Today my Facebook feed was flooded with Egyptology, archaeological, and ancient history facts. Maybe they think I’m nostalgic for the days of my youth?
I can understand the posts about Star Trek and Babylon 5 facts, considering the number of my friends who post this sort of thing, and that I’m a member of a B5 group (as well as a Heinlein fan group).
I seem to have trained Facebook to send me wombat and beaver posts. It tries to branch out into other animals. I’ll allow capybaras, but not koalas.
A while back, totally out of the blue, Instagram decided my husband needed lots of pictures of bats (he seems to be good with that).
One of the three radiators in my apartment is not working. I woke up to find it was 57 in my living room. My beloved loaned me a space heater. It works wonderfully. I cannot find anything in my lease prohibiting space heaters. But, I don’t feel safe leaving it on when I sleep.
In good news, I called the electric company. They confirmed that I had paid all past due charges and set up auto pay. After being transferred to the credit department, I learned that I could ignore the letter requesting proof of income and that my credit rating should be untouched by this whole mess.
If you’re from ancient Egypt, you’ve definitely taken pretty good care of yourself.
I Totally get it. My favorite are Louisville Slugger white ash…
Yes, I know this is a silly rant, but hey that’s what this thread is for, isn’t it?
NO! Today is not Christmas Eve Day! It’s the day before Christmas. Christmas is December 25 and the reason we even (sorry) have the expression Christmas Eve is because the reckoning of the day was from, get this, the eve(ning) and the day(time). Christmas Eve is part of Christmas Day.
Over in MPSIMS, there’s a thread about Christmas Adam. That makes a lot more sense than calling today Christmas Eve Day. Granted, it doesn’t make all that much sense, but it makes more sense.
Nor should you. Space heaters safely used are fine - I have one on right now. But they cause an estimated 1,200 house fires a year. You want to treat them with all due caution, including not using them with extension cords that they might overload, not using them within a few feet of anything combustible, always put them on a level surface, avoid putting them on carpet/rugs if you can and never go to sleep with them running.
Already done.
I remain extremely worried about just how I will keep the apartment warm enough that the pipes don’t freeze during my two week visit to Florida next month.
I have 1 primary CC that gets most of my usage and two sorta-backups that get about 10% each. Month in and month out. There are other occasional or special use cards, but the big 3 do all the heavy lifting.
2 days ago, so Sat, I try to use one of those secondary cards to buy my GF an extra-nice Christmas present at the mall. She’s standing there. By my standards this is not an especially large purchase. I’m 30 miles from home. It declines as probable fraud. So I pay with my main card. Then spend over an hour on the phone, mostly on hold, with their Indian-outsourced fraud hotline. They reinstate the card. Color me pissed, but I get it. Hot cards are a problem.
I make a minor purchase with that card later that day to prove it works again, and it does.
Yesterday, Sunday, I try to use the same secondary card to buy my GF a different Christmas present at a different store, this time not in a mall. She’s standing there. By my standards this is not an especially large purchase, and is in fact ~1/3rd the size of my card issuer’s mistake yesterday. I’m still 30 miles from home. It declines as probable fraud. So I pay with my main card. Then spend over an hour on the phone, mostly on hold, with their Indian-outsourced fraud hotline. They reinstate the card. Again. Color me livid, and ready to cancel the card; It’s a premium card that is not cheap, and I use this for travel all over the world. If they’re gonna shut it down every time they get a funny feeling it’s worse than useless. I will eat some C/S manager for lunch in January about this.
Today, Monday, around dinner time I get a text from my main card’s issuer. Did I just spend $1,000 at walmart.com? No, I have never spent so much as a dollar at walmart.com.
Log in to check my transaction history and there’s several transactions totaling ~$3K all at name brand major online merchants that I did not do. All today.
Call in, talk yet again to a different Peggy at a different Indian call center I can still barely understand, but she helpfully reverses the bad transactions and will FedEx me a new card with a new number.
Which means I get to spend most of Tuesday logging onto e-commerce sites and changing my stored card details.
Color me simultaneously impressed and disgusted with 21st century consumer finance and e-commerce.
The definition of “eve” as it is used for a holiday is the evening or day before the special day.
The word “eve” can be short for “evening”, but that’s not how it’s being used for a holiday.
While it’s true that “eve” as used in medieval Europe encompassed the evening before the holiday, and thus was included as part of that day (because holidays were reckoned from evening to evening rather than midnight to midnight), last I checked we aren’t in medieval Europe. The term has not meant that for centuries.
