Left knee (the one that was more painful)

January	February

Right knee

January	February

As for resolutions, I had already decided that 2026 would be the Year of the Knee. Then, I looked back at my 2025 resolutions and that was basically the same thing. So it didn’t go so well last year. However, this year, I’m going to try tracking it better. One thing is to make a daily note on my calendar whether or not I did the stretching exercises. This does not take long. I just need to use a strap to pull my knee closer to my butt. If I do this once a day for about two minutes on each knee, I’ll be happy. Hopefully, I’ll do it more than once per day, which will help. I’ll also try to sit cross-legged on the floor more when I’m watching tv, which should help. And to try to track any progress, I’m going to take a picture of how far I can bend my knees. Below are the pictures that I just took. It’s obvious (and I’ve known this for a while) that my right knee bends more than my left knee. I can’t even get my left knee to a 90 degree angle without pain. I also see that I should get a yardstick and put that behind my leg to see if I notice any small changes. My guess is that I’m not going to notice much for a few months, but we’ll see.

The left knee is pretty bad.

The right knee also needs work.

As for my country, it’s quite the disappointment. The fact that so many people still think that our president is a good person and not a convicted felon is quite problematic. This is also the year that I think showed pretty plainly just how racist many people are and how many people will proudly proclaim that. I’m unsure how the country will survive another three years of this administration, but I hope that I’ll have the courage to stand up against it.

As for this website, I haven’t really been using it much. I’ve been preferring to write in my paper journal a lot of the stuff that I used to post here. It’s not that I want to keep it private. It’s more that I’m more enjoying using a nice fountain pen and journal to think through things. I feel like I stare at screens all day long, so anything that gets me away from that is a good thing.

I am changing my server for this website, which is what prompted this post. Mainly I want to see if my new server/setup works. This will now be running on an Ubuntu system because I want to do some other things that are ubuntu-related. Once I know that this website is working, I’ll be able to start testing out some other things that I want to run here.

I’m still somewhat new to fountain pens, so I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or this ink just has a lousy quality to it. I took out the brown ink and put in Waterman Serenity Blue, which I already had. That ink wrote just fine in my journal. Both inks wrote fine in the Expedient Notebook I had. I don’t quite understand why. I thought the paper in the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook was good for fountain pens and felt pretty close to the paper in the Expedient Notebook. So why one ink behaved so differently is a mystery to me. I guess I should avoid the DeAtramentis ink. But I’d also like to figure out what about that ink causes it to behave so weirdly. It would be good to avoid whatever that is in the future.

Aside from my plans to basically just walk around New York and maybe go to a museum, one big part of this trip was I wanted to take a train. Specifically, I wanted to take a train with a room so I could sleep on it. At this very moment, I am sitting in my room, car 4812, room 1 (on the Lake Shore Limited) and looking out at snowy New York. I had taken this train to Boston when I was in graduate school. But I was always in coach. And that was basically not that pleasant of a journey. This time though, I am in a roomette. The train left exactly on time at 9:30pm. It’s now a bit after 9am Eastern time and we’re getting close to Buffalo. Supposedly, we’re going to arrive in New York City around 6:30pm. My previous trips on Amtrak (and yes they were decades ago), make me doubt that arrival time. But we’ll see. Maybe things have improved.

As for the train itself, it’s old. The ride is like a flight with a constant bit of turbulence. It took me a while to get used to it. But I finally did fall asleep around midnight. I slept for around six hours which has been really pleasant. The ability to easily stand up to stretch and to lie down and sleep is great. Of course, I’m now sitting in my room and will be here for the next nine hours or so. Somewhere there’s a dining car on board. And when I feel like taking a walk, I’ll go and find it. I think they said it’s about six cars in front of me. The bumpiness of the ride means it’s been pretty much impossible for me to write in my journal. I tried last night and again this morning. Typing on the computer isn’t bad. And I’ve already watched a couple videos that I previously downloaded. Amtrak does provide wifi, but I doubt I could use it for streaming a video. It’s pretty sketchy because as we move, my equipment keeps getting messages that it found another Amtrak hotspot or I’ve been disconnected. Anyway, it has worked for me to check mail every so often. But I hadn’t planned on using it because I heard it wasn’t reliable, so I had planned for that.

One of the big reasons that I like taking the train is that I arrive right in Manhattan. I can just walk a few blocks to my hotel. I could have flown and taken public transit to the city. But I probably would have either rented a car to go to Connecticut or taken a cab to Manhattan. I’m happy to not do either of those. I like vacations where I don’t need a car. And I definitely don’t need a car in New York.

