Bastards are everywhere.
Would wife have given broke grandson the money if she’d known it was a scam? I’m struggling to decide whether I think that matters to the giving. Tough call for sure.
How old / clue-full is this “grandson”.
He’s 22. I think he wasn’t completely truthful with her to begin with. It’s basically related to a legal situation he’s in. He was talking to the scammer on one phone (he told my grandson if he hung up on him they were going to come and arrest him) and my wife on another. There were lots of things the scammer said that he didn’t relay to my wife when asking her for money. She only found out some of these things after the fact, and said if she would have known at the time she probably wouldn’t have given him the money so quickly.
My biggest complaint with my wife is that she is constantly bailing out her kids and grandkids financially. And then she wonders why they can’t ever manage to get their act together. Well why should they when she’s always right there with a blank check! It’s been a major sore spot for practically as long as we have been married.
Ouch. The hard part now is the time to learn those lessons has long since passed. If they’re cut off today, they will crash themselves a time or three and may never internalize the lessons not matter how many time reality smacks them upside the head.
Raising them right is sooo much easier than raising them wrong and then dealing with the lifelong consequences of your earlier failures. For the rhetorical “you”, not you specifically.
Best of luck …
Just for something completely different, a strange health rant. I was up very early this morning, feeling perfectly fine, and quite suddenly started to get a really sore throat. Not the dry scratchy kind like when you’re getting a bad cold, but the kind that makes it painful to swallow.
I thought it best to go back to bed for a bit, whereupon a little while later I got really severe cold shivers, even though it was warm and I was under heavy covers.
Strange. Woke up about five hours later pretty much entirely better, just feeling like I’d recovered from something. I don’t know of any virus that manifests so quickly and departs equally quickly, and those are not the symptoms of food poisoning, not that I ate anything suspect anyway.
I am currently taking the cure in the form of seafood, vegetables, and antibiotics; to wit, I am having a Caesar well infused with vodka, shortly to be followed by another. Cheers!
Supplementary rant: my faithful Weber barbecue needs attention. A few years ago, after more than 20 years of faithful service, one side of the bottom under-tray (which collects drippings and funnels them into a grease tray) collapsed. I propped it up with copper wires but I see this afternoon it’s collapsed again. The good news is, I blamed myself too quickly for not doing a good enough repair. It was the other side that collapsed this time. I just have to repeat what I did before, except now I’m older, crankier, less agile, and, apparently, sicklier. These handyman tasks are not easy for an older dog.
P.S.- Webers are (or certainly were) very durable high quality grills. This thing has been out in the weather, summer and winter, for what is closing in on damn near a quarter century. All it needs now is a simple mechanical repair. The burners are still good as new.
There was tornado watch through 3am this morning and just constant pounding rain. I can’t sleep through storms and heavy rain so as a result I lost three hours of sleep last night. I have anxiety around storms, for a couple reasons, one, my Mom obsessively watched the weather channel and freaked out anytime there might be a storm when I was growing up, so I was kind of taught to fear them.
Two… a story. I was at an amusement park in my early teens and all hell broke loose. The park, Cedar Point, is built on a peninsula, surrounded by water. We were in line for an indoor coaster and they shut it down and threw us out without explanation. I swear to God, the attendant said, “You’ll see why when you get outside.”
As soon as I got outside you could see this big water spout. I started running toward the other shore only to find another fucking water spout on that side too! I tried to hide in the bathroom and it was crammed full of frightened people. I looked up and directly overhead was this big ass funnel cloud - not a water spout, a tornado about to drop on my head. Oh my God were people terrified. There was nowhere to go. I ended up in the arcade which was probably not all that safe but it beat standing in the middle of the open park. The funnel cloud never touched down thank God but there were two other funnel clouds in the northern part of the park that I didn’t see. It was like something in a nightmare.
So yeah, not too fond of storms or tornado watches. Especially as I live in a manufactured home with no basement.
Oh, right, the point of all this is that I didn’t sleep so I’m fucking tired.
