Though I don’t quite know the exact day Luna was born, I know it was some time in late August of 1999. This means a cat I adopted shortly after I graduated from college is now 21 years old. I had just brought Luna home. When I stop to think about it, that’s a staggeringly long time. Up until now, the oldest cat I’d ever seen was my grandma’s cat Boo-Boo, a beautiful Russian Blue she found playing in one of her wood piles one day.

How often I think about all the things I want to do. The tasks I want to complete, one by one. The games I want to finish. The software I want to install on my web server and VM host. The Anime I want to catch up on. My Cayman, sitting neglected in the garage in need of having its bumper cover restored, among other bits and bobs. Even the time I want to set aside for meditation is just another thing on the list to fit into a day where there simply isn’t enough time.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984 America is burning around us. Much of the justification is flawed, and many of the instigators are being sheltered from criticism by a litany of voices and spurious reasoning. And our institutions which are supposed to protect us from misinformation leading to this, are merely fanning the flames.

Sleep is the crank that turns the engine, and mine has long since snapped at the axle. I don’t blog much anymore, a thing I realized once it became obvious even to me. I didn’t wax nostalgic about turning 40. I didn’t say goodbye to the home where I’d spent the last six years. I didn’t gush about the Porsche Cayman I recently purchased to fulfill an old childhood dream. No espousing about Keto, either recipes or studies.

Ever since my previous foray into building a server, I’v been trolling Lab Gopher for an upgrade. My preference would have been for a Dell PowerEdge R720xd 3.5-inch format since it could hold 12 full-size hard disks. But those are relatively rare and deals were scarce. Instead, I stumbled across a Dell PowerEdge R720 2.5-inch format with an additional drive cage. So while 2.5-inch drives were lower capacity, I could use 16 of them if necessary.