Yes, like last year, I have a bunch of vacation days that I have to use or lose. Since they won't pay me for them, I figure I'd use them. Since I don't pay attention well, I was off the month of December last year. This year I paid attention, so I'm only off half the month of December.
Why is it a forced vacation? Because I don't do well without structure (not defined as a wife screaming at me). So while I'm off, my job becomes finding things to do. Anybody with a functional set of eyes could look around the house and find a lifetime of things to do, especially in the living room. Depending on your decorating tastes, the 74 Camaro sitting nose-down may or may not be a keeper. If nothing else, it's really tall, and brings to mind the monolith from 2001 - A Space Odyssey. So the artsy-fartsy among us could consider it an homage to Stanley Kubrick. Or just an absolute original in the Department of the Abstract.
Incidentally, due to the laws of physics, you too can have a monolith in your home. Anything even mildly out of place, like a welding rig or Camaro, left there for more than 3 days, starts to become invisible. You walk past it and it doesn't register. Eventually you catch it out of the corner of your eye and realize it looks pretty good there and you'd miss it if it 'had to go.' This all started with my friend's beautiful sitting room. One day I noticed a large red air compressor on wheels. The following week it was still there. I told my friend that it was a spectacular decoration and she should definitely keep it there. She didn't know what I meant because the laws of physics had rendered it part of the room. So I had to go out and get my own air compressor, in red. The only problem was my house lacking a sitting room. I was flummoxed and I was beat, because I do not have the skill set to add a sitting room (or turn the bathroom into one). I can wield a hammer by the correct end damn near 84% of the time. Same with screwdrivers. I hit 100% with my soldering iron, for obvious reasons. I guess I could buy a pre-fab shed-like thing, but couldn't attach it to the house, plus it would lack light. So the red air compressor sits unused in the bedroom. Almost unused, but I won't expand that.
So on my first day of Forced Vacation, I was awakened precisely at almost 11am (12:37 New Jersey time). Wife, who was getting into bed (don't ask), informed me it was snowing. This is a dangerous trio: awakened, gloom, and snow. The stupid weather doesn't even have the decency to have sunshine with our snow. I think somebody roofied Mother Nature.
Apparently the mailman snuck up on me and delivered my NEW MEMORY! The laptop's new memory, but it would be great to order my own, right? Then the strangest thing happened: I installed the memory, the laptop recognized it, and everything ran ok. I had to wake Wife to have her explain it to me. She told me "Essentially, it failed to fail." It may take a few days for this to sink in. Anyway, now I can open up 12 programs at the same time, without everything stopping due to no memory. The irony here is that I don't have 12 programs I use, and after 3 programs, the tiny 13" display won't show them anyway. So things run faster and it makes downloading my hamster pr0n a breeze. The memory only took 4 days to arrive, from just under 10 miles away.
But even I know that vacation (even forced vacation) should include more than installing RAM and downloading hamster pr0n. Let's see.... there's..... ummm... and then.... but.... I know - breakfast! Sugar Frosted Chocolate Sugar Bits await me. Oh. No they don't. The store didn't have any. Supply Chain Issues, you know. It's pretty sad when a supermarket doesn't have the most popular breakfast cereal in the world. I think they may have to be reclassified from a supermarket to a market if this keeps up. There's nothing super about it. It now costs more for lunchmeat than to fill your car. Perhaps because it's so expensive, I notice a lot of 'help' when making a sandwich lately. The dog has laser-focus upon the lunchmeat. She's helping me, in case it tries to attack me by falling to the floor. She will throw her body between the lunchmeat and me, then eat it so it's disarmed. I'm thankful for dogs, especially this one. She has a t-shirt that says COCKERS FOR COLD CUTS. She's a lot smarter than I thought. So after being awakened at 11, it's time for breakfast at 3.
