Good Night, Irene
30/05/21 07:02
If it's Monday, it's time to get my blog started for the week. I'll duck in and out throughout the week and get it out the door next Sunday right on schedule. But, where to start? There's something in the local paper this morning about dropping the mask mandates before the scheduled stop which is maybe at the end of June. I think the populace is way ahead of the politicians and, as usual, the politicians are in with both feet when it comes to acting like it was their idea to get life back to normal by dropping the stupid mandates.
I started a list of stores just last week that no longer required their customers to wear masks because I was determined not to do business with stores requiring them. My list was a short one but in the space of a week my list has expanded to the point where there are more stores that have dropped the mandate than not. I wasn't even waiting for them to take down the "masks required" signs.
I figured that if they wanted to kick me out then they would do just that. Word must have gone out to the staff in store after store because no one has said a word to me and I've gone about my business without wearing a mask. It was my way of saying, enough is enough. I can always take my business elsewhere and I did just that on occasion. Funny thing is that a lot of stores still have the signs up but, in practice, they've moved on from the mask bullshit.
I noticed in one store that they had actually removed the arrows from the floors before they did anything with mask signage. You know, the arrows that directed traffic during the height of the pandemic so that you didn't have people passing one another in the tight aisles. That was kind of an odd policy to begin with since you often had to pass someone by on the right or left anyway as they stopped to pursue this or that item. I'm guessing it was a good policy for profits since it forced people to go up and down aisles they might not otherwise go down.
The skeptic in me thinks that by changing definitions and relaxing standards we might well find ourselves in the soup again when this, that, or the other variant arises out of the ashes. Such variants will actually be encouraged to find a footing in a populace that has shed the usual protections for no protection at all. Recent history tells us that the pandemic, created out of whole cloth or not, enabled the democrats to push for voting changes such as mail-in-balloting, etc., which gave them the advantage they needed to steal the 2020 presidential election.
If the democrats are to capitalize and build on their electoral wins to date, they will need another pandemic to get them across the finish line. What better way to bring that about than to drop protections now only to have it resurface just in time for the 2022 and 2024 races. Could that explain why I still see so many people still wearing masks in and out of stores during my travels? Are these democrats who know the plan and want to avoid the second coming of the plague? The word "sheep" also comes to mind.
I popped over to see the Ev man yesterday while the missus worked from home. He enjoys having bottled water on hand so I brought over a dozen one-gallon jugs. I bought a hand dolly of sorts some time back which I use on occasion to wheel things up to his fourth floor apartment. He has to be up for these so-called deliveries and, if he isn't, he'll typically take a gallon or two at a time with him when he comes to visit. I don't know that the water in his town is unpalatable but he prefers the spring water in the gallon jugs so that's what we do.
I also brought over a replacement bulb for one of the headlights that he had out in his car. I walked him through the exercise as a teachable moment and I think he was a little surprised at how involved it was. It was really nothing more than an exercise in taking something apart and putting it back together again. But you have to know which pieces come out, which clips need to be unclipped, which things screw in and which things don't, so it helps to see all of that unfold in a logical manner. Nobody was chasing us so we had the luxury of getting it done at our own speed and in our own time.
I'm hoping to get a call from the local mower shop today letting me know that they have the mower blade that they ordered for me last week. Yes, I turned over my mower recently and noticed that the blade was pretty beat up and needed to be replaced. I hadn't noticed a problem while mowing but you know how those things work. You get used to seeing, or at least think you're seeing, the machine do it's thing. What you may not notice is that the cut isn't as precise or maybe you find yourself going over the same area more than once because you're just not happy with the way things are looking.
I have to say, I was getting a weird vibe from the guy behind the desk at the mower store. There was a bit of an edge to his customer service that almost bordered on hostility. Maybe it was one of those passive aggressive things that is, quite frankly, above my pay grade to chime in on. That said, I didn't feel as though he was unwilling to help me but I'm not entirely sure his heart was into it. I wasn't even sure that he wouldn't be treating the next guy in line any differently but in the moment it was all me and it felt personal. He told me that the blade I ordered would be in the following Tuesday so that was fine.