Here are some pictures of my room on the train.

Here I am arriving at my roommette.

My roomette has a toilet and sink, which I wasn't expecting. Have to be honest that this could be a little awkward to use with two people in the room. The toilet and sink also make up the stairs that a second person would use to get to the top bed.

After the bed has been set up, it was nice to stretch out and relax.

In my room, seeing if I can get any work done here. Writing definitely can't happen. Computer work is a maybe.

But one thing that I think may be necessary is that I start working on servers running ubuntu instead of CentOS. Since CentOS has changed to CentOS Stream, it’s probably time to change. I always used CentOS because it was RHEL, which is what I was familiar with. I guess I just need to get much more comfortable with Ubuntu and using that on my servers. If nothing else, I think I’ll change coldandheartless to Ubuntu. Then I’ll see if I can get a rails container running there, as that’s what I should be using.

So, as always, lots to learn.

2024 is over. As usual for me, it’s been a pretty good year. THE main accomplishment of the year is my back stairs. They aren’t completely done, but I do have a much better temporary solution than what I had in the past. I took some time off from work around Memorial Day. During that time, I dug six footings, mainly with a post hole digger. That was a lot of manual work. But it was great exercise and I felt pretty good after all that digging. I did do a post with pictures at that time. You can see aht here. Not much else happened with the stairs over the summer. I was pretty busy with work over June and July. And then at the end of August/start of September, I took a proper vacation. I flew to Boston and rented a car to meet some friends in New Brunswick and then drove to Cape Breton. I had always wanted to go there. It was beautiful and just a nice time to relax and see some friends. This just reminded me that I need to take more proper vacations.

I returned from vacation to being busy at work pretty much until Thanksgiving. In my mind, I was going to be get back to work on the stairs over Thanksgiving weekend. Thankfully, I got the posts in a little prior to that, so Thanksgiving was spent doing some welding. It worked ok. Is it a great welding job? No, but it seems to be holding together. After that the stair treads I ordered from Home Depot finally showed up, and they were super easy to install. Since I’m not going to keep these risers there forever, I wanted to make them easy to un-attach. So I just bolted them to the posts. Drilling the holes was easier than I thought it would be. The worst part was that it was ridiculously cold that weekend. Then I just needed to get some 2x6 boards, cut them to length and screw them to the risers. That finished the stairs for now. I’ll take all the wood off in the spring and make the risers out of steel, to match the platform I made. Then I’ll see about maybe making the treads concrete. And then, I’ll put up a railing. So the stairs aren’t fully finished, but I am able to use my back door again, which is great. The only bad thing that happened is that I slipped while welding the platform and definitely did something to my knee. It was really sore for a few weeks, but I’ve been doing strenthening exercises and I feel like it’s getting better.

Going into 2025, one of the things I hope to do is keep up my therapy on my knee. Relatedly, I’d like to bike a lot more as I feel I didn’t do much last year. Getting out of town more…yes, I hope to do that. Doing more welding and woodworking, yes, I also hope to improve my skills there. It’s my usual list.

Happy New Year!

Spend the money on the forms I heard a person on youtube say that you don’t need forms, just a box above the ground to make that part look nice. Maybe he’s dug a lot more footings than me, but the forms are incredibly helpful. They make sure you dig the size hole that you want, it’s easy to level them in the hole and it keeps the concrete clean from dirt falling in. I should have started off with buying forms.

Clear the entire area at the beginning I found the concrete slab as I was about to dig the first hole. Since I was ready to dig, I just moved the location of the footing to the edge of the slab. I have no idea if that’s where I really wanted it. It just seemed like a good spot and I could dig there. I should have first figured out where I wanted the footings and if the slab was in the way, clear it right away.

Lay out exactly where I wanted the footings Related to the above lesson, I was just sort of eyeballing where I wanted the forms and just tried to work around the sidewalk that was there. It was only after working a few days that I realized that the sidewalk wasn’t really straight. So my footings aren’t in an exact rectangle. I’m going to have to work with this when I put the posts in so that I have a rectangular platform. It would have been easier if I had the footings in a good rectangle.

Use the post-hole digger I did the first footing by digging mainly with a spade. That just made far too large of a hole. I should just use a post-hole digger. Once I got the hang of it, it didn’t take too long.

I’m writing this about a week after I finished and I’m sure there are other lessons that I learned that I can’t remember. I’m just still quite happy that I got the footings done.

Onward!

In May 2021, in a big storm, the stairs sort of really fell apart. I thought about fixing them, but as I was working, I realized they really were pretty rotten.

