On a More Positive Note

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."

-Anton Chekhov

A beautiful, rainy morning here in Corning. Sixty-four degrees and gloomy.

It's like living in Ireland without the jet lag and the bad roads.

And there's Little Joe peeking through the trees and rooftops, painted on the side of the Gaffer Tower next to the site of the old Corning Glass Works.

Although it looks like a smokestack, it's actually a tower used to create very thin, very long strands of glass they would heat and clip into thermometers. Not sure if they still do that, but I imagine not.

And that photo was taken from the lovely reading nook in our entryway.

Truly a lovely space.

Trying to accentuate the positive in the midst of this national meltdown. In the last day or so I've gone back to just living life and planning as if we'll still be here for awhile.

Last night's triumph was finally, finally getting the two radio operator's licenses required to fly into Canada. We're all legal now, and if my schedule clears a little before it gets too cold P and I will fly the Mighty Columbia to see my buddy Brad in Ottawa, visit the Maritimes, and who knows what else? I started this application process in 2023, and the only reason I finally succeeded was (1) having a couple days open with this trial continuance, and (2) calling FCC customer service not once, but twice to have a nice lady walk me through whatever I was doing wrong in navigating their Rube Goldberg online licensing portal. There's something to be said for human, verbal tech support over some chatbot.

So there's that.

This morning I attended a Zoom call with a nice young man, a finance grad from FSU in the business of selling solar panels, to talk about taking the farm solar. The bid was far less than expected, and he said we didn't need batteries, which run over $10,000 a pop, because Florida allows us to run the power meter both directions, and although we can't sell the power back onto the grid Duke Energy will net out how much we're sending down the wire during peak production as a credit for when we're running a net deficit. When I asked about hurricanes and power storage, his advice was to buy a big Generac, which he doesn't sell, rather than buying batteries from him. Then when I asked about their financing package he advised theirs was too expensive because the banks tack on a 20% vendor fee, so we should go with cash or our own line of credit.

In other words, he didn't try to oversell and add stuff we didn't need or that wouldn't be cost effective. I still need to talk with our son, who's been through this recently at his place, regarding what I'm missing here. Overall, at least at first pass, this looks like a go for later this year.

All in all, a better way to spend the early morning than brooding over the latest insanity emanating from DC and Austin and Tallahassee. This is how we would be living our life if those folks didn't exist. For our own sake in these precious waning days, we need more talk of flights to Canada and solar panels, and less of the other stuff.