I spent the last two weekends working on the house. I averaged 7 hours each day working on various projects. Thinking back, I honestly couldn't tell you what I accomplished. Well, I could point out a few things, but the time it takes to do those things barely covers a few hours. I must have spent an exorbitant amount of time setting up and cleaning up for the projects. Sometimes I just feel like I am spinning my wheels getting no where. I have two more weeks to push on the house and get things done before holiday vacation. My goal is to have enough done that I don't feel guilty sitting on my backside for a week doing absolutely noting but watching tv, reading books, and drinking. My wife has agreed with my plan, provided I finish up a lot of lingering projects.

I took an old mac mini I had gotten when the kids were younger and converted it into a Proxmox host. The goal was to setup a bunch of web services to keep my own data. My plan was to run an rss aggregator/reader, code repository, document store, photo backups, bookmarks sync, etc. I really like Proxmox, but getting rDNS working was just beyond me for some reason. I wanted to publish based on domain/sub-directory, but couldn't get it to work right. Reading through various forums, the recommendation seemed to just publish to domain:port. So I decided to start playing with docker. I run fedora on my laptop so I am giving podman a try. I like that I don't have to run as root. Everything seems to be working, so now I need to wipe the mac mini and install fedora on it. Sounds like a great project for holiday break.

For the past few weeks I have noticed my grandson watching me more. Like last night, we sat down for dinner and he took my normal chair. No big deal, so I moved to a seat on the other side of his mother. After a few minutes he got down and climbed into the chair on the other side of me and then reached across and dragged his plate over. When he sees me in my office he climbs up on my lap and starts tapping on the keyboard and moving the mouse around. I am not sure if it is a natural inclination to mimic male role model or if I just haven't been spending enough time with him. He always joins me when I am working on the house, so now he has his own tool set with hammer and pliers and paint brush. Hopefully the weather will be nice during holiday vacation so that I can take him biking and to the playground.

There is a part of me that hopes the pandemic normalizes wearing a mask when out in public. I have always hated when the person in line behind me sneezes, then wipes their mouth and nose with their hand. It makes me think about all the people that were there before me touching the credit card terminal. Then I become paranoid about touching that, the doors, then I think about all the boxes I picked up to read the back of and how many people might have touched that. By the time I get to my car I just want to run home and shower. Humans are really just nasty.

On the bright side, my wife is happy with progress on the house. She likes to so "Happy Wife, Happy Life". I try to correct her and say "Happy Spouse, Happy House" but she isn't buying it. I know she'll come round. It only took 17 years to break her of being a pack rat/hoarder.