My hostess is going through this due to a slipped disk. I fed her some magnesium malate to resolve the pressure issue. Now, the official word is to yous magnesium citrate but I’ve discovered that malate is gentler than citrate on the belly. There’s no need to add to a person’s pain level just to have a bowel movement. Check for it at a coop or natural foods store.
My therapist suggested I join local Facebook groups to connect with other parents of autistic children. It’s not a terrible idea but I haven’t been on Facebook for years, because I hate it. But I signed back up and joined some groups. Oh, it’s terrible. There isn’t even an easy link to view all group posts. I have to dig deep into the app and then click them one at a time. My feed is just garbage advertisements.
And the one local group I found appears to have zero engagement. It’s mostly fliers for local events, and oh, I don’t know if I can endure this garbage app for the occasional relevant flier.
Then don’t. Or get an effective ad blocker.
My wife left her purse on a plane in Zurich yesterday. Thanks to an AirTag, we knew exactly where it was and were able to go back to the airport this morning and retrieve it from Lost and Found. L&F is run by the airport, not the airlines. When we went to the L&F, the agent went behind a wall and was able to retrieve it immediately. Huzzah!!
Then she said, “That will be 30 francs.” Obviously we paid it since it had her credit cards and hundreds in cash but WTF? I have to pay to get my stuff back? The answer is “Yes.”
And I now highly recommend AirTags. We were able to see its location yesterday evening and saw that it never moved. It was quite the relief.
I wouldn’t have minded paying for it. I’d consider it a finder’s fee, or a tip for taking care of it and returning it to me. Maybe that’s just me.
Nice tip on the AirTags. Maybe I’ll consider one to keep in my jacket. Not that I’m prone to misplacing it, or that I ever have actually done so, but I keep so much important stuff in it that if I ever did lose it, I’d panic.
Well I’ve been trying to find local groups and I’m getting a bit desperate. One group we signed up for online and showed up at the designated place only to be told they had no idea what we were talking about. It’s hard to find community. If Facebook is the only way, I have to try. But I don’t have to like it.
That’s normal. The airlines or their security contractors find stuff left onboard aircraft. The airport janitorial and security staff find stuff left in the terminal.
All of it goes to the airport-operated lost-and-found. For international arrivals, after a customs screening.
The airport L&F office tend to categorize their goods by where it was found as well as what sort of stuff it is. So beyond knowing what you’re looking for, knowing which terminal or airline you used, or where you might have left it is helpful.
I’m guessing that everyone in this situation has as limited bandwidth as you do. It might be better to start a group, by posting to these groups saying “we’ll meet for an hour at [time convenient to Spice_Weasel] at [location convenient to Spice_Weasel],” and then show up and bring a book / some work / whatever in case no one shows. Cross-post to neighbourhood groups in case there are people who are local but don’t know about / don’t use the other groups.
I’m OK with the finder’s fee, I was just taken aback by it. I would have paid a LOT more and still be thankful. I made no comments at all to the agent because it wasn’t her idea and she was helping me.
At dinner yesterday as we were bemoaning the day’s events, my wife mentioned that it was the “This AirTag is no longer detected near you” message that clued her into its missing. At this point I (kind of) yelled, “You have an AirTag in your purse!?!?” We can tell exactly where it is and if went to Luxembourg or not!” (It hadn’t.)
We monitored it and it never moved so we were fairly confident we’d get it back.
In all seriousness, I am buying an AirTag based solely on your story.
@Spice_Weasel, maybe NextDoor might be more helpful?
For the AirTag fans, is there an equivalent item that does not require the iEcosystem? I’m a solidly Android type myself.
It was truly an Og send.
It wasn’t cheap but it was cheaper than the 30 francs you paid to claim the lost purse (Google estimates that at about $35 US) so still a good deal. 
Never heard of any Lost and Found charging people for relinquishing a lost item. That reeks of greed.
If airport staff locates a lost child, do the parents have to pay ransom to get it back?
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