To make matters worse, or maybe to confirm my worst fears, I stopped back in on the day I was supposed to pick up the blade and wouldn't you know it, this very same asshat gave me some nonsense about there being a problem with the delivery. His attitude hadn't changed much so I figured the old cliche, what you see is what you get, is probably what I was experiencing. Maybe he didn't much care for his job. Maybe he didn't much care for me. Maybe he got a bad performance review and didn't much care for being told that his customer service skills sucked. I think I made a mistake when I paid for the blade in advance. That's on me.
I have a bolt for the mower on order which is coming today thanks to maybe FedEx or Prime. Maybe it's the reliability of company's like FedEx and Amazon that have conditioned me to think "overnight" when setting expectations in my own head for products and services to be delivered. In retrospect, I should have ordered both the blade and the bolt from the same place. I could have avoided all of this customer service nonsense.
There's no need to interact with people to get the things we need these days. You go online, click the right buttons, and it's usually on your doorstep the next day. I guess I was hoping to waltz in and pick up the things I needed. It didn't quite work out that way. In the meantime, my grass isn't getting any shorter. But with a new blade, I should be able to make quick work of whatever I find while mowing be it high grass, gnarly weeds, or small animals that are otherwise foraging in the dense cover and don't see me coming.
It was good to see Mrs G over the weekend. We dragged our feet for one reason or another but finally made it over there on Sunday afternoon. She has been hinting or maybe suggesting strongly as of late that we go through the facility's check-in process rather than enter her first floor unit directly from the outside. This is but maybe one of many precautions they're taking these days in the era of covid. I'm guessing she's concerned that one or more of her neighbors might drop a dime on her for letting in guests who haven't gone though the check-in process.
I don't think it's that big of a stretch to think that some busy body or other might be watching from a window or other spot maybe for the sole purpose of identifying scofflaws and maybe ingratiating themselves to the management. To what end, I ask. An extra serving of pudding? A front row seat at the weekly movie playing in the grand ballroom? When you check in at the front desk you get a sticker that you are supposed to wear and that tells anyone interested that you are good to go. Without that sticker, you are suspect. Patient Zero. Public enemy number one. Pick your poison.
As goes the missus, so go I. She wasn't wanting to push her luck with her mother, being maybe the more accomodating of her two other siblings, so we went through the front gateway and did what we had to to get our patches. There were people milling about near the front desk as we walked through and none of whom were wearing masks as required. That didn't sit well with the missus. The slightest infraction of the CDC guidelines brings out the mask nazi in the missus and I knew we were heading for a very dark place the longer we stayed in the foyer.
Mrs G had her usual list of things she wanted us to take care of so we spent more time fiddling and diddling with this and that, including a bit of gardening outside on her patio, that we never really got around to having much discussion with her. She was bright and alert as usual and she was getting about quite nicely despite having reported more recently of certain aches and pains. Nobody said getting old was easy. She had her knickers in a bit of a twist because her favorite blender was on the outs so I promised to look into it for her.
I wasn't so sure that the things she was asking of us were necessarily outside her area of expertise or capability. I suppose as you get older and maybe more frail you are less inclined to want to tackle certain things. There is probably a bit of that that ends up with her making lists and maybe not wanting to do certain things physically that were clearly in her wheelhouse not even ten years ago. You know what they say about the elderly and what it means when you break things or lose the ability to do things that you once did without a second thought. It's good night, Irene.
There is an ongoing bone-on-bone thing that Mrs G is going to have to come to grips with sooner or later. I suppose it's nothing more than the usual wear and tear but when it causes chronic pain there comes a time when you have to make a decision. There aren't a whole lot of in-between remedies available so it's either surgery or Tylenol. You'd think a shot of this or that or maybe elevating the joints would do the trick but when those options don't work you need to move on to plan B. Plan B wouldn't be so bad were it not for the extended period of rehabilitation involved. It's difficult keeping your chin up when your mobility is curtailed.
This is one of those mornings where I'm up too early and I think I'm fading fast. I couldn't wait to get out of bed so that I could add things to my to-do list before I forgot them. I calculated my sleep time and decided that 6 hours was sufficient and since I was going back to sleep that it was probably time to get out of bed and get my day underway. I know that six hours of sleep is just a little shy of what my body really needs so I'll need to make up for the sleep lost sometime in the next few hours. With everything real and perceived that I have to follow up and thorough on in the next few hours, that nap my body is longing for might just have to wait.
