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Estate Agile

Transferable skills are not always met with enthusiasm once employed outside their initially-intended realm. However, resistance does not negate their usefulness. In the context of a home, estates are, in fact, businesses that old money maintains. The revenue stream must continue, and so must the maintenance. And without careful management of assets, the estate will fall into disrepair.

I do not own a large estate, and neither am I from old money. My quaint half acre “estate” must rely upon family income, but even so, I too must take care to not exceed that which is available. I also am not in the possession of a butler’s services, nor his accompanying staff. Any work done here must be at the hands of those who reside therein. Neither of these resources are inexhaustible.

Therefore, I have applied my project management background, specifically Agile; or more specifically, Scrum Agile; into managing the eternal backlog of estate-oriented projects. It was not initially well-received by the family, but we need a system.

So I present to you: Estate Agile! Here’s the breakdown:

  • A time period is defined. I chose a month because that’s generally how financial plans align with recurring bills.
  • Each member of the family agrees to a personal time investment for the period, in hours, per week, because most projects are accomplished on weekends.
  • The investment is multiplied by the number of weekends in the time period. This becomes the individual’s total time pool.
  • A financial allocation is defined for the time period.
  • Projects are groomed for priority, personal time investment, and cost estimate.
  • Projects withdraw from each available time pool and the total financial resource pool.
  • Priority is defined as: High = health hazard, structural issue, or otherwise time sensitive, Medium = research required, potential long-term financial/structural/health issue, Low = cosmetic/home repair.
  • If the grooming cannot fully define all parameters, then it is not considered DOR (definition of ready). It is reduced in scope until it can be defined as DOR.
  • Projects are added to the commitment plan based on priority, followed by cost, then personal time commitment. The goal is to maximize the total number of projects for the time period without exceeding either the financial or time pools. If a project does exceed one of the allocations, then the next available project is selected until no more projects can be added to the time period. Unused time and finances do not carry over to the next time period.
  • Anyone can add a project to the backlog for future grooming.
A snapshot of June’s plan

We shall see how successful this is. So far it has, at the very least, curbed the insanity into manageable goals. Rather than forcing myself into project schedules, I can approach actionable items as defined by reasonable time and financial investments. If sanity is all I get out of this, then I’ll consider it a win.

–Simon

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Back Door Huh? Good Idea.

I can’t find a post about this, other than a brief mention elsewhere, but at one point I updated the back door with a modern lock and security film on its window. The frame, having degraded with time, was barely holding the door in place. I corrected the problem temporarily with hardware reinforcements. It worked for the foreseeable future.

Then I got COVID and Liz used my compromised mental state to convince me that the door itself needed replacing, after she tried and failed to strip it of paint for a fresh coat. An indifferent and barely conscious self agreed.

The back door, before I ripped out those ugly curtains.

To be fair, the steel cladding on the bottom of the door had recently warped and was catching. The seal around the frame itself had long since cracked and fallen out. There was definite water intrusion damage, but with so many priorities on a house’s upkeep, the door had remained as deferred maintenance.

So when my bout of COVID finally broke, we acquired a replacement door. It remained in the garage for a week on sawhorses while Liz applied goofy bee-themed designs. I will note at this point that we bought a pre-hung door, not because the included hardware is ever top-notch, but because I had learned the hard way that doors and frames shrink and warp at the same rate, and it’s almost impossible to match up a new door with an old frame. It can be done, but it’s definitely worth the cost/time offset. This lesson was learned with the inner garage door. Frustrating times, those.

Of course, installing a pre-hung door necessitates the removal of the old frame. And I’m glad I went through this trouble, because what lay beneath would not have been seen otherwise.

Mind the gap.

When the former homeowners installed the deck, as with all things they did to this place, they took the quickest and cheapest route to address any hangups. In this instance, in order to support the door base, they attached a piece of particle board vertically against the house frame. This wood was neither rated for moisture exposure nor sufficient to close the gap against nature’s intrusion. The particle board only succeeded in holding moisture against the house, resulting in rot and carpenter ant damage. And to further exacerbate the issue, it also formed a trench on top of the old concrete patio into which yard waste had accumulated.