So I took them down and put up what was in the picture below as something temporary…though they were up for three years.

I’m fairly certain that these wouldn’t survive another winter, so my goal for the summer is to put up some new ones. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that I wanted to build them out of steel because it seems like anything wood in my yard rots pretty quickly. So to make something that will last, steel seems to be the way to go. I had thought that I could use the smaller steel tubes that I got from the store, but I have realized that I’m going to have to buy stronger steel. That’s a problem for another day. This post is basically about what I did on my two week vacation (May 28-June 7, 2024).

First, removed my temporary stairs.

The City of Chicago has a lot of information for people building porches to help to make them safe and to get a permit. However, permits are not required since these stairs are under six feet tall and less than 50 square feet. I haven’t quite measured, but the stairs won’t be as tall as me, so they’re probably around 5’ high. And the platform at the top, used to be around 3’x3’ maybe. It should be nowhere near 50 square feet. But I do want them to be strong and sturdy, so I’m trying to follow the guidelines set out by the city.

I need to pour footings and they should be 42” deep. I’ve never done this before, so this is where I probably made my first mistake. When I started cleaning up and digging the footings, I found there was a concrete slab (wasn’t sure how thick) right where I wanted to put a footing. What I should have done was immediately broken that slab up so I knew where the footing would go. But I didn’t. I just positioned the second footing right where the slab ended. That’s not exactly a problem, but in hindsight was not the best way to do this, which can be seen later.

I also didn’t buy the concrete forms because I was being cheap and I had read that someone said they weren’t necessary. I’ve learned that they’re not. I built some square boxes that I was going to use for the part above ground. Worked, but not easy. Since I did end up buying forms after putting concrete in two of my holes, I can tell you that they’re very helpful. First because it makes it easier to dig the proper size hole. For the first two holes that I dug, I used a shovel and you make a bigger hole with the shovel. So my first two holes are probably closer to 15” in diameter, which is way overkill for this job. They also each required around 8-9 bags of concrete. When I used the form, I could fill it with four bags of concrete. So yes, I’ll always use forms in the future. And once I got the hang of using a post-hole digger, that was the way to easily dig the hole for the form. I will remember this in the future.

Here’s a picture of the first two holes I dug. In each hole, there is a piece of plywood that I cut, which is 42” long (to make sure I went deep enough) and 9” wide because I thought that was the size of the hole I needed. The hole on the bottom was the first one that I made WAY too big. The second one is also too big, but not as bad as the first. You can also sort of see the concrete slab that I should have broken up as the first thing.

Here is the box that I was going to use to make the top of the footing, along with the bolts I was going to bury to hold the posts for the stairs. Later on, when I did rent a jackhammer, I ended up breaking this all off because that plate was going to be too small for the metal that I’m going to buy for the posts, so the bolts are in the wrong place.

I dug around the slab a bit more to find out if it might be strong enough to hold the stairs so that I wouldn’t have to put a footing there. Here’s what it looked like from the side.

That wasn’t that thick, so I tried using my little sledgehammer to see if I could maybe just poke a hole big enough to be able to dig a form. And anyone who has worked with concrete is probably rolling their eyes at that idea. I rented a jackhammer. The good thing about that was I had found that there was a lot of concrete also in the other location where I needed to put a footing.

Using a jackhammer is pretty easy, though the one I rented was incredibly heavy. I rented it for just over an hour, which included the time for me to drive to the store and it cost around $100. Took care of all the concrete I needed to break up.

It was at this point, that I also bought forms. And again, my stairs don’t require a permit and are pretty small. So I decided to get 10” forms. I think that 8” would probably have worked. And after looking at the city guidelines again, they require 12” for porches with permits. So I thought that 10” would be a good compromise. I also bought some rebar (on one of my many trips to the store) so that I could use that to attach the previous square forms with the new stuff I’d put on top.

Here’s three footings done with the forms and the rebar sticking out of the others. Thanks to my cousin Janet who came over to help me mix the concrete and pour it in. Things went WAY faster with two people working. I then put pieces of form, around one foot tall on top of the old forms to put new concrete on them to finish all the footings.

Footings done.

And this was finished on the Sunday before I went back to work.

I made a bunch of mistakes on this project, but I learned so much. The first thing is that I just might be able to make these stairs after all. I went into this project not knowing exactly what to do, figuring I’d learn a lot on the way. That has definitely been true. And if it turns out that I screw the entire thing up, then I’d just hire someone to take what I did down and redo it all. But now I’m feeling that I might not have to do that.

I’ll make another post with the lessons that I’ve learned so far.