Well, it IS the internet.
That’s me in the avatar (an artist’s impression, to be sure). Why do you think I’m always so insanely pro-dog in here? 
But I’m highly domesticated and trained, and can type rapidly with both paws at a rate that is the envy of my vet’s secretary.
I can drive, too, although that’s not really unusual:
Doesn’t always turn out well, though; we’re easily distracted:
But you need to have device location on to be able to use it, something by default is off on my phone unless I’m actively using an app that needs my location. I’ve never really lost it per se, it’s more of a where in the house is it when it’s hiding under some piece of paper that I put down 5 mins earlier - google voice or work phone to the rescue!
Yes there are a couple that work with Android. The problem is that, while there are more Android devices worldwide, Apple gives away phones with all of the major carriers & there are many more fruit phones in the US. In simple terms, they use a passing phone to ‘call home’; since air tags are built in to fruit phones, if you lose an air tag (connected to your lost ___), you have a greater likelihood of finding it than probably any of the other trackers. The other BS of them is they actively let fruit phones know if there’s an unknown tag around them for too long - ie.if a stalker drops one in your bag / under your car. There’s an app that you can use on Android that will notify you, but it’s passive, meaning you need to open the app & press for it to notify you whereas with the fruit phones it’ll actively notify the phone owner giving them an alert that there’s an unknown tracker around them. Sadly, it’ll probably take a lawsuit after someone is raped/murdered for any possibility of them changing it to make the Android app automatically alert you.
For the second year in a row, this weekend’s race mis-placed me. Last year the preliminary results had me in 4th but when the final results came out I was 3rd in AG; no award, no recognition. Whatever.
This year they called me up for 3rd place but when I got to see the results they were 9:59 slower than my time. One second is a rounding error & not worth quibbling about but the other 10 mins was a maths error on their part (it was a time trial start so the first people off were done before I even toed the line) & I should have been solidly in second place. I did get the right award but again, no callup recognition…& this is probably the last year for the race, too.
.
Tonight was a track workout; it was hot out but I had no energy; only afterwards did it dawn on me that the Red Cross stole red stuff from me just 25 hrs earlier. If I wasn’t so tired from two early mornings I probably would have remembered that & done a modified workout.
My power has been out for 5 hours now. Goodbye everything in the fridge. A storm came out of nowhere around 6. I was on the porch when the wind hit. Everything started flying around and a limb from my neighbor’s tree landed in my yard. Scared the hell out of me. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get the door open to get in the house. By then the power was out.
This is the third storm in a few weeks to knock out power in a significant portion of the city. 122,000 without power now. I really worry about the future. The electrical grid sucks but people aren’t willing to pay more taxes to upgrade it. The weather is going to continue to be crazy. And I’m not getting any younger. It’s going to be 98 degrees tomorrow and I don’t think I can tolerate that. I talked to a friend with power so I can go there if I have to but I hate having to leave the cats here in that kind of heat.
I just ate a whole bunch of sliced turkey breast and drank two big glasses of milk. Maybe that will help me sleep. I’m glad I didn’t make it to the grocery today. At least I won’t lose much food. Hopefully the power gods are smiling on us tomorrow.
What?? I repeat (cue incredulous voice) whaaaaaat???
A few years ago we had a storm here that caused major damage to a power substation, and the power was out for something like 2½ days. Days, not hours. Everything in the fridge was fine.
Not opening the fridge or freezer except very briefly when absolutely necessary was key. Also the fact that both compartments had quite a lot of stuff in them, hence a lot of thermal mass. But after the power came back on I carefully checked items in the freezer and most were still well frozen, and one or two things that had begun to thaw were still mostly frozen with lots of ice crystals.
Proceed with caution, of course. I don’t want to give advice that will make anyone sick. But Jeebus, a few hours without power shouldn’t affect anything in a typically loaded normal full-size fridge.
ETA: I believe this was early spring, not cold enough to need heating but definitely not hot. If your weather is exceptionally hot, as it currently is in much of the US, that might change the equation.
