A year and a half ago my CPAP machine started telling me it was old. Every time I turned it on, a message popped up on the tiny screen informing me it was old and tired and needed to be replaced. Again my old CPAP, a ResMed S9, was working fine. The only reason I replaced it was because it literally told me it was time to do so.

Upgrading a CPAP is a series of minor pain in the ass events. While the medical industry would certainly not agree with me, as a consumer/patient it feels like a series of arbitrary hoops designed to milk insurance companies. To get my new cPAP I had to have another sleep study done (my fourth or fifth one since getting my first CPAP two decades ago), make multiple appointments to see my sleep doctor, and finally pick up my new CPAP machine. Again, not the end of the world, but multiple appointments, tests, and payments to keep doing the treatment I’ve been doing and has been working for twenty years.

My new CPAP machine, a ResMed S11, has a bunch of bells and whistles my old one lacked. The new one came with heated tubes designed to further warm the air that comes out of the machine and shoots up my nostrils. The new machine also came with a cellular modem that tells somebody somewhere how much I use it. I already know how much I use it, so the data is not for me. They also replaced the small LCD screen that had I could (but rarely needed to) navigate with a rotating dial. The new one came with a large touch screen that adjusts its brightness according to the amount of light in the room, making it impossible to view unless you cover the sensor and trick it into thinking the doom is dark when all the lights are on.

My initial thought was “this new CPAP has a lot of things that could go wrong with it.” It took sixteen months for that to happen.

Last December I began waking up in the middle of the night with my nostrils on fire. It didn’t take long to discover the built-in humidifier was no longer working. It’s a little confusing as to who actually owns the CPAP. It appears to be some sort of rent-to-own plan through my insurance. When the CPAP is broken, it becomes very clear who owns it. Me.

It’s interesting but perhaps not unusual that all the same people I had to see to get the CPAP were suddenly not responsible for its repair. My insurance company said they only paid for the machine and pay for supplies, but not repairs. My sleep doctor was also quick to say “not it.” When we contacted the place that gave me the CPAP they said I could contact ResMed directly as the machine was still under warranty, but if I really really wanted to, I could bring it to them to look at. Second guessing myself and afraid I had dome something to make the machine not work right, I opted to take it in. Secretly I was worried that I had unintentionally changed a setting or broken something by taking it in and out of the van while on my little camping adventures.

The week before Christmas, I took my CPAP back to where i had received it. After a bit of brow beating (I was asked multiple times if I had dropped it or spilled water inside it), my CPAP was wrapped up in a plastic bag, papers were signed, and off it went to ResMed for repairs.

I went back to using my old CPAP. The one that nightly reminds me it’s on its last legs.

After nearly a month, we received a call that my new new CPAP had returned and was ready to be picked up. There was no charge, I was told, and the paperwork I received said that the humidifier had failed and needed to be replaced and daughterboard that controls the heating system had failed and needed to be replaced, and the motherboard had failed and needed to be replaced.

Well, at least the plastic shell was still okay.

We picked up my new CPAP a few days ago and… it’s still sitting in the plastic bag in the floor of my bedroom, waiting to be hooked up. Sometime this weekend I’ll re-disassemble “ol faithful” and put the old S9 back in a box, warning message and all, waiting in case it ever needs to return to service.

On Black Friday while sitting in the Best Buy parking lot, a guy hit my car. This past weekend, we were finally able to get it in for repairs.

It all started because of a TV.

As you may recall, a couple of months ago my 55″ television died. If there was any silver lining to that cloud it was that the television had the courtesy to end itself just a few weeks before Black Friday. I asked Susan to keep an eye out for a good sale on televisions, and she found one — another 55″, for less than I paid for the first one, on sale at Best Buy. Susan paid for the television online and in the height of madness the morning of Black Friday, we went to pick it up.

Mind you, we didn’t have to pick it up then. We could have picked it up any time during a five day window. But if you know Susan, you know she loves to be in the middle of a madhouse. Remember those videos from the 1980s where mobs of people rushed into department stores, pushing and shoving to try and get a Cabbage Patch doll? Susan’s dream is to be in the middle of that. My dream is to be as far away as possible from that. Like, in Cambodia or something.

On the morning of Black Friday we made our way to Best Buy, parked in one of the curbside pick-up spots, and waited for someone to bring my new television out to me car. We hadn’t been parked for more than 30 seconds when we heard someone honking his Suburban’s horn aggressively at pedestrians as they had the audacity to walk through the parking lot. A few seconds later, the Suburban made its way down our row and began to pull into the parking spot next to ours. Now I just looked it up and the average Suburban is 81 inches wide and if I had to guess I would say that parking spot was 82″ wide. There was really no chance of him getting into that spot and if he did, there would be no way he (or we) could open our doors. Or breath.