And after breakfast, there's napping! And after napping, there's napping. I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm woefully behind on my napping. There are some days I get barely 3 naps.. can you imagine? It has been brought to my attention that people do stuff and go places on vacation. Really? It's a pretty good bet the dog doesn't do rollercoasters, so that's out. The only guitar store I really want to visit is the Southpaw Shop, all the way at the bottom of the country, in Houston. So it's a pretty nasty drive. Plus if I see an entire shop of lefties, I may not want to come back, and they probably won't let me live there. So I'm a bit limited on places to go. Wife doesn't have this problem: there are shoe stores everywhere. Plus she lost weight and now nothing fits her anymore. WARDROBE SHOPPING! Vacationing looks too expensive. I think I'll spend my time becoming a zen-like one with the couch. Oh, wait... that's what I'm NOT supposed to do. I'll report in as I figure it out.
The Biden administration refused to obey the law and withheld a percentage of the JFK records, which were supposed to be 100% released already. #Impeach
On another day of forced vacation, I awoke (at noon) to some strange light in the sky. It took me a while to figure what it was. The neighbors all pulled their kids inside and rolled down the shades. If I listened closely, I could hear murmuring, chanting, praying, and of course, the neighbor's continuing construction. I thought the construction guys had a clause that said they couldn't work if the sun came out, but I never really saw the contract. I know they only speak Spanish because they kept telling the dog to shut up in Spanish and I informed them she didn't speak Spanish, so they gave up.
Although I could see light in the sky, I could also see clouds. Lots of them. They were hanging back, getting their strategy ready to begin their assault. Even though we are allowed 1 or 2 days of sun per week, the clouds are not happy about it and are never far away, just in case. PA has what scientists call Shoe Weather. Whenever it's sunny, people get nervous, waiting for the other Shoe to drop. I heard one parent talking to her frantic children, telling them "It's ok, kids.... it will be gray and rainy tomorrow, just like every other day."
Last year England called and wanted its weather back. This year they called to say they're thankful their weather isn't as bad as ours, and if it's all the same to us, they'd rather we keep ours, please. So a spot of tea and Bob's uncle is the bees' nipple.
Google is introducing end to end encryption to Gmail.
Now only Google will have access to your email.
Further in the Great Laptop Debacle 2022, my laptop has been received by the manufacturer and is being looked at by their technicians. Impressive - it only took a week and a half to arrive there. Probably because I didn't want to lose a mortgage payment to the shipper. I can imagine them looking at it.... picture a line of technicians. Shipping hands the laptop to the first technician, who shakes his head, says tsk tsk, then hands it to the 2nd technician. This goes on the larger part of the first day. Not that I blame them. Aside from the crappy plastic hinge that broke, I mean. Every Monday morning, I wipe the laptop down, using a hideous green brush on the keys. When I took the laptop out of my somewhat dim office (caused by its somewhat dim owner), the thing looked filthy. "But I have a hideous green brush," I thought to myself, as I handed it over to be shipped.
NOTE: do NOT use anything but a soft cloth and a little soap to clean monitors, laptop or external. Anything with alcohol in it will dry out the plastic. No special green cleaners or anything else. Don't apply too much pressure or you too will have to send it back to the manufacturer.
So now it's only 2-3 weeks before my sainted laptop makes its way from Bumfuct North Dakota to my house. Naturally this depends on whether they can fix it and how much it will cost. But mostly if I can afford return shipping. If I were smart, which I am obviously not, I would have purchased another laptop in the meantime, to act as a backup. So I'm still pounding away on the 13" old laptop, only running 32 bit software. On the bright side, it hasn't ever failed me, and it runs much better with 8g RAM, as opposed to 2g.
While I'm meandering from subject to subject, I wanted to talk about updating your laptop. If you don't have a laptop, pretend you do and play along nicely with everybody else. In the case of my ancient laptop, there were a few obvious upgrades. Of course you have to decide if this is financially viable, but let's continue. Since I only had 2g RAM and the meter was constantly pegged, I needed RAM, desperately (like television needs to lose its reality shows). It cost me the staggering amount of $23 to go from 2 to 8g. There is no arguing that upgrade. This also goes for home machines. More RAM never hurts, especially with very popular operating systems starting with W.
I can't do anything about the CPU or the 32 bit operating system. A traditional bottleneck in laptops is the hard drive. Many laptops have tiny hard drives with poor specifications, like a 5400 rpm drive. These are extremely slow. Yes, you can upgrade to a larger, faster (7200 rpm?) drive, but don't. The answer is to upgrade to a solid state drive (SSD). The performance is so much better, it will floor you. Same for your desktop. It will feel like a new machine. None of these suggestions is very expensive. I've seen SSDs for well under $100. Shop carefully.
