Mixing Chocolate Cream Pie and Anvils

Your love is like  sleeping with tarantulas

Excuse me - I don't mean to be rude...

Yes you do 

My doctor wants me to sign up for their Patient Portal.

I asked if I could get a doctor's note to get out of signing up for their Patient Portal. This did not go over as well as I would have liked.

There are so many reasons not to bother with this.

1. if it's online, it WILL get hacked.
2. when it gets hacked, your private info will be all over the place (moreso).
3. Where does this database go after you put your info in?
4. Even if you refuse (I refused), your info will still be stolen: see #1.
5. Many people are too stupid to have social security numbers, and why should the rest of us pay the price?
6. Where... anywhere... any time.. is the benefit for the patients? Nowhere.

There are also (allegedly) many reasons to do it, like....  ummm.... errrr... you know...

1. the doctor will ignore your call just as quickly in the portal as via telephone
2. your meds won't be called in regardless
3. the amount of your bill will be shown clearly, without any interpretation needed
4. you will still have to wait from 30-120 minutes for an audience with the doctor

It just doesn't seem like there's any advantage in it.

Keep my information in an off-white patient file in a huge piece of office furniture with a few thousand other patient files. They are safe from the internet. None of my financial or medical info will get out via the internet. Instead it will get out via the insurance companies, but that's another battle entirely.

• If you're up for a little light reading, check out "Technological Slavery" by Theodore John Kaczynski. The publisher promises the book will not explode in your lap. These are already better odds than getting into a Tesla.

Fresh from the news of the latest postal system price increase....

The USPS Has 452 Wayward Cremated Bodies

Funeral Director: You can bury him, you can cremate him, you can scatter his ashes, or you can send him to the US Postal System. The USPS is your best option if you are low on space and don't really want to see him again.

We're in the midst(?) of 2 weeks of gray skies, unbelievable humidity, and thunderstorms. It's pretty disgusting. As we who live here say, Philadelphia: it's not a climate - it's a plague. Mother Nature has been a bit off since she discovered crack...

My dog has a very limited palette in terms of speech (how bout that segue?). We don't know a lot about her other than we adopted her at 5. So when the thunder started, she dug down deep into her responses and came up with the right response: she barked at it. Barking seems to be her go-to. She is a dog; a fact we have to remember after having a raft full of really different cockers. She couldn't see her way clear to jumping on my lap last night, so she... you guessed it.. barked. If the treats aren't coming fast enough... oddly she doesn't bark - she sits there, trying to behave. Life, as we see it, is a lot of sitting there, trying to behave. Fortunately I have a job where behavior is secondary to job performance. I feel for my poor boss, because there's another of me in the group and we have to be separated somehow, lest things get really out of hand. Maybe they'll put us on opposite sides of the video meetings - I don't know how that works with a virtual workspace.

So the dog barks at thunder, and most other things. The problem here is that she doesn't stop, especially when told to. She always has to get the last bark in. In other words, she fits right in, even if mine is supposed to be the final bark. She'll just stand there and bark, until... well.. we're not sure. Maybe until she's done barking. All barking seems to go on for longer than 5 seconds, but it's the same for thunder as a leaf flying by the front door or a dog being walked somewhere in the city. 

Speaking of weather, it just started raining. Again. This means thunder all over the place and flash flood warnings. Let me do some Mental Magic for you: The showers and thunder started at 5:01. How do I know? The trash needs to go out and I finish work at 5. Wife showed up to deliver a frozen drink, in the midst of 40 days of floods. There was 3" of whipped cream missing. I can tell you the dog was in the car. Smart dog too.. she won't touch the whipped cream on the frozen strawberry drink, but the whipped cream on the chocolate drink is OK - DIVE IN!!  (whipped cream only - no chocolate for dogs)

I just read an article that said this summer will be very hot, due to El Ninos and La Ninas and mamicitas causing a hot sauce pressure system over the US. Coke will sponsor the humidity.

• Note to Self: You really miss big hair and tube tops

Congress doubles down on explosive claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

Those of us with blogs, who like to think we know better and are always the smartest person in the room, now have smug grins. It's very interesting that these unnamed sources are speaking up. We know the whole thing continues to happen, but why all of the sudden? Who benefits? Can Congress really cut that part of the black budget? Can they cut the budget retroactive to 1947? It's all very interesting and very silly to watch. I guess the Great Unwashed will get quite a shock, if they can pull themselves away from Judge Judy Sam Justice Legal Americans Idle lawyer drug commercials.

Best headline:

Threads is All The Worst Parts of Twitter And Instagram in One Very Bad App

Work is giving me a hard time. This is unusual.

First I get put on a team to make an entirely new system work. Then I get put on a team to demo the new system for everyone. We explain that since the new system isn't installed yet, perhaps it would be a better idea to demo it at some point after it's installed. That worked for about a week, until we were back demoing it for everyone again.

We started putting everything together with PowerPoint, because the entire business world runs on PowerPoint. Slides are most effective with blinky lights, but nobody knows how to do this because we actually DO something other than produce slides. Since literally no one has used this system, all we had were online manuals. Now we all know it's immoral to just cut and paste from the internet, so we kept that in mind as we were cutting and pasting from the internet. We reduced our collective guilt by only copying and pasting from the software manuals. Just after that, we learned we had to talk over the slides.

YOU MEAN NOT ONLY DO WE HAVE TO CUT AND PASTE FROM THE INTERNET, WE HAVE TO know how to use and explain it?  Bastards.

Have I mentioned that the software is still not installed and our training consisted of copying and pasting from the internet? 

New York Train Tunnels Get Partial $7 Billion Funding From Feds, Enough For the Whole Project in A Sane Country

President Giveaway comes through again!! 

If the estimate of work in New York is $7 billion, it will easily cost $21 billion, due to graft, underestimation, graft, weather, incompetence, and graft.

Take THAT, DeSantis