Guam is tiny, 9 miles at its widest point. It doesn’t change in elevation much. The highest spot is 1,332 ft above sea level at the peak of Mount Lamlam, which is barely high enough to be considered a mountain. (Though there are claims that if you measure it against the bottom of the nearby Marianas Trench, it could be the tallest mountain on the planet.)
Yes, I understand, I guess I was just pushing back, unnecessarily, on the comment about being on the Equator meaning you have summer all year long. That is true on Guam but not of other countries that are on the equator.
Just a quick response that I was elucidating something that is probably already well known.
//i\\
It was a cool fact IMHO.
Bumpdate: it’s 3.5 days before surgery and no update.
The hospital staff is not returning my calls to say that they’ve reached out to insurance to request that it be expedited. The main person who does that wasn’t working today. The person I did speak with said she’d escalate it to a manager and I should get a call back this afternoon. Nope.
The person I spoke with at the insurer said she would to try to notify them to escalate it too.
So you know I’ll be on the phone Monday morning raising hell. I don’t want to have to drive to the hospital that day to speak to someone - not sure what that would do.
I may reach out to the breast surgeon too to see if THEY can light a fire under someone in the other office. They did their part right on time. Because otherwise we have to cancel. The mastectomy part doesn’t even need pre-auth, but the reconstruction will be a hundred grand or more. I can’t risk paying that out of pocket.
Which would be fine, if it in any way indicated this was the case on the website.
It doesn’t. It has a summary box with daily high and low, which you can click on to get a more detailed hourly forecast you can scroll through. This has a gap and a vertical line dividing the hours labelled ‘Today’ from those labelled ‘Sunday’, placed at midnight. There is nothing at all to show the hours labelled as comprising that day are not the same set of hours for which the daily summary is given, except that the numbers don’t match.
If they were designing it to confuse, they couldn’t do it much better.
Granted.
What’s really happening is that standards used by meteorologists worldwide for decades are now being exposed by websites to laypeople. Somewhere on https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ is a glossary of terms that explains this. The web programmers who create the website are just blindly dumping data out of a database onto your screen. They themselves may not be aware of the detailed technical definition of terms like “day”.
Everything about the modern world is more complicated that it appears and needs 2 pages of disclaimers and background notes per sentence of mainline content. The assumption almost has to be that anyone reading [whatever] already knows all that background content. The alternative is unworkable.
Another example from upthread is my cite to the wiki article on seasons. The simple school-age conception that there are 4 seasons with fixed start and end dates is sooo naively wrong. There’s vast complexity once we so much as scratch the surface. Who knew “seasons” had to come with a 10,000 word instruction manual? But it does. Because seasons are that complicated.
Here’s a relevant cite:
from xkcd: Average Familiarity.
See also:
from xkcd: Ten Thousand.
Hell, some, like NYC, have 5 or 6 in a week in March; including Winter, Spring, False Spring, Winter pt II, near Spring, Winter (again).
Actually, you left one out. There’s kvetching about the weather season. Which seems to run nearly all year. 
Does the a-hole on top of a horse know when something is coming out of the a-hole at the back of said horse?
I did a trail run this morning, in the park near the stables; counted 17 separate horse poops on the trails in my first 2¾ miles. Some were big piles but some it was obvious the horse was walking while leaving apples, which I & every other runner & walker had to dodge on the single-track. Putting in a complaint with the local PD as pooper-scooper laws do apply to them. Don’t give me this horseshit (heh!) that they don’t eat meat so it’s not as nasty as a dog’s; I still don’t want to step in it!
Dear youtube. I like to occasionally waste time watching old British comedies, and I can stand the occasional advertisements you offer.
But lately, your algorithm has gone way, way off track. I do not want to be solicited by the Mormon church, thank you very much. I am hard-core atheist, for a start, and Mormonism is just about as wacky as Scientology as far as religions go.
And the repeated use of the “dislike” button seems to have the effect of youtube behaving like a naughty child, performative misbehaviour to gain attention.
