And then you picked up your phone and said “Towing? Yeah, got one I was going to let slide, but this woman’s got an attitude here…”
So I have Covid for the first time (as far as I know, I’ve tested many times since the start of the pandemic).
The good:
- I’m fully vaxxed and boosted.
- My symptoms are mild (sore throat and head congestion).
- I’m on vacation and haven’t been in the office for a while, so they probably don’t have to stress about contacts and cleaning.
- I can probably isolate well enough, it’s a good sized house.
- Everyone in my house is asymptomatic and tested negative.
The bad:
- My daughter and her boyfriend are visiting. I had to push out their return trip 3 days since they were in close contact with me. And that’s assuming they stay healthy and test negative.
- With 2 extra people in the house that’s going to make things cramped, especially since nobody is supposed to go anywhere and I’m supposed to stay away from everyone.
- My wife is high risk and I really hope she doesn’t get it from me.
- The kind of work I do requires me to be in the office frequently and I don’t really have a backup. I’m it. So this is going to put a big strain on my workplace.
Hopefully nobody else gets sick. This hit at possibly the worst time. 
OK, these are first world problems dripping with privilege, but DAMN you can’t get good servants anymore!
Air conditioner needs to be serviced. Ms. Fish negotiates extensively with company regards scheduling, gets 8 am time. This is the only thing that works with our schedule, although it does require us all to get up early and rush through our morning routine. Rushing through the morning routine is something I am very, very bad at.
Servicing should take a bit over an hour. Ms. Fish and the sprat will leave for camp/work at 8:10, and I need to leave for work at 9:30, so the timing is somewhat tight. Also, at some point at 9 or later the housekeeper will arrive, but that’s fine because she can be left alone in the house and has a key.
Guy doesn’t show up, normal chaos of morning departure routine is intensified by Ms. Fish talking to the office on the phone while simultaneously preparing an ADD-ridden child to leave the house for the day. Upshot is the guy didn’t show up, unhappiness was vented, Ms. Fish and sprat leave late and agitato.
Well, that was unpleasant. On the other hand, it’s now 8:15, and unusually I have a bit of morning time with the house to myself and nothing to rush doing. I settle into the couch to sip my coffee and contemplate…
and the housekeeper shows up 45 minutes early. 
I had it at the beginning of the month. Five days of feeling crap followed by five days of feeling a bit off. The upshot is no one in my house got it from me. Fingers crossed for you.
The fuck? I feel your pain. But wtf?!
I’m looking out the window to see if the recycling has been picked up yet (it hasn’t). But then I notice something orange waving in the breeze. It’s a tiny little orange flag planted near the curb just beside my driveway.
I then notice that the neighbour has a similar flag. Other adjacent houses don’t, but a few farther away have them, too.
With my luck, this will not be good. Some kind of digging or destruction will ensue. Actually I have this paranoia that an evil city council is going around marking the houses of residents they don’t like. We shall see what develops.
If it’s regular utility flagging, orange is for telecommunication, alarm, or signal lines, cables, or conduit. May the destruction be minor.
We had our yard marked a couple weeks ago. AT&T is laying fiber in our neighborhood. We were away on vacation last week, and came home to find a couple guys digging a hole in our yard.
The worst part is, the city came through our neighborhood last summer doing street repair, including ripping out and repouring the curbs. So we had about a one foot wide swath of our yard along the street that gone torn up and then refilled with fill dirt. I had finally gotten the grass to start filling in, now I have a big pile of dirt in the front yard again.
On the plus side, fiber will be awesome and I can’t wait.
I’d appreciate if you could report back on your experience. I get regular mailings from AT&T begging me to upgrade to fiber. When I read the fine print on their offers…I say the current DSL is good enough, thank you.
I use a service provided by the town transit company called E-Z Rider for transportation to doctor appointments and grocery shopping. Ever since Covid hit they’ve been having staffing issues, which has effected timing for rides. This morning I was scheduled to be picked up for a grocery run from 10:00 - 10:20. When the bus didn’t show up by 10:30 I called the dispatch office and got their voicemail. So I left my phone number and asked if they can let me know when I would be picked up. No call, but the bus finally shows up at 10:50. There were already three people in the bus, and apparently the driver was scheduled to drop each of them off before taking me to the store. This meant that I got treated to a tour of the whole town before I was taken to the store (which was a 10-15 minute drive from my house) at 11.40.
