This week was unusually heavy on socializing with friends who are also past coworkers (days 88 and 89). I can only take so much of that, and I have hit my socialization quota for a while. It was really great though, and I feel much more inclined to do that now without work draining me.

The other big event of the week was a trip to the mountains to look at the area where my friend wants to hunt. I did some mountain biking to see how bad the road leading there is(day 87).

FIRE: Day 85 (9/21)

I slept great last night and had a good day at the gym. I took BC to the skate park to ride his scooter after that.

In the afternoon I emailed back and forth with my friend about elk hunting. He wants to go to a place that neither of us can drive to. Last year he went there and had to hitch a ride with his son’s friend who has a more extreme off road vehicle. I don’t want to do that, so I don’t know what I’ll do.

The smoke detector in the kitchen keeps tripping when anything hot comes out of the oven. I ordered a new one to replace that.

FIRE: Day 86 (9/22)

Spanish, Gym, a little tech.

The new smoke detector came so I installed that.

I made plans to go check out the hunting area tomorrow, assuming the eight hour round-trip drive doesn’t deter me in the end. My plan is to mountain bike up the road that is apparently undriveable. I’ll at least be able to tell my friend at that point that there’s no way I’m driving my Crosstrek up it.

FIRE: Day 87 (9/23)

This morning I made the long four hour drive to the area that my friend wants to hunt.

In the last half mile of the drive before I parked the car and got on the bike, the back passenger wheel of the Crosstrek started making this awful squealing/grinding noise. It sounded like bearings going bad, and I was worried that I wouldn’t get back out of there. I was about 12 miles from the nearest town. I had to force myself not to worry about it, and to proceed with my bike ride.

The ride was brutal. This is my old mountain bike which is fine, but it’s not an e-bike. I forgot how hard it is to human power a bike, especially uphill over bad terrain.

My goal was to evaluate the road to see if the Crosstrek could make it. It’s the worst road that I’ve seen in my 13 or so years of hunting. If I drove the Crosstrek perfectly, I might make it up. If I made any wrong move I would damage the car or get it hopelessly stuck. I won’t be driving that road, and I don’t know what that means for the hunt.

The way back down was fun ripping through ruts, over and around rocks. I did have a near tragedy though when I got thrown from my bike. It was so fast that I’m not totally sure what happened. I think I was trying to get up out of a rut at pretty high speed and got tossed over the handlebars. My head and left shoulder hit the ground hard.

In the split second after I hit the ground I was trying to place a specific sensation, and it was the feeling of my head impacting with a helmet over it. My helmet has an indentation where I guess a pointy rock or something sharp hit it. If I didn’t have a helmet I’m not sure I even make it off the trail. I had about a mile left at that point.

Even with the helmet on, my bell was rung and I felt spacey the rest of the day. My shoulder doesn’t hurt much; it just has some scrapes.

FIRE: Day 88 (9/24)

Coffee

I had coffee today with a coworker/friend from my last job. It was really good to see him, and a great conversation. We talked a lot about our year of travel, and about things at the office. It was interesting to hear what’s changing at the office with AI. They already aren’t writing code manually anymore. I thought it was odd for that to be a 2027 goal when I heard that several weeks back from my other coworkers.

It’s not something that sounds particularly enjoyable to me. It’s basically the same job that business analysts would do in my working days, but they were interacting with a human developer instead of an AI agent. At some point, once the tech implementation details are sufficiently hidden under the covers, you just need the business analyst and not the developers.

I was relieved the subject of me coming back to work was not the purpose of getting together. It was just two people catching up. As we were walking out he asked if I had planned what’s next for me, and I told him no, that I was enjoying just drifting a bit. He said I should do something that I really enjoy, and that if I wanted to go back to work he’s sure they could find a spot for me, but that I should only do that if it’s what I really want to do.

It was timely and on-point advice given my periodic post-FIRE existential crises. It would be easy to panic and fix it with a job, but working in tech is not what I really want to do.

The rest of my day

I’m still feeling a little spaced out after hitting my head yesterday, but I managed to get some things done. I mowed the lawn, and picked up some things around the house. I didn’t go to the gym because my legs were pretty tired after mountain biking yesterday.

In the evening I holed up in the basement watching football while JC hosted her book club upstairs.

FIRE: Day 89 (9/25)

Spanish and gym like usual.

eBike Research

In the afternoon I spent a lot of time looking into eBike things, mainly for hunting. I looked at conversion kits to turn my existing mountain bike into an eBike. Ultimately I probably won’t do that, because I like the lightweight bike with unlimited human-powered range. It’s hard to pedal it up mountain trails, but I don’t need less exercise. I also won’t have to worry about the cold draining the battery and leaving me with a brick to pedal.

One useful thing that came out of this research is that I discovered I can increase the top speed of my current eBike from 20 mph to 25 mph using the Aventon app. A top speed of 20 mph has always been a little slow. I never bothered looking at the possibility of increasing it because I thought when a vendor sold a class II eBike, it had to stay class II.

Old Friend

I met up with an old friend who I worked with way back when I was 21 years old. We are almost the exact same age, and we started working at that company within a month or so of each other. We became good friends in the way you only really can in those youthful years of life.

The night started at this cool Spanish dive bar where we had some drinks. I caught up on his work situation which was crazy. Doge gutted their department, cutting from 210 people down to 70 in the first round of cuts. Then there were additional cuts down to just 40 people. He survived both rounds of that.

To make matters worse, other divisions of people were removed completely, leaving these 40 people in charge of applications that were built and run by hundreds of people.

My friend didn’t escape unscathed though. He got chopped during the contract renewal because he signed on with the incumbent company which lost the bid. He was unemployed for several weeks. Eventually he networked around and got hired on with one of the winning companies, but at lower pay, less vacation time, and worse benefits.

That was just the Doge related impacts – there are additional AI impacts looming. A separate company is working on replacing their entire application suite, and if they succeed the contract my friend is on will expire next summer and he’ll be out of work.

He had an interview today with a startup that sounds promising. I think he’ll land on his feet somewhere because he’s great at solving problems, and there’s always a market for that.

We went to a small concert after the dive bar, which was just one guy playing the guitar very skillfully. I didn’t know what to expect as I know nothing about guitar, but it was really good.

After the concert we ate some delicious Japanese Ramen.

FIRE: Day 90 (9/26)

Following my 9 units of alcohol last night, I was just trying to get through the day. My day began with two ibuprofen and a 45 sleep score. I took a nap around noon, and that got me back to neutral.

We had FAC today on a Saturday since I was out last night. It was my movie pick and I chose the classic Stand And Deliver.

FIRE: Day 91 (9/27)

I ran today since I was too hung over to do it yesterday. It wasn’t my best run, but I completed the three miles.

The rest of the day, the whole rest of the day, I watched football. That’s really unusual for me, as I typically would feel restless at some point and move on to something else.

I did find myself day dreaming about mountain biking quite a bit. Maybe it was a happy accident that my hunting buddy picked such a shitty road to hunt on, and it sparked a new interest.