Brace yourselves, this is my first podcast in my new office. Yes, the audio quality is not good at all. The room is super echo-y and I am on my Bluetooth headset for a microphone. That makes the resolution low to begin with, nevermind the acoustics. This is all about what I have been up to and I didn’t just seemingly disappear. That means that the podcast stays. I will work to make this better just not today.
Tag: moving
February 5, 2026 – I Am Warming Up To This
It should be no surprise that I am not an early adopter. I am not opposed to change if there is a valid reason for it. I guess what I find acceptable is different then a lot of people. In most cases, I don’t need to change anything. I am happy with me, I am happy with what I have and I am happy to live within my means. That being said, not everyone feels the same. My wife for instance wanted to move to the water.
Here I have a shop, a garage, a large lot and even a second house. Why would I want to leave somewhere that I am comfortable and setup? Even more so, why would I want to sell my woodworking pile of wood, spend every weekend going through all of our things and totally disrupt my life when I am already happy? I was looking forward to having a lot of shop time now that my kids have moved out.
Despite the fact that there is only one (personal) reason I would want to move, I have been going into this with the best possible attitude. I want to make sure my kids don’t have to deal with my woodpile and all of that outgrown ski wear. But, if I am going to move, I want to make sure that it works financially and it works for my life. One of those things is deeply re-connecting with fishing.
I have been patiently waiting to try my luck at fishing on the lake. I have fished the lake before, but it has been nearly twenty years ago. My brother’s bachelor party was here, on the north end of the lake. Our house is a couple of miles south of that rental house so long ago. I have always assumed like so many bodies of water that not everywhere is equal habitat. It was no barnburner when I fished it last time.
I did find my pole and tackle amongst all the packed boxes. The forecast was great, it was going to be dry and warm and we were planning to stay over until Saturday. Since I get up so much earlier than everyone else in the house, I pinned Saturday morning as my inaugural attempt to see how lucky I was.
When I got up, I kind of drug my feet. What if the neighbors see me and question whether I belong or not. We are renting the house and I have only met one neighbor so far. What if it is all weedy and I am wasting my time? I finally got over my nerves and rigged up my pole. I also put on the hot water so that I could make some instant coffee. Once everything was done up, I opened the door and headed to the dock.
It was a beautiful morning. The eventual forecast was a high in the lower sixties but it was a bit brisk at 8AM. We are about a mile from the ocean, I could hear it in the background. A blue heron was annoyed by my coming down to the dock and flew off in disgust. The perpetual Canadian geese started swimming away honking. I assume that was their warning noises that something is not right here. I carefully stepped around all of the goose poop in the grass and the dock and started to cast.
It was my plan to only spend about thirty minutes fishing. I wasn’t going to re-rig to try different lures or spend the whole day doing this to get a limit. This is how I intend on fishing when I live here, a few minutes during lunch time or a few minutes before dusk. I am not opposed to taking fish and eating them but I am more interested in the fact that I can catch them or not. Especially now, I am not setup to clean, save or preserve fish. I would have to eat it now.
I did my 270 degree pass around the dock and nothing was doing. My stomach was growling and I started dreaming of heading back to the house and starting breakfast. This wouldn’t be the first trip that I didn’t catch anything. In fact, I didn’t actually expect to catch anything. I didn’t have any sort of vessel to put fish in if I did catch something. I told myself a few more casts and then I would head back to the house when I felt a tug.
It was a lazy tug. I thought that maybe I snagged something. But as I was reeling up I saw that there was a fish on the other end. It was a nice fish too. I would estimate that it was probably twelve inches long and around a pound. It was a rainbow trout, which means that it was put there as a hatchery fish. Now that I had it, what to do?
I really wanted to put it back for another day. The treble hook on my Panther-Martin spinner bait is not easy to remove with a flopping fish. I eventually got it on the dock and was able to get the hook out. I crossed my fingers that the fish would swim away because I had no net if it started floating after I tossed the fish back in the lake. It swam away and my heart was floating. It worked, this is exactly how I wanted this morning to start.