The word “silly” derived from the Old English word gesǣlig which meant “holy/blessed/worthy”. That is now an archaic and obsolete usage. Just as assuming that “Christmas Eve” is part of Christmas Day is archaic and obsolete. (Similarly, Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve is not part of All Saints’ Day, it’s the day before.)
I will say your argument is quite silly. You can choose to interpret that in the archaic sense if you’d like.
I went out to a nearby mini mart that my beloved found for me when I moved here. Just like last week, they were out of eggnog. I was stunned to find eggnog there in the first place. The brand was better than they carry at Target, and I can walk there instead of taking the trolley. Oh well, they still have a superior selection of junk food and chocolate. I was also able to convert seventeen dollars from bills to quarters. I need quarters to do laundry.
The mousetraps my beloved ordered for me arrived. I am not sure they will work. The rodent (or rodents) I saw were longer than these traps are.
As long as you’re getting rat traps for rats or mouse traps for mice you should be fine. If you get the wrong thing for the wrong rodent you might just anger them.
Heh. I just pictured DocCathode lying in his bed, with a rat standing upright on his chest, a mousetrap clamped to one of it’s front paws, saying “You wanna explain this?” 
But OTOH, we have this: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.‘’
The concept of “eve” as the day before an important holiday is so entrenched in the language that the word has come to be a metaphor for any arbitrary period of time immediately preceding an important event.
It’s also officially recognized as the day before a holiday.
Railing against that now is like being mad that people won’t adopt the slang you made up.
I will be in the cold cold ground before I hear somebody say literally when they mean figuratively! Other than that, I accept that language is changing, living thing.
I just turned on the radiator in the bedroom. At least, I think I did. While I was turning the dial, it came off in my hand. I have avoided turning this radiator on because it is close to stacked bins and boxes of my stuff. I am not worried about fire. I am worried about the heat getting hot enough to melt plastic.
I am on the 5 year plan for colonoscopies. Probably for life due to genetic history and findings.
Mammogram every 2 years (Swiss standard), with ultrasound to follow (same appointment, so at least I don’t have to make two appointments).
The mammogram is the lesser of two evils. Mammogram is squish and done. Twice on each side. Breast ultrasound means running the transducer up and down and around each breast for some minutes. With very firm pressure. With the doctor apologizing because she knows it’s uncomfortable. Not fun.
Coloscopy? Eat weird for a few days in advance. Go to appointment, fall asleep, get dressed, look at pictures and I’m on my way. Takes longer, needs more prepped, but less discomfort after the appointment.
Due to insomnia (worried about the normal stuff, such as money, US government, etc.), I came to the Dope to read stuff. Not enough interesting in the normal places so I came to this thread.
After reading the comments about fruit cake, I remembered that I have a ministollen, which is 25% marzipan. Well, I had. So I ate jelly beans, cookies and stollen, for first breakfast. I don’t need two breakfasts.
Breakfast is anyway annoying because I usually make bacon in the oven. My oven is at the repair shop because it decided to stop working on Monday morning. I have a steam oven, but I don’t want to get the interior all bacon-y - it’ll need a lot more cleaning than the standard oven. So I made bacon on the stove.
And then there’s the great news from yesterday. My mom’s cousin is in the hospital and it’s not looking good. My mom is the oldest cousin, and this cousin is not even a month younger than her. I don’t have any details, but I’m not really looking forward to talking to my parents because I know they will be really worried. Or sad, depending on what happens with the cousin.
Which is another thing. I learned about it because the cousin’s granddaughter asked for prayers on FB. I’m sure my mom is pissed off about that.
Which reminds me. When did Mountain Dew become the official drink of MAGA?
My Christmas Eve rant is that I was trying to make a batch of orange slice cookies, and the whole experience was miserable. These are cookies which have little pieces of cut up orange slice candy embedded in the dough. Once you start cutting into the candy they just stick to everything - the knife, your fingers, themselves… Then the cookies themselves turned out horrible. They wouldn’t rise at all, just flattened and spread out and ran together, wouldn’t brown properly, and I literally had to scrape them off the cookie sheet. It was just impossible to get a spatula under them. I was tempted to just throw out the recipe card but instead wrote “Worst! Cookies! Ever!” on it so I’d know better next time. (My wife says she has two different orange slice cookie recipes and one is better than the other, so I must have found the crappy one.)
My Christmas Day rant is that I have two stepdaughters with a long-running animosity toward each other, so that we can never have the whole family together for holidays and have to do every holiday in two shifts. So the stepdaughter who is currently living with us while she is between jobs and apartments has to bug out for the day while everyone else comes over. Which makes me sad. We are doing Christmas with her and her son tomorrow.