Did I mention that my Mbps download speeds are kicking butt and taking names? The cable guy paid a visit yesterday and did some serious re-wiring to correct some long overdue deficiencies in my internet performance. This was a problem that I thought I was going to have to live with given the age of our home and the cob jobbing of the wiring over time. The wiring is here, there, and fucking everywhere in this house. You need a road map to follow it all and even then you're not sure that what you have in place is going to get the job done.
The signal off the pole at the street level was a good one so the cable guy ran a few new cables to select spots in and around our home. It was a good two-hour job. He ended up going in and out of a few rooms I wish he hadn't but he said he's seen just about everything in his 32 years with the company so I said what the hey. I didn't want him thinking that we had a marijuana growing operation that we didn't want him to see so I moved a few piles of clothes here and there to make it look less cluttered and opened the doors to give him the access he needed. Needless to say, this did not endear me to the missus. Everyone has a room or two like this. Right?
Once he had the infrastructure squared away, he helped to get everything up and running. I had planned to simply ask him to activate the one room that had recently been deactivated and I would set up the equipment after the fact. That plan kinda went south in a hurry as he whipsawed his way in and out of our home just doing his thing. He was at least two steps ahead of me at any given moment. He kept showing me his mobile device depicting the ebbs and flows of this, that, and the other signal as he made one change after another.
I wasn't following any of it but I didn't tell him that. All I wanted to hear was that I was good to go. When he was finally finished a little after 2pm, he looked over my shoulder as I sat at the computer pulling up the page where I could test download speeds. He was feverishly working his mobile device hoping to beat me to the punch where he could announce his findings before I found the page I was looking for. Any detectable differences in performance, of course, might have more to do with my computer set-up involving modems, routers, and other devices too numerous to mention.
That is precisely where we ended up. He showed a terrific signal on his hand held device and my speeds, according to the website that measured such things, sucked wind. I was getting the usual 89 Mbps download speeds that I had before the cable guy even showed up. So, if I was paying for 400 Mbps and I was getting a mere 89 Mbps then the problem had to be on my end. I fiddled around with the connections changing this connection and that connection, which elicited a whine or two from the missus who was trying to nail down a sale or two at one of her online retailers, and it seemed I was getting nowhere fast.
I've never but once in my life had my computer out for service and I wasn't about to change that up now. I can do this, I said to myself time and time again. I had three days until the missus needed the computer for work so I had the time. Was it the VOIP device that I was forced to retrofit into my set-up that was causing the problem? Were my devices capable of handling the throughput that I was paying a king's ransom for month in and month out? It was not a hardware problem, I concluded. I can figure this out (the power of positive thinking!)
Besides, taking my computer out for service wasn't going to solve my wiring issue. The cable guy mention a service provided by Best Buy but that, to me, would have been to admit I wasn't capable of getting to the bottom of the problem that I was trying to solve. I wasn't going to have some twenty-something come into my house and fix my problem in the time it took him (or her) to unpack their tools and make the assessment. No fucking sireee, Bob, When all I was left with was trying to get back online, I looked at my router and uttered to myself, it's just you and me now, pal.
Sometimes, you just get lucky. You go down a path that just works. Of all the paths you could have gone down, you somehow picked the right path. You clicked the right button, checked off the right option, and it came together. I decided to let the router make the decisions instead of looking at MAC addresses, etc., and maybe ending up making a decision that would make matters worse.
Then, where would I go? What would I do? Who would I turn to? Did I even know that the router was capable of sorting these types of things out by itself? Seeing was believing and when the orange indicator lights on the router turned white all I could think of was, there is a god. Be they heaven sent or other, there they were in all their glory.
In the eyes of the missus, I am nothing short of a hero. That's wishful thinking on my part since the truth of the matter is she's used to me sorting these kinds of things out. It would have come as a surprise to her if I had admitted defeat and had to go out and find someone to lend me a hand in fixing the problem. I might have worried that she had somehow come to the conclusion that I was losing my fast ball and this was just one more example of how the passage of time lays bare the frailties we all face as we get older.