End Your Programming Routine: This is what I talk about when I say do things that matter. Maybe fishing isn’t your cup of tea but I wasn’t thinking about the ridiculousness of the world or what I might write about next or even the things that I wanted to do later in the day, including packing up and travelling home. It was no traffic and no boats on the lake just me and the geese and the heron and the fish. Even though I have most everything I want, maybe this is what I need and moving just gets me closer to that.
January 29, 2026 – Is This Where My Heart Is?
If you were to ask me six months ago about where I would lay my head, never in 100 years would I have said the central Oregon Coast. It was about that time that I was watching the show Port Protection and I was wondering if I could convince my wife to move to coastal Alaska. I didn’t think she would go for the isolation. My dream is more the mountain west with mountains, livestock and cowboy boots not rain gear and rubber boots anyway.
We were coming home last week and my wife said, “it is time”. I said, “what do you mean”? She said the lake house feels more like home then our current home. After sleeping three nights on an air mattress, I was ready to get back to our true home. But a lot of that is only because I have no stuff there, the house is cold and I had a lot of problems with my work computer that I suspect is related to our makeshift internet situation. I am in no hurry to move but I am getting kind of tired of living out of boxes.
As this thing drags on, it is getting more and more real. Each weekend, I spend time boxing, organizing, trashing, donating and recycling. I sold my woodworking pile of wood two weeks ago, now I have next to nothing. As I go through all of my sheet goods off cuts, each one has a story. That one was from my Grandpa’s ice table. That was from the soffit that I replaced. That was the ottoman I built in SC. There was a piece of T-111 that I took off of the house when I fixed some rotten spots prior to residing. It goes on and on but if they are too small, they get cut up and thrown away.
My son and I took my last range trip for my birthday. Not only could I not find ammo to go, but when we got back, I couldn’t find my cleaning supplies either. I have a universal kit that I keep with my hunting bag, but I ran through all of the supplies that it contained. I have a bulk bag of patches somewhere along with other parts that I want, but for the life of me, I don’t know where it is right now and I am surely not going to move all the boxes around to find it.
I guess when I started packing, it didn’t occur to me how long I might be in the situation of getting ready versus actually moving. I can’t afford to sit around and wait for certainty, I will actually be out of time. The thought does cross my mind, what if this falls through? The cabinets I gave away, the shelves I broke down, all of those things in boxes have to get put back? It is kind of overwhelming and motivating at the same time. This can’t all be for nothing.
The picture above is Friday night sunset at our closest beach, about two miles from the house. It has been a beautiful run of weeks at the beach. It is clear and cold with an arctic wind blowing. We felt sorry for the dog being cooped up all day and thought this would be a nice ending to a long week. So did a hundred other people that you can’t see behind me.
I think that there is a metaphor there. I am sunsetting my time at my current home. I couldn’t have been more fortunate to have a warm house, a shop, a nice yard and loving family that has arrived, blossomed and has now left. My memories are like the day this photo was taken, bright and sunny. Even if there is now a freezing wind blowing, this is still is a moment to be savored. If I really boil things down, I am not wishing that it stays twilight forever, it is just inevitable that the night will come. Fortunately, a new dawn will be coming tomorrow.
I will never be ready to call the lake house home, until it happens. There is always something that will need to be done here and I feel like I owe my heart that. But, it will happen and it will happen when we actually complete the move.
End Your Programming Routine: Since we were going to stay into the weekend with a clear forecast, I was going to take my takedown fishing pole. Guess what, I couldn’t find it. It must be boxed up somewhere. Yes, I should just take a regular fishing pole which I know where it is but that is illustrative. While I may not call the lake house home yet, it feels like it is time to get this show on the road.
January 14, 2026 – One For the Road
Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. The original plan in mid-December was to go to the Portland Boat Show with an eye toward trying to find a boat for my birthday. But, due to things changing with our real estate transaction, things are pretty tight financially right now. As much as I would like to go to the boat show, I didn’t think that made a lot of sense for the cost and use of time.
My wife said, what do you want to do instead? I thought about it and I said, I want to go to the range one more time. I had already squirreled away one more range trip’s worth of ammunition for a December visit that I never got to. My annual renewal is due already and I am in the 30 day grace period. So, I am planning on not renewing my membership due to the distance of my potential new home and my current range.
Looking at the activity calendar, I almost panicked. Nearly half of the range was booked for events. Usually that is bad news for the guy that wants to pull up and get a space. I almost cancelled but then I remembered that almost nobody shoots at the shotgun range and we were arriving after the scheduled 4H practice. One of the things on my agenda was to shoot 410 bore out of the new 20 gauge chamber adapter. And, I had a box of targets that I had stacked up to move. If we shoot them all, I wont have to worry about moving them.
I probably should do an after action report now that I have shot all the chamber adapters I talked about in the early Fall time. But, I can say that they do make things go bang. I had zero failures when I pulled the trigger. Whether you can hit anything is another question. From an accuracy standpoint, they all resulted in less than ideal results. Thinking about things, probably a lot of it is that a shotgun is a poor rifle, due to the sights. I tried to use Kentucky windage as my aiming method and was semi successful.
First, we went to the shotgun range. My son is a much better shooter than I am due to his significant more time behind the trigger doing trap for years. He was the first to hit a target albeit it took us probably twenty attempts in order to do it. We found that you really had to jump the target or you had no chance.
My ‘expert’ analysis is that a chamber adapter has no choke on it. For that reason it is considered a ‘cylinder bore’ or no choke whatsoever. This means that the only real shot pattern is what the wad is providing. The closer the shot, the more likely of a hit because once the shot leaves the wad, it is going to spread out tremendously.
Another thing that makes a difference is that in trap, my son was shooting 1 1/8 oz of #8 shot. In this 410 shell, there is only 1/2 oz of #8. This means that there is less than half of the shot then he is used to. A poor pattern with half as much shot means that chances of target breakage is significantly reduced.
Despite all of that, we had fun. I had 50 rounds if 410 and half was 2 1/2″ shells and the other were 3″ shells. We both shot about half of each. I missed every single shot until the very last two. He hit three of them toward the end. Like I said, he is typically an 80% shooter with 12 gauge whereas I am more like a 40-50% shooter. My analysis of the situation is that if you really ‘needed’ a 410 like this, it might cost much more than it was worth to get that rabbit or quail. When you only have one shot, it is low odds that this will be it.
I suspect that if this were a proper 410 shotgun, things would be different. I don’t know if we would have been in the 80% success range but I bet we would have hit more than 10%. Regardless, I enjoyed the time, there was very little recoil so if you could afford to shoot all day, you could do it without bruising. It definitely got me thinking that maybe I should add a 410 to the fleet.
After we got done at the shotgun range, most of the open bays were open. I find that later in the day it is always easier to get a space regardless of the day. People want to be home and winding down at 4pm rather than dealing with the elements. We switched over to shooting pistol rounds rather than shotgun shells and we lucked out that the bay we were in had lights. I didn’t even know that they had them other than one bay.
Wrapping up the day, we chatted in the truck on the way home about his carburetor problems and tools that he was looking to buy. It was the father/son time that I never really experienced. Maybe I was too busy to take notice or maybe we are both changing. But, despite the fact that it was kind of a risky, make-shift plan it turned out perfectly.
End Your Programming Routine: I shed a silent tear as we drove away. I guess that if there was a way to go out, this should be the way. It’s not like I couldn’t become a member again if for some reason we move back but time also has a way of moving on. It is just going to cost double to start over again. Maybe even bigger, we have turned the corner on something my son and I have never had, an admirable relationship rather than an hierarchical one. That is worth the price.
December 17, 2025 – Who Do You Want to Be?
While the deal is not completely done, we are in the process of packing. We are also paying rent in the new house and so we have the keys but I am a little leery of doing too much until the deal is done. It does allow us to do some advanced planning about how things are going to be arranged at the new house. As I pack, I am wondering how I am going to cram things into the places that no longer exist. It makes me feel like I missed my window on some hobbies and that maybe I should consider down sizing. My internal debate today.
November 28, 2022 – What Does Freedom Look Like?
I am taking a look at some data from the Cato Institute of Freedom‘s index. There is a state by state comparison of many different categories to make up an ultimate ranking. I found the recent decline of own state very validating.
End Your Programming Routine: This is just the beginning for this journey. I don’t really need to make a move but I definitely want to . This gives me the time to do my due diligence before just making a leap. It is hard to say where this will truly lead but I need to spend some time if it is ever going to happen.
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