.

I don’t want to offer excuses but since I said that I intended to start the series this week, I needed to reset expectations. Having holidays in the middle of the week and not taking any additional time off has essentially caused all of the extra curricular activities to occur every day. On the first, I fell asleep on the couch about 6:30 PM out of sheer exhaustion. That was my first down day since early December.

I suppose the prime question is are things going to get better for me? I sure hope so but I also would like to know the answer. We can only do what we do. I plan to try and find some zen in the storm so I can keep on keeping on. Look to getting back on track next week.

October 23, 2024 – Foreshadowing

October 23, 2024 /

I started this endeavor for a number of reasons. I wanted to create a lifestyle business where my life was my work and vice versa. I have been a long time listener of The Survival Podcast and this is one of the things the host encourages for personal freedom. Another tenant is that is one or more people can do something and be successful then there is certainly a market and likely I can do it too.

When I quit my job in April 2019, it was not to explicitly do this but that it was a perfect opportunity to have the time to figure it out. The truth is, I didn’t use my time effectively and I didn’t get moving until December. I got behind the gun in 2020 and I had this huge project of remodeling my little house and then I had to go back to work. In that time, I created a formula to test whether I could actually do this.

I actually got my domain name in the fall of 2020. That is where I switched from Floricane on free WordPress to AltF4.co. I guess this is where today’s story starts. I got my renewal notice a couple of weeks ago. Hosting is now over $400 a year. When I first started, it was around $200 per year. I started asking myself, do I want this bad enough to keep paying hosting fees?

I think where I have started breaking down was this summer. I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep cranking out daily posts. The combination of what was happening in my life as well as my fatigue for reading the same book for nine months. I started to realize that I was doing this to myself. As a result, I wanted to make some tweaks, which I did. I dropped the hard daily requirement.

I have talked about needing a vacation, and I took that a couple of weeks ago. This was right around the time that I was enacting my reduced expectations. As a short amount of time has elapsed, my enthusiasm is continuing to wain. Part of it is that I have painted myself into a corner. Now that I have read half of it, I want to be done with the Art of War. I am doing stuff, but it is more of the same. There is only so many times I can write about another way of making Grape Juice.

What is really holding me back is my extremely stiff counter culture streak. I have written over 1000 articles, most of which nobody has read. Why is that, I hate social media. I have realized that I am never going to market my work in a way that I will be successful. Take that to the extreme, if I am not going to be successful, then why am I doing this in the first place? That sounds like insanity.

It is not all negative. I am proud of what I have done. Unfortunately, that doesn’t pay the bills or become a career. I find it useful too. I search my site to jog my memory on things that I have done over the years. Sometimes I am looking for a certain recipe or thing I did and this helps a lot in keeping track of those things.

As a reminder, I started writing as a way to build discipline for podcasting. As a working person, I simply do not have time to do a daily podcast. It typically takes three days for me to get each podcast done. I could do a lot better with time if I didn’t spend so much time writing my outline. That is pretty risky (for me) though. The more prepared I am, the better I deliver. I really do not need a website to continue to podcast. It will still go out on Apple and Spotify and be available at Castbox.

Spoiler alert: I did renew for another year. I will be honest though, I am starting to fade from futility. I don’t mind doing all of this for myself, but I don’t see the point of paying for it too. Maybe I just need to shop the price, if it was more reasonable then I wouldn’t feel like a big waste.

In year’s past, it was a no brainer that I was going to keep going. I think that I am going to set a line in the sand this year. I will probably make the decision by mid- September next year. I definitely want to take what I have done if if the site goes down and that will require some time to prepare. I say all of this because I don’t want to disappear someday without knowing what is going on.

My criteria is yet to be determined. Certainly, if I could find a way that doesn’t violate my being to make some money would be a good start. I don’t need to replace my income to keep this viable. If I had the ability to offset expenses with income, like buying tools and giving reviews as an example, then it would definitely be worth the effort. More on this as the year goes on.

End Your Programming Routine: Don’t just keep doing things for no reason, this would be programming. My reason has been because I like doing it, I still do. But, do I like spending most of my free time doing it? Not as much this year as year’s past. For another year, I will finish out The Art of War and keep working to put up content as time and desire permits.

September 9, 2024 – I’m Out

September 9, 2024 /

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I am out for an indeterminant time. I currently have technical problems and I am too busy to do anything about them at the moment. Today’s podcast has already been posted at Castbox but I haven’t been able to get the html code necessary to get it posted over here.

So instead of solving the world’s problems, my suggestion is that you take in the last weeks of summer and spend some time enjoying the opening moments of football.

May 30, 2024 – 1000

May 30, 2024 /

Believe it or not, this is post number 1000. Today is not going to be grandiose or spectacular. I am going to talk about what doing this project has meant to me.

I have been a chronic podcast listener since 2008. One of the first podcast I started listening to (and still do) is The Survival Podcast. One of the host’s schticks is starting your own lifestyle business, like he did. I loved that idea and it was my plan to work toward it until life got in the way. Then when I quit my job in 2019 I was going to officially start the process.

My wife finally kicked my butt in to gear in late 2019. I had Toolbox Fallacy about getting started. I needed the right domain name, a good business plan, a way to monetize it and start making a six figure income. I finally realized that the best way to do it was just to start. And I had investigated WordPress four or five years earlier where I opened an account titled Floricane.

