The last six weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. In early November, I took a couple days off work and ended up pinching a nerve/pulling a muscle in my lower lumbar. This probably happens every few years when I tweak something back there and I’m down-and-out for a day or two. Lucky me, this was a two weeklong ordeal. As the end of November approached, and I couldn’t really shake the pain and immobility, I decided to go to a massage therapist and see if they could work it out. And they did, just a few days before we were scheduled to fly to New York for Thanksgiving.

In general, being in New York was great, but after only a day or two, my back decided to rebel. I’m pretty sure it was a result of sleeping on a different bed than I wasn’t used to. My bed at home is of medium softness where the beds at my sister-in-law’s are pretty hard. Most of the visit I was in pain and hunched over like an old man. It was difficult to move around.

The day after we got home, I got another massage, a mere 10 days since the last one. Would this help like the last one? It did. I was still sore for a day or two afterward, but I could tell it was from the deep massage and not the initial “injury”.

I finally felt like I was in the clear, but nope. A few days after returning home I started to get sick. It was early December and I’m pretty sure I picked it up either from the family or maybe the airport. For two weeks I was congested, coughing and generally feeling rundown. And, of course, as Christmas approached, I got my wife sick too. She went through the same thing that I did. But we both recovered a few days before Christmas and largely had a great time over the holiday.

We’re creeping up to 2026 now, and I am spending the next week doing a lot of planning. There are projects around the house that I really want to tackle, but there’s so many that sometimes I lose track and get a little overwhelmed. That’s not to say I can’t get these things done, it’s about organizing. And yes, I’ve talked about this here before, but I’ve never really sat and made plans to get some of these things done. I’ve also never taken these projects and broken them down into steps and put them into a calendar. I know when I do that, I can accomplish things in a very timely fashion. And I think that, in the past, I simply tried to manage it all in my head.

That’s not all I’m working on this next week. I really want to start grinding on creative projects. Those need to be put together and scheduled as well, and I really need to create a good creative life/personal life balance to get everything done (or at least started). I have some fun, creative ideas, and I received a Christmas gift that may be a game changer in getting some of these projects done. No spoilers yet, as I still have some testing to do. I’ve also spent time over the last couple of months purchasing some things that should make these projects happen. Again, it’s all about organizing, planning, then executing.

So, I hope to stay motivated and continue to press forward. I think the likelihood is extremely high that momentum will be achieved soon, and I’ll have a bunch of interesting things to post up here.

Even though January 1st is just a date on a calendar, it does hint at the idea of a new beginning, or sorts. I hope that everyone out there finds time to start doing something interesting, fun, or creative. Good luck!

This summer has been hot and we’ve had the air conditioning running a lot. That’s a pretty normal thing in Florida, but I’ve also switched to working from home for four out of five work days, so I need it cool so my brain doesn’t bake.

With the extra cooling, came an unfortunate incident where the condensation pan of my HVAC unit filled and overflowed. The result was water spillage that took a few days to dry out. The root cause was the drain line to the outside world got clogged with calcification. Subsequently, the leak detector in the pan (the one that comes with the A/C unit) didn’t work and didn’t shut off the unit. So, double-fail.

I cleared the line with my Shop-Vac and replaced the PVC “S”-shaped trap on the outside of the house, which was easily re-built with new components.

But, along with buying an IoT water leak detector and installing it in the drip pan, I also decided to get a drain gun. These use compressed CO2 cartridges (think: paintball guns) to deliver a blast of air/CO2 down the drain line to blow out any half-stuck gunk.

When I got the gun, it was just in a simple bubble-mailer and needed a new home, so I documented the project of designing a new box. Check out the details here.

For quite some time, I’ve been running a website on my internal LAN where I document all sorts of projects I’m working on. Since I’m the only one who sees it (my wife can too, but she has no interest), I feel like I’ve been curating this as more of a personal diary than anything else.

Today, the Projects section of the chewbode.com site goes live. I’ll be posting everything I’m working on. My goal with this is two-fold: To hopefully inspire and motivate others, and also add more frequent content to this site.

I update the internal site pretty regularly, and that steals energy away from blogging here. Why should I spend all this time documenting and posting internal blog entries then turn around and do it all again on the public website? So, I don’t. Or, I haven’t. By moving projects to here, I can consolidate this energy.

Oh, how good it feels to have a few days off. In addition to the long Labor Day weekend, I took two additional days off, today and tomorrow. So, if you count Friday night, that’s five and one quarter days to relax and enjoy myself.

In such situations, someone might watch a movie (at home or in the theater, I don’t judge), get lost in a good book, touch base with friends, or just get out into the quiet bliss of nature by hiking or fishing. I think most people want something that derails their mind and calms it; makes it so they don’t have to think of things they might normally consider responsibilities.

Me? Nope. I come up with another project and hyper-focus on it “while I have the free time to get it done.” Of course it’s around the subject of organizing things. Or rather, re-organizing things. Over time, I’ve found that the way I have been storing stuff has wasted space and made it hard to find stuff.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but I have two large parts organizers hanging on the wall over my workbench. Each organizer has 30 small drawers and nine large drawers and I use them for holding electronics parts (capacitors, relays, switches, transistors, etc.). Up until I started this project, it was hard to find parts and the way the drawers were divided into their constituent compartments wasted space, so I decided to stop half-assing them and re-do everything from scratch.

This meant designing new drawers, from scratch, printing them on my trusty Bambu P1P, and replacing the factory-supplied drawers with the new ones. The design process did take a few hours to get just right, but the majority of the time spent comes from printing. If all goes well, I should be 100% complete with one of the two organizers today.

I’m famous, or maybe infamous, for starting projects and not completing them. This will be the first project where I’ve implemented a encouragement and reminder system for getting it done. Basically, making notes to keep plugging away every day until it’s complete. I’ll have to see how it goes, and will report back.

Let’s continue forward with the discussion of whether or not writing for this blog makes sense. I’ve spent some offline time thinking, and even today I was talking to my friend, Carl King, about it. I feel like I’ve settled on a direction.

The thought of writing a blog is an ill-defined, long-term task. You never really get to the end; you never really finish. Even when you’re about to die, there’s a good chance that you won’t have the time, or possibly even the inclination, to “wrap up your life story in the blog”. It’s like an open-ended MMO video game. Never complete. Always grinding.

That all sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Yeah, I guess it does. So, if it’s that bad, then why do it? Well, that’s the profound question I’m asking myself, especially when viewing it as writing for the sake of writing. But I’ve come to realize that jotting these entries down from time-to-time can be a pocket of joy and creativity too.

I’ve been updating you all on the little hobbies I have going on, and sometimes I sprinkle in a severe weather report. Mostly this has been a tool to regurgitate a bunch of facts. Entries like this are ok occasionally, but they need to be the exception.

The fun, I believe, comes when you’re focusing on telling a story with those facts. So, that’s what I’m going to attempt to do: Write “my story”. I’m not sure how to enunciate the details of that style yet and it may take some time to find my voice. I’ll also be learning how to construct the posts it in a way that make me feel that they’re not a chore.

My point is that, starting with the next blog post, you’ll need to strap in, hold on, and pardon my driving as I get used to the new road.