I've been wanting to write this post for almost a month now. And as I waited, more and more things kept popping into my life. So, this weekend I wanted to sit down and write but yesterday I had an insane sinus headache that prevented me from doing anything. I wanted to just write about everything that's been happening.

Traveling

Since moving to Portland, one thing that I've had in the back of mind is to travel less during the summer and travel more in the colder months. This simply because Portland has great summers, hot days for the water, warm days for walking around under the tree cover of the streets around my neighborhood.
But despite all this, I still had to travel a little bit. I had two weddings to attend to and those were both in the bay area. The first one took us to the hills near Santa Rosa and the second one was in Fremont. Well, the second one happened to line up with the company offsite which worked out great for me. Kristen came to both weddings with me but once Fremont wedding was over, she headed home. I stayed an extra 4 days for the offsite. The offsite was in Healdsburg and I got to meet all my teammates in person. We mainly did dinners, lunches, and a few activities. One of these activities was going to Safari West which was so unexpected because I got to see animals that are only really seen in Africa. Here's some photos of that:

Pets

A big update that I wanted to share at some point by itself but it kept just getting delayed, we got a puppy! Her name's Rosie and she is an Aussie doodle mix. Here's a photo of her:

She has been a handful, to put it lightly. She has a ton of energy, one because she's a puppy and two because she's an Aussie mix. Compared to Samson, she has huge paws, as of this writing, she weighs 26 lbs (11.7 kg). She's already bigger than him and will continue to grow for awhile. I hope to post more about her as time goes on and she grows.

I wanted to include updates on the other pets as well. Heisenberg has been having a great summer, her daily routine includes eating breakfast and then heading out for the day (like someone's expecting her). She used to go out in the backyard and lay on the couch or in the front to hang out in the sun, but recently, she has found a new spot.
She goes out to our neighbor's house and lays under their bush. Which works well with her gray coat and during the hot days, it protects her from the sun while still being very warm. Just recently, I've realized that cats love being warm or at least warmer than humans.

And lastly, I don't want to forget about Samson because he has had an interestingly crazy summer. First, he got a baby sister who has taken over his daily routines. The only time he gets time to himself is when he comes down with me to the burrow (the office) while I'm working. Hopefully, things will settle down enough that both of them can hang out here without Rosie constantly wanting to play with him. A more important and extremely stressful thing that happened was about a month ago now.

I took him out on a walk and he was doing his slow walk where he will smell the same thing for a long time, then slowly trodding over to another interesting bit of foliage. But on this unfortunate day, he went and just sat down on the concrete. It was warm outside and where we were hanging out, it was shaded and chill. I was talking on the phone so hardly paying attention to him. And then, all of a sudden, I noticed he got up quickly, started pulling on the leash, but unlike any other time he pulls, he spins around in a circle, and then continues to get more aggressive on pulling. While he's spinning around, he's also trying to get something near his back leg or his butt. And at this point, I started getting worried and as soon as I went down to check on him, he fell over, like his legs lost control. And at this point, I just started to check his hair and see if there was something on him. I couldn't feel anything and within seconds, he went from having fallen over to convulsing his whole body. I didn't know what to do and this moment has been cemented its trauma within my mind forever. As I picked him up and the first thought that occurred to me was to get him to the vet. Luckily, our car was right across the street so I ran into it, started driving. I was holding him in my arms as I was driving. I was freaking out, I was sweating, Samson was breathing very hard, his tongue was sticking out, he just had his jaw locked in the open position. He kept trying to breathe, I put the car in auto-pilot and tried to calm him down. He was not convulsing anymore but his body was stiff. He kept breathing heavy, long deep breaths. The vet was a 6 minute drive. When I got there, the place was closed (it was a Sunday). So then I got in the car and asked siri to find an emergency vet, and at this point, I found VCA Laurelhurst. They were open, thank god, and I handled him to them. He was taken in the back right away and they took me to a room. About 10 minutes later, they brought him back. At this point, Kristen had shown up at the hospital too. They said, he's doing okay and there's nothing serious I need to be concerned about. The doctor noted that their might be a heart murmur we should get checked out. They said we should take him over to a bigger hospital called Blue Pearl that will give us more information and have more test available.
We took him there, he was not happy about the whole thing but we thought of it as necessary. So after many hours, we got him tested and they confirmed there's nothing we need to worry about and that it was most likely a bite from an insect that caused an allergic reaction. I'm happy to report that the heart murmur was something they picked up due to his body being in overdrive while it was trying to fight the anaphylactic shock from whatever bit him.
I will say, since getting Rosie, he has been a lot more active which I'm hoping is good for his overall health.

