Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Whatever the case may be. This is Mike, and this is Mike Dell's World number 4 0 1. What is the date today? Oh, it's the March 1, 2025. So, since I haven't had an episode this year yet, happy 2025. So my year got off to kind of a crazy start. Crazy meaning, you know, a little stress, a lot of lot lot of big life change things, happening. So I guess I'll give you kind of the rundown of what's been going on. So I guess that's what
this is for. Thanks for staying for subscribed and, following and whatever else they call it these days. Yeah. I do consistently on, Podcast Insider or somewhat consistently. And, of course, this one's just, once in a while. But like I said, I appreciate you staying subscribed. So I don't know if I said anything in previous episodes, but, my dad was having a little fight with lung cancer. Not a little fight, a big fight. And, ultimately, he lost that fight at the December.
And he was doing reasonably well up until the last probably month or so. Something like that where, you know, he just got to the point where he couldn't do things he wanted to do. He wasn't in any particular pain or anything, so I guess that's, that's a good thing. But, anyway, we were all there when he passed, the whole family. And and, like I said, it was quite peaceful, but, yeah, always hard to take.
He made it to 79. He was, about eight months short of his eightieth birthday, which would would have been at the May this year. And, along with that and, you know, I don't wanna gloss over that, but, you you don't wanna hear, you know, sob stories. You're all familiar with losing people. So, you know, but as an upshot of that, we had a lot more snow this year so far, and, it's still continuing a little bit.
It started snowing, I believe, right around Thanksgiving, and it and it we had accumulating snow just about every day up until last week. So it's been maybe, well, week and a half probably by now, where we haven't had any major snow, at least not enough to have to plow, but I was plowing twice a day. So I go out, plow my mom out, and then, put the tractor on the trailer and bring it in here and plow out us.
And and then, the last couple of times, my sister, over, in Interlochen, which is not too far away. And I've been plowing her out as well. Her snowblower broke, and I haven't got around to fixing it yet. I've been busy with other things, but that was, that was one of the major stressors this this season. You know, it's just snow's good. You know, I don't mind snow, but this year, it was just so frequent. You know, I enjoy going out and plowing
the snow. That was that's fun, you know, with Big snow blower and a cab on the tractor and, you know, you get to to play with power tools. It's fun. But it definitely definitely gets old after a while. But, yeah, I I think now, the rest of the year, if we get any big snow, it's gonna be once in a while. Of course, you know, we could potentially have snow all the way up until June, really, but doesn't usually happen that way.
Usually, by April, it's, it's completely done with the snow, but, there's always a chance. But hopefully not a chance of snow so big that we gotta go plow it. So that's the hope anyway. So along with that, I inherited my dad's pickup truck, and that's come in handy, you know, hauling the tractor back and forth. Of course, my truck was fine too, you know, but, I did end up selling that because, you know, I have two big trucks sitting in the yard.
This one's a 2020 Toyota Tundra that didn't have a whole lot of miles on it. He didn't, didn't drive it a whole lot. You know, I drove it a lot, but he didn't put a lot of miles on it, I guess, is the right way to put it. So, I got a pretty, whiz bang truck. It's, you know, rather he drive it, but, since that's not a thing, I drive it. So that works out pretty good, that way. And then on top of that, about, it was around Christmas time, I guess. Was it yeah. It was around Christmas time.
We had two beagles. We had Benny, who we still have, and Percy, which we no longer have. And what happened was at some point on Christmas, Percy sort of snapped and decided he wanted to kill his brother. And we don't know exactly what happened, but the, vet, you know, the the well, first off, Percy had epilepsy ever since we got him. We got him as a rescue. He was a year old. And, you know, he'd have a seizure about once a month and, you know, wasn't
super terrible or anything like that. And we were just keeping an eye on it, keeping track of it. Never had him on any medication or anything. So, anyway, he just literally tried to kill the other dog. We thought, okay. They just got in a spat and it went too far. You know, Benny got bit up a little bit, you know, his ears, whatnot, and Percy too. You know, they both sorta, you know, just a normal spat. And they've had those before, so I didn't think too much of it. And maybe a week or so later,
they got into another one. And, I mean, this one was terrible. I mean, I, you know, I had to hold back the dogs. And, I mean, they were just completely and utterly trying to kill each other. And so we figured out maybe they just need some time apart. Kathy needed to go down to her mom's house, and so she took Percy. And, so Benny, you know, recovered at home. He had to get his, spot shaved where he, got bit. Didn't have any stitches on that one, but, you know, they had to be shaved and healed.
