By 1990, it was becoming a commercial endeavour. Computers were being connected to it at a growing pace. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web. In 1994, the Netscape browser showed the world a whole new way. Billions of dollars poured into stock markets and infrastructure builds. The Internet boom started in software.

Living in Austin at this time, the geek’s dream was to come up with an idea on how to use the Internet to make money and you’d become a millionaire overnight.

At this time, the biggest companies in the world were oil companies like Exxon and industrial like GE. The richest man in America, Sam Walton, had built a chain of stores selling low-cost goods in every big city and small town in America.

In a decade, companies that didn’t exist had pushed these companies into obscurity as every computer in the world was connected to this wired network called the Internet. The biggest companies were now Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. All internet companies.

The term Internet time was coined to describe how quickly things were happening. Those companies went from start up to market leaders in 2 decades.

Then Apple released the iPhone in 2007, and the size of the internet — already connecting hundreds of millions of computers — would grow by 30 times as it moved into every pocket, car, watch and doorbell. By 2018, Apple and Amazon were competing to be the first companies in history to be worth a trillion dollars. Apple got there first in August, and Amazon followed a month later.

Why am I giving you this business history lesson?

Because I lived through that time on the inside of the industry that drove it. I saw what it was like to be part of Internet startups. To see hundreds or thousands of geeks start companies in their garages and bedrooms. 99% of these failed, but a few became legends and made geeks multi-billionaires.

Let’s talk about what I’m seeing today.

Back in 1990, I was in the middle of it. Surrounded by geekdom in Austin. So I saw the internet go viral, as it were.

Being an old retired guy in Abilene in 2026, I’m not quite as connected as I used to be.

“Attention Is All You Need” was an academic paper released in 2017 that introduced the Transformer architecture — the foundation of modern AI. An academic oddity few knew about.

ChatGPT was the first Large Language Model chatbot to reach mass adoption, and was released in November 2022. Four years, kind of like HTTP to Netscape browser.

The top LLM makers, those considered on the frontier of the tech, are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. OpenAI started the race in 2022. In 2023, Anthropic and Google joined in. Together they release 7 major new models that year.

2026 annualised is projected at roughly 20-24 combined major releases — assuming the pace holds. That is roughly a 30% increase in releases per year.

And that’s just 3 American companies. China’s DeepSeek was in the news a year or so ago, but China alone has half a dozen major AI companies building their own models. Add in Meta, Mistral in France, and others, and there are easily a dozen companies racing to build the most powerful AI in the world.

We’re in AI time now.

As an interesting side story of how fast things are moving, in November of 2023, OpenAI’s founder and CEO was ousted by his board on Friday Nov 17th, offered a job leading AI at Microsoft the next day, the whole workforce signed a letter saying they’d leave and join him on Sunday, and the board was removed and he was reinstated by Wednesday.

That’s drama in AI Time.

Anthropic’s CEO said just a few weeks ago — right after they had released two major new models in 2 weeks — that for the last 3 years their revenue had 10Xed per year, growing from roughly $100 million to $1 billion to $10 billion.

In 2020, the biggest companies in the world were Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphapet (Google), and Facebook (Meta). In 2026 the largest company in the world, which wasn’t even in the top 10 in 2020, is NVIDIA. It’s market cap went from #323 Billion in 2020, to $4.4 Trillion in 2026, providing the chips to build AI.

That’s company growth in AI Time.

And we see it here in Abilene. The $500 billion dollar Stargate data center broke ground in June 2024, and by October the next year 200,000 computers were up and running in two 500,000 sq ft buildings, consuming as much power as all the homes in Abilene. And that’s just phase one. Oh, and those 200K computers? NVIDIA GPUs, each roughly 2,500 times more powerful than a tricked-out gaming PC — never mind your five-year-old word processor.

That’s construction and infrastructure in AI Time.

If the Internet boom started around 1990, it took 30 years for an internet company to be in the top 5 market caps. And there were three in 2020, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook. The first AI company to make the top 5 sits at the top six years later.

Unlike the Internet, this tech is making creating more of itself faster.

Those geeks looking for the killer AI app that will make them billionaires? They are doing it with AI tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.

