Finally found the right leverage to get the appointment setter to call me. Surgery in late August. It’s looking iffy about getting the second/final surgery done¹ by the time my lease is up in mid-December.

the sugah

My A1C has been high-normal for years. This month it went above the diagnostic criteria for diabetes. Yay. Started the traditional first-line med (metformin) a few days ago. Started diabetic self-management classes at the VA.

I asked my GP for an Rx for a continuous glucose monitor but apparently you have to be bad enough that you need insulin to get a CGM. So I started looking for options. Turns out there are some consumer-grade units available without a script. I picked up an Abbot Lingo and affixed it today. After about an hour of warm-up it start delivering useful data. It’s enlightening to see what kind of eating drives blood glucose up and how exercise drives it down.

It’s early on but a couple things are working together:

• the metformin is reducing between-meal hunger
• watching the monitor is reminding me to eat less and eat more slowly

I haven’t eaten much meat in recent years because of both cost and difficulty of storing it in the camper. But I will probably need to ramp up lean meat consumption to displace some of the carbs I’ve been eating.

My first attempt was some pan-seared chicken thigh “fillets”. Normally I like bone-in but it was too hot to bake. The butterflied thighs cooked evenly and had actual flavor and juice unlike chicken breast.

I had the surgical consult in late May; really liked the surgeon and his approach. The problem was with the surgery scheduler; I couldn’t get her to call me and she had no direct number. One of those worker bees who’s afraid to talk to customers, I suspect.

Anyhow, neck surgery scheduled for late August. A couple days in the hospital then 6 weeks in a hard collar. I’ll board Muffin for that week.

apt-listbugs

Based on comments in this thread I installed apt-listbugs. The idea is that it checks for dealbreaking bugs before installation and gives you a chance to pin the existing version so it won’t upgrade. Then when the bug is fixed it’s unpinned and upgradeable. Neat!

reverting to the prior version

But that doesn’t help me with the existing crashiness. apt list -a chromium showed this output:

chromium/stable-security 150.0.7871.46-1~deb13u1 amd64 [upgradable from: 147.0.7727.137-1~deb13u1]
chromium/stable,now 147.0.7727.137-1~deb13u1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 150.0.7871.46-1~deb13u1]

chromium/stable-security 150.0.7871.46-1~deb13u1 i386
chromium/stable 147.0.7727.137-1~deb13u1 i386

so I put the old one back in:

sudo apt install chromium-common=147.0.7727.137-1~deb13u1
sudo apt install chromium=147.0.7727.137-1~deb13u1
sudo apt install chromium-sandbox=147.0.7727.137-1~deb13u1

and we’re back in business.

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Bought a used travel trailer… stock lead acid batteries were garbage

To be fair, deep cycle lead banks can do a good job. Most of them inherited used have aged out and/or not been charged properly.

300Ah gives us 3.8kWh usable

I’d say ~3.1Wh usable if we stick to the 80% depth of discharge spec many LFP manufacturer’s state in cycle ratings. Doesn’t make a practical difference in your case if you’re only cycling 30% of capacity.

The self-heating was a lifesaver.

Warming LFP cells is important in the cold ; internal self-heating isn’t. IOW, it doesn’t matter to the cells where the heat is coming from.

Battery kicks on the heating element automatically and by morning its warm enough to accept charge from our solar panels.

Close. When cells are cold the power from the panels turns on the heating circuit. When the cells are warmed above freezing power is sent back to charging. See the chart in Section 8 of the manual (pdf).

If youre new to boondocking like us dont wait on the battery upgrade. We wasted two weeks and a lot of gas figuring that out the hard way.

I’d encourage folks to assess their actual energy needs before upgrading to LFP. It can help size the new bank appropriately.

Note: the 30% DoD and 3 day autonomy suggests OP bought about 2x the battery bank they actually need.