The time will come when that may be true but it's not today, it won't be tomorrow, and if the good lord's willing and the creek don't rise, it won't be anytime soon.
I started a list of stores just last week that no longer required their customers to wear masks because I was determined not to do business with stores requiring them. My list was a short one but in the space of a week my list has expanded to the point where there are more stores that have dropped the mandate than not. I wasn't even waiting for them to take down the "masks required" signs.
I figured that if they wanted to kick me out then they would do just that. Word must have gone out to the staff in store after store because no one has said a word to me and I've gone about my business without wearing a mask. It was my way of saying, enough is enough. I can always take my business elsewhere and I did just that on occasion. Funny thing is that a lot of stores still have the signs up but, in practice, they've moved on from the mask bullshit.
I noticed in one store that they had actually removed the arrows from the floors before they did anything with mask signage. You know, the arrows that directed traffic during the height of the pandemic so that you didn't have people passing one another in the tight aisles. That was kind of an odd policy to begin with since you often had to pass someone by on the right or left anyway as they stopped to pursue this or that item. I'm guessing it was a good policy for profits since it forced people to go up and down aisles they might not otherwise go down.
The skeptic in me thinks that by changing definitions and relaxing standards we might well find ourselves in the soup again when this, that, or the other variant arises out of the ashes. Such variants will actually be encouraged to find a footing in a populace that has shed the usual protections for no protection at all. Recent history tells us that the pandemic, created out of whole cloth or not, enabled the democrats to push for voting changes such as mail-in-balloting, etc., which gave them the advantage they needed to steal the 2020 presidential election.
If the democrats are to capitalize and build on their electoral wins to date, they will need another pandemic to get them across the finish line. What better way to bring that about than to drop protections now only to have it resurface just in time for the 2022 and 2024 races. Could that explain why I still see so many people still wearing masks in and out of stores during my travels? Are these democrats who know the plan and want to avoid the second coming of the plague? The word "sheep" also comes to mind.
I popped over to see the Ev man yesterday while the missus worked from home. He enjoys having bottled water on hand so I brought over a dozen one-gallon jugs. I bought a hand dolly of sorts some time back which I use on occasion to wheel things up to his fourth floor apartment. He has to be up for these so-called deliveries and, if he isn't, he'll typically take a gallon or two at a time with him when he comes to visit. I don't know that the water in his town is unpalatable but he prefers the spring water in the gallon jugs so that's what we do.
I also brought over a replacement bulb for one of the headlights that he had out in his car. I walked him through the exercise as a teachable moment and I think he was a little surprised at how involved it was. It was really nothing more than an exercise in taking something apart and putting it back together again. But you have to know which pieces come out, which clips need to be unclipped, which things screw in and which things don't, so it helps to see all of that unfold in a logical manner. Nobody was chasing us so we had the luxury of getting it done at our own speed and in our own time.
I'm hoping to get a call from the local mower shop today letting me know that they have the mower blade that they ordered for me last week. Yes, I turned over my mower recently and noticed that the blade was pretty beat up and needed to be replaced. I hadn't noticed a problem while mowing but you know how those things work. You get used to seeing, or at least think you're seeing, the machine do it's thing. What you may not notice is that the cut isn't as precise or maybe you find yourself going over the same area more than once because you're just not happy with the way things are looking.
I have to say, I was getting a weird vibe from the guy behind the desk at the mower store. There was a bit of an edge to his customer service that almost bordered on hostility. Maybe it was one of those passive aggressive things that is, quite frankly, above my pay grade to chime in on. That said, I didn't feel as though he was unwilling to help me but I'm not entirely sure his heart was into it. I wasn't even sure that he wouldn't be treating the next guy in line any differently but in the moment it was all me and it felt personal. He told me that the blade I ordered would be in the following Tuesday so that was fine.
To make matters worse, or maybe to confirm my worst fears, I stopped back in on the day I was supposed to pick up the blade and wouldn't you know it, this very same asshat gave me some nonsense about there being a problem with the delivery. His attitude hadn't changed much so I figured the old cliche, what you see is what you get, is probably what I was experiencing. Maybe he didn't much care for his job. Maybe he didn't much care for me. Maybe he got a bad performance review and didn't much care for being told that his customer service skills sucked. I think I made a mistake when I paid for the blade in advance. That's on me.
