Tag: Reflection

September 23, 2026 – This Summer I Lost My Home, Truck, Dog… and Now Cat

September 23, 2026 /

I certainly don’t mean to come off as ungrateful. For the most part, I have a pretty good life. It is now officially Fall and I was thinking about my Summer. I realized I could make a country song about it. Of course, there is a little bit of sarcasm to it. I really didn’t lose a home, I traded it. Like I posted last month, this move is going to set me back years in terms of organization an getting settled in. That is a slow go.

But I really did lose my truck. This picture is from June when my pickup suddenly stopped running in a busy intersection. I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment over an hour from home. At that time, I thought that this is a temporary setback. There were a few things that I wanted to work on anyway like the constant engine ticking. I suspected that it was some broken manifold bolts and that was a job that I was really not going to take on.

About a week later, I got a call from the mechanic saying that the engine was seized. I said give me an estimate so that I can decide if it was worth moving forward. Weeks turned into months and that was OK since I was stuck in financial limbo anyway. I couldn’t spend money or use credit until my house sale was completed.

Getting an estimate took so long that I started investigating myself. I had second thoughts about whether this mechanic was competent in the first place. I called local part stores about crate engines and all signs pointed to buying a remanufactured engine from Ford at a price of $5000. By the time you add labor and incidentals like belts, filters, etc. we were talking over $7000. That was too steep. I can buy a running version for half of that with significantly less miles as well.

As a result of financial analysis, I made the call and surrendered the title last week. I have to say that I was kind of down. I purchased that vehicle over 23 years ago. We drove from South Carolina back to Oregon in 2004. It was my daily driver until 2016, that is when I got my Mustang. All my kids drove it until last year. I was looking forward to getting it back and doing some work on it before we started talking about moving.

This is just one memory, I remember putting my kids in the back when they were babies. We always went to the same gas station in town. They grew up and started driving to the pickup to that same gas station on their own. I could have sunk the money in and I probably would have if the price was half of the estimate but this is smarter even if I was sad.

I know that I have been pretty lucky. I never had any problems with that pickup until the last and final one. I also am lucky because I haven’t had a car payment since 2020. When I sold my Mustang, I only had paid off vehicles. I also know that my Navigator is on its last legs. It has 265,000 miles on it and is on the verge of being loved to death. So, a replacement vehicle is coming onto the horizon.

You already know all about my dog. What you don’t know is that she was knocking on death’s door a couple of weeks ago. We had scheduled a follow-up veterinarian visit on recommendation of her diagnosis and the new vet offered steroids. It has helped a lot in that by the time we met with the vet, she had not eaten in a week. Now she is eating twice a day and wanting more. This is not going to prevent the ultimate end but it is allowing us to enjoy what time we have left.

That same week that we got the news about our dog our cat went missing. As of this moment, it has been about a month. On the last night we saw him, my wife said that she heard a terrible scream. We found out a couple days later that there has been a cougar alert in the area. Given that he has never been gone longer than one day, I am reasonably sure that we will never see him again.

I didn’t have quite the same relationship with the cat that I do with the dog. I did appreciate his instincts however. We found a dead mole in the grass a few days before his disappearance. In my observation, not all cats are good cats. Even the good ones take a couple of years to develop. I guess that this is the hard lesson of city moving to the forest. I never considered this to be a risk, but now I know.

Fall is also football season and we are about a month into it already depending on how you measure it. I have never played football but my nephew did and it is common knowledge that a day or two after the game is film day. Film day is when you review every detail of the previous game in hopes of identifying things to work on as well as the things that went right. Clearly, not every team/staff is equal in using that information to improve. Just like in life, identifying problems is only part of getting better. I cant say that I would have done anything different only that the result is not how I would script a ‘good summer’.

End Your Programming Routine: I think that I have told this parable before but it is worth repeating. Lobsters become very vulnerable when it is time to molt. But, without taking that scary step to grow a larger shell, they are never able to grow to full potential. I think that we as humans sometimes are so scared of pain and risk that we get stuck in our potential to do more. Of course I did not want that day to come when I signed over the title for my pickup. But, this is the step to next pickup to go another twenty plus years.

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 30, 2020 – AltF4.co’s 2020 in Review

December 30, 2020 /

Since I was a child, I always looked forward to that period between Christmas and New Years. The chaos died down tremendously and this was that brief period where rest seemed like the prescription before the new year cranked again.

When I was in my teens, it seemed popular to have the ‘best of’ countdowns on TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. It was the best 100 songs of the year or the top 10 news stories of the year. Since it was pre-internet, there wasn’t an instant access to video clips or music like there is today. There were those songs that you sort of forgot about as time moved on because they were on the charts eight months ago and no longer on the radio.

I was driving home from work last night and I was listening to the Sunday sermon on podcast. There was a statement that made a lot of sense and that was ‘You should live your life like you drive a car; mostly looking forward, but sometimes glancing back and side to side.’ And the point of that is that you can’t get to where you are going if you are only looking in the rearview mirror. But of course, this is the time to put an end to this year and everything that went along with it.

I have kind of batted around the idea what I wanted this to be. One thought I had was the top ten things of what happened in the world, but I think that would be too pedestrian. I thought about putting together some sort of song list or something that represented the year but that seemed boring. In the end, I settled on my year in review and the highlights of my year.

  • January- We rang in the New Year in Whittier, California. I picked five ripe oranges off a tree as we were heading back home January 4th. We had a tremendous week and a half family vacation which turned out to be tremendous luck that we took our trip when we did because travelling soon became impossible.
  • February- Right before our trip, we had a water leak that caused the ceiling to collapse in our pantry. Once the damage was repaired, I spent most of January and February building cabinets to replace the pantry and turn it into a more functional space. This was my most ambitious all wood woodworking project to date.
  • March- This was the month where our lives were impacted by the ‘Coronavirus’. School ended a full week before spring break, my wife’s office closed that same week. We cancelled our couple days of vacation that we were going to take and went into ‘lockdown’. Fortunately, we had some distinctly un-Oregon like spring weather and the weather turned mostly nice from here on out.
  • April- We said good-bye to our exchange student. Even though his Visa was good, he wanted to stay and both parents were OK with the decision the exchange program was not. After we signed a waiver for him to stay, they rescinded the support like insurance and such. All was quiet and melancholy at our house for a couple of weeks.
  • May- The weather changed for good toward summer this month. I went from working on the apartment four to five days a week to seven days a week. In the back of my mind, I already knew that I was behind and that there was so much to do that I really didn’t have time to waste, especially because we were still in quasi lockdown anyway.
  • June- This was the month that we started hosting small group at our house. It was really a rededication for me to get more serious about my commitment to God. I have gone through the waxing and waning of church attendance, devotional reading etc. Each time as I come back, it seems that my tuner gets a little clearer. It seems like I am hearing more.
  • July- This was all remodeling, all the time. I am trying to think of a highlight for this month but it is all kind of a blur. I guess if I were to pick one experience it would be roofing the new addition with my son. I don’t know if he learned anything but it was kind of fun teaching him. Side note: we got it right the first time, no leaks.
  • August- The apartment is complete. Tenants move in the first weekend. I wasn’t completely done until the second week. I still had, garbage to deal with, materials to donate, and a mess in the garage.
  • September- I don’t really remember this month. It was the month of wildfire, we had two weeks of smoke and maybe I was in a daze. I had to come to grips that I no longer employed a landscaper and started spending time in the yard mowing, pruning, etc. I now find myself watching the weather to find the dry days so I can attempt to keep up with all the things that need to get done.
  • October- This was a month of disappointment. I chose to do handyman work and job search over going hunting. I was really disappointed but my dad said that they saw zero deer during the whole week. You know, I always want a chance but the comradery is really fun too. I don’t know how many more chances I will have like that. I hope that wasn’t the last one.
  • November- I guess that this was a leap of faith. This was the month that I was looking to make a move for a more menial, labor type job since we were moving toward the holidays. The interview was easy, I think the test was just having the perseverance to try. I was hired without being asked a single question other than “can you do the job?”
  • December- I settled in for regularly driving for Amazon. I have really enjoyed my time. Part of it is that I know I am not going to do this forever. Truthfully, I haven’t worked as much as I hoped I would from a financial perspective. I have been averaging about thirty hour weeks and it takes the best part of the day: from about 9am to about 7pm on the days that I work. Now that peak season has ended, the number of drivers on the road has decreased by about a fifty percent and consequently it seems like that routes are getting longer. Yesterday I was ‘on-duty’ for nearly eleven hours, the max allowed for a day.

Conclusions for all of this… I guess if you routinely document your life, it is easy to remember. But seriously, the big one is that we are not leaving the year in the same fashion as we did last year. The pandemic stopped monthly trap shoots, it cancelled my kid’s summer camp and other extra-curricular activities. My daily EDC now includes a mask and unfortunately I have to wear it all day when I work. I fear that we have severely damaged our economy as well as raised false flags of hope that we are all doing our part to ‘flatten the curve’.

One more quick tangent. I had a nice Christmas. It was the first one ever that we did not leave the house after we got home from Christmas Eve service, including when we lived in South Carolina. It is strange when fourty plus years of tradition suddenly don’t exist. But on the plus side, it allowed us to take some time in the day and just relax rather than just feel rushed. We did spend significant time cooking, so we go a little taste of the rush.

I hope that you enjoyed my year in review. This will be the last post for 2020. My next post will be talking about goalsetting and plans for 2021 so I will save all of that for probably next Tuesday. With that, Happy New Year.