And so she was gone about a week, ten days, something like that. And we figured, okay. We'll reintroduce them. So we were careful and cut muzzles and reintroduced them, and they got along fine for a little bit. And everything was copacetic. And that night, we're sitting there, and one of the dogs let out a little bit of a growl, and the fight was on. And, I mean, it was that was the worst one. And it was, you know, the the Percy was just trying to kill Benny.
And, you know, at that point, it was like, well, there's not a whole lot we can do. We'll try. So we separated them. So Benny ended up going to the emergency vet and getting stitches, and and he was bit up pretty good. So he lived in my office here, which is a little separate building in my backyard. And we kept them apart, for probably a week. And after that week, we just decided, you know, we we tried to maybe, get some advice and whatnot. There was nothing medically wrong with Percy.
You know, we had two different vets look at him and say, well, they figure something must have just went wrong in his brain because of the seizures maybe. So, anyway, unfortunately, Percy had to be put down. So that was another stressor, because, you know, you don't wanna pass your problems off to another
person. You know? Like, we, you know, brought him back to the the beagle rescue, you know, who knows who else he'd snap on, you know, and and you just can't have a dog that has that vicious tendency around. So that was that was extremely sad and and stressful. You know? And on top of that, we still got the snow happening. I'm, you know, I'm plowing every other day. It's cold. It's you know, snow's building up. It's just, you know, the the stress was just, you know, all all the above. You know?
So that was that's been my, my winter. And now things are calming down somewhat. Like I said, not as much snow removal. The you know, now we don't have two dogs trying to kill each other, and, you know, Benny's all healed up and, doing good and and all that, but, you know, just those kind of things just drive you crazy. You know, and and and there's just you know, you feel so helpless because, you know, you're trying to reason with with a dog. And, you know, just all the stuff happening.
So, anyway, that's that's been my, my year so far. But, it is getting better and the weather's starting to get a little better sometimes. Last week, we had 40 and even one day of 50 degrees and we lost probably three quarters of our snow. Traverse City, let's see what the current snowfall is because we did have some last night. I got it here somewhere. Snowfall information. National Weather Service in Gaylord, Michigan. And let's see. So for Traverse City, season to date, 29.6 inches.
Normal to date is 84.7. So we're a 53 of normal, which normal for the entire season is 101 inches. So we're not you know exactly on a record setting year here because, the record was in 1995, '90 '6 snow season at a 91.2 inches. I guess I remember that. I don't know. It's been a while. But, so, you know, we've had way more snow than than normal, but, again, you know, we had that nice warm up last week, so it knocked down the snow banks to a reasonable level.
And one bad thing though is it melted my driveway down to gravel. So, plowing it isn't gonna be as fun if I have to do it anymore this year. Same out at mom's place. So I guess we'll, we'll make it happen. But, let's see what else has been going on. Of course, you know, I re re how do you put it? Reinvigorated my, flying. Last couple of years I've been flying a, RV 12 IS.
It's a light sport aircraft over at Giving Wings Aviation, and been having a lot of fun with that, but, had to quit, you know, with with the, all the stressors. I I quit flying for a while here, so I'll get back at it this spring when the weather's a little better. Had a few nice weather days, but, I wanna get get back to it. That's a a lot of fun, but, you don't wanna be up there all stressed out. So it's just as well. Kathy's doing fine. Health wise, we're both doing fine. That's
all good. Work's doing fine. Staying busy over at Blueberry. You wanna check us out over at blueberry.com. That's blueberry with no e's. And, of course, they sorta sponsor this show only because I get free hosting since I worked there. So, anyway, so that's just a quick life update. Sorry I'm not more prolific here on this feed, but I do appreciate you guys sticking around. I know I say that every time, but, you know, it is what it is.
And I didn't really wanna get too deep into anything, but, let let me know what's going on in your lives. I know, I know a few of you guys that are still listening, you know, haven't really heard much, haven't really said much, haven't really done much with this. I love getting on the microphone, but, you know, sometimes when you have way too much stuff going on and you don't wanna, you know, don't wanna overshare, That's part of the problem.
You know? And then this time of year, it's always it's always funny because, you know, you've been cooped up, you know, or out in the weather all the time. So the weather's crappy. You can't do what you wanna do. You got all these little projects stacking up and and say, oh, I wanna do x, y, and z. As soon as spring hits, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna go do this other thing. You know, get all these projects done. And then when the time comes, you never get the projects done.
Well, we'll see. I did get one big project done before, winter hit is I ran a conduit from my office out here to the house so I could run, you know, my Internet wires. And, I'm gonna run another power line out here for a ham radio amplifier that requires two twenty. So I'm gonna run another two twenty power line. But I did a three inch conduit, three inch PVC pipe that goes, from my, office out here into the basement.