I have a bolt for the mower on order which is coming today thanks to maybe FedEx or Prime. Maybe it's the reliability of company's like FedEx and Amazon that have conditioned me to think "overnight" when setting expectations in my own head for products and services to be delivered. In retrospect, I should have ordered both the blade and the bolt from the same place. I could have avoided all of this customer service nonsense.
There's no need to interact with people to get the things we need these days. You go online, click the right buttons, and it's usually on your doorstep the next day. I guess I was hoping to waltz in and pick up the things I needed. It didn't quite work out that way. In the meantime, my grass isn't getting any shorter. But with a new blade, I should be able to make quick work of whatever I find while mowing be it high grass, gnarly weeds, or small animals that are otherwise foraging in the dense cover and don't see me coming.
It was good to see Mrs G over the weekend. We dragged our feet for one reason or another but finally made it over there on Sunday afternoon. She has been hinting or maybe suggesting strongly as of late that we go through the facility's check-in process rather than enter her first floor unit directly from the outside. This is but maybe one of many precautions they're taking these days in the era of covid. I'm guessing she's concerned that one or more of her neighbors might drop a dime on her for letting in guests who haven't gone though the check-in process.
I don't think it's that big of a stretch to think that some busy body or other might be watching from a window or other spot maybe for the sole purpose of identifying scofflaws and maybe ingratiating themselves to the management. To what end, I ask. An extra serving of pudding? A front row seat at the weekly movie playing in the grand ballroom? When you check in at the front desk you get a sticker that you are supposed to wear and that tells anyone interested that you are good to go. Without that sticker, you are suspect. Patient Zero. Public enemy number one. Pick your poison.
As goes the missus, so go I. She wasn't wanting to push her luck with her mother, being maybe the more accomodating of her two other siblings, so we went through the front gateway and did what we had to to get our patches. There were people milling about near the front desk as we walked through and none of whom were wearing masks as required. That didn't sit well with the missus. The slightest infraction of the CDC guidelines brings out the mask nazi in the missus and I knew we were heading for a very dark place the longer we stayed in the foyer.
Mrs G had her usual list of things she wanted us to take care of so we spent more time fiddling and diddling with this and that, including a bit of gardening outside on her patio, that we never really got around to having much discussion with her. She was bright and alert as usual and she was getting about quite nicely despite having reported more recently of certain aches and pains. Nobody said getting old was easy. She had her knickers in a bit of a twist because her favorite blender was on the outs so I promised to look into it for her.
I wasn't so sure that the things she was asking of us were necessarily outside her area of expertise or capability. I suppose as you get older and maybe more frail you are less inclined to want to tackle certain things. There is probably a bit of that that ends up with her making lists and maybe not wanting to do certain things physically that were clearly in her wheelhouse not even ten years ago. You know what they say about the elderly and what it means when you break things or lose the ability to do things that you once did without a second thought. It's good night, Irene.
There is an ongoing bone-on-bone thing that Mrs G is going to have to come to grips with sooner or later. I suppose it's nothing more than the usual wear and tear but when it causes chronic pain there comes a time when you have to make a decision. There aren't a whole lot of in-between remedies available so it's either surgery or Tylenol. You'd think a shot of this or that or maybe elevating the joints would do the trick but when those options don't work you need to move on to plan B. Plan B wouldn't be so bad were it not for the extended period of rehabilitation involved. It's difficult keeping your chin up when your mobility is curtailed.
This is one of those mornings where I'm up too early and I think I'm fading fast. I couldn't wait to get out of bed so that I could add things to my to-do list before I forgot them. I calculated my sleep time and decided that 6 hours was sufficient and since I was going back to sleep that it was probably time to get out of bed and get my day underway. I know that six hours of sleep is just a little shy of what my body really needs so I'll need to make up for the sleep lost sometime in the next few hours. With everything real and perceived that I have to follow up and thorough on in the next few hours, that nap my body is longing for might just have to wait.
