Still hot out. The triple digits almost waited until July but didn’t quite make it. Had a few scorchers last week, and this week is forecast to be even worse. There are a few days down by the office where it is supposed to hit 110! That ain’t right. Even worse, we are scheduled to take the RV out for the holiday. No big deal, it has A/C? Well, yes, but there is no electricity at the campground. On the bright side we are headed uphill about 3,000 feet, so hopefully it’s significantly cooler up there.

That was a moderately entertaining weekend, at least for me. I am fairly sure nobody else will think it remotely interesting, save perhaps my friend Mike, but it’s all I have to work with, so it’ll have to do. The excitement began building on Friday when my spiffy new Synology DS224+ unit arrived. I’ve always had two similar ones running; One higher end one, and one smaller one that is just for backing up the nicer one. Every five years or so I get a new higher end one, set up the old one as my “second,” and get rid of the oldest. Well, plans changed this time. I’ve kind of fallen out of that rotation at some point, and they really both needed replaced. That is a little cost-prohibitive though. After the usual few months of thinking and over-thinking, I decided their new upper-tier one didn’t really interest me anyway, so I ended up getting a replacement for the smaller one. It was, after all, a rather shocking 11 years old and wasn’t even supported by Synology any longer. So, yeah, that’s the background. My plan was to wait until this week to set it up, so as not to burn valuable weekend hours, but of course that didn’t work out. Got too excited and started early in the morning Saturday. The process went remarkably smoothly to my surprise. I’d say about 1.5 hours and it was up and running just like the old one. That wasn’t the case last time I did the same thing, not sure what I did wrong that time. Now the plan is, since it is so much faster than the old one, I will sort of split the load between my bigger DS718+ and this one, because there is really way too much running on it.

After essentially wasting my entire morning on that project, Donette wanted to get out of the house and go to the lake. Sounded fun, although I wasn’t quite done tinkering. We loaded up and headed out though, and it was a good time. Little bit busy to put it mildly, but we found a shady spot right by the water and hung out several hours. Actually, when we got there, they had a big sign that said “Day-Use Full,” and were turning cars around, but they waved us in. Didn’t ask why but I assume our annual pass tag lets us get in anyway. We even got out her paddle board, which has set idle in the garage for a whopping eight years! Not as in we haven’t used it in eight years, but as in we bought it eight years ago and it was still in the packaging. Rather remarkable that we found all the parts actually. It worked great though; it was pretty fun. I’d like to get it and the kayak both up there, but I’m not sure we can get them in the car together. Have to give that a try I guess.

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