I'm back home from Boston. The doctor had good news for me. I'm healing well and he was able to remove the stitches.
Another encouraging bit of news was the elimination of the five pound lifting weight limit. That will allow me to finally catch up on a huge backlog of home projects.
It's going to take time before I'm back to 100% but things are really looking up.
-Sixbears
Just before I went into surgery Medicare sent me a copy of a letter they sent to the hospital. They rejected covering my operation.
I went ahead with the surgery anyway. Worse come to worse I was willing to refinance the house. Excuse me for wanting to be able to walk again and lower my pain level.
The surgery went well. Today the bill came in. The operation itself cost close to $40,000. There are other bills have haven’t made it through the system yet but those should be much smaller. The good news about the bill is that Medicare did cover the vast majority of the expense. Not only was the bill much smaller, the hospital offered interest free payments.
It’s nice to get a break now and then.
-Sixbears
I’ve a phone I almost never answer. It’s a landline number through a voice over Internet system. The phone service is really cheap. It has caller ID and voice mail. This is the number I give out 99% of the time. It’s main job is to catch all the spam and junk calls I don’t want to deal with. If it’s someone I actually want to talk to I can check the caller ID or they can leave a message. Normally, if I’m home, I call them right back.
One of the beautiful things about a landline is it doesn’t follow you around everywhere you go. When I’m out all those junk calls aren’t piling up on my cell phone.
The cell phone number is given out to those who I really really want to talk to. Unfortunately, I find I have to sometimes give that number out to things like doctor’s offices. If I’m waiting for important test results or appoints I don’t want to miss it.
Eventually, someone gives that number out to the wider world. Junk calls arrive in greater and greater numbers. When that gets too annoying I change my number once more. It’s my phone and I can do what I want with it.
There are time when I long for the days when I’d disappear in the deep woods to my dad’s hunting camp. Being cut off completely from civilization is nice. Most of the time I didn’t even bring a radio. What I did bring were some really good books.
-Sixbears
I’ve been using an electric tankless water heater for over five months now. So how’s it working out for me?
There are some pros and cons. It was less expensive than a regular water heater, compact, lightweight and fairly easy to install.
On the flip side it has some quirks. Even the fairly small unit I purchased requires a 60 amp breaker. That’s not a problem for me as my 200 amp panel is almost empty. Most circuits are in a different panel powered by my solar electric system.
It’s great for things that require a steady stream of hot water, like a hot shower. What it’s not so great at is things like hand washing dishes. Here’s how that goes. My previous habit was to do a few dishes at a time and turn the tap on and off a lot. Every time the tap is turned on and off there’s a brief spurt of cold water that enters the line. That causes the temperature to vary quite a bit. The way around that is to run hot water to soap up a large batch of dishes. Then the tap is turned off. Once the dishes are scrubbed run the tap again and rinse a big batch.
Many years ago I had a propane tankless water heater. That worked great -until winter hit. Cold wind would blow down the exhaust vent and freeze the heater. At bare minimum that would destroy the diaphragm. It was under warranty but the service guy was here all the time. All my kids got to know him by name.
The electric tankless heater doesn’t have that problem. There was also a noticeable drop in my electric bill switching from a tank to tankless.
-Sixbears
I’m not exactly done with being a snowbird, but pretty darn close. What I am done with, at least for now, is driving from New Hampshire to Florida for the winter. Last winter my lovely wife and I spent some time in the San Franscisco Bay area. The main goal was to visit family but we found the climate to be a lot more comfortable than Florida. Too bad it’s so darn far away. We aren’t going to do that every year.
The other day in the grocery store I met someone who used to do the Florida snowbird thing all the time. In fact, we’d sometimes meet up while down to Florida. Like my wife and I, her and her husband are spending the winter in New Hampshire. They are enjoying themselves with friends and family.
In recent videos from Florida I see a lot of campground vacancies. Campgrounds that normally fill up 250 sites are hard pressed to get fifty. That’s not going to be sustainable long term. So what gives? In this economy a lot of people can no longer afford to do it. Then there are all the International travelers who feel very unwelcome in the US and Florida in particular.
Personally, I’m really enjoying time spent with friends and family. Now that my health is improving I’ve discovered how much I miss winter sports. We live on a lake and I want to do more ice fishing. There are top notch cross country ski trails just four miles down the road. Snowshoeing is right outside my door. All these things are easier on my budget than a trip down south.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the people I used to visit have either died or moved out of Florida. (Okay, Spud, we do miss hanging out with you and yours). I’m not saying I’m never going to do the snowbird thing again, but it’s not in the near term plans.
-Sixbears
Investment in AI is insane. It’s all that’s keeping the markets moving forward right now. The investments are a high stakes gamble. The business is being driven by the relentless desire of companies to eliminate head count.