In my lifetime, I’ve lived through at least 3 major tech revolutions. The PC revolution as a child. The Internet Revolution as a young man. The Smart Phone revolution in my middle years.

And now we are in what will probably be the biggest yet, and it will likely take less than a decade.

Top 5 Companies by Market Cap — A Half Century of Change

How much code to you actually write on a daily basis?

“None.”

From all three of them.

They use Claude Code to write their code. There was a fascinating discussion of how many instances Simon runs at the same time (9) and how that might make him Claude’s biggest token user.

Needless to say after 20+ years as a coder, I had to see how this was possible.

My Time With Claude

I’m a writer now and don’t program every day, so I needed a project. Knowing the capabilities, and limitations, of LLM chatbots I feel they could build a story bible from a manuscript. But if you put a 80,000+ word manuscript in ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to tell you what characters were in each scene for the whole book you completely confused output. These models just can’t handle that big of a dataset.

But they can look at a scene and pull out the characters pretty well.

I’d tried cut and pasting each scene into ChatGPT asking for a character list. Then I asked it to keep up with the list, but that had mixed results, and you’re still filling your whole context window with the novel.

My feeling was custom code would be a better solution. Read my Scrivener file (a XML based proprietary format), grab each scene and pass it to an LLM API, have it format the return into something computer parseable, then keep the scenes and character stuff in a data structure.

So I installed Claude Code. Got familiar with it by having it clean up my complicated shell start up scripts. Then I basically told it what was in the previous paragraph.

It wrote 70 files and hundreds of lines of python code, tested it, and committed it to a git repository.

And it work.

It was a first step and we tweaked things. I watched what it was doing and suggested changes, which it did. It was facinating to watch it think. Yes, think. It even said things like “I’m getting off track here, roll back and try something else.”

An Enthusiastic A+ CS Grad

It really was like team programming with a recent grad. They can write the code, but don’t always know what to write.

At one point we had a problem with the ASCII output library it was using messing up Claude Code’s UI when it ran the tests. It fixed it by adding a command line flag to do plain text.

After that was done, I pointed out it had added if statements around every print output. “Wouldn’t it have been better to refactor the code so the output was moved to our own routine, and then handle the if statement there once?”

“That’s a great idea” Which it promptly implemented. (Did I mention its gung-ho).

The I said, “Now Claude, we learned a valuable lesson here about when to refactor. How can you remember that logic so you won’t do it again?”

It was just so weird to be talking to a computer program like a college intern.

Claude Code 2.0 came out last week, and one of the things it added was a way to remember things. Plucky assistant Claude wrote up an “Anti-Pattern” document that included how to recognize when it was going to make the kind of mistake we talked about and what to do instead, including asking for directions.

It wanted to put that memory in just the project’s CLAUDE.md file, but I pointed out this is relevant to all coding, and we put it in the file at the user level of my machine.

Then I opened another terminal window, launched another Claude, and told it to up date my saved and shared start-up scripts to include the Claude.md file.

We live in the future people.

PS: Claude was working on implementing a SQLite database in our analyzer while I was writing this posts.

This takes time, energy and mental focus. Plus it keeps us from doing or picking anything. It also introduces doubt. “Well that’s a pretty good oven mitt, but is it the best? I better spend another hour reading reviews.”

Most of us have heard of the 80/20 rule. You get 80% of your gains from 20% of your efforts. There are lots of corollaries where this 80/20 principle shows up, but for the purpose of this article, let’s use effort and gains.

Not the Best and Not the Worst.

If you aren’t getting any exercise, there are a lot of things in the 80% you could be doing to improve. You don’t need to find the absolute best workout for a body builder, or runner. That’s mastery, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.

Nor can you sit on your ass and do nothing. If you’ve identified you need to make a change, then doing nothing is an outcome. A bad one. There may be worse ones – going from the see-food diet to the candy diet – but generally doing something is better than nothing, and you are moving toward the 80%.

If you need to buy something, a tool or object that fits a purpose – even if that purpose is going to a party for an outfit – we live in a world where you can look at 500 options. You can get people who will tell you the minutia of difference between the regular and pro model.

Just pick the damn phone already.

There’s a point where you know you are not getting crap. Now pick something and get on with your life. Sure you may not have the greatest phone currently on the market, but you’ve got something that will more than meet your current needs.