And so of course when he pulled into the spot, he sideswiped my car. I wasn’t sure what had happened at first — all I knew is that my entire car moved, but we were in park. “Did that guy just hit my car?” I asked Susan, and before she could answer, he backed up and did it again.

HE BACKED UP AND DID IT AGAIN.

I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm myself before the man who hit my car came over to apologize and give us his insurance information… and after a couple of minutes we realized, the guy was not coming over or getting out of his car. He obviously thought we were not in the car and had we not been in there, 100%, he would have left and not left a note.

It was up to Susan to approach the driver, who acted like he didn’t know he had hit my car (twice). His response was to get out, look at the back of my side, and then try to clean off the damage with his spit. The paint had been completely scraped off my bumper and my taillight was cracked and he tried to fix those things with his magic spit. By the end of the interaction, he was grumbling under his breath and I was grumbling under mine and Susan handled everything.

Now here’s the thing. The damage is not “that” bad. If it had only been the bumper and not the taillight, I probably could have buffed most of it out and maybe covered the rest of it up with some paint. I’m not paint and body guy and I might have even been willing to live with it. My car already has a few nicks and dings, and I know filing a claim has the potential to raise this guy’s insurance. I am ashamed to admit this, but when a guy hits my car and then acts like he didn’t and was going to drive away, then that made the decision to file a claim against his insurance much simpler.

Over the weekend, Susan and I dropped my car off at the body shop. The estimate to repair the scuff and the taillight is $1,300. (We saved someone some money by not getting a rental car.) I tried to convince the body shop that the man’s Suburban had also caused all the hail damage, but they weren’t buying it.

I’m not sure how long the repair will take, but in the meantime the van has become my primary vehicle. Big Rob’s Van to the rescue!

Oh, and the TV works great.

Every year I start dozens of blog posts that never get finished. Sometimes I’ll start writing one and they simply don’t go anywhere. Other times I’ll start one and by the time I finish them they no longer seem relevant. According to WordPress I currently have 80 blogs in varying states of completion sitting in the draft folder. I may finish a few of them, but most of them will end up in the trash pile. Here are just a few that I’ve deleting this morning.

MIKE TYSON KO’S NETFLIX, LOSES TO FATHER TIME
I wrote a really long recap of the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight on Netflix. For some reason it took me a week to write it and by the time it was finished, nobody was talking about the fight anymore and it was old news.

BACK TO NORMAL
This was a really long blog post I wrote about the 2 1/2 weeks Susan was gone and I was home by myself. It mostly talked about how Susan stocks the refrigerator for me before she goes on long trips and how I end up eating fast food anyway. Apparently I ate a lot of frozen Italian beef sandwiches while she was gone. Riveting.

WHEN THE RULE OF FIVE MEETS THE TWO-MINUTE RULE
This was a post about to different rules I use. One is Susan’s “rule of five” which is whenever you walk into a room that’s messy, pick up five things. The other was an anti-procrastination tool I discovered called the two-minute rule which says if you think of a task and that task will take less than two minutes to complete, do it now instead of waiting to do it later. I may actually leave this one in the draft folder and revisit it.

PAIN, PART ONE
One night before I was on my back meds I started writing about my back pain and things got dark so I abandoned it. The back feels a little better now.

UNFOLLOWING INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS WITH POWERSHELL
This is a really long and technical post about how I wrote a script to automatically unfollow accounts that weren’t following my on Instagram. I’m pretty sure this goes against their TOS (who cares) and I honestly don’t know why I didn’t publish it. I’ll save this one for a rainy day.

CRUISE
This appears to be a summary of our cruise to Cozumel that we took with our friends Jeff and Heather. I know This appears to be a generic summary of the vacation that I never finished, and I know I wrote some more specific tales from that trip so at some point I decided this one was unnecessary. Buh-bye.

BED BUGS
Have you ever had one of those stories that never seems to end? One day while sitting in our recliner, Susan felt and then saw what she thought was a bed bug. This led to us throwing out my favorite recliner and I think maybe a couch. Then we threw away a bunch of pillows and bedding. Then we started putting powder on the floors and furniture. We eventually tracked the infestation down to a used Roomba we had paid $5 for at a garage sale (lesson learned). Then a few weeks later Susan was looking online and determined that they weren’t bed bugs at all, but carpet bugs, which probably came from the used Roomba. Carpet bugs are way easier to treat and after that it seemed like we threw away my recliner for nothing. The post went on for a few thousand words and got abandoned when the story never seemed to end.

