Sigh.
I’ll allow it.
I enjoyed seeing the glee on my students’ faces (college-age, designers) when I announced that, as Web/Advertising/Graphic Designers, they’d probably never have to write a paper again in their lives.
I did have to add “Unless you have to write a grant proposal… try to stay away from those.”
I actually love writing grants, generally, but it takes hours to enter budget and budget justifications into the federal system and it’s tedious as hell. I miss the old days where you could just upload an Excel file. Also, the UI is shit.
And I’m tired.
Another Neil Young song. They never get old, even if I do.
Our washing machine has decided to randomly stop working mid cycle. When you try to start it again it gets stuck believing it’s on pause (because it’s mid cycle) and doesn’t want to start up again.
I need to wash my son’s baseball uniform for a tournament starting tomorrow. It’s just not happening (it’s not even in the load I’m currently trying to wash; I planned to do two tonight) . So I guess I’ll hand wash it and maybe see about doing laundry at my brother’s this weekend.
Yay.
Well, stupid budgets are mostly done. But I’m not done.
My son, who has been having behavioral challenges lately, did great at daycare today, and was all set to earn copious rewards - until I came to pick him up. He was coloring all over a piece of paper with blue chalk and he refused to leave until the chalk was gone. I told him multiple times he was going to lose tally marks and videos and he flat out told me he wasn’t going anywhere. Then he ran away and got chalk all over his hands and face, and I had to wash it off of him, all while staying very calm, while he cried and resisted because he doesn’t like wet feelings. Then he ran away and screamed some more.
That was about fifteen embarrassing minutes.
Then when we got home and I reiterated that he wasn’t going to watch videos or get his tally marks, he lost it again, and he wanted to play but I am so damned tired and frankly I was just pissed off at him and sometimes when your loved ones piss you off, you need some distance.
I wanted to do more work tonight but I’m just tired and stressed now. It’s going to be a big push tomorrow to get it all done. Nothing I can’t handle but damn. Another day, please. This one’s not to my liking.
Re: Our House…
Saw Graham Nash live, and he’d tell the story behind many of his songs.
He and Joni Mitchell had just gotten home from a craft fair, and Graham got out of the car first, saying “I’ll light the fire. You place the flowers in the vase that you bought today.”
By the time Joni got in the house, Graham was working on this song at the piano. “Hey, I thought you were going to start the fire!” “Sorry, kind of forgot…”
For the past month or two, I keep getting voicemail messages that never rang on my cell phone.
Each one appears to have been blocked as spam by Verizon - but Verizon lets it go to voicemail.
It’s always an automated recording from some loan company, and always from a different number. I’ve taken to adding them to a specific “loan scammer” entry in my address book, which should prevent them from even leaving a voicemail….
It’s probably good that such places CAN leave a message: several times, I’ve gotten calls from medical practices that were inexplicably listed as spam by Verizon.
That comes from people reflexively clicking [ignore] or [block] on every number they don’t recognize.
Yes, the call spammers are making an annoying mess for us all. But crowdsourcing “what is spam & what is not” to a bunch of lazy untrained indifferent users is simply producing a large pile of litter where a curated list of baddies ought to be.
That or a spammer spoofing a legitimate number, and that number getting reported as spam despite belonging to a legitimate organization.
My apartment complex just installed new locks on all the apartments that don’t use a key, they can ONLY be opened by a phone app or a 7 digit code. And you can’t pick the 7 digit code, you can generate a new random one, but you can’t select it.
It sucks. It was so much easier to put a key in the lock & turn it. Now I have to hold the phone to the lock, and hope the NFC unlock works. If it doesn’t (50% of the time), I have to unlock the phone, go to the app, hit “Unlock”, and wait a few seconds while it connects to the lock & unlocks it.
Also, with the old locks, you couldn’t forget your keys and lock yourself out, you had to manually lock the door behind you. Now it automatically locks, so if you forgot to pick up your phone, and you didn’t memorize the 7 digit code (which you can’t pick yourself), you’re screwed. And of course you don’t have your phone, so good luck calling management to let you in.
Kroger has decided that they can scrape a few more pennies out of their store if they let these shitty energy salesmen stand around and hassle their customers. Yesterday one guy kept at me as I shopped. I ignored him for a while until I got irritated enough to loudly say I sure as hell wouldn’t get my energy from them because they’re a scam. Finally shut him up.
I suppose what I really need to do is go tell the store manager that their competition doesn’t hassle me with salesmen and maybe I should switch. See if that sinks in and helps change their behavior.
For you. For management, now they don’t have to change locks, just change a code. So to the people who make the decisions there is no downside.
At least it wasn’t a store employee. I stopped in a Best Buy the other day looking for something (which they didn’t have in stock) and the two young ladies “helping” me suddenly went from being Best Buy employees to AT&T sales reps and tried to get me to change my cell phone plan as I was walking out. So that’s another store that has permanently lost my business.
I can’t think of the last time I went into a Best Buy.
I used to like to shop for TVs there because they were really cheap, but Walmart has been cheaper (especially during Black Friday deals).
I think it might have been 5 years since I’ve been in a Best Buy? At least.
I’m sure they’re dealing with a huge upswing in “I locked myself out” service calls now and for the next few weeks, but yeah, you’re right.
Yeah, our local Best Buy is kind of small, maybe about half the size of a typical store, but I was in the Kansas City area for a doctor’s appointment and stopped in a store on my way home to see if they had some networking equipment I was looking for.
I think the last time I was in a BB was about five years ago after our dryer died. My wife wanted to get a cheap dryer to hold us over until our washer died and then we could get a new stacking W/D combo. They had a floor model real cheap that we bought.
Update: Federal grants are done. I’m tired. They went quicker than expected but the five hours I spent entering in the budget and budget justifications felt like an eternity.
Then there was the delightful discovery that my Adobe program will no longer combine files into PDFs so I had to attach them all separately, which is just kind of bad form, I think, but I had no time to get this resolved.
We really need a win. In some ways I think they were really strong and in other ways I’m not sure. Part of the challenge is trying to guess what the awful new administration is looking for, and not knowing who is reviewing these - DOGE or someone who actually knows what the fuck they are doing?
We got 10 letters of support, including law enforcement, which will go far. I’m hoping that makes up for weaknesses in the narrative. I needed more time on the narratives, but at a certain point you get to the end and you’re like, “good enough." I’m going on vacation tomorrow so I don’t have to think about this shit anymore.
Maybe do some state grants instead as the US Grants are only for $50
I heard two helicopters go by late last night. My rant isn’t because they woke me up, I was still awake, and I don’t care about the noise, although they were only a couple of blocks away and flying low, but because any such flight, especially in the middle of the night, is a serious medical emergency flight headed to either the General Hospital or the Children’s’ Hospital a few blocks away from me. I like aircraft, but not these ones.