Goals for 2023

I never really make “resolutions” but I do always think it’s good to have goals for the year. Melanie asked me what my goals were on New Year’s Eve and I had to pause because I hadn’t put much thought into it. But it’s good to have them! So here are a few for the year: Fitness I always like setting some Time & Distance goals in Garmin In addition to those goals, I also plan to get back to some general strength training. I’d like to do an hour per week which seems very reasonable. I used to go …

2022 Year in Review

I haven’t done one of these in a while! But I am trying to be a more frequent blogger so it’s good to get back into this. This year was…crazy. So I’ll just get right to it. Home Renovation Complete(ish) In January of 2021, we started a massive home renovation. Ezra was 17 months old. Most people didn’t have access to COVID vaccines yet. We expected to be back in by the end of 2021. That didn’t happen. September 5, 2021 we were pretty far along when Hurricane Ida came through New Orleans. We were very fortunate in that we …

Home Automation with OpenHAB

Home Automation is something that has always fascinated me. Just the thought of my house doing things to make my life a little better always seemed like “the future”. So about 7 years ago, I started seriously looking at my options. When I started off, I went with Z-Wave as an automation protocol and decided on Homeseer as my hub. Both of those decisions really worked out as I was able to run my house with some really great automations. But I’ve always kept my eye on what other platforms are out there and when Homeseer released v4, I took …

Joining the Fediverse!

With all of the craziness over at Twitter, I decided to migrate myself off of that platform. Mastodon has been there, quietly, in the background and obviously this has pushed quite a few people to explore it more seriously. And from what I’ve seen, it’s been an excellent alternative! I already dropped Facebook years ago when they couldn’t (or really wouldn’t) get their racism under control. Twitter at least felt like it was making an effort. But it definitely is not anymore. So I created an account over at mstdn.party (@tierran) to learn a bit more about the Fediverse. It’s …

Ironman 70.3 Chattanooga 2021

Wow, has it really been almost 2 years since I had a real race? My last triathlon was shortly before my son was born in 2019 and I had planned to take that fall off. The only race I had after that was the Miami half marathon in February of 2020 but Melanie and I run that as a fun run and not a race most years. Then, of course, COVID hit and all of the races I had planned last year were cancelled/rescheduled. When Chattanooga got cancelled, I took the option to defer to 2021, hoping the pandemic would …