Our week’s worth of Weather Alerts… 'scuse me, ALERTs with overly colorful graphics (so… your Map of Dangerous Snow goes 'white to green to red to yellow to white to blue to dark purple?), turned out to be <1" of wet, slushy snow.
Now we’ve got the beautiful ‘snow globe flurries’, but they’ll continue to dust everything for four days straight, so it’s constant re-shoveling.
A followup to my rant about my MIL and FIL health problems. Recall, one has a horrid knee infection and the other just got a triple bypass.
Mrs. Cheesesteak calls me at work and tells me she has bad news, I should sit down rather than be standing at my desk. She sounds really down, so my heart is starting to race. And she let me have it… her crossword streak ended. Yes, folks, she didn’t finish Monday’s puzzle, one of the answers was wrong, and she forgot to go back and fix it. Now her streak is at zero… the horror!
That was just the dump of stress hormones I needed for the day.
In other news, my sisters have made up over the wedding invitations. Apparently, it’s not actually a thing to offer your single guests a plus one for their BF/GF’s. I must be working from the wrong playbook to think that it was normal.
I just shoveled for about a half an hour and you can’t keep up with it. It’s the heavy wet stuff too. My back was spasming all over the place. Which surprises me because I do posterior chain exercises.
Not how I wanted this day to go. Reframing because at least I get to spend some extra time with my kid.
I am also working from home with my child. The baby’s daycare was still open, thank goodness, or I would not be working today.
Rant for today - My husband gets paid in paper checks as he works at a small shop and they don’t have the infrastructure for electronic payments. But the banking system is still stupid and it takes 3 whole business days for his checks to clear. I love that for us. Great times. Money isn’t real.
That’s what we usually get. A friend gave us a 3’ wide, deep scoop with a sort of manual mower handle on the back, that you stand behind and push the snow all the way down the driveway into the street.
The reason I do “constant re-shoveling” is that I have to. If I let it build up at all, the snow wins.
We don’t shovel. The barn is 100 yards away and that’s too much snow to move.
I do drive out our lane and back every hour during heavy snowfall to keep tracks worn in the snow. Our lane is a private road that doesn’t get plowed.
That is incredible. The rest of the world has basically ditched paper cheques. It still sometimes takes a day or so, because electronic transfers aren’t instant (=because someone is making money on the float), but e-transfers are so easy here [Canada]. I’m always astounded that the US hasn’t been leading on this.
What might make it easier would be if there was a display INSIDE THE ELEVATOR saying where it was going. That would reduce a lot of confusion.
I’m pretty tech savvy. I would have figured it out in time. However, if I didn’t notice it saying what elevator to get on, or didn’t notice the elevator’s designation, I’d likely have gotten on whatever opened up first - and been pissed that I was getting a trip somewhere I didn’t want to go. There was no “Stop at the next floor, I did not WANT To go to the 50th floor” idiot button, either.
More details: This is in a medical building. As in, a fair number of elderly people who won’t pick up on stuff as fast as someone younger (I’m close to that age… but use computers constantly). People who are hearing and/or vision impaired would have trouble with this as well.
And it’s about 6 or 8 floors tall. In a mega highrise, streamlining things makes a hella lot of difference. But a 6+ story building, whose elevators are in near-constant use, I doubt it will affect much.
And a separate mini-rant: Appliances.
They make life easier. They sooooo seductively get us hooked on using them. They offer features and bells and whistles and pretty much do everything for you.
Then they fail. And the joke’s on you.
Our washer died the other day. Less than 7 years old. We got a repair guy out surprisingly quickly, and he diagnosed the issue, plus pointing out several potential problems (the inlet lines are > 30+ years old etc.). At first he thought the repair was gonna be close to 500 bucks. Roughly half the cost of the machine itself (it wound up being about 250).
So my rant is
Appliances that have been replaced due to the last item include: 1 washer (this one’s predecessor), 1 dryer, 2 microwave ovens (over-the-stove - never again!), a dual wall oven, and a dishwasher.
A home warranty actually begins to make sense, financially.
I was trying to remember where I ran into one of these not too long ago. It was in the Sears Tower when we went on vacation to Chicago last summer. We had come out of the underground bunker where the elevators to the top are, and were trying to figure out how to get to some rooftop garden they had a couple of floors up. A guy who worked there had to show us how to work the elevator to get to where we wanted to go. It’s an interesting concept, but not at all intuitive.
Thanks for helping me appreciate our ancient appliances.
Our washer and dryer (built in the '80s) have temperature dials. Otherwise the only technology they have is a “Do you want me to do my job now?” button.
Our dryer did stop working a couple of years ago. Now, I’m not mechanical, but even I could repair it (shhh, don’t tell my wife, but all I did was unscrew the front and replace the belt).
Hah!
My husband attempted to fix the microwave, the dishwasher, and the old dryer.
Each involved an investment of several hundred dollars for replacement electronics.
None of the repairs succeeded.
I’ve forbidden him from attempting this again.
Believe me that I appreciate your annoyance. I was pissed a LOT when I first got mishandled by one just as you did.
There (almost certainly) is a display inside the elevator of which floors it will visit. The unexpected gotcha is that the display is installed on the door jamb of the elevator car facing across the door opening. it’s not inside the body of the car facing back at people facing forwards.
The placement makes sense, once you know it’s there, and why. When the elevator doors open, before you get on, you glance at the interior doorjamb to see that the display of floors it will visit includes the one you want. If so, you’re looking at the right elevator and should get on. If not, it’s the wrong elevator; don’t get on. The display is fully visible while standing inside the car, but that’s not really who it’s intended for. It’s intended for the people outside considering whether to get on this car or another car. And in this novel location you’ll never think to look for it unless you already know it’s there. Now you do.
Overall I think you’re 100% right that in a 6-story medical building full of seniors, this is just dumb with a capital D. Next time you’re there you can be the good Samaritan teaching the wrinklies how to use it. That’s what I do when I find a confused person at a hotel.
Just like a supposedly “intuitive UI” in a phone or website or whatever, it’s totally “intuitive” the 5th time you use it and have stumbled on and then remembered the secret. Until then it’s just a vexing PITA.
Omg the wrinklies. I love it.
“Wrinklies” is bog standard UK slang for the elderly. I love it too. I think it’s sort of endearing, but I admit I really don’t know whether the Brits think it so.
I’m working on becoming one myself; the backs of my hands have a pretty good head start on the rest of me.
I love wrinkles, so I would mean it in nothing but an endearing way. I do note that none of my elderly relatives are particularly wrinkly. But it’s a good sign I have elderly relatives, eh?
Yes; the wrinklier the better. 
Yeah, I’d say it’s typically used as a term of endearment, rather than an insult. You might get away with jokingly referring to your parents as such, for example.
I remember hearing Lionel or Jean referring to themselves as a couple of old wrinklies on As Time Goes By.
My bank (Truist) allows me to deposit paper checks remotely using my phone’s camera. The funds show available in my account the next day. Does your bank offer this?