I’m jumping around here, from dresses to hammers to phones. That’s on purpose because this excuse of maximization is everywhere. Their were two pies at my birthday party and someone could spend 10 minutes trying to pick the best one. Heck, choose both in that case.

There are other things we tell ourselves that push us to maximization. I recently upgraded my iPhone. Used to do this every time a new one came out, but then they just got a little bit better each time, so I generally will skip at least a generation. Then you have to pick a model, and I firmly believe they have voodoo shaman’s creating feature sheets and price points to make each level just enough better you think you need it. You need the best one. You don’t. When you hear yourself asking, “Is this one the best one for me?” remember this article. You’re maximizing.

Finally, Mastery.

Yes, in life there are times where you need the best. Figure out what those times are for you. They aren’t the same for everyone. I’m a novelist and I need the best writing software. Sure I could use a paper and pencil, but those 20% gains at the top of the scale can make a difference here.

A master knows what they need.

I just got an airbrush. Never used one before, and have just started painting minis. I watched all the pros videos where they compared different brushes. But I’m not a pro. I need something that doesn’t suck and won’t break the third time I fire it up. I bought my airbrush at Harbor Freight, and it’s fine for a beginner. When I hit its limits, then I’ll know what I need for an airbrush to be better or even, shudder, the best.

In the end I hope this article helps you notice when you are spending too much time on finding the best, and gets you to find something good enough. Then you can use your time, energy and mental focus on mastering the things that are truly essential.

P.S.

After writing this and discussing the concept with some friends I sat down to do the thing you do in the bathroom and grabbed The Pocket Guide To Action by Kyle Eschenroeder from The Art of Manliness. This is collection of short articles I find myself going back to. I gave to to my boys for Christmas. When I opened it there was an article entitled Satisfice, p 58. Where he discusses Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon postulation there are Maximizers and Saticficers. Guess which is happier?

1. I still believe Jesus is the Son of God.
2. Perception colors everything.
3. Feeling “hot” or “cold” has little to do with air temperature.
4. To make money as a writer you need more books.
5. The value of a thing is not determined by how hard you worked on it.
6. Value is set by the consumer.
7. 60 isn’t that old, but don’t kid yourself, its still up there.
8. You’ve got to fight the fight.
9. It’s okay to be pretty.
10. You aren’t a grown up until your make something of yourself, or at least live on your own.
11. You won’t make something of yourself just doing what others tell you.
12. People should probably give more fucks.
13. We outsource so much of our thinking, and that is ok.
14. Pick your oursourcers intentionally.
15. Intentionality is the key.
16. Doing something a little everyday is more important than doing something a lot once.
17. Things have changed.
18. WordPress isn’t as easy as it used to be.
19. Software has lost its way.
20. Apple used to be all about simplicity. Now its overly concern with security.
21. The amount of online security a normal person needs is not that much.
22. Social media only controls you if you use it as an outsource. (see 15)
23. Or you spend too much time on it.
24. Don’t believe crazy things.
25. I guess you need to be able to discern crazy.
26. Know how when a source says something about a topic you know and its dumb? That’s probably true of topics you don’t know.
27. People who don’t understand the stock market shouldn’t try to use it for divination.
28. “I read a study” has replaced “scripture says”.
29. “I read a study” is used just as badly as “scripture says”.
30. People generally pick studies to confirm their bias.
31. Just like scripture in the past.
32. I learn most of how to question sources from studying exegesis.
33. Things aren’t true just because a scientist or a doctor says them.
34. We probably aren’t as right as we think we are.
35. I watched a documentary doesn’t make you sound smart. I read a book on the other hand…
36. Your kids are influenced by you, but not as strongly as you think.
37. And probably not in the areas you think.
38. There are 1000s of ways to be a bad parent.
39. But only a few to being a good ones.
40. And the later doesn’t guarantee “success”.
41. Stop beating yourself up.
42. Treat yourself like you’d treat your best friend, not your worst enemy.
43. I’m starting to doubt autocorrect. I seem to spend a lot of time correcting it.
44. ChatGPT isn’t evil.
45. AI chatbots will rapidly replace Internet search.
46. The implication for online advertising is profound.
47. Google enshitified search with advertising.
48. Coffee tastes like liquid dirt, and RedBull tastes like sweet tarts.
49. Developers need to count the number of clicks to do something again.
50. Please give users preference again.
51. My life has been easy.
52. Tragedy is not evenly distributed.
53. I don’t think it comes in threes either.
54. It is easier to write when you know what you are writing.
55. Writing is rewriting.
56. Though I don’t think it has to be and isn’t for experienced people.
57. Seems the change happens around 6 novels.
58. Your social network – those people you interact with regularly – are the key to success and happiness.
59. The bible isn’t easy intentionally.
60. I should take #1 more seriously.

