Lately FB has been spamming me with friend suggestions that I don’t have a single friend in common with. Yeah, she’s cute, but I only “friend” people I actually know.
My mini-rant.
The 3D printer I ordered a year ago (kickstarter) finally arrived after many delays blamed on covid. I’m going to be at a client site for 6 weeks starting January so it’s just going to sit in a box wondering if it did something to upset me.
I suppose if someone is putting out a printer capable of experiencing self-doubt and abandonment issues, it’s probably worth supporting it on Kickstarter.
One year ago today. Not so much a rant as a reflection:
Right during this appliance shortage, our dishwasher decided to crap out. It’s sixteen years old, and has been fixed twice, but it gave out a frightening death rattle yesterday and it’s kaput.
We looked online at Home Depot, and most dishwashers from them would take until May 2021 to be delivered! We found an acceptable one that would take three or four weeks to be delivered and ordered it. I understand why there has been a refrigerator and freezer shortage (COVID food storage), but why dishwashers?
I had a FedEx package with $450 worths of good in it due in late November and it showed as Delivered - left at door on the tracking site. The delivery time was given at a rare time when both of us were out of the house. We didn’t notice any package by the door when we came back and this was early the next morning before daylight, when I saw the email.
I checked the door into the carport because packages sometimes get left there; there’s no gate in the way like with the front door and easy it’s easy to get to when the car is missing – no package. Still in my PJs I walked down the driveway and check that it’s not under the mailbox, another favorite spot. No joy.
I come back in and go online to report it missing and get a response number. A few hours later when it’s light, DesertRoomie lets the dogs out and spots the package just inside the fence at the corner of the driveway. It was in corrugated tan and on a like-colored pile of leaves so we hadn’t noticed it the afternoon before when we came in.
I look online and there’s no way to report a package has been found, even with the report number. I call the support number and get the all agents are busy - we’ll get to you when we can recording. I put the phone on speaker and go about my business. A half hour later it disconnects.
Screw 'em, I think, I’ll let them know when they call or email me abut it. Five weeks leter I’ve yet to hear anything.
ESPN headline today:
Tulsa-Miss. St. brawl mars Armed Forces Bowl
“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!!!”
This afternoon I was on my front porch working on the kittie shelter I’ve built. Suddenly, I saw the mailman at the bottom of the steps. I jumped up to get in the house and he just came right on up the steps. He wasn’t wearing a mask and, of course, I wasn’t. I’m sure it will be fine but it really annoyed me that he wasn’t considerate enough to wait until I could get in the house. But mainly, it felt so weird to be within a few feet of a person without masks, kind of like being naked. After this is all over, I wonder how long it will take for that to feel normal again.
With a new car like ours, we don’t yet have a good sense of the distance in a tank - especially if we get different mileage depending on different types of driving (very local, vs highway).
It clearly can tell when the tank is more full - the range when we got it, where they topped it off, did say 500 miles and we’ve never gotten it display more than about 400 when we tank it up.
So I do think it’s at least partially that the gas pump shutoff happens too soon (what triggers that, anyway?).
My last car was a Prius. It had a liner in the fuel tank that contracted when it was cold (part of the effort to meet emission requirements). It would vary the amount of fuel capacity by easily 2 gallons from summer to winter.
My rant: My refrigerator quit new year’s eve. Had a repairman out on the 2nd. The replacement parts are out of stock so we won’t have it fixed until the 15th. Fortunately we have a spare fridge in the basement but it’s a pain in the ass to walk up and down the steps 20 times a day. I’m really not good at remembering everything on the first trip.
It’s your fridge’s way of helping you burn off those holiday calories…
My Prius did the same. I watched the trip meter and refilled at 260 miles.
PS There’s a January rant post up and running
Motherfucker. I’ve been working on the same novel for six years (SIX FUCKING YEARS) and I finally finished it. I gave it over 20 beta reads, a paid professional developmental editor, multiple drafts, I mean the whole nine, and I finalized the draft. It is my first completed novel and I spent over 2,200 hours working on it (I tracked.) FIN! I even started on the sequel.
I sent it over to a friend who offered to read it and I explained that it was finished and I just needed a read-through for continuity errors. She responded with just a fuckton of ways she thinks I need to change the novel. 
Some of it was spot on, and some of it was really out there.
You’d think after six or seven years of getting regular, sometimes brutal, feedback I’d be able to handle it without it sending me into an insecurity spiral. Yet here we are. So goes that old familiar internal monologue: That thing you thought you were finally getting really good at? Sorry, you still suck. Nobody will ever understand your work, it’s too weird, and you’re weird by extension.
And this is the thing. I appreciate her feedback, but I’m seriously done with this fucking book. Unless I start getting feedback from agents that I need to change this or that to make it viable, I’m done. Maybe nobody ever will understand it. Maybe it’s just my shitty first novel. But for fuck’s sake, I need to move on.
Wow, you wrote a novel! Congratulations! 
I hope I get to buy a copy someday.
Join everyone in the new minirant thread.
Seriously. I know most of you are just replying to previous posts, but let’s not drag 2020 out any longer, shall we?
You didn’t get an answer so I’m putting this here instead of January.
At the tip of the nozzle is a small opening that is the tip of a venturi tube. When the fuel backs up in the filler neck and covers that port the pressure differential triggers the shutoff.
If your filler neck has a long horizontal run the fuel can slosh back far enough to cover the port and give a false indication. Restart the fill and manually run it at half the rate it was before should get you the extra fill you crave.