Looks like pool season is over for the year. My final swim of the season was September 21, 6 days later than 2023’s final day and 6 days earlier than 2022’s. This year came in third since 2021 in total swims (74), second in total strokes (52,564), and first in average stokes per session (710). This will be the third straight year with no swimming in the month of October. Like last year, the culprit was the onset of a multiple-day period of overcast, humid, drizzly weather. Almost every September features a stretch of this kind of weather, which is why October swimming is so rare around here. Hope springs eternal for next year, though.
I have to figure out how I’m going to winterize the pool this year with the new pump. I plumbed it with unions to give me the option to remove it and store it inside for the winter. However, the wiring will likely make this somewhat of a pain. I may still try it, although I may hate myself for it next spring. I figure I have until around the second week of November to decide, as that’s when I usually finish winterizing the pool. I’m hoping to get the winter cover on it this weekend or shortly thereafter.
After starting it a few months ago, I’ve finally got all of my web infrastructure moved out of AWS RDS, and I shut the RDS instance down this evening, with the intent of deleting it if I don’t see any issues. Also, I’m in the process of switching domain registrars for lpaulriddle.com. When I initially registered the domain (at least 10-15 years ago), I used Yahoo! Small Business, and while slightly pricier than GoDaddy, I was happy with it until it ended up morphing into Turbify. Last year, the registration renewal fee jumped to $45, and this year, they wanted $55, which was enough to motivate me to switch. After some research, I settled on Cloudflare, and the transfer is now in progress, with a pending completion date of 9/29. In the meantime, I moved the DNS over to Cloudflare, which went off without a hitch. If all goes well with moving the registration, I’ll probably move my other domain (currently at GoDaddy) to Cloudflare as well. I’m not doing much with that domain, but I do have email forwarding set up for it, so I’ll need to figure out how to do that with Cloudflare. I will say that their registration fees are much cheaper than GoDaddy’s, let alone Turbify’s.
Edit (9/29) just in case it’s helpful to someone: I got a confirmation email from Turbify/Tucows a few hours after initiating the transfer with Cloudflare. It said that if I took no further action, the transfer would complete at 2024-09-29 01:30:17 UTC. That time came and went and nothing happened, so I revisited the email and noticed that there was also a link to “visit our website” at the end. I clicked the link, and it took me to a page with options to approve the transfer immediately or cancel. I clicked the approve button, and the transfer completed a few minutes later (verified by an email from Cloudflare). Not sure if it would have eventually happened automatically had I not done that, but it’s done now, and reflected in WHOIS. Now to go cancel the Turbify plan…