You’re not you when you’re hungry!
Today I decided to haul some hay into the snow covered pasture on a hunting sled (big sled used to haul deer carcasses out of the woods not that we use it for that). The intention was to lure my horse out there so 1. she’d get a bit of exercise and 2. she wouldn’t stand in her nice bedded stall all day long, out of the wind which is ferocious right now, and enjoy hay going in one end and piles of poop going out the other, poop that yours truly has to pick up twice a day.
In the gaiety of my heart I let the sled hurtle across the pasture by itself, figuring it would come to rest and I’d slog out there and dump it. But no. Instead, it hurtled along until it took a right turn and slid right under the hot wire and headed into the next pasture and disappeared. That is not the big mistake.
The big mistake was when I sighed and started out to find it, only to realize that walking in my cleated snow boots was impossible. I broke through a half inch of ice that had been laid down over the 16" of snow, and got completely stuck – every step.
My horse watched all of this with interest from under the barn overhang but showed no inclination to move.
I dragged myself out of the pasture, went and got some snowshoes with big teeth on them, and tried again. This was doable, if I went slowly. My 75 lb dog could run on top of the ice, but not me. I found the sled, and hauled back up the hill still filled with hay. My horse thought it was as good as tv. She went back into her stall and I put the sled behind the barn. Still full of hay.
Ah well. At least it wasn’t wasted effort. 
On my phone I was able to install additional dictionaries so it would stop auto-incorrecting the foreign words. It also added the correct accents for me, which was a bonus.
Probably worth looking to see if you can do the same on your tablet.
I have all that, but the Tablet comes with a very nice small bt-keyboard (español) … and if I switch over to english (I have tose dictionaries installed as well), things get completely out of whack, as some characters like (,;-?!) are no longer where they are on the HW-keyboard.
so, yes itś a lose-lose situación and falls squarely into the “dumb thing theme” of this thread.
aaarrrgh!
Don’t judge until you have gotten a face full of pepper spray. I’ll bet you’d change your mind pretty quickly then.
Wouldn’t that ruin my contact lenses forever?
I don’t know. I’ve never worn contacts, I thought they were disposable nowadays? Don’t they need to be cleaned on a regular basis? I’ll bet milk can be rinsed right off of hard permanent lenses but I don’t care enough to find out for myself.
It’s your question, why don’t you find out and report back?
I had two people who had to go to work but needed to register their kids. I arrived at 6:00 and got them both done by 7:20, much to their pleasure. Mission accomplished, but I want to go home but still have my day in front of me. 
I dropped a wooden chopping board on my foot once.
I remember watching it fall and thinking “I should move my foot out of the way” … but I didn’t! 
(I lost my big toenail - but it grew back. 
)
I parked in a parking spot that was surrounded by ice. I didn’t fall, thanks to cautious duck-walking and grabbing onto other objects. But it was a dumb thing to do, given how I’ve fractured bones from slipping on unsteady ground.
More of a “not paying attention to the obvious” moment, which made me feel monumentally stupid.
I bought a new car just over two years ago – February 18, 2023 to be exact. It’s a Kia Soul.
Now, Kia doesn’t do their trim level like most manufactures do. Most manufactures take a base level trim and then add more and more features to each level. So an A level trim will have all the bells and whistles of a B level trim, plus the added ones specific to the A trim. Not Kia. Kia starts with a base trim and then adds different features for each trim level above that. So trim A won’t necessarily have what the cheaper trim B has. Sometimes they will, oftentimes they won’t.
My specific Kia is the “GT Line” model which I chose because I need fog lights. The GT Line is the only trim level that comes with them from the factory. Some of the cheaper trims had different features such as a sunroof that weren’t available on the high-priced GT Line trim.
So the other day at oh-dark-thirty I went out to start my car manually rather than use the remote starter like I nearly always do. ~5 minutes later when I went back out to get in and head to work I noticed weird squiggly lines in the condensation on the side mirrors. As I watched the lines grew wider and eventually the condensation began to disappear.
Yeah. My car has auto-defrost side mirrors and it took me two years to notice.
Reminds me of something my dad did some years ago.
At the time he owned a mid-70’s square body Chevy pickup, single cab, 4x4 with an auto transmission. It had a manual shifting 4x4 transfer case. The transmission had a steering column mounted shift lever.