For the average person this is a lose lose proposition. If (or when) the AI bubble crashes it’s going to take down the economy. A lot of people are going to suffer should that happen. On the other hand, if AI proves wildly successful a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. That will drive down the wages of what few jobs remain.
Then there’s the issue of who’s going to buy the products that AI makes when nobody has an income.
It gets worse. AI uses so much power that it’s driving up electric rates for every rate payer where data centers are built. Power demands are so high that the only way to power the expansion is with nuclear reactors.
On a personal level I recently had a very unsatisfactory interaction with a company’s AI. Just after placing an order I noticed some items had been ordered by accident. No problem I thought, I’ll just click onto customer service and sort it out before it’s packaged and shipped. I thought I was dealing with a person at first. Then I thought I was dealing with an idiot person. Only later did it become clear it was an AI. There was no way to stop the order from being packaged and made ready for shipment.
Fortunately a second mistake saved me from the first mistake. (Sometimes two wrongs really do make a right.) One tiny bit of information had been omitted that was needed before they could ship. The only thing to do was to not give them that information. AI bots were very persistent about me giving that info. Over and over it was emphasized that my order was ready to go. After days of this a human finally canceled my order. Their use of AI for customer service convinced me to never do business with them ever again.
-Sixbears
I’m betting that 2026 is going to be a recession year. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s paying attention. For those who can’t accept reality -I can’t help you.
So I’m curious, with economic downturn baked into the cake is anyone changing their behavior?
Personally I’ve been aggressively paying down debt and avoiding taking on any new loans. This is not the year for buying a new car. Actually, I’m hoping to keep my paid for cars running for a long long time.
More of my food is going to be locally sourced and that includes fishing and hunting. My food storage systems were in pretty good shape -until dietary restrictions became an issue. My lovely wife developed go-to-the-ER food allergies. She can no longer eat about half our dehydrated foods. Another member of our household has issues with a lot of common ingredients. We are adjusting our food storage to compensate.
Now that my health is improving I’ll be able to catch up on house projects. These projects are not to make the house prettier. Instead they are for saving energy and securing backup water supplies. Some upgrades are security related and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Historically, I tend to do well during recessions. That’s probably because I keep my eyes open and act accordingly.
-Sixbears
So what happens when the grocery stores are gone and all your food has been confiscated. (for the greater good, of course) Then you gather up some food that nobody knows about.
Today’s example are sunchokes. They do well with poor soil and neglect. There is one big potential downside to sunchokes. If you plant them once you’ll always have them. When I did up the tubers I take all I can find. Whatever little bits of root that get left behind are enough to them to all come back. I knew what I was getting into so I’m fine with this.
Unlike potatoes you don’t have to dig them all up at the end of the season. In fact, they don’t really keep all that well when you do that. If I am going to store some in the house I’ll slice them thin, blanch them and dehydrate. They add a nice turnipy flavor to soups and stews.
However, there are plenty still in the ground. I could shovel snow off garden. Then dig up the tubers from the frozen ground with a pick, and they’d be perfectly fine to eat.
-Sixbears
I got sick of shoveling snow. Last winter I pulled a muscle in my back that didn’t fully heal until late spring. That sucked.
A good friend has used a Toro battery powered snowblower for a couple of years. It works well for him. They are pretty good machines. However, the EGO seem more optimized for electric power. Not only can the wheel speed be adjusted, the auger and blower section can be dialed up or down. Sometimes the snow only has to be moved a few feet off the path. Other times you might want to yeet it into the next county. I must admit to using the turbo high speed mode to admire the instant snow volcano. Nice.
I’m still recovering from surgery so I’m limited to how much I can lift right now. Shoveling is off the list. The snowblower is like having a powered walker. It’s pretty easy to use and I don’t have to lift anything. Not only that, there’s no straining on a gas engine pull cord. All I do is drop the rechargeable batteries into place and hit the power button.
The big question: do the batteries last long enough? They last long enough for me. The town plow wings a huge snowbank into my parking place. Electric motors have plenty of torque and my machine eats that stuff right up. So far I’m using between 1/5 and 1/3 of the battery capacity. That includes clearing out a parking space in front of the neighbor’s.
The two stage battery powered snowblowers cost more than a gas equivalent. It’s worth it to me due to ease of use, lack of fumes, lower maintenance, less noise, and more fun.
-Sixbears
This feels a lot like the early stages of World War III. There are the obvious signs: sabers rattling, countries invaded, allies treated like enemies. Throw in massive riots and protests around the world. Add a pinch of drought and crop failure. Our world system built upon freedom of the seas and open trade is coming apart before our eyes. Just wait until the 2026 recession takes hold.
While there are parallels, this isn’t the 1930s. Keep an eye on what happens in digital space. The early salvos are not being fired with artillery. This phase involves things like massive data breaches and AI generated deep fakes. Since the modern world relies heavily on computers and the Internet the damage is immense.
When your cards and payment apps stop working you’ll be just another casualty of the opening stages.
-Sixbears