Rereading the 54 at 54, I think I was deeper then.

Ez loved people during a life of blessing punctuated with hardship. He was born in poverty that few in America can even understand, in Bombay, India. His single mom had the chance to remarry after losing a child to starvation, but the new husband didn’t want Ez. In a country of a billion people, most of whom aren’t Christians, Ez’s mom was. The hand of a loving Savior made a way. A missionary reached out to a church in America, asking if anyone would adopt a child.

Our parents, said yes they would adopt a second son, and Ez came to the US when he was 7 years old. Compared to the life he would’ve had in India, this was a dream. But it wasn’t without challenges.

Ezra was the only person I ever met who loved Basic Training in the Army. When I was young I tried to join 3 of the military branches with my father trying to dissuade me. When Ez told him he was going to join the Army after High School, Al said, “Sounds like a good idea.”

He excelled in training, finishing the top of his class and being assigned as a clerk to the headquarters unit of the Ranger Battalion in Hawaii.

Ezra cared about people and wanted to make them like him. Which was both a blessing and a curse. People pleasing can give you relationships, but not help you keep them. He manage to win the love of three women, but didn’t make those relationships last. They still remember him with varying levels of fondness. He cared for and did his best for his step kids.

The center of Ez’s universe was his daughter Emilie. From the moment she was born, Ez’s entire world revolved around her. He worked tirelessly to provide for her, to give her the best life possible, and to be the best father he could be.

As Emilie grew older, Ez’s pride in her only intensified. He marveled at the intelligent, compassionate, and strong young woman she was becoming. He often spoke of her accomplishments with a beaming smile and a sparkle in his eye, telling anyone who would listen about his amazing daughter.

Though Ez faced his own struggles and demons throughout his life, Emilie was always his guiding light. She gave him purpose, motivation, and a reason to keep pushing forward, even in his darkest moments. In many ways, Emilie saved Ez’s life. While he was taken from us too soon, I fear it would have been sooner if Emilie had not been here to give him a reason to carry on.

My relationship with my brother was as full of ups and downs as the rest of his life. When he first arrived in the US at the age of 7, I suddenly had a new sibling to contend with. I was all in favor of sharing everything with my brother, until I had to. Then we bickered constantly over just about anything we could think of. As we entered our teenage years, the dynamic shifted. In high school, we drifted apart, occupying different social circles and rarely interacting beyond the occasional grunt of acknowledgment in the hallways.

After high school, our relationship settled into a sort of affectionate indifference. We’d see each other at family gatherings during the holidays, exchanging polite small talk and catching up on the surface-level details of each other’s lives. But beyond that, we didn’t make much effort to stay in touch. It wasn’t that we disliked each other – we just didn’t have much in common at that point, and our lives were pulling us in different directions.

In the last 3 years since our dad died, we had a fairly close relationship. We dealt with our father’s estate as partners, with only mutual care and respect. Afterwards, we made it a point to call each other regularly to talk and visit despite the distance between us. We went on a spiritual journey together at a men’s boot camp, bonding us as spiritual brothers as well had physical ones. In the end, I have no regrets about things left unsaid or things I should’ve done. Undoubtedly, my last words to Ez were “I love you” because that’s how we ended every call.

So I shall end this tribute as well. “I’m going to miss you Ez. I hope you know the full extent of my love for you now in eternity. I love you, brother.”

A lot has happen.

A crazy amount.

Not the least of which is I bought a franchise for Osteostrong and opened a brick and mortar wellness business. Technically a Biohacking business. Osteostrong helps people increase their bone health in 15 minutes once a week.

Yeah, that’s the elevator pitch.