A minor car accident

Last month, while driving downtown, Kristen got into a car accident. She and everyone else involved are completely okay so that's great. Our car, it's not doing so well so it has been sitting at the body shop for weeks now. The people who ran into her were tourists and they most likely weren't familiar with Portland streets, especially being downtown where bus lanes and bike lanes appear and disappear without much notice. Here's a photo of our car's damage:

Work

As this summer's seemingly bad combination of things have continued to pile on, the one thing I've been very happy with is work. Work has given me routine and some sanity. Being productive and focused at work helps me feel less anxious and I hope this continues on. I won't go into much about work since this is more of a personal update so I'll write about work things at some other time.

Health

My health has been a continued focus because of my UC sort of staying at the same state for many months now. A bit of improvement occurs when I am working out regularly but as things like travel, people visiting, and other life things get in the way, very quickly my body starts to feel weak and stressed. The best way to deal with UC so far has been a combination of regularly taking my medication, eating healthy and often, and exercising. Stress will naturally make it swing in the wrong direction.

Resting heart rate

Now is a good time to check in on my resting heart rate goal of under 60 bpm. It isn't anywhere close to that but it's been moving in the right direction. September has been mostly me sitting at home. The lowest so far was August at 64. I'm hoping to work on improving the resting heart rate as it's a decently good indicator of my overall health.

Seasonal allergies, fire season, and the odd non-covid flu

Warm weather also brings fires on the West Coast. California and Oregon suffer a lot from fires and those fires also send much of their smoke inland. In Portland, the air quality has been jumping around and the past few weekends it has been pretty bad. Last weekend, I wanted to sit down and write this post but instead I got sick starting on Sunday and it didn't subside until Tuesday evening. Then my throat has been scratchy due to a mix of allergies and the fire smoke. The flu that I had last weekend felt like covid but the covid test did not come back positive. I'm trying to take allergy medicine everyday to prevent the symptoms becoming unbearable. Yesterday, it got so bad that I basically was unable to do anything useful all day.

Tech

I got a PC! I bought a used Windows PC that has been neglected enough over the last few weeks that it feels like the only good thing it does is light up the room with its lights during the night time. I haven't had a windows computer in over 15 years and for the first time in so long, setting up Windows has been an interesting experiment. I've learned a lot about tech over the last 15 years so my first foray into setting it up was how to remove all the bloatware. Fortunately, there's a lot of info on "unattended files" on the internet now. These files allow you to proactively prevent installation of the bloat. So now, the PC is a bare bones Windows 11 install and it's still sitting there waiting for me to do something with it. For now, I plan to use it as a gaming PC but I haven't installed much on it to even begin gaming. I bought it for $600 from a post on social media. It came with a mouse and keyboard, I ditched the keyboard due to it having some keys not working. It also came with a 1080p monitor so I am using that for now. Later on, I will upgrade it to a 1440p quicker response monitor but for now, I plan on playing either Civilization or some other strategy game so graphic performance isn't much of a concern.

Wifi upgrade

Last week, I finally bought what my younger self would consider "a cool thing" which is a better wifi setup. I used to have a mid-range wifi setup before, it was a set of two Netgear Orbi routers. They worked fine but managing anything on them was a pain in the ass. So I took the plunge and bought into the Ubiquiti Unifi ecosystem. The cost for this was $525. I bought the Unifi Cloud Gateway Max, this allows me to connect and manage other Unifi devices. In my case, I bought a U7 Pro which is the latest wifi 7 access point Unifi makes (currently retails at $180). Then I bought a less powerful UK-Ultra or the Swiss Army Knife access point, this one is connected in the gym. There's an ethernet cable that runs from the garage (where the gateway sits) to the gym, so the Swiss Army Knife is sitting there. The nice thing about Unifi devices is that they can be powered over ethernet so the gym setup looks super clean with just one ethernet cable coming out of the wall.
In the office, it's a huge upgrade from before. Since the Orbi's were an all in one router setup, I had to put them by the modem, which meant in the garage, surrounded by a bunch of metal to obstruct the signal. Now the U7 Pro sits in my office so that all the devices in my office have virtually no latency issues. I did have a Ubiquiti switch (the flex mini) from a couple of years ago so connecting that to the Gateway allowed me to set up the PC, the mac mini, and the linux box all through ethernet.
All this means that the wifi has been a whole lot more stable and I'm able to manage it better. Let's hope I don't have to upgrade anything else anytime soon. The one thing that prompted all this was how bad Quantum is, their support is just so bad that we had two wait 2 weeks without any working internet and in that time we used Xfinity.
With all these changes to wifi and other thing things, I've moved away from the "Sky" naming scheme. The old wifi network was "Skynet" but now it's a new network called "Heisenbergerville", a long yet unique name dedicated to the pets.

Farewell summer

Summer's almost closing and we are starting to get colder days here so I'm going to close out this post and hope to write one for the fall soon. And shorter posts in between. 👋