I'm ranting at you, July! (July mini-rants)

Here’s a 30-minute video on how to probably make your dishwasher work better without much if any pre-washing. I like the guy’s wink-and-a-nod, semi-self-deprecating style, but it may not be for you (and you may not want to spend 30 minutes on your dishwasher when you’ve got a method that works for you). Broken link because I apparently can’t embed Youtube videos?

https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHP942Livy0

Thanks to the Microsoft thing I have no telephone service at work. I could have stayed home.

See here.

Ugh!! At least you didn’t go from “you’re fine” to “sucks to be you”, that would be much harder (I think).

Definitely send some kind of complaint somewhere. Likely not a HIPAA violation, unless the caller said “Whoops, I read George Smith’s results not yours!”.

How do they look for those plaques? MRI or something? And is that a routine thing, or were they doing whatever the scan was for another concern?

It was a complicated approach, as part of a study. I got into the study because of my dad. He deteriorated quickly, though he was clever at masking the symptoms (So I wasn’t sure how to answer questions like “And when did your father begin exhibiting Alzheimer’s?” “Well, when did Ronald Reagan?” Months, or maybe even a year, after he’d started being impaired…).

I bought a new teapot. It was advertised online as 1000ml. Technically, it does contain that volume, if you fill it to the brim and omit the strainer and tea leaves.

I’m torn between being mad and impressed.

It’s a cute teapot though!

I probably don’t need to drink a litre of tea most mornings… probably…

First world problem: My wife and I are on vacation in Alberta, Canada, and the hotel in Jasper we checked into on Wednesday told us the Internet (not their Wifi) was out on this whole end of town. Cell service in this area is also weak, at least in this room of the hotel.

Annoyingly, a few blocks away there was a strong 5G signal. Just not where we spent most of our time.

I assumed that with a problem of that scale, someone would be on it and get it fixed pretty quick. Nope. I checked several times each day since then and it only just came on after midnight early Saturday morning.

Two full days without fast, reliable internet!!1! Oh, the horror! I had to read a book I had already downloaded to the Kindle app.

But while I’m ranting about hotels, why in Og’s name don’t all hotels put night lights in the bathrooms? You get up to pee in the middle of the night in a strange room, and if you switch on the full bathroom light you’re blinded. If you don’t, you stumble around trying to find the door, then the toilet.

I travel with my own, but more than once I’ve forgotten to take it with me when I left.

This hotel had a new wrinkle that stymied me: the outlet in the bathroom, into which I’d normally plug my night light, was controlled by the light switch. So the night light was useless! :rage:

Due to the Microsoft outage I am stuck in an airport on a 3.5 hour delay. It’s a spillover effect…all the mess yesterday screwed up all the schedules and, though there is a plane, there are no pilots available. I am just hoping that we don’t get pushed back again.
Every time I fly out of LSL it turns into an ordeal. I know this one isn’t the airport’s or the airline’s fault specifically but that’s little comfort.I am really starting to hate this airport.

That’s a pretty stupid setup as one of the common uses of those outlets is charging appliances like shavers! What were they thinking?

And similar to that, hotels that have the bathroom light switch outside of the bathroom, so it can only be turned on/off with the door open and the light comes into the whole bedroom at night. Why is this a thing!?

What might LSL be in your parlance? Officially, that’s

which is a mostly-general aviation airport in rural Costa Rica.

I bet that’s not the one you mean. So which one do you mean?


Near as I can figure, in some countries light switches on the outside are normal or maybe even required by code. As a way of keeping the dangerous electricity outside of the wet room. This seemed to have been prevalent in e.g. the USA in stuff built in the 1940s and 1950s, when electrical appliances and bathrooms really didn’t mix. Before hair dryers, before curling irons, before rechargeable anything, etc. So bathrooms were built with no electrical outlets at all.

When I encounter the light switch outside the bathroom in a country where that’s not the norm and the place was built or renovated after the 1950s I’m as baffled as you are.

A new trend in fashionable hotel bedroom / bathroom design has the clear glass-walled shower looking directly out into the bedroom. Usually with some kind of motorized roll-down privacy shutter, but the assumption is the shower & sink area is directly visible from the bed and vice versa. Typically in these rooms the toilet is in a separate closet off the main bathroom area.

Traveling alone for a living, that design never bothered me. But it’s sure not good for light control for your roommate.

As the years go on, I get more and more sick and tired of the fact that every single privately-owned public space in the whole fucking country just has to blast LOUD, shitty pop music non-stop!

Supermarkets, stores, malls, restaurants, bars, movie theaters, even outdoor plazas in some cases. They just have to keep shoveling that shit into your ears like it’s a fucking legal requirement! And it’s usually loud enough to stomp all over any music that you’re listening to through earphones!!

Are most people so aesthetically impoverished that they actually enjoy a steady diet of this stuff?

It’s getting so I dread shopping nowadays.

I SO endorse this pitting!
It gets even more awful when October rolls around and they start with the cheesy Christmas music.
My only consolation is that with my developing deafness I can’t really hear anything over the general ambient noise that seems to be everywhere.

Lambert St. Louis.

Still sitting here. 5.5 hours now. Need a drink and it’s just after 10 am!!

Ahh yes: good old STL. Thanks.

The plane is still there. Apparently we just need pilots. You aren’t in the area anywhere, are you?:grin:

Yes, I long for the days when stores played “elevator music” at a background level of volume - the days I still think of as “when the grownups were in charge.”

Edit: On my way to work I have to walk past a Silver Diner. Going home in the afternoon, they always have music blaring into the parking lot. And it’s always the same few songs. Living on a Prayer, Eye of the Tiger, Crocodile Rock, Jailhouse Rock, Heartbreaker. (Never Hit Me With Your Best Shot, only Heartbreaker.) And the Brady Bunch theme for some Christless reason. Either they have some severely restricted form of ASCAP/BMI license or the manager/franchise owner thinks every customer and employee needs to hear his personal mixtape all day, every day.

I worked for 2 1/2 years at Toys R Us, day after day listening to the same music over and over and over all day long.

Nearly 30 years later I still get triggered when I hear some of those songs.

And guess what, back then grumpy old people would routinely complain that it was loud.

I think the volume is the same now as it has always been, what’s changed is you all. :wink:

Trump is in town today :nauseated_face:

And some random aging dude in the grocery store parking lot expressed his pov that I should be wearing shorts. He asked me why aren’t you wearing shorts? Wtf! Maybe it was a nod to the beautiful summer weather. But dude that was fucking weird. Then he goes, imma be up at Ludington park today. JFC keepnitntonuourself in no mood to small talk it up with some rando bald head big truck beer gut sweat hog.

Of course these assholes never harass other men. Somehow women get to be their universal target. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you to smile.