Fortunately, the house joists were insanely solid, despite the ant damage. I suspect they were hardwood, not the usual pine, so I left them as-is, but not before we added a spray sealant for good measure. Then I layered planks of pressure-treated boards to replace the particle board and support the frame, stacked in a tile formation to prevent water ingress, complete with outdoor caulking on the joints.

That’s not going anywhere.

The door itself, complete with frame, fitted as good as could be expected with only a few angry bouts of profanity. And as per my usual creed for upgrades applied to fixes, the strike plate was replaced with a security version, using 3.5″ screws through the frame and into the joists, in addition to the hinges. And the lock was given a proper upgrade as well.

I guess a beekeeper lives here, who’s also conscientious about weather-proofing and security.

Full sealant applied to the frame, the last external door has finally been addressed.

But not before a bronze bee knocker was added too.

–Simon

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AI on Quantitative Philosophy

I scoff at the idea of AI emulating human interaction. I totally get that it has the potential to replace it, but that’s very different. For example, if I need my ego crushed a little bit, I can talk to my old family. Always eager to play devil’s advocate for no reason other than to destroy someone’s ideas or life philosophy, it rarely matters what the topic of conversation is. Insert an opinion and, however grounded in logic it may be, one of them will think furiously for a rebuttal before I’ve even finished speaking. That’s a human experience that AI can’t emulate.

However, once properly instructed, AI can recreate a similar experience. Here’s my example: I asked ChatGPT to evaluate this site’s Quantitative Philosophy section – something I’m rather proud of. Here’s what it had to say:

Your style is less “academic philosophy” and more a systems-oriented observational philosophy focused on everyday modern life, infrastructure, incentives, and material reality—using practical evidence and comparison rather than abstract ideology.

I think it’s the quotations that annoy me. As if to say: “I know you think you’re being clever and all, but your ramblings are based on your own experiences and therefore flawed as objective truths, limiting your philosophy to the material rather than being scalable to the intangible.” It further went on to tell me that I didn’t coin the term.

Fuck you.

I did adjust the settings to be more direct, so I supposed I asked for it.

This part, at least, seems fair:

Amusingly so, in fact, since the entire bases for my “philosophy” was self-identified as satire built upon observed struggles by people to over-quantify the human experience. The big realization here is, therefore, that despite limitless data aggregation, AI still can’t create itself as a human facsimile with all the bizarre mental conditions that doing so would normally include.

I still win, and I managed to do so without causing an emotional meltdown.

Quantitative Philosophy

I wonder if I could also direct it to sound more condescending?

–Simon

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Ode du Noel

de dendro, ummm arbor?

I’m botching a lot of linguistics here, but that seems fair for Christmas as a concept. We take a bunch of Pagan rituals and mash them together with Christianity and end up with a holiday that just so happens to almost coincide with the winter solstice and arguably not with what historians would agree is Jesus’ birthday. Personally, I think that’s fantastic. I like to enjoy the best of every culture. That was this country’s original directive, before, you know…

So I present to you the Christmas tree! The origins of which are hilarious when asking a Christian, because even in the context of doctrine, the explanations lack both consistency and general reason. But who cares?! It’s fun!

And so it was that during the holiday season of 2006, Liz wanted a tree for our janky little apartment. And with little money to afford such an extravagance, she decided upon a Martha Stewart variety, back when she was contracted with K-Mart. But no blue light special here. No – this thing was dang expensive!

Yet it wasn’t until 2013 that I can find a photo of it. In the era predating smartphones, I was much less likely to document everything, much less take the time to download photos off the camera. But here it is in a time when it possessed needles still.

And here it is in its final setup, 2024.

Over a decade’s worth of ornament collection has hidden the fact that it was almost completely see-through.

And so another era has ended, ingloriously dumped on the side of the road for unlimited trash pickup day, in its original box which was, at that point, more tape than cardboard.

So long tree! May you continue to clog vacuum hoses in decoration afterlife.

–Simon

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Mushrooms (Part 4)

In what appears to be a mushroom theme as of late, here’s a newcomer I haven’t seen before. AI has made identification significantly easier now, taking some of the fun out of the search. Can’t stop what’s coming, I suppose.

Anyway:

Peziza vesiculosa

They grow in nutrient-rich mediums, such as this layer of mulch.

They’re also apparently inedible. Oh well.

–Simon