The fridge is pretty empty since I didn’t get to the grocery today. When I drank the last of the milk, it was just cool. We won’t have power back until at least tomorrow. Depending on when (or if) that happens, the stuff in the freezer may be ok.
The utility company has called in 35 repair crews and 37 tree crews from out of town. I’m not expecting power anytime soon.
Fortunately today’s high was only 90 and it cooled off to 75 after the storm. So the house is tolerable at this point. Tomorrow not so much with temps near 100. Fridge side is a lost cause.
You need a carry bag. I made a simple one for my grandmother long, long ago. (She’d had a stroke and needed a cane to walk safely, making it a pain to try to get to the porch or opposite side of the house or whatever with book/reading glasses/a bottle of water/packet of tissues/etc.) It was just a pillowcase I cut down to about half height and added a fairly wide strap long enough to go over her head to the opposite side’s shoulder.
It did mean she had to either wrap up food items, or put them into plastic containers for the trip, but that’s much easier and safer than juggling stuff on a paper plate while climbing stairs!
And when accidental spills happen, washing out a (half) pillow case is trivial.
Well. This is almost worthy of its own thread. I just learned about this:
I learned it all in the worst way. Through my job.
You see, I work for a domestic violence and sexual assault services organization. We have what was once a very robust Prevention Education program, which provides age-appropriate education about the dynamics of abusive relationships, for older kids provides leadership training in creating safe environments for schools, etc. This programming has always been LGBTQ inclusive. The award-winning Elementary Curriculum has a name that references gender, as women and girls are disproportionately impacted by intimate partner violence and sexual assault. The statistics we’ve been pulling out of these high schools in terms of the prevalence of dating violence and sexual assault are heartbreaking. So a lot of our programming is targeted at that age. We’ve seen evidence that this education approach actually works to reduce incidents of such things in schools. I’ve been working here for eight years and can attest it is an outstanding program, and a lot of the reason for that is because of one trans dude and friend of mine who understands how to engage and talk to young people about these issues. We reach about 10,000 young people a year.
Well, this fucking fascist organization is now suing school districts in Michigan for having this kind of content in schools. And our gutless board of directors started pushing for us to change our elementary school curriculum to not mention gender. And my dear friend quit. My newish CEO comes from a really conservative background, but I think working here has really been eye-opening for her. To her credit, she told the board we are not changing the curriculum.
But it won’t prevent the schools from removing our program from their curriculum out of fear of being sued. And it didn’t keep one of our greatest assets and one of the best people I have ever known from walking.
It’s really fucking horrible. These people are really fucking horrible. I wonder how many children won’t know where to go when they are abused or how many teens will be raped because of these pieces of shit.
I’m ashamed of my board. What this place once stood for, I am fighting tooth and nail to maintain its integrity, but I am only one person.
Lots. I am grateful to you for continuing to fight this.
When I was growing up, there was silence around these issues. That is what they want to return to. Silence is comforting for people who don’t want to hear about it, but isolating, damaging, and deadly to those who do suffer, and a wonderful gift to abusers.
Thanks, that might be quite useful some of the time, depending on the articles being carried. Unfortunately one of the most common sets of objects I regularly haul up to the computer is a plate of dinner and a glass of wine, neither of which is readily baggable.
OTOH, for things that can be carried that way, there’s already an invention custom-made for me! 
Some stores carry dry ice. Get a couple of blocks for your fridge and freezer(s).
The continuing saga of AT&T tearing up our neighborhood to install fiber… I thought they were pretty much done at this point, except for getting individual houses hooked up.
Friday morning I was working from home. Came upstairs to get some more coffee and my wife says “What’s with the hole in the front yard?” I looked out front, expecting to see one of the small hand-dug holes that they gifted all the yards with last summer. Nope, this was about a 4’x8’ hole, about 4’ deep, that had been dug between our driveway and the neighbor’s. Obviously the work of a backhoe, which was three houses up the street digging another one.
