Freewrite: 2024-11-27

Ahhh, furnaces.

We had to get the furnace guy out again as water was leaking all over my floor after they had corrected the issue last week. Turns out it was simply a single bolt needed tightening, so there was no charge and they apologized that they'd missed doing it last week. I wasn't upset at all, if I knew anything about furnaces I could have probably solved this one myself... but I don't so, that's how it goes.

I finally set up my new PC. It's a pre-made from Best Buy, but it's my first time having a fancy window and internal light setup, so I've enjoyed being able to watch it spiral through the rainbow as I play and work at it. The storage on this thing is atrocious for a data-hoarder like me, so for now I'm going to be sticking a 4tb NVMe M.2 into the extra available slot and that'll bring us up to a total of 5tb internal storage and my 2tb external drive for photo storage and long-term document storage.

It's a pretty nice PC so far. My last one was bottlenecked hard on the processor (an old i7 6th gen) and would have required about as much to upgrade to reasonable modern ability as it cost to outright buy this one. I've managed to try out a few games on it in the bits of downtime I have (rare though they are right now), and it seems to work really well. I chucked Total War Warhammer 2 at it because it loads terribly slow on my old PC, and it zips right along on this one. I also tried out the Call of Duty: Warzone for a few min to see what it could do in an FPS environment and I have zero complaints. All around a great upgrade.

And of course, I mentioned the other day when I had a moment to write that we were about to get ~25cm of snow in a two day period. We did, in fact, get that. Though it was about a day of snow, instead of two days.

It's hard to tell from this photo, but there are drifts in my yard (and around town) that are easily 3-4 feet high. My 6yo comes up to his shoulders in some of them, so the city has been having snow crews out basically every day for extended hours trying to deal with it. We had a large dump of snow (about 15cm) a week before this, and then another 25cm a few days ago (for a total of about 11 inches in a week, for you Americans) and it's left some folks having to deal with awful residential streets. They'll get cleared, but the city has to deal with priority 1 and 2 roads before they can move to residential-only streets. Thankfully, because we're on a road that is the main artery for garbage/snow removal trucks, we're priority 1 and the main street out my front door is typically well taken care of all year. One of the perks of buying this place.

We continue to be extremely busy. Our eldest plays his first hockey game next week, so our regular 2-practices-per-week jumps to 2 practices and 1 game OR tournament for the next 3 weeks. It's a lot of driving and planning, but he's loving his second year of hockey so far. Our middle kiddo is just finishing her skating class this week, but of course, as Christmas is looming we've got a bunch of shopping and such to do, so having the extra hour and a half every week doesn't actually give us a lot more time at all. The baby of course is going through her various doc appointments and vaccinations per the typical schedule for a healthy baby in Canada. It's a logistical challenge getting everyone where they need to go when they need to go, but it's all pretty typical and expected. I did manage to save a solid two weeks worth of vacation time this year, so a week or more off over Christmas will be a great reward for chewing through these next few weeks of running around.

Hope y'all are also doing well as we close in on the end of the year!