My dad, my brother, and a friend of his were driving across town in the pickup. Since it was a single cab the three of them were sitting next to each other on the bench seat. They came to a stop light, which happened to be one of the busiest intersections in the city, and when the light turned green the pickup wouldn’t move. It was in gear, the engine was running, but it simply would not move. Within seconds traffic was snarled horribly. A couple of bystanders stopped on the shoulder and the 5 of them managed to push the pickup into a nearby parking lot – it could roll, just not move under its own power. By then traffic was backed up for blocks and people were laying on their horns and screaming out their windows.
Now that they were out of traffic dad went over everything again. Engine? Running, revving as normal. Transmission appeared to be shifting as it should. Shifting into gear, not stuck in neutral. No obvious external problems apparent with the drivetrain. It simply wouldn’t go. By then it had been an hour or two since it had died so dad called a tow truck and had the pickup hauled back to his house. The three of them rolled it into the barn where dad could start taking things apart to try diagnose it. It wasn’t his daily driver so it wasn’t something he was going to start tearing into right away.
A day or three later a buddy of is came by for coffee. Dad was telling him the story of the dying pickup and how he had checked everything and it looked like he’d have to drop the transmission and start poking around in it. His buddy listened for a bit and the asked “is the transfer case in neutral? Did the lever get bumped by the guy sitting in the middle seat?” The transfer case had a floor-mounted shifter, with the lever sticking up right in front of the middle seat. And of course it could be shifted into neutral, which would disconnect the entire drivetrain from the engine and transmission. Had dad checked that incredibly obvious possibility?
“… uh… shit…”
::goes out to the barn and checks::
“SONOFABITCH!!”
With my last car it took me (and my wife) about 18 years to notice that it had a rear fog lamp. We realized when it was turned on and off while we were standing beside the car during the mandatory two yearly tecnical inspection (the dreaded TÜV). We looked at each other and thought… well, I don’t know what we thought.
We seldom used it afterwards, but we could have used it a couple of times during the previous years, particularly during our stay in Belgium.
I’m not sure that’s the best solution. A snowblower that doesn’t start when you want it to is annoying; but a snowblower that starts when you don’t want it to can be a whole lot worse. Just ask my grandfather with eight fingers.
Many years ago I moved into a new apartment. There was a coax cable in the living room, but when I connected it to my TV, I got nothing, so I assumed the cable was for people who wanted to pay for cable TV. So I just hooked the TV to a crappy indoor antenna and had crappy TV reception for the next 2 or 3 years.
Then one day I was talking to someone in the laundry room about the aftermath of the recent Loma Prieta earthquake, and she mentioned that her cable TV had been out for a while. I told her that I don’t have cable TV. She said, “I just mean the free service that comes with the apartment.” Hm. I went back to my apartment and hooked up the TV and sure enough, there were a number of cable channels available. I don’t know why it wasn’t working during the one minute when I tried it when I moved in, but I had never checked it again up to that point.
I bit the inside of my mouth significantly.
And then tried to eat potato chips.
Your coming in early to register two kids was a good story. District employees should get respect for giving up personal time for students like that.
Good point.
mmm
This story will make you feel better.
Not quite 20 years ago, my husband got a big promotion at work. We decided he should get something special to mark the occasion. He chose a big ol’ flat screen tee vee and a nice set of expensive Bose surround-sound speakers, consisting of 5 satellites and a sub woofer. Nice set up at the time, eh? He wired it all up to the receiver and we thought we were livin’ large!
Sadly, my husband died not long after, and I was on my own with everything, including the electronics. The big ol’ flat screen tee vee eventually died and I replaced it with a bigger one. I often felt the sound system wasn’t all that and a bag of chips, but whaddayagonna do? Maybe Bose isn’t such a great product after all.
Finally, after many years of faithful service, the receiver gasped its last. I knew replacing it and getting the wires to all the various components to the proper places were tasks beyond my abilities, so I hired my electronics/computer guru to come set everything up.
He’s a very thorough fellow. He checked all the connections from the new receiver to each speaker. Quietly, he said, “Um. I think these speakers are all wired backwards.”
They were.
I don’t fault my husband, who was from Down Under where everything is backwards to how we do it here. That’s my excuse on his behalf and I’m sticking to it.
My, the sound is phenomenally improved!