2025 Year in Review

Big news this year is I got a new house. Originally I was hoping to buy land somewhere and then build a custom house. Instead I got one in the city I grew up in that was built in 1994. Still ticks off most of the boxes I was going for. It's a ranch style with almost 2 acres of land. There's no HOA. Some things I was initially a bit worried about is it's well water and septic system which I wasn't familiar with. Turns out it's not that big a deal. During house inspection they had the water going full blast for an hour and it kept up without any issues. It has a water softener so no issue with taste of water. With just me I don't have to add much salt to softener either. Septic system is pretty basic, which is good as that means less stuff to break. About the only thing with that is make sure to have it pumped every 5 years or so. I also don't have gas, not even a propane tank. The HVAC system uses geothermal which is supposed to be less expensive than regular electric furnaces. Don't really have anything to compare it to but so far bill hasn't been that bad if you factor in I just have an electric bill and no gas bill. So that means the only utility I have is electric. Everything else is handled on property. I still need to get well pump setup so I can connect it to a generator when power goes out as I have maybe about 10 gallons of water in reserve before it runs out. And last but most certainly not least, I paid for this house in cash from investments. Meaning I don't have a house payment. Cashing all that money is going to mean a whole lot of taxes though. I did set aside enough money so I'm not worried about it but still not looking forward to it.

The moving process took much longer than I expected. I got the bare minimum I needed to live at new place within a month with a couple uhaul trips. Getting everything else here took like 4 months and most of my vacation time from work. Only a couple weeks ago did I finally move the last of the stuff I wanted. I meet with the realtor tomorrow actually to see what I need to do to get it ready to list. Wanted to sell it by end of this year so I could just deal with both buying this house and selling the condo in same tax year. Maybe this will make things easier for taxes since I just have to deal with buying a new house this year and then selling old one next year.

Another big change this year was I lost weight, like, a lot of weight. I started February 17 at 305.3 pounds and as of this morning I'm at 225.0 pounds. That's a loss of 80.3 pounds or 26.3%. The magic trick? Zepbound. It is one of those GLP-1 based drugs like Ozempic. It's been a huge change. When it was covered by CVS Caremark (more on that in a second) it was around $200/month. Then CVS Caremark announced that starting June 1st it would not be covered and to switch to an equivalent medication like Ozempic. Which it isn't. My doctors say it isn't and that Zepbound is the most powerful GLP-1 medication out there. So you can request a prior authorization. Problem is all the doctors I talked to said it wouldn't get approved unless there was a documented reaction to Ozempic. A common reaction is constipation and quite a few cases of severe constipation requiring a visit to emergency room. As you can probable guess having severe constipation is not pleasant and also life threatening when extreme. So CVS Caremark, an insurance company, is determining what medication I can take and not my doctor. And the only way they would cover it is if I go to emergency room? With Zepbound I've had practically no side effects. But CVS Caremark doesn't want to cover it because it costs too much, my health be damned. Fortunately Lilly, the maker of Zepbound, has a self pay program that offers it at a reduced price of $500/month. It's still been so high I've had to adjust my budgeting and I'm the only person that is being punished for this. CVS Caremark doesn't have to pay it so they win. I'm still buying Zepbound from Lilly so they win. But I pay more than double the price and it doesn't count against my deductible or yearly max out of pocket. CVS Caremark has also done other things this year related to this that I will never use them again. Problem is I don't have a choice. I voiced my concerns to both HR at my company and I filled out a survey to CVS Caremark about it. Of course no response. But I guess I can feel a bit better. But I've improved my health substantially from it and will hopefully be able to stop taking it next year. As long as I stick to my high protein diet and no carbs I should be able to maintain this in theory. Although I've read several cases that people are on this for rest of life in order to maintain it.

Job has been going ok. It's still annoying with the amount of paperwork that is done and how long it takes to get anything done. All the automation stuff I would have liked to do isn't possible. Not for technical reasons, or regulatory reasons, but business reasons. There's a security paradigm called "Separation of Duties" that both this company and previous company were big on. It means that no one person should have all the power. From a security standpoint that makes sense. But when taken to the extreme it makes getting anything done a pain. For example I wanted to automate building linux servers, simple enough task. Well I just can't do it because I don't have permission to. Even though I'm the primary admin for these servers, in a non production environment, I'm not allowed to do even basic tasks like restarting servers without opening a ticket for another team to do it. Eventually an automated way for me to restart servers was added so I just use that but it's still just business process for the sake of business process. Then during an all hands meeting in November the CEO announced that next year he wants everyone in the office 5 days a week. His argument was he had 30-40 meetings on the previous Friday and people didn't show up to them... that was black Friday which most people took the day off. I do think some people take advantage of working from home and not actually work but to punish everyone for that is ridiculous. I don't take advantage of it and in fact I have a dedicated work space just for working from home. Also everyone I work with lives in different states so meetings are still going to be virtual. So it's an office filled with people wearing headsets doing virtual meetings, which I find distracting. At old place I was maybe 15 minutes away from office. Now I'm about 45 minutes if there's no traffic, probably closer to an hour with rush hour traffic. So I've started looking for another job and told my boss that because I want it to funnel up the manager chain that people are already looking because of this. I doubt it will change their mind as they've been requiring more and more groups to be in office and this is just the final demand that everyone returns to office.

I got my general class ham radio license. This means I can use pretty much all the valid ranges of frequencies down to shortwave frequencies. On these new frequencies I've been able to do ft8/ft4 (digital mode frequencies using a computer) around the world and been able to talk to people as far away as Puerto Rico and South America. All at modest 100 watt power levels. I'm licensed to go up to 1500 watts but the equipment to transmit at that power gets expensive.

Next year I have a few plans. One of the first things I want to build is a shop. This house has an attached 3 car garage but it's not insulated so trying to keep it warm in the winter is a bit difficult. Also I don't want to keep moving car out of the garage so I don't get sawdust or paint on it. Still looking at what options I have but probably looking at building something that's as big as a 2 or 3 car garage. I also want to look at adding solar panels to help offset electric costs. Unfortunately a lot of the tax breaks for solar panels were ended early by current government so it's going to be a lot more expensive now. I've seen some states offer incentives to replace the government one but don't think Ohio has any yet. I also want to setup an antenna tower for radio stuff. From what I could tell I could have a 200 foot antenna here if I really wanted to. That's a bit extreme but I'm looking at maybe a 30-40 foot tower. I already have an antenna strung up to a tree, something that wasn't allowed at condo, but want to have a more permanent setup. And for the higher frequency stuff that is used by mobile radios all require line of sight. So getting your antenna as high as possible is more important than how much power. And finally I'd like to actually travel more. Hopefully I'll be able to use more of my vacation time at work for actual vacationing. Not really sure where I'd like to go yet. Would like to take Amtrak to some more places.