Oh, and during the ride I got to listen to two of the other riders complaining about how E-Z Rider dispatchers never gave the drivers the correct drop-off spots.
The optical office where you are prescribed your contacts is the place to get an air travel compliant bottle of contact solution. They think they are just samples of solution given them by manufacturers but they are perfect for travel. Ask for one next time you pick up contacts or have your annual exam. They probably have a basketful under the counter.
We bought a new car in November 2020, due to our older car (bought late in 1998) requiring massive expenses in order to pass inspection. In hindsight, this was very fortunate - as this was just before the major car shortages started to manifest.
Lately, the dealership we bought it from has been inundating us with mailings (snail and e) saying they would just LOVE to buy that car from us, and surely we’d like to come in and browse their selection of pre-owned cars.
So, let me see: they want us to sell our brand-new car, quite possibly for more than we paid for it new… and then we’d be driving… what? There would seem to be a logistics problem here. But that’s OK, the dealership would profit by reselling our existing vehicle, AND by selling us something different, possibly older, and certainly more expensive in the long run.
Er, no, thanks.
Then there’s the whole term “pre-owned”, implying someone has done us a huge favor by driving a new car around for a bit to get rid of that nasty new car smell and reliability. It’s
USED, not PRE-OWNED, dummies! But I lost that battle decades ago.
My in-laws (in their 80s) use a similar service in their town, and have had similar complaints. They’ve started using it only for AM appointments (supposedly somewhat more reliable).
We’re going down to visit them in a couple of weeks and are debating whether to get them a low-end smartphone so they can call a Lyft or Uber. Not entirely sure they could figure that out, mind you… Taxi service where they are stinks - they had an ER visit one evening and had a hard time getting a cab home - at 11 PM. So Lyft/Uber might not be much better but would at least give them more options.
We made them give up their car a couple years back, by dint of refusing to pay for it any more. Well, it was my sister-in-law who was paying for it (my husband and I are paying for their housing).
Just friendly advice: If you hear cheesy guitar playing outside by the curb, don’t look out the window to check it out. You’re welcome.
You’re using a service called “E-Z Rider” but you never expected to get screwed? Okay…
Back in 2017 I filed a claim in a class action case. Now, in 2022 I actually remembered that case, and went to the official website to see if the settlement had been approved yet. Apparently it had been, and they started issuing payments back in June. That’s odd; I never got any payment. After some investigation, they sent an email to claim an electronic payment to an old email address I no longer use. And the deadline to have your payment reissued expired… 4 days ago. So I went through the trouble of filing a claim 5 years ago, and I’m most likely not going to get anything out of it. I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!
For most of us, there is certainly a point of diminishing value. A few years ago I upgraded from whatever I had then to 150 mbps service, but that was mainly because at the time that was the lowest level that had no monthly bandwidth caps (the caps have since disappeared for all tiers). It has since gone through several incremental upgrades at no extra cost and is currently at 700 mbps, which is really way more than I typically need.
Thanks. When I went out yesterday to bring in the recycling bin, it turns out that there are a great many of those little orange flags up and down the street. There’s been no activity of any kind today so I still have no idea what it’s about.
There’s an ad making the rounds on social media about a class action lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol. There seems to be a link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and the risk your child will be diagnosed with ADHD or autism. My daughter has been diagnosed with both.
I have really complicated feelings about it. But my top feeling is that maybe we need to have better science on this before we start plastering every news station and social media feed with ads about how people are damaging their babies for taking the one over the counter pain medicine they can take. We spend enough time trying to police pregnant people, we don’t need more fear mongering around it.
Regarding the little orange flags. They’re usually put in to show where utilities are so that other construction can avoid hitting them.
Yesterday really sucked. I’m feeling better today. I’m hoping that the symptoms are gone by the time my mandatory quarantine is over.
I do have an Uber app on my phone, but I hate spending the money it costs for a ride if I can avoid it. Up until this year the E-Z Rider service has been pretty good, with my major complaint being that when I call Dispatch to request a ride home I usually get their voicemail, and they never call me back to let me know how long it will be before my ride gets there. Fortunately, I always have a book with me.
As somebody on the spectrum, I am soooo sick of people saying (note I am NOT saying you are saying this. But plenty of folks are) ‘This causes autism! Your child is better off risking death than being autistic!’ Especially with the anti vaxers. How is this not another way of saying ‘I would rather risk my child dying than have them turn out like you’?