This thing has been all consuming for over a year now. We opened for business the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Before that there was build out, which involved contractors and therefore was crazy. There was also pre-sales, which involved talking with lots of people on the phone and trying to convince them to buy a membership.

Then we opened.

Running a business like this is totally different from any of the many other businesses I’ve started. You actually have to be there at the business. I have employees and do payroll. There is also actual revenue that has to be looked at and I have to determine if the business is going to run out of money before it is profitable.

Luckily we have grown to a razor’s edge profitability. Took about 6 months, and there have been down months since them, but we’re not going to go broke anytime soon.

Why Osteostrong?

Here’s our Origin Story as I’ve told it lots of times.

It all started with Tony Robbins’ book Life Force, in January 2022. That was the first time I ever heard the word Osteostrong.

Really I guess it all started in October 2020, when my wife Suanna fell and broke her hip. Ambulances, emergency surgery, weeks in rehab during COVID. Not a fun time.

Which is why of all the things in Tony’s book, from stem cell healing, to regrowing hair for bald men like myself, Osteostrong caught my attention. I said to myself:

“If this really works, it needs to be everywhere. Especially Abilene.”

That started our journey, first to find out if it worked, and then to do something we’d never done before. Open a brick and mortar, health and wellness business.

We joined the nearest Osteostrong to Abilene, the one in Colleyville. This meant a 3 hour drive each way to go to our sessions. Luckily you only have to go once a week. But we did that for months.

About 8 weeks in, I was convinced it worked.

Obviously this wasn’t because the Mrs had another DEXA scan and seen bone growth. That’s way too short a time for those results. Rather, I put on 8 lbs of lean body mass.

You see at the same time I was going to a doctor who required me to get on a fancy body composition scale. I’ve been weighing myself with a scale that gives me body fat percent for years, but this was a whole other level of accuracy and specificity. I’d known my percent body fat had been the same for awhile, but my weight had gone up. That meant I wasn’t gaining fat, it was something else. The doctor’s scale confirmed this.

Now that I knew Osteostrong could deliver incredible results, I decided to come out of retirement and buy an Osteostrong franchise. Anyone who has opened a business knows it is a process. Add in a business that requires finding a location, doing build out, getting equipment delivered and installed, dealing with supply chains in the post-COVID era, contractors…well, you get the point. It ain’t easy.

But I kept telling myself, “Osteostrong needs to be everywhere, especially Abilene.”

I was determined to do it as quickly as possible and spent day after day pushing everyone from Osteostrong corporate to my contractors and electricians to get things done. I experienced more stress than anytime in my life, but I was determined. I was going to get this thing open.

And we did. We opened the Tuesday after Thanksgiving for those people who needed a solution to their osteoporosis that didn’t involve drugs with horrible side-effects, and believe in us to provide it. There were literally wires hanging from the ceiling and half our modalities weren’t there, but we opened.

That’s when lives started to change.

I set down to write a blog post about my recent long discussion with ChatGPT about time travel, but that will be for another day. Hopefully in less than 18 months.

On February 14, 2022, I release my first novel, The Adventures of Space Girl Red on Amazon in eBook format. It was a long time in the making.

The post I wrote when I started writing explains what I was thinking at the beginning. After a year or more of write, re-writing, editing, re-writing some more, knowing it was broken but not how to fix it, beta readers, and finally shipping the stupid thing, it went live.

Here’s the final blurb for the book.

Raised on a world populated by women, Red has finished her training. Now she’s officially a Space Girl, agent of change for the women of Home, complete with signature flying saucer and rayguns. Join her as she discovers the difference between training and the real world.

Red encounters a world of plant people plunged into darkness, and her childhood rival won’t return their light. This is the real world and the games she used to play with Space Girl Blue have consequences. When those games collide with the God King Bruno’s desires, she learns it isn’t enough to be a bad ass Space Girl. Sometimes you need help from your friends.

The Adventures of Space Girl Red immerses you in a retro sci-fi world with a modern sensibility. Flying saucers, rayguns, monkey space pilots, cookie-making elves, and dance contests are transformed into gritty – but amusing – reality.

“This is super fun, and most of all, it’s super cute. It’s like The Powerpuff Girls plus The Jetsons.” – H.C.H. Ritz, Author of Absence of Mind.

