A miracle has occurred!
There were SIX 12-packs of my precious Canada Dry Diet Cranberry Ginger Ale cans on the shelf today.
I only took four, mainly because I did not feel like carrying more from the car into my home.
I am fully vaccinated.
On Thursday, the U.S. changed the rules for international travelers arriving in the U.S., so now I have to change my pre-travel COVID test. At least they accept an antigen test, but it has to be the day before.
On Friday, Switzerland changed the rules for international travelers arriving in Switzerland, so now I have to find a PCR test on New Year’s Eve (probably better, due to the lab time) or New Year’s Day. And the PCR test has to be no more than 72 hours before arriving in Switzerland. And travel time, not including check in, is almost 16 hours.
Lots of paperwork. So much fun.
The music that accompanies fragrance ads on TV at this time of year. In a single evening, the same damn music can be heard dozens of times on multiple channels.
Publix in my area is out of scrapple! I sent them an email, asking if they had decided not to carry it anymore, or if it was a supply chain issue, and just got back a generic apology with no answer to the question. Woe!
Can anyone confirm this? I have an Instacart VIP as well and would love to be able to order from Costco and Sams occasionally without a membership.
Which reminds me: I sprung for the executive membership, a few years back. So far, I’ve always gotten back more in rebates than the extra cost, but
- The rebate is paid via a Costco Cash certificate - an easily-lost piece of paper, which I gather cannot be replaced.
- They calculate the value of your rebate a couple months before your membership year ends. So you do not get any rebate for the last couple of months. Bit of a ripoff, that.
Need a new dishwasher … the repairman told us the old one is basically unfixable.
I ended up ordering my 5th choice because choices 1-4 are all out of stock. Hopefully the new one will come at the end of the month like the delivery date says, but we’d planned to take a short trip during that time, so now that is cancelled. Not that I could afford it after buying a new dishwasher anyway.
That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is that from now until at least the end of the month I will have to wash and dry dishes by hand. The horror!
May the gnashing of teeth commence.
BTDT. After I repaired the Whirlpool thrice (different things all failed all at once), and discovering it was less than 4 years old, we decided on Bosch or Miele…Miele winning out as it had a lower first year repair percentage (8% vs 12%)…
But we didn’t like the silverware tray on it, ($1000) and the next one up ($1499) was ‘at least 8-10 weeks out’ and so we bought the crazy expensive $2000 one.
And dammit if I’m not uncomfortably in love with how it washes dishes. It better do so for a good long time.
I’ve just discovered can still get it - at least in the “no sugar” variant!
But weirdly I have found only one place that sells it, where I am.
I was recently in another city at a car rental agency at the airport, trying to use my Apple Card that I use for everything. It’s a perfectly proper MasterCard that should work everywhere.
The agent insisted that she had to type in the last 4 digits of the card–there is no number printed on the card. I gave her the last 4 of number that Apple said was the card number. It didn’t work.
It turns out that there are two secret card numbers, one for online purchases and one for “manual entry”, available in the app. So I gave her the other one.
Then the card was declined. Whenever that happens with a CC, I call the phone number printed on the card…but the Apple Card is absolutely blank. In their desire to have a perfect beautiful unblemished hunk of titanium they removed one of the most crucial bits of information: There is no phone number printed on it. There is no phone number in the app.
I had to Google “Goldman Sachs customer support” to get a phone number. Why? What a stupid setup.
After all that, the bank lady told me the card hadn’t been declined, and it was likely the dumb software of the rental agency that did it. The lady at the counter re-ran it and all was good.
Shamus, one of the two cats I inherited from my mom, was a wonderful pet. But in his later years he would only eat salmon flavored Friskies’ wet food, rejecting all other brands and flavors, which made for several protracted shopping trips going store to store to find the acceptable flavor.
So, when Linden and Poe graduated to adult cat food this summer, I was determined to expose them to many different flavors of food by a brand I liked (and had previously fed the other inherited cat, Sassy), of which they produce about ten. But the cat food shortage has hit this brand of grain-free food especially hard, so it’s difficult to get a reliable supply of all but two flavors…so broadening their palates isn’t going too well. sigh.
Nearly every Saturday there’s a booth offering professional knife sharpening at my local farmers market. For the past several weeks I’ve been meaning to take my knives there for sharpening, but I kept forgetting to bring my knives with me to the market. This morning I remembered to bring them, in fact I was specifically going there for knife sharpening; I didn’t really need anything else from the market this week. This turned out to be the one week the knife sharpeners weren’t there.
Got the one computer replaced a month or so back - a Microsoft Update bricked it - seriously (I was not the only one on the project that this happened to). And for whatever reason, the new one works with the KVM switch.
I just got a new keyboard. I really wanted a mechanical keyboard - and I wanted a gaming keyboard with programmable backlit keys because I wanted to be able to program some of them to be more visible - e.g. the home/end, ins/del etc, as they can be impossible to find by touch.
I’d read that the one I wanted didn’t play nice with KVM switches because it uses a second USB cable as a passthrough for things like controlling audio. But there were plenty of sites that said it would work fine with the regular USB - you just wouldn’t have the extra features.
That was fine by me - I don’t really need them on the work computer.
Only, it doesn’t work AT ALL with the KVM switch. So I’m back almost to where I started a couple months ago - except at least the mouse still works, as does the monitor. And the new keyboard seems like it with withstand a nuclear attack, and is wonderfully noisy (my husband is glad he doesn’t work in the same room as I do!)
I haven’t gotten a paper bill from my car insurance company for two months. Fortunately, I had already set up digital payments out of my online checking, but I have to estimate how much I’m supposed to pay. So I called the company and asked them why I’m not getting bills. They claim not to have a clue. The guy did say that they could send me email bills so that I could know how much to pay. I told him that I still wanted to get paper bills, and not to take me off paper. So I got a confirmation email that said, “Click here to go paperless.” I had to call them back to tell them that I DO NOT want to go paperless.
Yes. This. I have four computers at my home office. 3 personal, 1 work. And two monitors, a 32” 4k, and a 24” 2k…I’ve resigned myself that one personal laptop will just sit at the side, the Gaming PC and ‘ol Mac Pro will just stand by while I’m at work.
Nobody makes an even slightly affordable more-than-two-computer-more-than-one-monitor KVM. And Macs like Thunderbolt for multi-monitor docks and the Mac Pro predates Thunderbolt and the Work Dell uses USB-C which the MacBookPro won’t support multi monitors on.
Best I’ve gotten at this point is a bluetooth keyboard and mouse that drive three computers, and I have to manually change inputs on the monitors…like some kinda caveman.
(I may have bitched about this before, but I don’t see it on this page, and my mind is old and feeble…and apparently crotchety.)
Reddit is glitching out so I can’t spew my obviously superior opinions on how to play a video game at the moment.
Friend of mine haunts second-hand junk shops - no first-hand junk for him - for those old toasters that look like '30s Chrysler Airflows. He has one on his kitchen counter, in daily use, and two in the basement, awaiting their turn.
Bonus: they’re NOT energy-efficient, so they actually brown the bread on the first go-round.
Dan
Y’know, they don’t all have to go in the reefer at once. Unless you think they’ll have separation anxiety.
Dan
My First World problem: Trying to figure out which end of the plastic trash bag opens.
Close - mine is trying to open the produce bags at the grocery store