SUPPER CLUB
Some friends of ours met us for dinner one night at a supper club. It was a super weird dining experience. Our meal took 2 1/2 hours from start to finish and all kinds of weird things happened, like possibly our waiter quit during out shift (we had at least three different servers) and at one point in the meal we noticed the air conditioner above our table was dripping water directly into my glass of water. The post never really got a point and you kind of need if you’re going to write 1,000 words about a meal, you kind of need one. Around the time I wrote this one I was vying for a food columnist position in a local magazine and the blog I wrote was so bad that I abandoned both it and the writing position I was pursuing.

THREADS IS THE TWITTER KILLER WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
This was a half-baked post about how Meta’s Threads will destroy Twitter and that in a year everyone will be on Threads and Twitter will be a ghost town. Not only did I not finish the blog post but I never use Threads. This one didn’t age well in multiple categories! Deleted.

THE SWEETEST SOUND TO A PERSON’S EARS IS THEIR OWN NAME
This was a long, cranky rant about how I was recognized at work for fifteen years of service and during the ceremony they pronounced my last name wrong. The manager who mispronounced my name was one I had previously worked for. I won’t rehash the entire post but the gist of it was, if you want employees to feel appreciated for their service, maybe you should take 5-10 seconds and learn how to pronounce their name, especially if you’re going to say it to a large group of their coworkers. This post was more than 500 words long and at least 350 of them wouldn’t have done me any favors at work. I was pretty mad when I wrote this one and it belongs in the trash pile.

ONE MONTH OF USING THE MCDONALD’S APP
The McDonald’s app is the first restaurant-specific one I installed on my phone. I wrote 400 words about how I love 99 cent coffee and fresh breakfast burritos before abandoning this one.

There were many more drafts that hit the trash pile this morning, most of which were half-baked ideas that didn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t even tell what some of them were going to be about. The fun thing about doing this each year is finding those blog posts that were almost finished and still hold up. There are definitely a handful that will get recycled into new posts here. Blog housekeeping, who knew that would be a thing!

It took me a couple of days, but I figured it out.

I love this little blog, and it’s not going anywhere. What I was and have been frustrated with is how my traditional posts get reads and comments, but the content that doesn’t quite fit, like my retro-related stuff, doesn’t seem to find an audience. The solution, of course, is to start a new project.

Yesterday I launched NinjasAndNeon.com, a site hosted on Substack. Substack is part blog and part newsletter with a small sprinkling of social media on top. It’s a perfect place for me to write posts about old toys and video games and things like that.

To be honest, not much will change around here. If you’ve enjoyed my blog here at RobOHara.com in the past, you’ll continue to enjoy it! If deep dives about Pac-Man lunchboxes or how many special effects performers were physically inside Jabba the Hutt, check out NinjasAndNeon.com.

Every year, between Christmas and New Year’s, I write a series of posts reflecting on the previous year. To do this, I typically scan through my blog to jog my memory. What I found this year is that… I kind of abandoned my blog.

One reason I quit writing so many blog posts is because I ran out of things to say. When I started blogging — we’re going all the way back to the late 90s, early 00s here — anything and everything qualified as a blog post. Funny exchange at the McDonald’s drive-thru? Blog post! Saw a traffic accident? Blog post! As time went on, I decided that I wanted to have something to say in my posts. I didn’t want them to be dry recordings of events like some sort of court ledger; I wanted to tell stories and be creative and even when writing about, say, Thanksgiving, I wanted to write something that had a little deeper meaning. After a couple of decades, I ran out of interesting things to say. This year for Thanksgiving, everyone who was invited showed up, the food was delicious, we all had a great time, and everybody went home. The end.

Unfortunately and perhaps sadly, it’s often easier to share those things through social media. I saw a killer sunset last night. I took a great picture of it and literally had nothing to say about it and so I posted it on Facebook. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to drop pictures and those disposable events that happen at McDonald’s drive-thrus. It’s a great place to say something when you have nothing to say.

Over the past several years people have moved away from blogs — both writing them and reading them. Writing 1,000 words about a trip to the zoo or a particularly delicious slice of pizza is one thing; getting someone to read those words is a different challenge. There are many reasons for this. One is because of the amount of content available to us today. We have news apps that take all the news from all the other news sites and summarize them because there’s so much news. Believe it or not, finding interesting and free things to read on the internet was once a challenge. Today, if I click on a web article and it takes more than two seconds to load, I close it and move to the next one. There’s no value to any one article because there are millions more waiting in the chute. All of this stuff is being pushed down our throats, and unless I’m screaming about my blog a hundred times a day, it all gets lost. In a world where Beyonce has a blog, it’s tough to get people to read about why I like ice cream.

The shift in how and where content is consumed has been pretty obvious if you’re a writer. The future is here. I would say I can listen to any album imaginable with the touch of a button, but I no longer need to touch a button to do so. There are so many great podcasts available today that if I only listened to the first minute of each one, I still wouldn’t have enough time in a single day to hear them all. We live in a world where I can stream nearly any movie or television show imaginable to my phone while riding i the car. That’s tough for a blog to compete with. People want bite-sized chunks of entertainment. People don’t want to spend an hour reading; they want to watch celebrities getting interviewed while eating increasingly spicy hot wings.

