Paul Alton MBA

Went for a D&A test locally. Blew 0.0 for the “A” portion. The vials got couriered to a lab for the “D” portion. Got my pass notification by text a few days later.

Went to a piano recital of all the local piano teacher’s students, including our grandson, Kohen.

Continued car shopping locally.

Puttered around the property to prepare for being away for an extended time.

Planted some tomatoes and a zucchini under cover.

Took the bumper off the car and found the problem with the backup sensor. Two broken wires. Once the wires were repaired the sensor works fine. Could have not spent the $US 177 for a new sensor in Texas. Anybody want a good used sensor? I installed the new one without taking the bumper off. Keyhole mechanics at its finest. Pity that wasn’t the problem. Oh well. It all works fine now. No more unhappy symbol on the instrument panel. Beeps when things get close.  

Drove to Edmonton on the Sunday. Started working ten-hour shifts in a fertilizer plant near Fort Saskatchewan that will go down for annual maintenance at the end of the month. This week I worked Monday to Friday.

Works starts early so I got home in time to eat supper with our daughter and her family. This meant we were able to go to a couple of the kids’ nearby ball games.

Friday after work, I drove back to Edmonton, picked up Juanita and we drove back home to Meadow Lake.

Saturday amongst other hobbies and interests we built a scaffold to use for installing the ordered Starlink satellite internet dish on the peak of the house gable end.

Each evening I play tomorrow’s Wordle from the New York Times. I can do tomorrow's Wordle by telling my phone it is somewhere east of where I am, usually Newfoundland, which is three and a half hours ahead of Alberta.

Each working day I set the alarm to 4:30 and most days wake up before my alarm.

One morning I was sleeping hard when the alarm went. Before I risked going back to sleep, I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. I staggered into the kitchen through the unusually dark house, banging my knee on the open dishwasher door on my way to turn on the coffee pot. Back to the bathroom. Get dressed. Back to the kitchen. Heat the daily omelette in the microwave. Fill the lunch bag and hang it on the door. Back to the bathroom for pills and teeth. While I was in the bathroom, I noticed my watch was several hours behind my phone. Made a mental note to buy another battery. I guess that one I put in the watch a couple of weeks ago from some I had on hand must have been a bad one.

I put on my boots at the door. As I opened the door my daughter’s whispered voice floated downstairs, “Why are you leaving for work so early?” “It’s not early, I’m actually running a little late.” “No, you’re not.”

My phone was on Newfoundland time. I had got up at one a.m. (4:30 in Newfoundland).

I went back to bed and got up at 4:30 Alberta time.

We went to church on Sunday morning. After lunch we drove back to Edmonton for another week of work.

Monday our Starlink dish kit showed up on our daughter’s doorstep.

Tuesday evening, we drove Ezekiel to his ball game. We watched about half. Staying to the end would be past my bedtime. Becky was done with the littler kids’ games and drove to pick him up.

This week was only four ten-hour days. Juanita drove home on Wednesday for a doctor’s appointment on Thursday. Thursday afternoon she planted the flower seedlings she brought from Edmonton.  I drove home to Meadow Lake Thursday evening.

Friday morning, I got up and did half of my walk for the day, walking out to the highway and back before settling into using the scaffold to install the Starlink dish. It unpacked easily. After taking a few measurements I had built a frame to screw the stock base onto. We clamped the frame to the scaffold, mounted the dish to the base and ran the cable down to the laundry room. Hooking the wires to the hub took seconds. I set the hub on the washing machine. In only a couple of minutes it had communicated with the dish and the dish had found its happy spot and we had over a hundred Mbps download speed.

It was eleven-thirty. I decided showing up at the fab shop to buy some scraps just before lunch might be annoying. I’ll go after lunch. The local fab shop parking lot was empty on my drive by after lunch. I guess Friday is their half-day. On to the hardware store. I bought nuts, screws, washers and bolts with the plan to use Unistrut to mount the Starlink bracket. Off to the electric supply house. They, too, work half days on Friday. Back to the hardware store. Buy some more screws for Plan D. I have definitely been overthinking this mount.

Ernie and Kohen showed up to help. I put both to work. By six we had the dish up and working with the hub in the house. The scaffold is disassembled and on the ground. All the cable is neat and tidy with proper pass throughs. The dish can see a few tree-tops on its periphery but it doesn’t degrade service in any noticeable manner.

With all the up and down and going for parts and tools there was no need for an evening walk to hit ten thousand steps.

Saturday dawned brown. Heavy smoke in the air from forest fires. No morning walk today. Instead, I take advantage of having serious bandwidth to settle in and do the bulk of the work to build three months of update web pages for posting tomorrow. In the evening we put the scaffold frames into storage and took a walk on our paths. The smoke is a little less thick.

Sunday morning, I was up early and got a walk in first thing. The smoke is evident but not choking like yesterday. Tomorrow is a holiday. Work starts again on Tuesday. We plan to drive back to Edmonton Monday afternoon. After this is posted I will work at getting some pictures posted before any more wordsmithing.

The church service today was led by representatives of Bethel Gospel Camp with a fundraising lunch that followed. We came back into town later to attend a come and go tea honouring a friend’s 85^th birthday.

The work schedule is up in the air this week. It revolves around the shutdown timing of the plant for maintenance. Once it is down, we will settle into six days a week. Early on I will be working twelve hours a day but will probably revert to ten’s after a week or two. Or not. There may not be much to write about and little time or energy to write. Stay tuned.

That last paragraph is so last week.

The schedule ended up as Monday to Thursday, ten hours, and Friday eight hours. I drove back to Meadow Lake from site after work on Friday. Juanita had proceeded me on Thursday. It was good to be home, If only briefly. I took about an hour longer than normal to make the trip home with frequent stops for some GI issues and constant need for re-caffeination. I am already tired before we have started working six days a week. We’ll see how it goes. It won’t be the first time I’ve retired. It's good to have options.

Saturday, back home was a puttery day, I fixed a latch on the garden gate and did some brush mowing (the fire ban is off here, for now) and some weed spraying. That will have to last until August. Only Sundays off until then if things go according to plan. We filled the truck with diesel and the mower gas can with premium before taking the truck to sit at Deborah and Ernie’s while we are gone.

We’ll live with one vehicle. The work schedule should quickly settle into a routine that allows some car pooling so Juanita will still be able to go back and forth between Edmonton without needing two vehicles in Edmonton. Parking is at a premium in Rebekah and Nick’s neighbourhood. To make things even more interesting it looks like the city is setting up to repave the area.