I’ve actually written two more books over the intervening years. A sequel telling the story of Space Girl Green, which is a cross between The Wizard of Oz and the modern WestWorld with Green as Dorothy. But the plot of Oz is broken – the climax happens in the center of the book – so my story is broken. I recently tried to go back to it, but side characters keep taking over.

The other book I wrote is a prequel, working title Growing Up Rainbow. It tells the origin story of all the Space Girls in Rainbow Capricorn and takes place on Home. I like it a lot more. There is a lot of emotion in it. But it too is unfinished. I might even make it into a part of Space Girl Orange or Yellow’s adventure, doing a jump backward and forward in time.

Writing it hard, but fun.

Which I should get back to and not get distracted by blogging.

Creator God, you show us the greatest artistry.
You turn light into sugar and trees,
In an ironic twist worthy of a master poet,
The waste of this transformation is the oxygen we breath,
Show us your ways.

Creator God, your spirit inhabited the crafts people of Israel.
You taught them, and watched over them, as they created your house,
They smithed metal and carved wood into forms worthy of your presence,
They wove tapestries for walls, and sewed costumes for those serving before you.
Give our craft your purposes.

Creator God, when you sent your Son you chose a maker as his step father.
You could have selected a politician or priest but you picked a carpenter.
His skills supported his family from Bethlehem to Egypt and Nazareth.
His faith raised a boy to a man who saved us all.
Make us makers worthy of your Son.

Creator God, your servants have prayed while making for millennium. 
Your gospel went to the Gentile world through a tent maker.
Tailors and Dressmakers. Blacksmiths and Potters. Your followers have been all.
They asked for guidance while making.
Guide our craft.

Creator God, these maker’s prayed while they worked.
Prayers not only for their craft, but their families, churches, and leaders.
While they worked they lifted up the troubles of their world.
You heard them and answered.
Give us your prayers as we work.

Creator God, your glory surrounds us, today and forever.
Your creation confronts us in the sky and the forest.
In the beauty of how you knit together our lives.
In the ultimate glory of your kingdom on earth and heaven.
May your way, be our way, for ever and ever.

Amen.

The Story Behind the Story

A few years back I was shining my shoes, and I wasn’t very good at it. I was practicing a more conversational style of prayer, trying to just talk to God in all contexts. I asked him for help with this mundane task. Then I realized he not only knew everything there was to know about shining shoes, from the molecular composition wax to the proper hand motions of the shiner, but he had be in the presence of millions of shoe shiners. His followers practiced this skill for a long as there had been shoes in need of shining.

This morning while walking and contemplating how to write my NaNoWriMo project, this prayer came to me. The same spiritual guidance leading my wordcraft for a novel, was used to craft a prayer.

I came home and wrote this. A little like poetry, though I’m not poet. A formal prayer written for others to pray, something I rarely use and have never written before.

Such is walking in the Spirit as a Disciple of Yeshua.

Photo by Mikita Yo on Unsplash

What this picture doesn’t give you is an idea of just how tall this thing is. I could tell you that the booster shown is 130 meters tall, but I’d lose most of us Americans right away. If I said, 230ft, you’d start getting it. But in this post I wanted to give some perspective on that height.

I live in Abilene, Texas, a small city in West Texas. These are the four tallest buildings in town.

What this means is that if the Super Heavy Booster were sitting in Downtown Abilene, it would be the second tallest building.

If you’ve been following SpaceX’s recent test launches in south Texas, you may have seen this being shot up to the edge of space and landed again:

This is Starship. It’s what will carry people, and it is no small thing. It is 50 meter, or 160ft all by itself. Which means all by itself, it would be the 3rd tallest building in Abilene. It is taller than the First Financial Building and the Winsor downtown.

And while it can take itself to orbit and back, that won’t get it to the moon. So the Super Heavy Booster was created to carry it. Starship will be stacked onto the top of the Super Heavy giving a total height of 130 meters or 390 ft. Making it much taller than the Enterprise Building.

According to Google, a building story is about 14ft on average. Which makes Starship 11 stories. Super Heavy 16 stories, and together almost 30 stories tall.

Just wanted to give some perspective to my Abilene friends.