So and then I put a rope through it that's long enough to where I can loop something on it, pull the rope through to pull a piece of wire through, whatever, or piece of coax or, you know, some cat six cable. That's that's the only thing in it right now. The power line's buried elsewhere, coming out here, but the new two two twenty line's gonna come through the conduit. So I did get that done. That was wasn't a lot of work, but it you know, dig a trench, you know, 30 foot
long trench. And, you know, and at the office side, I had to kinda make a a an s turn and and, you know, put one of those capped, you know, throughput and cut a hole on the side and all that. But, it's it's all done and then now everything's all protect you know, at least my Internet cable, I would well, when I first built this place, I put a supposedly underground cat five cable for the Internet and first year it crapped
out. So then I just ran another cable and it was just laying across the top of the ground. Of course, that one crapped out after a while and didn't look good. You know, it just wasn't a good plan. So now this one I think will will, stay working and even if it doesn't, it's real easy to replace. So I don't have to dig. I don't have to do anything crazy. I just plug the new one in and pull it through, plug it into the router, and I'm good. So a little technology there. But, yeah, so I've got,
gotta paint the house this year. That you know, we've gotta do that every, I don't know. It's been 10 probably since I did it last, but it it needs it. You know, it's an old log cabin. It was painted before I got here, so we just continue to paint. And this time it doesn't need a full paint job like it did before. It just needs, you know, some touch up here and there. And I got a rotten log I gotta replace, which sounds harder than it is. It's just doing it and get that all squared away.
And we had oh, yeah. Another another life issue thing I forgot to mention. We had one of those tent garage things you get, you know, you've seen them that people put in their yard temporarily sometimes or permanently sometimes. We had one of those that we put behind our garage, you know, to store yard stuff in it and just just outdoor stuff that just needed to be out of the way. We had tore off a lean to woodshed sort of thing off the back of the garage and then this replaced it.
I didn't think about it. And, it's snowing and snowing and snowing, and I'm not thinking about that tent out there. You know? So neighbor comes over. She comes over periodically, and she walks in the backyard. And as soon as she closes the gate, I had not it's had nothing to do with the tent collapsing, but, the tent collapsed because it had a crapped ton of snow on the roof, which I just absolutely did not think about. You know, had way more stuff on my brain than that.
So here we've got a collapsed tent in our backyard that's now covered with snow. We got a lot of the stuff out that we didn't wanna leave out there and put in the garage, but, a lot of the stuff is still under the the tarp. But, the worst part of it is we had shovels and rakes and stuff leaned up against the wall. Of course, that poked through the the, tent material, so it's not salvageable. You know? Plus, it bent up a bunch of the poles. It was a pretty heavy
duty thing, but, yeah. You gotta you gotta knock the snow off of it. My neighbor Nancy has the exact one. In fact, we got them at the same time. They had them on sale at Costco at one point. I got one for her and one for me, and we put them up. But she uses it as a garage, but she has this broom out in her out in hers that when it snows, she's, you know, hits the hits the, in from the inside, knocks the snow off because it slides right off. It's, you know, slippery material. And, well,
if we get another one. But I I think I'm gonna replace it with a, actual structure, you know, kinda, you know, carporty looking, but just, you know, something I can park the tractor under and and, you know, lawn mowers and weed whackers and whatever other accoutrement like that that we don't want sitting out in the open if possible or in the garage. I'd actually ultimately like to be able to park a car in the garage. That would be a novel, but, hasn't happened recently. It's okay.
You know, first world problems, I guess. But, yeah, that was another, interesting event this winter, the collapsing storage tent. So, maybe I'll just build a a shed double the size of my office. That might be good enough just to, like I said, park a few, yard implements in and and some light storage. But, we'll see. We'll see. The, you know, lumber prices are are not terrible, I guess. So so I guess that's all that's fit to
report. I figured, why not throw out a quick episode here, let you know I'm still around and, still kicking it. So everybody have a good however long it is, till the next time, stay subscribed, and, go check out mikedell.com for any latest anything. You know, I'm not really on social media either except for x, under m g Dell and on Facebook too. I've been doing these daily fact of the day posts on, x and Facebook. For my birthday this year, I got a calendar that has the fact of the day and
fact of the day. And, well, that'd be a good thing to just post on social. I don't really post any anything too personal there. You know, sometimes funny stuff. Memes. I like my memes. So and, maybe next time we'll talk about politics. Yeah. That'll get everybody fired up. Catch you later.