3 Feb 2026
Last weekend, we had Arya’s Arrow of Light (AOL) Crossover ceremony to what I call “big” Scouts, to distinguish Cub Scouts from what used to be known as Boy Scouts, now Scouting America BSA.
Meagan brought Randal and Garrett along for a visit, and for the ceremony later that night. We were given some camp chairs that fit them just perfectly and they loved them!.
I was playing with some of my toys you can see in the background, solar panels. It was of course a cloudy day, so I wasn’t able to recharge my battery pack that I brought to power the CPAP machine. I have a couple different ways I’ve been playing with for portable power, and these camp out have been a good time to experiment with them. I also set up the Starlink for its monthly exercise and updates.
Evan having fun with his fell Cub Scouts. They were running around finding pokemon stuffed animals earlier. That afternoon, before the ceremony, there was a flag retirement ceremony that the kids were able to participate in.
The rest of the camp out photos are here: https://photos.argentwolf.org/index.php?/category/67
The cross over ceremony was that night. I will put a couple of photos below, the rest I have on the gallery here: https://photos.argentwolf.org/index.php?/category/68
Here, she has had all of her Cub Scout things removed, ready to cross the bridge into Scouting.
The Scouts of the troop have received her and now dress her in the regalia of ‘big’ Scouts.
Jarek is not pictured, but he did have a speaking role in the ceremony.
It was a good ceremony, much better than last year. Nighttime photography is always challenging, and even more so when everyone is moving and lots of things are going on. Overall, I think most of the pictures came out pretty good, I only had a few that were not usable.
Year in review post
The Year in review is coming soon ™, largely due to a couple things:
1) bathroom remodel. The upstairs bathroom needs to be fixed, so that is starting now.
2) Tax time. yay
3) Data errors in the storage pool that holds the photos.
#3 has been the big booger that I’ve been somewhat avoiding dealing with, but as of today it seems to have resolved finally. I have a file system check in progress, (a zfs scrub), and if that comes back clean, then I will proceed. Otherwise I will need to rebuild the pool which will take a few days due to its size (27 Terabytes).
In other fun, I had two other spinning disks fail and need to be replaced. I had some shenanigans with a seller who sold me a non-Americas region drive, and thus had no warranty. So back it went and I ordered another disk replacement. Apparently the AI push is causing drive and memory prices to spike, so that isn’t fun.
Social Networks
At the request of Meagan, I set up a couple social networks, a Friendica (similar to the older Facebook) instance, https://friendica.argentwolf.org and a Mastodon instance (Twitter / X), https://mastodon.argentwolf.org to play with. These are federated social media servers, called nodes, that are run independently, but can talk and share across the network to each other. That way, you can follow someone and get their feed (or block them), and not be bothered by Big Social Media’s algorithm.
The blog (https://www.wolfandraven.blog) is also set up with this protocol, called ActivityPub. So now you can find and follow me at these places:
alan@www.wolfandraven.blog (this will notify you of blog posts there)
I’ve dabbled in these before, but they didn’t seem to be ready. After Musk bought Twitter, a large number of folks left Twitter and went to the ‘fediverse’ so there has been some maturing of the platforms in the mean time.
Along with my server project, hosting isn’t free and the Social Media companies make money by selling you to advertisers. So, all in all, I don’t mind hosting these instances as it takes back control of the feed and what happens with your data.
We also had some sadness with one of our goats, Chali, who lost her baby kid over the weekend during Evan’s birthday party on Saturday.
She started having signs of giving birth, but there was a bad smell. She was a couple weeks early as well. It turned out that the baby had died some time ago, but we weren’t able to determine when that was, other than the pregnancy terminated itself.
Of course, it was on a weekend, but we were able to have a helpful goat person come out and assist us with delivering the dead kid and make sure Chali was doing ok. Thus far, no signs of any further distress.
We are expecting several of the other goats to kid in the next few weeks. Also, we will be getting in more baby chicks, likely this weekend. Hopefully the cold weather will have passed us on by and we can resume our regularly scheduled Florida weather!