The reason this week, and really last week was the beginning, has been the most chaotic is because everything happen at once. On Friday we had 4 different trades people working on our house at the same time, and an auto insurance adjuster here at the same time.

Let’s take them in order.

Sprinklers

Our house is run on a lot of lore, rumor and hearsay. There have been sprinkler heads in our yard since we moved in. Rumor had it there was a well attached to our house, and there was this idea that the sprinklers, back when they worked, ran off it. But the well doesn’t work anymore.

We had Loren come out from Extreme Exteriors to evaluate the system. I had an idea there where two boxes that might contain the controls, or valves, or something for the sprinkler system. He looks in those boxes and then digs the dirt out of the one in the front yard. Low and behold there are two valves in there. He turns one and water comes shooting out of our yard. The sprinkler system actually is functional.

Well somewhat functional. There were multiple places where the heads were completely missing and we had “gushers”, the technical terms for a column of water. One of the four valves was hard enough to turn Loren didn’t want to force it until he knew he could turn off the water to the whole house if it broke. Now we knew there was a system there and they gave me a quote to get it working and all smartified.

That was in April. It wasn’t until last week that Loren was able to come out and actually start work on it. It took a week and they were just finishing up when the roofers started on Friday.

New Roof

We’ve had leaks off and on since we bought the house. Insurance adujsters have been out and assure us the roof has no hail damage. A few years back we got estimates to replace it, but those 5 figure numbers kept us from doing it, but this year we decided to bite the bullet and get it done.

A note about our house. We have a flat roof and no attic. The roof we had was tar and gravel, which no one uses anymore, even on commercial buildings. So when we got the roof replace we’d be replacing it with something else.

Tar and gravel really is what our roof has on it. Which also mean not only could we have water leaks, we had tar leaks. Specifically in the garage, where you are seeing the actual boards on the bottom of the roof. On top of those – what look like 1×6″s – there should be plywood decking. The on top of that there is tar and gravel. When it gets hot in the summer, that tar turns to a liquid and seeps between the decking boards and the 1x6s. And onto our cars in long thin strings of tar. There is supposed to be some other kind of barrier between the tar and the decking – plastic or at least felt.

“There is supposed to be….” could be our house’s motto.

We told the roofer we wanted to do the roof in March, and they ordered the stuff to do it, but needed 7 days of no rain the forecast. So they were finally able to start last Friday.

Then things really got crazy.

On Friday they are scraping off the tar and gravel over my office with a tool that looks like an old time plow. It is a racket, but I’m still able to work. Got my window unit AC in my office on.

The the AC goes off. I try to turn it back on but there is no power. Muttering to myself, I go out to the breaker box and sure enough it is tripped. I reset it.

There are sparks inside my breaker box.

OK, that’s not good. Talk to them and they had hit the power line running across the roof while working, which did something.

“The line is supposed to be up off the roof, but it’s just laying on it.” Its not up to code, and its dangerous. Call my electrician to come out and look at it.

Then I have a Zoom call with a buddy and near the end of it I hear a bank and a sudden rushing noise. It is coming from the closet that is in my office that holds the hot water heaters.

More cursing, and I go to see if they’ve caused a water leak. No. Worse.

The gas pipe that feeds the hot water heater is broken at a joint. There is much rushing around and the gas to the whole house is turned off. Then windows and doors are opens to get it out of the house.

“The gas line that runs across the roof is supposed to be 6 inches off the roof, and it is supposed to be secured where it goes into the roof and down.” Push or pull on it on the roof and you apply pressure all the way down to where it connects in a weird set of turns and angles near the bottom of the water heater.

Now I’ve got a call into my plumber.

And it is around 10:30am now when the appraiser is supposed to come out and assess the damage to Sweetie from…

Hit and Run

On the previous Saturday the Mrs and I had run away to Ft Worth. We were at a fancy outdoor mall doing a little shopping and eating. She’s moving a little slow still from her hip injury and I offer to go get the car and drive back to where she is.

A few minutes later I send the text, “Walk on down, I’ve been hit.”

I’d gotten to the car and eased back out enough to get the rear view camera where I could see traffic. Not clear so I stop. Then I hear crashing as a large fast moving silver pickup clips the back corner of Sweetie.

