December 29, 2024
The year is ending in two days. There are several things I’m looking forward to in 2025. My last loan payment will be at the end of February. In March, I’ll have been at Disney for 20 years. That will mean my vacation and sick time earned will go up. When I turn 55 in July, I can retire at Disneyland and have a lifetime pass to get into the park. I can’t realistically retire at that point, but the possibility is there. Sometimes, just knowing that the possibility is there is enough. The only thing standing between retirement and me is reality.
December 30, 2024
Today was the deadline for fixing the exterior of our house. Patti went down to the mobile home office and talked to them. They said that as long as we continued to work on the house, we were fine. She said they would still inspect it today, but we still had more time. I asked if Patti asked what the consequences would be if we didn’t do the repairs. She said they would just hire someone to do the repairs and charge us for it. Besides not knowing whether that is true, we don’t want that because of the expense and not wanting a bunch of strangers around the house. We can do the repairs needed, and we already have the supplies for them. All we need is time.
January 26, 2025
This is my first Thoughts paper of 2025. Why did it take me this long to write my thoughts in 2025? That’s a good question, but I don’t have a suitable answer. The only thing I can think of to explain it is being busy. I’m busy at home and at work. I don’t have downtime like I used to. Patti and I are continuing to work on the house. (Future note: In my last article, I talked about building our shed and disposing of the old one. This is where you find out about the actual timeline of events. I was honest about it not actually being on the day I said, so you can calm down about it.) We’re most of the way to building our new shed. We should be able to finish it on my next days off. Of course, we also must dispose of the old shed. After that, we can get back to painting the house. They came and looked at the house and gave us an extension until mid-February. My dominant state of being these days is tired.
I’ve worked quite a bit on a song I never finished. It’s called The Wedding Song only because I play the wedding march in the song on electric guitar. The main part of the song is something else, but I knew the lyrics of the song would be about when Patti and I got married on June 14, 1997. The recording I had of it was just the instruments, but I always sang along with it when I played it. I found out that I recorded the basics of the main voice, but I didn’t include it in the recording because it was so bad. I cleaned it up and created a harmony from the main vocal. The sound was much improved, but it was still missing something.
I saw a program online that used artificial intelligence to create artificial singers. You put in notes and add words for the voice to sing. I worked with the updated recording of the song and added several backup singers to it. This is something I’ve thought of doing for many years, but I’m finally doing it. But wait, there’s more! I could put samples of my singing voice into it and my AI voice could sing along with the other voices. So far, it’s close but not great. The voice sounds like me (which is both a good and bad thing), but the interface is not intuitive or easy to work with. I created actual lyrics for the song and I’m slowly getting artificial me to sing them.
How is my throat doing these days? Thanks for asking. It feels better than it used to feel. I can sing and it doesn’t feel instantly painful in the back of my throat. There is still a general scratchy feeling in the back of my throat most of the time, but that is mainly because of allergies. I still have four cats around me most of the time at home and I’m discovering new foods that I’m allergic to. The other day, we had friends over and Patti made meatball sandwiches. Knowing my allergy to wheat, which I recently found out about, I wasn’t going to eat them. I ate them anyway and couldn’t breathe later that night. The giant chocolate chip cookie I helped finish didn’t help. My casual wheat-eating days are over.
Thoughts from Life 
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