Google recent articles about blogging and you’ll find two types. Half of them have doomsday, clickbait headlines like “Is Blogging Dead?” and “Why Are People Still Blogging?” The rest of the articles (the majority, in fact) are about how to monetize your blog — how to “brand your content” and how to write blog posts that lead to sales. The type of blogging I do isn’t even on the radar anymore. It’s not even considered quaint. It just seems old.

If this sounds increasingly sour or spicy (the post, not the hot wings), I don’t mean it to. There are changes I could make and things I could do differently that, if all of this were a business, I would do immediately. What do you do when nobody wants the stuff you like to make? They say you can either change with the times or get rolled over. I’m having a tough time choosing between the two options.

This morning, as I log into WordPress, I see a bunch of errors at the top of my screen. Some obscure plug-in has failed. Again. I’ve said this before, but the more I am required to work with computers, the less I enjoy working on them. There was a time when nothing sounded more fun than tearing apart a computer and adding some RAM or upgrading a video card, and today that sounds awful. I come here to write, not to troubleshoot plug-ins and do upgrades and check for security patches and all the other nonsense that comes with maintaining a website. Maybe it’s me this morning.

Where does that leave me in 2025? I’m not sure. I’m having a good time dabbling on YouTube and I will always write because I love words. This blog post was starting to sound like the end of something but maybe it’s the beginning of something else. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, here are the rolls we had for Thanksgiving. They were tasty.

It all started with our neighbors — and it wasn’t even a Christmas display, it was their Halloween decorations. On Halloween Susan and I like to sit on the front porch and hand out candy to trick-ot-treaters. We love seeing all the costumes and hearing the kids laugh and shout “TRICK OR TREAT!” when they run up to the porch. This year, all of our young visitors asked us the same question. “Did you see the Beetlejuice house?”

We had a lot going on this year and didn’t decorate as much as usual. We put Mick Rib (my 6′ skeleton) and Slimer (from Ghostbusters) on the front porch, but that was about it. We didn’t have time to reassemble our 12′ skeleton and we didn’t put up any lights. We didn’t go all out. The people across the street, however, went all out. The house is on a corner and from our porch we couldn’t see everything they had put out, but we could see enough. There was a giant sand worm from Beetlejuice in their front yard. There were flashing lights and loud music. We had been bested, and I don’t like being bested.

“Just say the word,” Susan said, “and our yard will beat theirs for Christmas.”

I don’t think I said a word and I don’t think she was really waiting for me to. Within a week or two, box after box coverer in Chinese writing began arriving from Temu. Sure, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot, and all the big stores have Christmas decorations, but Temu sells them for pennies on the dollar. For just a couple of bucks you can purchase rows of plastic candy canes. For five bucks you can get strands of lights that will stretch all the way across your yard.

Susan spent about $300. I believe the term she used was, “we’re going Griswold.”

That’s how we ended up with a yard full of lights, candy canes, Christmas-themed signs, and three large inflatable gingerbread men. There’s the large one relaxing in the front yard, the ninja-themed one performing a flying karate kick near my office window… and then there’s Ginger McHoleHead, a 10′ tall gingerbread man guarding the entrance to our home. 10-foot-tall is just an estimate — the top of his head comes to the top of our gutter, and his top hat extends several feet above that.

Ginger McHoleHead likes (er, liked) to dance in the Oklahoma wind. He came with a variety of plastic stakes, none of which were able to withstand Oklahoma’s wind gusts. We ended up strapping him to one of our porch posts, which kept his belly affixed to the house but allowed his arms and legs to flop around as if he were trying to escape this house of holiday horrors.

Ginger McHoleHead was so large that he blocked our view of the street from the living room. The morning I noticed sunlight coming in the front windows again, I knew something had gone horribly wrong.

The paper-thin nylon this thing from Temu was made with did its best to hang on, but the Oklahoma winds proved too much for him. Either by accident or some form of sick holiday protest, Ginger McHoleHead flung his head down to the ground and ripped a hole in his own head on one of the ground spikes. While his original name was Ginger McHappyHat, this is when he was rechristened Ginger McHoleHead.

Ginger McHoleHead’s fan is still running in an act of futile defiance. On a good day his leg will inflate almost up to the knee, but other than that, he s a goner. If anybody really tall is looking for a Halloween costume next year, I’ll make you a heck of a deal on one.

And so, for now, his icing-covered brethren look on. The other two remain inflated but are secretly hoping for Christmas to hurry up and arrive so that they might make it to the attic and live to inflate another day.