DaedTech Digest: Our Glorious Return to the Frozen North

I am typing this from home.  Or, at least, I’m typing it from a house that we own.  We’ve always thought of it as our lake house, despite opting to make it our primary residence as far as various municipalities are concerned.

This puts in southwest Michigan, kind of in the middle of nowhere, and definitely in the woods.  And it’s nice to be back!

I was going to do a winter retrospective this week, but I thought I’d tackle the subject of coming home instead.  Maybe I’ll do the winter retrospective next week.

The Trip Home

As I mentioned last week, our last vagabonding stop was the Florida Keys before spending a week in Raleigh to visit a client.  So the final leg of our cold season journey involved a single (long) day trip from Raleigh to here in Michigan.

That was a minor adventure.  The vent system in our Jeep is on the fritz, and it crapped out an hour or so into the trip.

Now, this might not sound like a big deal, but when you’re traveling with cats, you can’t really roll the windows down.  And, even though it was probably 40 degrees or something for you northerners, Monday in North Carolina saw highs around 90.  So we sweltered.

But, as luck would have it, the temperature dropped 50 degrees during the course of that drive, as we headed north and the sun headed west and down.  So, by the end, we were actually cold in the car, with the window cracked to prevent the windshield from fogging, rather than to keep us from dying of heat stroke.

But we made it.

We made it to a house that was more or less in good working order.  Eh, give or take a weird smell from mineral deposits in the water heater and a sagging deck by the lake there.  The place held up pretty well for a house relentlessly attacked by ice-nadoes and bomb cyclones and whatnot all winter.

So we did what anyone used to 80 degree weather, beaches, and sun for the last bunch of months would have done upon arriving in the frigid north.  We made a fire.

Luckily, the cold spell lasted only a day, and now I’m out jogging in the 75+ degree weather to which I am accustomed.  And, I’m doing it back home where I can take power tools to anything in the house that displeases me, rather than calling an AirBNB host to come fix it.

Picks

• On the return trip, Amanda and I started listening to the audio book Ready Player One.  I haven’t finished it yet, but as someone who grew up RPGs and reading fantasy books in the 80s, it’s a real laugh-shot of nostalgia.
• I’ve historically had a… complicated… relationship with Quicken.  I’ve relied on it heavily to keep my books for 2 decades, but its user experience is somewhere between that of the DMV and the business side of a rumble strip.  But as of Quicken 2019, you can sync your finances with their server, giving you the ability to quickly log a receipt from anywhere, as if using Expensify.  I no longer keep receipts in my wallet, and consider this a game-changer.
• Amanda and I visited the Duke Lemur Center while we were in Raleigh.  For something like $25, you can wander around visiting the different lemur exhibits, and there are tour guides stationed everywhere to answer all of your questions and talk about the different animals.  If you like cute cat-monkeys, you will not be disappointed.

The Digest

Now that I’m home, I plan to make good on my threats for more content.  But, since that didn’t apply to the past week, here’s another embarrassingly sparse digest.

• We published a video on the Hit Subscribe Youtube channel, where we talk about the case study website we’re building with Hit Subscribe.
• And, badly in need of a haircut (I would get it literally the next day), I joined Amanda to do some Q&A with common questions for digital nomads.

And, as always, have yourselves a great (holiday, in the US!) weekend.