Mini-est, pettiest of mini-rants:
Why in the goddamn hell do I bother going out of my way to purchase locally produced spirits – and, of course grow attached to them – when it seems like these distilleries/wineries inevitably shutter? Two of my favorites are now gone due to owner retirement and ‘pivoting to take advantage of market trends’ [they’re exclusively making canned cocktails now].
I had a new HVAC system installed a couple weeks ago. The company sent me a text the other day that they needed to schedule Code Enforcement to come by and check it out. I could pick a morning or afternoon time. I set it up for tomorrow afternoon. I got a text from the company today confirming this which said “we have requested an afternoon appointment, however, we cannot guarantee they will accommodate the request.” WTF? Then why give me a choice? If I was still working and had scheduled off the afternoon I would be pissed. As it is, I’m retired so I’ll be here but I generally sleep until noon and will not be happy if someone shows up before that (they will send a text ahead of time). Oh, and it’s going to be two people (electrical and mechanical) who may or may not show up at the same time. Awesome. Can’t wait.
Don’t blame your contractor for crappy service from your local government.
They presumably passed your request to the city, and the city will honor that or not as the city sees fit.
But yeah, it sucks that your city government is not responsive to your citizens.
Reminds me of the old Soviet-era joke about a man buying a new car.
A man goes to a car dealership in the Soviet Union, and after many years of saving, is able to pay the full price for a new car. He’s told by the clerk that he can pick up his vehicle in exactly 10 years.
The man asks, “Morning or afternoon?”
The clerk says, “It’s 10 years from now, comrade, what difference does it make?”
The man replies, “I have a plumber coming in the morning”.
I just got a message on my cell phone about my upcoming MRI appointment. Trouble is, I’m not expecting an MRI appointment, and an even greater trouble is that my name is not “Jennifer”.
I tried calling the number of the clinic, got a recorded message with some options (none of which were “speak to a human”) and then it cut off in the middle of a sentence. I tried again, and exactly the same thing happened.
So someone named “Jennifer” somewhere might miss her MRI appointment, but the Good Lord knows that I did all that I could to deal with multiple levels of incompetence.
Someone just landed himself a new SDMB nickname.
Jennifer “wolfpup” Caesar
A few days ago I got a nearly unintelligible voicemail & then a confused text message from a mobile number similar to my own number. I haven’t lived in that aree code for near 15 years, and the number that contacted me isn’t in my contacts from back then. So probably a scammer right?
After a few more listens I pieced together that this was a tree service calling somebody not with my name to check on a job they’d bid. Somebody somewhere fumbled that customer’s phone number and the tree service now has mine.
Not a rant, but akin to @wolfpup’s misplaced Jennifer.
I got a message on my rarely given out (Google Voice) # from a county social worker in a neighboring state, where the biggest city in that county has won the murder capital per capita more than once & can mostly be described as ‘Da Hood’. She didn’t address anyone by name but called to tell me my brother had passed.
I was heartbroken! I was devastated! I had a brother that I had never even heard about & now he was…dead??? Oh the agony!
Assuming she made a typo & that was important info for someone to receive I called her back trying to tell her she left a message at the wrong number. She started arguing with me, “Don’t you remember your brother?” Ummm, no. You are the first person to ever tell me I had a brother & you haven’t once even used my name. She was very nonchalant & seemed used to the fact that people didn’t remember their family members; I could only think in that neighborhood it was to keep your loved one from going (back?) to jail.
On this same theme, I’ve been receiving messages from Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, senior US Senator from Nevada, telling about things that, as a Patriotic American and Nevada resident, I should be Deeply Concerned about. I don’t know if those emails are capable of being replied to, but I feel like composing this sort of reply:
Dear Senator Catherine Cortez Masto,
I’m sure that getting elected as US Senator from Nevada is a great accomplishment, but I wish to inform you that I have never in my life been to Nevada, have never even seen a cactus in the wild, and do not reside in these United States, as great as you claim they may be. This may be my loss, but at least I should not be hounded by emails from there.
I rarely directly log in to Gmail but your emails are causing my cell phone to beep because it monitors my Gmail account, and you are beginning to seriously piss me off, Catherine. Cut it out.
Best regards,
Jennifer