And keeps on going, never to be seen again.

This is getting long, but I filed a report online with the FWPD, but am never going to hear anything back from them. File a claim with GEICO.

On the good news side, GEICO calls on Monday and says since it was a hit and run, it can be covered under my uninsured motorist instead of my collision insurance. This means I have a smaller deductible, it doesn’t count against my insurance, and they will give me a rental car which isn’t in my collision insurance.

Sweetie is going to Tesla to get fixed July 7.

Finishing up Friday.

Really it is amazing I’m not even through the first day of this story.

Electrician says the wire is actually bare in the breaker box. This is because it was pulled and scraped where it enters the box. But it also points out the whole thing needs to be redone. But he can patch the wire for now and we can do it when the roof is finished.

Plumber comes out and explains how the piping in the closet is weird. While there the plumber shows him the roof line and they agree to add some pipe at the other end to raise the gas line up over the roof. A few hours later the pipes are fixes. The whole system leak tested. Carbon Monoxide detectors are given – turns out both the plumber and the roofer have to insure I have them according to code.

By Friday evening the new roof is on the office part of my house. They plan to comeback the next day and work some on Saturday.

Of course it rains Friday night.

The Week Begins

A few more things about the house. It has two parts/roofs, on slightly higher than the other. The lower, what I’ll refer to as The Addition, is where our garage, utility room and my office are. The rest I’ll refer to as the Main House. The Main house has central heat and air and it has a pier and beam foundation. The Addition has gas heaters built into the walls, and a old, but powerful window AC unit in the office. The AC unit isn’t in a window, not it is in a custom hole in the wall.

It is very loud and it was suggested to me that I get a mini-split to replace that AC. So I asked my VA to get some AC people to come out and bid it. There are 5 appointments this week. Not including the AC guy who is moving the central unit on the Main House so they can roof under it.

The Central AC Unit

In the center of the Main House there is a large wooden box about four feet high, ten feet long, and 6 feet wide. The AC Unit sits at one end and the ducts go into this box.

But what is in this box? Well the roofers need to redo the ‘roofing’ on the top of the box and reflash around it so water won’t get inside. So they had to open it up.

I’m really starting to dread the words, “have to open it up”. Wen’t not finding anything good when we do that.

This box had a plywood top that covered most of it, but along one side they had just stretched the base layer for the roofing and added tar and gravel on top of it. Sigh.

When they open it up they find at least 10′ for ducts for the AC with multiple corners in it. The actual AC Unit is at one end of the box, and the entrances to the house for the main duct and the return are at the other. The ducts themselves are covered in tar and not actually metal on the inside. The whole box has spray insulation blown into it.

We call the AC guy back out when we discover all of this has no purpose. After a lot of discussion we decide just to remove that whole box and place the actual AC Unit right at the openings, which will hopefully make the AC Unit a lot more efficient. So the roofers start tearing it down and cutting off the pseudo duct work.

Then there is a crash inside the house.

The internal ductwork where the cool air enters is in a closet in our hallway. Appearatly the only thing holding it to the other ducts – both on the roof and in the house – were cloth straps. There were no screws holding anything together. Not tape or sticky anything. When they removed enough of the upper duct work it just fell off.

When the roofers started working near these new openings they found a powerline for the AC coming out of the house. It was held in place with a block of caulk about two inches deep and four inches square. When they cut that off they found the actual line had bare copper exposed to the outside. We also couldn’t figure out which break was powering it either.

So another emergency trip for the electricians to make sure the power was off to this bare wire on our roof and in our walls.

That turned out to be a Federate breaker-box I’d never know did anything. I mention the brand name because if you mention it to an electrician they will immediately tell you to remove it. It’s disconnected now and we’ll have to rewire from the modern main breaker-boxes when we reconnect the AC Unit.

So we have no AC. That was expected for a day or so while they roofed under the unit. Now it will be at least till next week when the AC people can get back out to create new custom duct work for the new placement of the unit.

Well at least we don’t live in Arizona where the temps are 120. Only 98 or so in Abilene. Also the house has handled it pretty well, and I’m sleeping in my office which is cold at night.

When all this is over we should have a better roof, better AC, a cool sprinkler system, and all around a better house.