Simultaneously Speeding Up and Slowing Down: A Quantum Conundrum

This probably doesn’t have anything to do with Quantum Physics, it’s been nearly twenty years since I had those lessons in my Engineering Physics classes in college. But I did a quick search to refresh my memory on what the theory was that stated no two (or more) objects could occupy the same space simultaneously. Turns out that’s actually a misquote since the original statement referenced fermions, something I don’t recall being covered in my classes. So relegating that to Newtonian Physics and shelving that particular topic, there is still the issue that’s plaguing me of late – speeding up and slowing down at the same time.

Back in the 90’s Dennis Miller was known for his rant segments on Dennis Miller Live and began them all with the phrase “Now I don’t want to get off on a rant here…”. Now I don’t want to get off on a rant here but since I’ve been so up and down in recent months I wanted to at least put some of my stream of consciousness out there instead of taking forever to make my next post, which if left alone could have the real possibility of never happening. I don’t want that.

So what has sped up in my life? At the top of the list has been the addition of solar panels to my house. This project typically involves the re-shingling of one’s roof (if necessary) and then the panels are installed along with electrical modifications that allow one to backfeed the electrical grid, or store accumulated energy in a battery bank if the system is off-grid. My project is, naturally for me, considerably more complicated. Based on my electrical consumption for 2021 I would need approximately forty two solar panels at 400W peak output to achieve “net zero” power usage throughout the course of a year. The back of my house faces directly south, but the roof doesn’t have enough space for this. But I do have a pool that could do with some surrounding enhancements (namely landscaping) so the idea of a solar pergola came to mind. This would give us a shaded area next to the pool, an outdoor kitchen, and enough roof space to accommodate twenty four solar panels. Two projects means two contractors, two project managers each, and twice as much communication resulting in two hundred fifty six times the headache. The pergola was supposed to be built back in the middle of July. Well here we are in the middle of October with summer LONG GONE in the northern US and construction is finally supposed to begin within a week. Or … at least I’m told within a week. What really pisses me off is I had to special order some of the wood for this project myself, and that was a huge out of pocket up front expense that I purchased specifically at a time of my contractor’s recommendation. Eight Douglas Fir 4×12’s at 22 feet each. Do the math. Yeah, ouch.

We just got our roof done this past weekend, which is nice because I’m planning to take a page out of The Hook Up’s book and install aRGB lights in aluminum channels on my roof lines for permanent Halloween and Christmas lights. I actually bought everything for this last year, but unfortunately it started snowing very early so it wasn’t safe to do this until this year. Couple that with the new roof, the setbacks were real.

My woodshop is close to completion. The dust collector was my latest big ticket item and in order to cut the cost in half I opted to piece the system together myself. Instead of spending $3500 on a 3HP system I ended up spending about $1600. Just yesterday I got to fire up the system for actual use. Sadly after the second time of running it there’s some kind of rubbing or scraping noise coming from the motor itself (not inside the blower housing). Yay, more mysteries to solve. And I’ve got a set of cornhole boards to make as a birthday present for a neighbor.

Last year I built a new liquid cooled computer for myself to complete my “Liquid Cooling for Everyone” project for my family (my wife and daughter got their systems first). After just one year one of my GPUs died. I know SLI is truly dead but I built my system from GTX 1080 Ti’s, an era when SLI was still alive, and with my graphical workloads I did see noticeable gains, so the dual GPU option had merit. Now the second GPU has been serving as backup while the primary one is unplugged from power. This sort of forced me to purchase an upgrade a bit sooner than I wanted to, but considering how the past few months have played out I don’t think there was a better time. So now I have an RTX 3080 Ti with EK’s Active Backplate waterblock installed, making the card a true behemoth and weighing more than my computer’s case (cold rolled steel) does when empty. Installation will require new sleeved power cables and two new bent acrylic tubes. But the work area in my house where I do all of this has been a giant mess that I’ve slowly been picking away at. So needless to say the surgery hasn’t been scheduled. My takeaway at the moment is at least I still have a working system.

What’s slowed down then? In short, me. The headaches from all of these have led to classic exhaustion, disinterest, and burnout. The solution – slow everything down. I don’t mean take on less, or work through things at a slower pace. I’m already working slow enough, any slower and you’d need time lapse footage to see the progress. What I mean is plenty of people have said “there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done” and I agree. So my solution is slow the whole planet down. Slow down Earth’s rotation by a good 25% so that the days are longer. Imagine what we could get done with six more hours to work with? I know how I’d spend at least four of them – sleeping.

So back to my conundrum – how do I speed myself up to handle all of these things in a timely manner (meaning make sure they get done instead of abandoned) while my body is doing otherwise? One day at a time is effectively what I’m being told and while I don’t disagree with the sentiment, it sure would be nice to be able to break the laws of physics so I can be in multiple places doing multiple things simultaneously. So why haven’t I looked into cloning myself? Hmmm … might be time to watch Multiplicity again with Michael Keaton. Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong…