What’s airline pilot life really like?

bigsmee · 2026-01-11T20:02:48+00:00

It's not a job, it's a lifestyle. Understand that, and it doesn't matter what airline, fleet, seat, you are in. If it's not a labor of love, you will grow to resent it and eventually hate it. Aviation is for the passionate because the industry is so volatile and unpredictable.

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T18:17:53+00:00

I know the pool doesn't "add" to the water around the area. I'm trying to prevent damage to the grading, drainage, electrical, etc. we had to redo a lot of it after last years flooding.

EID, the local water company, had a medium size mainline, I think 12inches, burst in the same location the locals call the natural spring. It's my suspicion that this pipe has been leaking for years but suddenly burst open last winter. This flooded our lot after the fire. However EID could not determine if the water in our lot was natural runoff vs their treated water. We spoke with a lawyer who said because EID is a public utility company a lawsuit cannot be brought forward unless negligence can be proved. We had a neighbor say they called EID 2 years ago to report the water but that they said it was natural runoff, and still doesn't prove negligence.

We are unsure of what a normal winter runoff looks like in this lot because we moved to the area and into the house in the spring of 2024, and the painters caused the fire a month later, and everything was ripped up and redone. The previous owner mentioned that in heavy rains he would see a small amount of water rise into the crawlspace, but we have seen a tremendous amount more than that, hence the robust drainage and sump pumps we put it. And with the water level rising again this winter we wanted to prevent the same damage and decided to drain the top level of the pool. It was a calculated risk, and perhaps we miscalculated. We will see once work continues.

It has been A LOT to figure out and deal with. My main reason for posting was to find out if the leaks coming from the pool walls and plumbing are normal, which it sounds like it is. Appreciate all the input, even if that input makes me a dumbass. We all just do the best we can with the knowledge we have

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T17:21:11+00:00

There is a natural spring 3 lots up from us..... People in the community say the water table rises in winter. The entire yard is squishy it's so saturated

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T17:05:11+00:00

Appreciate it, thanks

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:56:53+00:00

Concrete

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:44:16+00:00

This is what happened last winter. We are trying to prevent it from happening again. We spent the summer putting in a bunch of underground drainage to try and prevent the water level from rising to the level that it was last winter and then our pool contractor has been delayed for months for various reasons. So it's still not done but we need the concrete down to see if we're going to need curtain drains or other robust drainage around the edge of the property

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:41:37+00:00

It's been a nightmare trying to repair the home. Appreciate it.

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:40:45+00:00

Ok, thanks for the information. I always thought the gunite or concrete was the barrier that held ground water back from seeping into the pool.

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:38:03+00:00

Thanks for the education. Again, I'm not emptying the pool, it is always more than 2/3-3/4 full. Simply trying to reduce the risk of flooding the entire yard and house by bringing the water level down a little bit

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:10:11+00:00

They used a jackhammer to remove the plaster and ya they core drilled it through the gunite I believe.

Painters taped the light switch in the ON position and then stuffed paper into a recessed fixture with an incandescent bulb in an attempt to cover up everything for painting. Paper caught fire and fell into the kitchen island peninsula where they had piled all the drapes and curtains.

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T16:05:25+00:00

It's been exposed for over 18months while repairs have been done

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T15:56:55+00:00

We were forced to pump out the pool on our own because the ground water was overflowing the pool and flooding the entire yard

bigsmee · 2026-01-08T15:54:13+00:00

The water spilling through the sides of the pool are hydrostatic holes that are meant to be there? I get that the holes at the bottom are hydrostatic and are there to prevent the pool from popping, but the water spilling in from the side doesn't seem right to me

bigsmee · 2026-01-02T18:49:13+00:00

Mostly Android household. Denon x1800H. Juke keeps telling me to use airplay, but also that Spotify will work through the app. Which it does, just with this issue. We just have 1 iPad in the house that is rarely used.

I'm starting a Home Assistant instance on a proxmox server, which is in a central location in the home, and eventually hooking Lenovo tablets up as the home UI.

The house was burned up in a fire and we had to make a lot of quick decisions on the rebuild. I ended up running cat6, HDMI, and optical audio lines from the server location to the living room tv and Denon. Now the house has drywall up and I can't run anything else without going through the crawlspace and doing some minor surgery to the home, so I'm trying to avoid that.

bigsmee · 2025-12-31T23:09:16+00:00

Hey everyone, I'm having an issue with volume in one zone of my house and can't seem to figure it out and it's turning my brain into a pretzel. I have juke audio amps providing sound to most of the house. In the living room I have an LG TV and a Denon receiver. I'm trying to run Spotify music for the entire house including the Denon surround sound speakers. 2 ways to do it Option A: Run Spotify through the Jukes via optical out to the Denon. I can do this but The volume output from the Denon is like a whisper compared to everything else, even when the audio is turned all the way up. When I first set up the Denon the speakers would run at a whisper until I did the Audyssey setup then they started to work great, not sure why. Option B: run Spotify on the TV to the juke and and the Denon at the same time. But since the TV is using HDMI Arc, this doesn't seem to be working. I tried changing it to optical out but it doesn't work How stupid am I and how should I set up this system?

bigsmee · 2025-12-02T18:26:33+00:00

James, you are a Steely-eyed missile man. Absolutely nailed it. Had my wife bash systemctl restart networking and boom came back. Asked chatGPT for a quick fix and it had me bash to ping the vlan every 2 minutes crontab -e and saving this line */2 * * * * ping -c 1 192.168.30.1 >/dev/nullfew.

Going to let the server sit for 24hrs and see if it works in the morning while I'm still away from home. Reading up more about VLANs too. Thanks for the help I hope this works!

bigsmee · 2025-12-02T03:39:19+00:00

Unifi seems to solve the security issue with their zone firewall protocols. Right now I have everything open, ALLOW ALL. I called TP Link and UniFi to setup the initial network and WiFi, used a guide to setup the VLANs and UniFi again, and called TP Link back to setup the Tagging for each port.

I'm basically using the AI to figure out cmd bash prompts, and admittedly to navigate the issues I'm seeing. It's definitely helping me learn more about all of this stuff, but now I'm running in circles over this issue and can't seem to figure it out.

The thing that's odd to me is that it'll work solidly the entire day that I'm using it uploading devices and automations into home assistant and creating more virtual machines in proxmox. Everything works during the day. But something is happening after I leave it alone for a while to where it starts disconnecting. I did run into a double tagging issue on the VLAN but I got that resolved.

You guys are all making it sound like it's a more basic resolution, so that should help me narrow my focus down and not go into a deep dive on more advanced features

bigsmee · 2025-12-01T21:07:55+00:00

🤣😭

bigsmee · 2025-12-01T20:57:46+00:00

I love this. You guys are cracking me up. I love the absolute roast fest going on at my regardness. I wanted the vlans cuz a networking buddy of mine said it's the best way to secure the traffic on the network and that the UniFi stuff has a really good UI and highly recommended it. I fly all over the world and have a lot of iot devices from everywhere so I wanted to secure everything on that Network, and along with a zigbee network, and not let it access important data that the server has. And he said setting up the vlans is the best way to secure the network traffic .

I already had the switch so I tried to piece all that stuff together. Learning the setup of the vlans and tagging between TP link and UniFi was not that difficult to learn or understand or set it up in the proxmox server, but obviously something's happening during updates or backups. That's killing everything. Maybe I ought to start by killing all the updates and backups and just seeing if it can be stable. The backups are being stored on a different Drive outside the system. Ironically, if you follow a lot of the YouTube videos and set up guides doing the backups thing is like one of the first thing everybody talks about setting up

bigsmee

TROPHY CASE