As for me, I got home last night, unloaded the car (a couple of trips) & then settle in & realize I’m cold. Nope, it’s not from being outside, the house is cold. Walk over to the thermostat & it’s 57° inside! Then I notice that it states that the battery is low. I pull the battery holder out (2 AA) but don’t have any more good ones in the house (I have some brand new ones that have leaked) so I pull them out & put them back in & that doesn’t seem to do it, either…then the lightbulb goes off inside my head. I go down to the basement & fix it in about 20 secs. I have a High Efficiency heater that needs a lot of air to work. A leaf got sucked in & is blocking part of the air inflow at the plastic filter - pop out tube, remove leaf, replace tube. The heater came on quickly after that but of course, took a bit to heat the house up to the (relatively low 68° that it was set for).
Then I made a steak under the broiler for dinner. Of course, when I was taking it out, I dropped it. Nope, it did not hit the floor, it bounced off a rack, hit the door, & landed on the floor of the oven. I is not stupid, I put the oven mitt one when I grabbed a paper towel to clean up the juices I didn’t get burned, but of course not all of it was on the paper towels, which required the mitts needing to be laundered.
Watching my work week, once again, evaporate before my eyes. Had to take the day off for medical and dental appointments (me and the boy) - oh boy, do I love the dentist! I love it so much I’m going back soon to have some loose fillings redone.
Tuesday, work meetings, Wednesday, work meetings. No time to do anything those days.
Well, Amazon continues to impress, more or less. Yes, they processed the refund for the sneakers without even requiring a return, and yes, the replacements arrived today and they agreed to refund the expedited shipping fee without argument.
There were just some minor hassles getting hold of a human to talk to – the online AI chatbot is completely useless, and the “call me now” function didn’t work as well as it did yesterday, I had to go through circuitous routes to get it to work. And then the agent wanted to provide the shipping fee refund as an Amazon gift card and I asked why it couldn’t just simply be refunded to the credit card it was originally charged to. After talking with his supervisor, they said, sure, why not. This was a minor thing but shouldn’t have been an issue.
So Amazon gets full points for doing what they promised and trying to ensure customer satisfaction. They’re willing to do the right thing, but it can be a challenge finding an actual human to do it.
Incidentally, the wrong-size sneakers arrived in a plain cardboard box, and didn’t have the shape-holding plastic inserts they’re supposed to have. The replacements arrived in a proper retail box in obviously new packaging. There was something fishy about that last shipment.
I’ve probably told this story before, but it’s so apt, I’ll repeat it.
I knew some folks who had “domesticated” a raccoon. Or so they were certain. They lived in a home that had an arched doorway between the main living area and the kitchen. They were very proud of the fact that they had taught their pet raccoon to not cross the designated line.
One day, they came home to find the raccoon happily tearing apart and eating everything it could find in the kitchen, leaving a massive mess. And a carefully chewed hole through the wallboard between the two rooms, adjacent to the arched doorway. Clever creature!
And another story told before but worth repeating. Many years ago the City of Toronto distributed “kitchen waste/composting” green bins to every household in the city. This was intended to reduce garbage volume by separating compost-ready kitchen waste from ordinary solid garbage.
Since the organic contents were naturally stinky, it was understood that they would attract raccoons, so engineers designed clever latches that were supposed to be raccoon-proof.
Guess who turned out to be smarter – the engineers, or the racoons?
I’m not sure anything exists that trash pandas can’t get into if they really want.
Did you know that an angry raccoon hisses rather like a cat? Learned that in my teens when my grandfather trapped one that was causing trouble in his yard.
I’ve been hissed at by a raccoon that found its way into my garage via a pet door. The pet door had a hook-and-eye latch. It took the raccoon about 5 minutes to figure out how to defeat the latch with a deft paw. I heard a commotion, entered the garage and caught the raccoon feasting away on dog food. And then it hissed at me as I shooed it out!
There wasn’t any hissing when a raccoon fell down my chimney into my living room fireplace at around 3 AM one morning. I could tell from the expression on its intelligent face that it was as shocked as I was, although its impression of me was probably less favourable – “the human is sleepy and slow-witted”. I opened the front door and indicated with a broom the direction of the exit.
I had an employee for awhile who, with his wife, ran a raccoon shelter out in ruralia. All wild, not really domesticatable, but smart & social & nothing but mischief.
His brood averaged about 15 members. The pix and stories …
Thanks guys. Only 18.50GB left? Gosh, what am I going to do with only eighteen and a half gigabytes? On my phone?
I did buy 20GB towards the end of last month because it was a very good deal, and given my phone usage and the fact I have home wifi (albeit off/on, hence my data purchase) all the restaurants I frequent have wifi, this 20GB is expected to last me a really, really long time.
I guess, sure, warn me when it gets to 1GB, and I will lazily consider buying more in the next week or so…
I have unlimited talk, text and data on my phone. Every time I go online to pay the bill, I get a message that I am almost at my limit and should consider upgrading to a better plan. Apparently, we have different definitions of “unlimited”.
My phone is grandfathered on a plan that hasn’t existed for many years. I don’t know or remember if it has any limit on talk time, but the data allowance is zero, and texts cost 30¢ each. But it has one great virtue – compared to modern cell phone plans, it’s practically free! And, honestly, it’s all I really need. It’s really more of an emergency phone than anything else.
Although the kid who mows my lawn insists on texting me when he’s coming over, costing me 30¢, because apparently Youth these days don’t speak into phones any more. When the first telephones were installed around 145 years ago, some people were afraid to use them for fear of being electrocuted or something. We now appear to have gone full circle, where the Modern Generation is afraid to use cell phones as phones.
It’s probably more that a quick text is way easier than a phone call, and paying for texts is such an ancient practice that I didn’t even know it still happened. He probably doesn’t even know that was ever a thing. I haven’t paid for a text in close to 20 years.
Grew up in very small town Minnesota. Everyone shoveled their walk except for one house on my route to school. It was a corner lot, so in addition to uneven packed snow on the sidewalk, I had to ascend the drifts left by the city plow when they cleared the street.
I still think evil thoughts of the Robinson’s to this day.
A learning curve for parents in our group was just how much kids could text when they got their own phones (2005 or so). AT&T was reasonable about it, and would waive the $x00 bill if you upgraded to an unlimited texting plan.
The number of texts my middle son sent/received was impressive, especially since it was pre-smart phone and he was using a dialing keypad.