Did I mention that my Mbps download speeds are kicking butt and taking names? The cable guy paid a visit yesterday and did some serious re-wiring to correct some long overdue deficiencies in my internet performance. This was a problem that I thought I was going to have to live with given the age of our home and the cob jobbing of the wiring over time. The wiring is here, there, and fucking everywhere in this house. You need a road map to follow it all and even then you're not sure that what you have in place is going to get the job done.
The signal off the pole at the street level was a good one so the cable guy ran a few new cables to select spots in and around our home. It was a good two-hour job. He ended up going in and out of a few rooms I wish he hadn't but he said he's seen just about everything in his 32 years with the company so I said what the hey. I didn't want him thinking that we had a marijuana growing operation that we didn't want him to see so I moved a few piles of clothes here and there to make it look less cluttered and opened the doors to give him the access he needed. Needless to say, this did not endear me to the missus. Everyone has a room or two like this. Right?
Once he had the infrastructure squared away, he helped to get everything up and running. I had planned to simply ask him to activate the one room that had recently been deactivated and I would set up the equipment after the fact. That plan kinda went south in a hurry as he whipsawed his way in and out of our home just doing his thing. He was at least two steps ahead of me at any given moment. He kept showing me his mobile device depicting the ebbs and flows of this, that, and the other signal as he made one change after another.
I wasn't following any of it but I didn't tell him that. All I wanted to hear was that I was good to go. When he was finally finished a little after 2pm, he looked over my shoulder as I sat at the computer pulling up the page where I could test download speeds. He was feverishly working his mobile device hoping to beat me to the punch where he could announce his findings before I found the page I was looking for. Any detectable differences in performance, of course, might have more to do with my computer set-up involving modems, routers, and other devices too numerous to mention.
That is precisely where we ended up. He showed a terrific signal on his hand held device and my speeds, according to the website that measured such things, sucked wind. I was getting the usual 89 Mbps download speeds that I had before the cable guy even showed up. So, if I was paying for 400 Mbps and I was getting a mere 89 Mbps then the problem had to be on my end. I fiddled around with the connections changing this connection and that connection, which elicited a whine or two from the missus who was trying to nail down a sale or two at one of her online retailers, and it seemed I was getting nowhere fast.
I've never but once in my life had my computer out for service and I wasn't about to change that up now. I can do this, I said to myself time and time again. I had three days until the missus needed the computer for work so I had the time. Was it the VOIP device that I was forced to retrofit into my set-up that was causing the problem? Were my devices capable of handling the throughput that I was paying a king's ransom for month in and month out? It was not a hardware problem, I concluded. I can figure this out (the power of positive thinking!)
Besides, taking my computer out for service wasn't going to solve my wiring issue. The cable guy mention a service provided by Best Buy but that, to me, would have been to admit I wasn't capable of getting to the bottom of the problem that I was trying to solve. I wasn't going to have some twenty-something come into my house and fix my problem in the time it took him (or her) to unpack their tools and make the assessment. No fucking sireee, Bob, When all I was left with was trying to get back online, I looked at my router and uttered to myself, it's just you and me now, pal.
Sometimes, you just get lucky. You go down a path that just works. Of all the paths you could have gone down, you somehow picked the right path. You clicked the right button, checked off the right option, and it came together. I decided to let the router make the decisions instead of looking at MAC addresses, etc., and maybe ending up making a decision that would make matters worse.
Then, where would I go? What would I do? Who would I turn to? Did I even know that the router was capable of sorting these types of things out by itself? Seeing was believing and when the orange indicator lights on the router turned white all I could think of was, there is a god. Be they heaven sent or other, there they were in all their glory.
In the eyes of the missus, I am nothing short of a hero. That's wishful thinking on my part since the truth of the matter is she's used to me sorting these kinds of things out. It would have come as a surprise to her if I had admitted defeat and had to go out and find someone to lend me a hand in fixing the problem. I might have worried that she had somehow come to the conclusion that I was losing my fast ball and this was just one more example of how the passage of time lays bare the frailties we all face as we get older.
The time will come when that may be true but it's not today, it won't be tomorrow, and if the good lord's willing and the creek don't rise, it won't be anytime soon.