The climate in St. Louis was that way for most of my 20 years there. Yes it snows, and mostly it doesn’t accumulate. And self-destructs in 3-5 days. Hooray.
The ice on the other hand? Yech! Total PITA. The 34-38F rain is no picnic either.
Holy shit, I take it all back. We just got snow bombed. Forecast predicted it would end at 3pm with little accumulation. Forecast lied. For a vast stretch of the highway, traffic was so slow my foot wasn’t even on the gas pedal, snow caking the windshield, ice all over my fucking wipers making it harder and harder to see. My nearly one hour commute home took over two hours. I fucking hate stop and go traffic, it makes me want to hurl. Visibility got worse and worse and it got dark and untenable just about the same time I pulled into the drive.
That’s the kind of drive where you’re just glad you made it home without ending up in a ditch somewhere.
Come back, cold rain!
I had a visit from Home Health Services today, which started a new cycle of visits to monitor my health. In addition to testing my blood sugar and weight, I’m now supposed to get a blood pressure monitor and check that several times a day.
Tomorrow afternoon an occupational therapist will be coming by to resume working with me, and I’m expecting regular visits from a physical therapist to start nagging me about resuming regular exercising. I’m also looking into setting up visits with services to help with housework and other things I can’t quite manage on my own. So far, this is looking to cost in the neighborhood of $35/hour, depending on how often I need them.
This is good news! Is there any way insurance can cover at least some of it? My mother had home care services in her elderly years through the Ontario public health plan that included a personal care worker, nursing visits, visits by a nutritionist, and hospital equipment like oxygen, and found it very, very useful. In fact it was the only thing that allowed her to live at home and avoid moving to a long-term care facility. I hope it works out well for you, too.
The therapists and home health services are completely covered by my Medicare and Federal BCBS. Unfortunately, this does not extend to cleaning services, housework, or errand running, so I need to figure out what I need help with. So far I’m able to prepare my own meals, do dishes and laundry, and wash and dress myself. The local public transit service gets me to and from doctor appointments, and I order groceries online now; I used to be able to use the public transit service to shop, but for now walking around the store is more than I can handle.
I’m really glad to hear this! Hopefully it will be easier with those supports in place.
That’s great news! The other stuff not covered by insurance is relatively minor in the large scheme of things. And I get it about the hassle of walking around a big store. I still do it for grocery shopping but it’s one of the reasons I order a lot of non-grocery stuff from Amazon now. I’d rather have items magically appear on my porch instead of potentially a long drive and then wandering around a big store.
Ontario is not St, Louis, not even southern Ontario. But I must admit that so far your perception is correct – we’ve had many, many days of snowfall, but it’s mostly been light. Still, enough accumulation that there are moderate hills of snow on the curb.
There was one January back at my previous house when I was younger and did my own snow shoveling that there were massive snowstorms day after day. I haven’t seen anything like that since. The two things that enabled me to survive were (a) a sled shovel, whereby I could haul huge amounts of snow out to the curb without actually shoveling or lifting, and (b) “the scoop”. The scoop was the invention of a kindly warm-hearted city. When a street plow went by and piled huge amounts of heavy snow across the end of my driveway, there would be a scoop at the back end of it that came down and cleared it all out. I was so thankful for that. That heavy salt-encrusted packed snow was a horror!
Well, with my crazy sleep schedule here I am up just after 4:00 AM and I hear snowplows out on the street. Again, no major storm but I think we’ve had a couple of inches of the white stuff. Once the streets are cleared and Snowplow Guy comes by I must go out, because I’m into the emergency rum supply – to wit, the single-serve miniatures! If the weather turns really bad I may be forced to subsist on frozen TV dinners and vodka, similar to what one would expect of lost and stranded explorers in Siberia.
I plugged in my new Windows 11 laptop just for the hell of it, and just for fun, I asked it to download the latest security update, because, why not?
I hate, hate, HATE Windows 11 with the passion of a thousand suns. The “security update” kept going for over an hour, with the advice to “please don’t power off your computer, it is updating!” and that was with a nearly 1 Gb/s wired internet connection. With the help of a real computer (Windows 7) I got the advice to power it down by pressing and holding the “Power” button for a few seconds.
I did that, but still got “please don’t power off your computer, it is updating!”. I tried it multiple times, and at some point I got “Dell updates are needed and are in the queue!”. Jesus H Christ almighty, just leave me the fuck alone, all of you!!!
I somehow coerced the laptop to an operational state again, though with some difficulty. I will now use it for its bare essential purposes and nothing else. For real work, I have real computers, not fucking Windows 11.
If it helps, Windows 11 Tiny edition (not a Microsoft release, but still gets updates) can be found on the world wild web (torrents).
You will still need a license, but I assume you already have one.
(ps… In true 1990s era style, let me suggest Linux, specially Ubuntu.)
minorist of rants - I swear my watch only counts sleeping in bed for the sleep score. Fall asleep on the sofa & then wake up at, say, 2am & head to bed & the watch shows me going to sleep at 2am, not at 11 or whenever I started studying the inside of my eyelids.
I should have done laundry at a reasonable hour last night. Instead I tossed it into the washer as I went to bed. This morning when I woke up (early) I got up for a minute to move wet clothes from washer to dryer, & since I was vertical, empty the bladder before getting back & going back to sleep for another hour until the alarm went off. Nope, today’s sleep score is calculated on the first time I got up (for about 3 mins); no credit for the last hour of sleep, not part of sleep nor even a nap.
Because that’s a really bad idea for most any OS in the modern day. Your computer should be left powered on overnight while you sleep and allowed to download and install updates when available on a regular basis. Otherwise you’re putting yourself in the position you’re in.
I can’t remember the last time I was without my computer because I was waiting for a huge update, whether Windows 11 or 10.
I always schedule the monthly updates for my computer (still Windows 10) for when I am gone from the house or overnight when I am asleep.
Sometimes they are huge and take quite awhile to finish and I do not want the aggravation of waiting for it to complete its cycle.
True. Even if it’s not updating every night, you can set an individual update to install overnight instead of immediately. Even on a future night. It’s pretty flexible.
company holiday gifts were finally delivery yesterday; just a wee bit late. (There were four options one could choose from, I chose Option E - None of the above)
I gotta go with wolfpup here, I want to do updates when I want them to so that I can do an orderly shutdown, or at least note anything that I have open.
Just shut everything down before you go to bed.
Or don’t. Leave your browser open and the next time you use your computer it will restore the pages you had open.
Computers can be a lot more convenient than they used to be if you let them.
IMO @wolfpup’s problem, as he himself said, is Dell. I have none of those issues with my Win11 install. Not a Dell. Not trying to install special Dell-only updates. Unlike his box.
Not so fast! I’ve only owned Dell computers for the last few decades, and have never had the issues @wolfpup described, which I think others have correctly opined as being a result of not scheduling updates to run automatically.
You sound like my (@#$%^) of a cow-orker who can only have one thing open at a time & reboots every day. That’s not the way I, or most people do it.
Most of my browsing is in private mode; no history when you reopen, but then that means no targeted cookies from that place you looked at/bought something weeks ago (glares at you, B&H) & not being stuck in rabbit holes. The way I watch Youtube is not signed in in a private browser; the advantage of that is every time I restart the browser I get a fresh YT, suggestions aren’t down the rabbit hole that is related to whatever I may have been previously looking at. Tis a glorious thing!