They did manage to get the hole filled back in before severe weather hit Friday afternoon, but apparently didn’t have time to load up the backhoe, so they just left it parked in our yard all weekend. And of course now I’ve got a roughly 10’x10’ area of the yard that’s all torn up and I’ll have to wait until fall to try to get grass growing again. (They did a half-ass job of throwing some topsoil and grass seed on top, but seriously - you think you’re going to get grass seed sprouting in July? Idiots.)
But the cherry on top was coming home from work this evening and seeing about half a dozen gas company vehicles parked on the street and a bunch of guys in yellow vests milling around the yard three houses up where the other hole got dug on Friday. My wife said there was also a fire truck earlier in the day. I guess we’re lucky that nobody’s house exploded, either today or last week when they were digging.
My power is back! I went out this afternoon to hunt down some food and charge my phone. The only place open within a couple miles was a Wendy’s with a line out into the street. I’m not sure how they were open with everything else around them closed. But I got enough food for today. I passed a few utility trucks on the next block. When I walked in the kitchen, the microwave beeped. Yay! But it’s a good thing I got food. Everything in the fridge is done for and I only had 3 frozen dinners in the freezer. I checked them and they were mushy so out it all goes. I did pass the Kroger and it was open, so I’ll get some groceries tomorrow.
After my power came back on today, I called AT&T to report that my Uverse was out. Instead of just having a robot tell me there is an outage in the area and an approximate repair time, I got a live person. She got all my information and said she was testing things. This went on for some minutes. Then she told me that the way to fix this problem was to upgrade to fiber. Now AT&T has been annoying the hell out of me to try to get me to do this for over a year and I have refused. I told her that I don’t want fiber and am happy with my service but would like for it to work. Then she said she would troubleshoot my problem. Oh, yes, there is an outage. Those assholes don’t give up. If I didn’t hate Comcast more, I would switch.
Silence is comforting for those who don’t want to get caught doing it, too. So disgusting.
Like I said…
The front row here used to be available to anyone, then they took away all but the first four spots on the left. A day or two ago they took away those, too.
Nobody is here. Nobody is using this service. ISTM they have other issues with their curbside pickup service than a shortage of parking spaces.
between handicapped (why does Wally World have soooo many HP spaces???), curbside pickup, parking for veterans (just veterans, not disabled veterans), pregnant women, parents of kids, employee of the week, employee of the month, employee of the quarter, a space or two for law enforcement (when they come to deal with a shoplifter) you had better be able bodied because you’re parking about two towns away. Here’s a trick though, with the exception of HP, most of those are not legally enforceable, meaning you can’t get a ticket & I highly doubt they’d tow someone in their store during business hours.
When I go to the supermarket at night I will frequently park in the parents spaces because they are all empty. I have a kid; oh, he needs to be with me; nope, he’s not with me because he’s in his own apartment. As for him being a young kid; well he is relative to my age.
You shoulda called a towing company; not only would they not have been able to work on Mon morn but the bill they would have gotten for something like that would have probably been a couple of hundred dollars…cash. Someone’s head would have been served up on a platter
I think I ranted sometime a few months ago about fiber being installed in this neighbourhood. But it was remarkably non-destructive. I really don’t know how they did it. As far as I could tell it was accomplished with big trucks that made a lot of noise and then left, with nothing obvious disturbed. My next-door neighbour and I both opted for the free “run the fiber right up to your house” option, which they also did without apparently even damaging the lawn. (So now we both have loops of fiber attached to our houses, but neither of us has yet subscribed. I’m getting 700 Mbps on cable so I’m fine with that.)
Anti-rant: Computer uptime 6 days 11 hours 40 minutes and 18 seconds with the new keyboard re-introduced into the system and apologies rendered; no sign of the interrupt storm. Danged if I know what the hell it was.
Rant: Of course, as is typical with Windows, non-paged pool is steadily climbing. Not something I would normally notice except I’ve been monitoring resource usage. Currently at 111 MB (paged pool at 699 MB). For the benefit of the less technical, non-paged kernel pool is the critical part of the OS and its data structures that must be permanently resident and cannot be paged out. 111 megabytes! Bill Gates once assured us that 640K total memory should be enough for anyone. Now it’s not even a drop in the bucket for his bloated operating systems.