Apr 30/31 - another round of the same

I know, it's not April 31, but what the heck !

Another round of stay-at-home and then on-the-bike.

I'd run into problems with those new cycling shoes, some of the age-old numbness coming back, so I gave them a rest and then donned them for yesterday's ride. They felt ok until I started down the road, only got a hundred yards and returned.  Instant numbness and pain ... guess these won't work.  I'll clean 'em up and send 'em back.  It seems that there's a bit of an arch in the base of the shoe that exaggerates the arch in my custom footbeds; I'm guessing that's what is triggering the neuropathy.  Since the footbeds were twice the price of the shoes, I'm not going to investigate changing those.

The other activity of the past days has been tinkering with the Linux and W10 VM setup.  Backup, synchronize, alternate boot in case of disaster, all of the above.  I could spend more money - memory, disks, external drives - ultimately new builds, but it just doesn't seem worthwhile.  Before that, I should buy a new laptop.

I was checking to see when I actually built these two machines (duplicate north and south desktops) - and believe it or not, that would be April 2013.  7 years is a long time in electronics-world.  I could update without spending as much money - new motherboard, processor, memory - and leave it at that, since I'm set with hard drives and cases, probably ... but it seems an unnecessary expense.  The existing duplicate setups are in micro ATX cases.  I could repurpose ATX cases that were the prior setups and leave these intact ... but I did that the last time and those ATX case machines haven't been turned on since.  I kept them intact in case of a catastrophic failure.  I need to do some cleanout.  All this old electronics sitting around in closets.  I even have, believe it or not, a machine up north with dual processors - yes, real dual processors on the MB, not dual processors in the chip.  It's loud as hell and I've kept it intact because that's where my Nikon scanner is attached ... but that hasn't been turned on in years either.  It has a firewire connection which I should at least try with the updated machine and see if I can retire that thing-gathering-dust. 

Cassie got a boat ride two days ago; not yesterday.  She walked 7 miles with Sandy; that was enough exercise. 

More glorious weather ahead ... can't complain.

I've been trying to reach out to friends long out of touch and talked to Ched Miller / Raytheon yesterday.  He's still working even though he's older than I.  I hadn't realized that Raytheon has been bought or, merger of equals, with UTC.  He was expecting to be laid off, perhaps, and handed a pot of cash ... but that hasn't happened.  I guess that deal just closed in April.

I exchanged messages with Frank Tetz last night.  I've been giving him regular updates via text but he's in the midst of his pancreatic chemo and is mostly wiped out.  He reads but doesn't often respond.  His markers are low but I guess has one more treatment and then scan for metastasized tumors.  Ugh.  He says that he's down to 128 pounds.  He was never overweight but that's low.   He joked that his next surgery will be a tummy tuck.  His daughter Cindy moved back east to be close and delivers food, goes on out social distance walks, etc.  With the COVID-19, neither Frank nor Nancy wants to be exposed.  That would be the end of Frank ... with no immune system and 87 years old.

So ... today is my off day, biking wise.  It's time for a grocery run.   Soon.