You can go back through all the archives if you want to read the actually history of all of this. The point is that I started writing because I hadn’t figured out how to podcast yet. Then I found I liked writing and it was easier to not try to figure out new things. I put another roadblock in the way until I forced myself to learn how to podcast.

I feel like if I took my own advice, I would quit doing this. I am not making money and I probably never will. I know what my problem is, I hate social media. I will never market myself in the fashion that is needed to make it work. I will never build a following because this that is not how I want to spend my time. From the little bit I do, I don’t enjoy it in the least. I don’t even want to do the necessarily evil level of it.

Doing this is not without merit or benefit. This is what keeps me going. First thing’s first, I enjoy doing it. Secondly, I have learned a lot in the process. I think that it keeps me motivated to keeps me thinking and doing. Particularly with podcasts, I keep working on being able to speak with minimal preparation.

I doubt that my reading would be as focused. I don’t see myself reading Dante for fun. Many of the other books I have read recently, I have already read before. This effort has truly made me consider philosophy a fundamental discipline. I used to lump it in with pseudo psychology but now I wish that I had a stronger basis. Philosophy (the love of learning) is the practice of logic, something that is sorely missing these days.

It has not always been easy, particularly recently. It seems like I am always working or working on this. I am doing those things at the exclusion of other things that I want to do or enjoy doing. However, I believe that I am getting dividends as a labor of love. There may come a day that I decide that I would rather put my efforts elsewhere. That day has yet to come.

I am not sure I would have imagined making it to 1000 posts. I guess that I was proceeding without an imagination of what the future would look like in general. Here’s to another 1000.

December 21, 2023 – Winter Break Ahead

December 21, 2023 /

I am going to do something that I haven’t done with AltF4.co, I am taking a break. Tomorrow will be the last four chapters of Slaughterhouse – Five. I will still have my conclusion to the book next week as well because I want to end the book with the year. I have yet to decide, I may do some sort of year in review next week. The truth is I would like to, but it is a matter if I can find the time.

Other than that, I am going to break until January 2, 2024. I am tired and I need a little distance to recharge my batteries. Christmas season is hard because just one more thing is pretty much how it goes with everything. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I will see you next Year.

November 23, 2023 – Happy Thanksgiving

November 23, 2023 /

No opinions, BS or anything else today. There is something to be thankful for. I wish everyone a wonderful holiday. This one by far exceeds Christmas for me and I am enjoying what it is all about: cooking, eating and enjoying the fruits of you labor all year.

Despite the fact that most of my daily’s are queued in advance, you don’t need to be spending your holiday reading this. I will be back tomorrow with more Anthem by Ayn Rand.

October 24, 2023 – Game Over

October 24, 2023 /

Just like I said in the podcast yesterday, I got pretty ahead of posts so I could take time off and go hunting. Consequently, I have stuff piling up behind me that I want to write about. Today is really more of an update than anything earth shattering. I feel like I need to get better at following up on things that I have previously stated.

A picture is worth 1000 words. As you can see from the photo on the left, I got my target. I think that it does a good job illustrating the final state without getting too graphic. As it turns out, it was a rat. I kind of feel bad for the guy because I saw very little evidence of the creature other than something was trying to get into pantry items. Usually I can at least identify the species by to poop it leaves behind. Not this guy, he was pretty tidy about his invasion.

In fact, the first couple of days that I had set the traps out, I put them next to the flour that he had spilled by getting into the package. I was going to get around to cleaning it up with the vacuum but I figured in the meantime, he might come back to it. In about two days, the flour was all gone without me having to clean it up.

After I threw away the punctured bag and he cleaned up the mess, he moved on to some sleeves of crackers. I moved the traps in and within three days it was over. I was pretty surprised at how big it was. And fortunately, it was trash night so disposal was pretty fast and easy.

Two days later was the anticipated solar eclipse. You can see from my picture on the right what we had. The forecast was already iffy, it rained most of Friday and it was going to rain at some point on Saturday. My picture was taken at totality, but with the fog and the clouds, no chance. I tried really hard to see if I could even notice a difference with the amount of daylight, but I could not.

I knew it was a risk, the weather that is. In fact, the forecast for the day that I am writing is clear in the low seventies. That is pretty unusual for mid-October, but the reality is that to get that temperature, the wind is from the southeast and with that is also moisture (or humidity). It has been at 100% all morning. Even more so than that, we have thick fog just like on the day of the eclipse.

I haven’t spoken with my dad yet. They were still hunting on the central part of the state during the eclipse. I had even purchased some special glasses to give to them so that they could view the eclipse. But, I forgot to leave them. When I do find out if it was possible, I don’t think that I will update you on that conversation. My point with that is re-enforcing what I was saying in the last post. If it isn’t a lot of effort to see an eclipse, you should do it. But, if it requires a three hour drive for a maybe, then I probably wouldn’t.

End Your Programming Routine: Part of my point today was to say that patience is a virtue. I think that we all hope that pest don’t do a whole bunch of damage. But when they do, we have to deal with it. Funny thing, our pest guy came by before I started going after the rat. He asked “any problems?” and I said no without a thought in my mind. I could have called the service, it is part of what I pay for. That being said, the best person and tactic for the job is me because I am in the basement five days a week. I can observe and react and ultimately get my target.