3 November 2025

Brian Bilbrey

Marcia's last fishing day

Marcia made it out on our boat just one time in the summer just past. Bonus for her - she caught the first (and second) fishes that day. Not big, but first, which was a big deal for her, as I was usually the one to catch the first (and the most) fish in any given outing.

Marcia in the boat on the lake, her small bass fish in the foreground.
Marcia and her first fish of the day

Coming into summer, her health was already failing, and she didn't have a lot of balance or stamina, both of which mitigated against coming out on the water in a small boat. She managed a couple of other trips out on Cobbossee, on her sister Nancy's pontoon boat, which was a lot easier for her to board, etc.

She liked being out on the water a lot, we were glad she got a couple of days there...

I'm slowly adapting to the hole in my life.

Fall Chores

Yesterday it got down to 31° F, and there was ice on the puddles along the dog walking route. Last night was the first full frost: the weather app and my outdoor thermometer agreed it got down to 26° F - brrrrr.

leaves on the lawn
Leaves on the front lawn

The first full round of leaves fell, so late in the afternoon on Friday last, I set to with a rake and tarp for a couple of hours, and knocked it out.

No more leaves on the lawn, momentarily
Lawn without leaves, but with a Georgia dog

Of course there are more - I'll give it a few more days, then clean up the leaves once again, and do some cleanup of the front garden beds and the back veggie beds.

SSH and MacOS 26 (Tahoe)

Ran into an interesting one today (well, interesting if you work on the command line on UNIX-like systems including MacOS). I had a system that got a new SSH host key, so I went to clean out the old one using the standard ssh-keygen command to remove the old IP host key entry (IP address changed to protect the guilty):

ssh-keygen -R 192.168.17.37

However, the output was full of things like line 637 invalid, and ended with a notice that the known_hosts file was broken and could not be used. 

Turns out that the ssh-dss host key type is not just deprecated, but illegal, invalid, and just-plain-wrong under MacOS 26 Tahoe. So I made a backup copy of ~/.ssh/known_hosts, and edited the file to remove all the lines with ssh-dss in them. Thereafter ssh-keygen was happy again.

Interestingly, I only learned this today, because as long as the various ssh tools didn't try to make use of or edit the ssh-dss host key lines, nothing complained. Sigh.

FYI.