The greatest and cheapest upgrade comes when you don't hold the pursestrings: I wanna new laptop. This one's slow.
And just out of fscking spite, the keyboard on the old machine seems to be developing a finicky space bar. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes I get 2 spaces. Sometimes they really are out to get you.
Why is there a gaming mouse pad? We all know that a regular mouse is $19.95, but you call it a gaming mouse and it's $79.95. But a gaming mouse pad? Does it dispense Monster overcaffeinated drinks? Does it tell Mom to SHUT UP, I'M GAMING IN HERE? Assist in other antisocial activities? When was the last time you used a mouse anyway?
While we're at it, a laptop cooler was suggested for my laptop woes. These are rectangular jobbies with a lot of fans in them. You put the laptop on them and it keeps the laptop cool. I was just about to buy one when I decided to look into the comments. Sure enough, you are supposed to put the laptop on the cooler, but on a surface. This kinda defeats the purpose of the laptop.. you know.... being on your lap. On the other hand, all those fans whizzing probably make an interesting device to have in your lap. Think about it.....
Another Great Reason to Get a Ring
On November 8, for instance, local police in West Covina, California, received an emergency call purporting to come from a minor child reporting that her parents had been drinking and shooting guns inside the minor’s home. When police arrived at the residence, Nelson allegedly accessed the residence’s Ring doorbell and used it to verbally threaten and taunt the responding officers. The indictment alleges the men helped carry out 11 similar swatting incidents during the same week, occurring in Flat Rock, Michigan; Redding, California; Billings, Montana; Decatur, Georgia; Chesapeake, Virginia; Rosenberg, Texas; Oxnard, California; Darien, Illinois; Huntsville, Alabama; North Port, Florida; and Katy, Texas.
Last Wednesday, Elon Musk seemed absolutely convinced that an alleged “crazy stalker” used a Twitter account tracking his private jet to accurately pinpoint the Twitter CEO’s live location at a gas station outside the Los Angeles International Airport
at a GAS STATION??
Musk polls Twitter users on whether he should be CEO - 57.7% want him to quit.
This single act proves Musk doesn't get Twitter. Say you asked Twitter who Jesus was. The top 2 answers would be 'serial killer' and 'racist'. So either he doesn't get Twitter or he's a megalomaniac.
Oh.
Long genital spines on male wasps can save their lives
And you thought it was hard to get a date now?
(You're a) HO HO HO
Yes, it's Xmas 2022. Things are different this year, as we learned at the mall the other day. Rather than staying open ridiculously late, stores are making up their own hours. By the time we were done at the department store, I was dragging Mrs. lefty into the mall, so maybe I could see something interesting. Typical of things lately, we were surprised to find a mall with most of the lights off. At 6pm on a Sunday, right before Christmas.
This particular department store is a very nice one, with friendly employees and stuff other stores don't carry. This was discovered to be another difference in 2022. Most of the employees one could find were nice, but therein lay the problem. We went by 3 sales desks and there were no cashiers. Did the corporate bean counters want to save money by not scheduling employees? Hint: if you don't put people on registers, no one can ring up sales, and it will be a coal-shaped Christmas for you, beanies. So we eventually track down a cashier with only a few people in line. No, wait, they were employees. Great - we're up! Err... no, we're not. It looked like the purchasing employee was purchasing 1,437 individual gift cards, then teaching the newbie employee how to ring them up. And we stood there, foolishly thinking our turn at bat would come. It didn't. Nor were we acknowledged. Both of us are fairly easy to spot in line, or from a helicopter. But nothing. Not so much as a hello, be right with you.
Employee #3 went back to his station, leaving the 2 on the Ignore Desk to do their thing, whatever that was. #3 left with a spring in his step, a hee-hee worthy of Michael Jackson, and a mustache. So I was not entirely certain I had the correct pronouns. Since the Ignoring continued, we discovered another cashier, halfway across the store and fled. I'm sure they never noticed us leave. I was thinking of a small stink or smoke bomb, which I always have with me, but Wife warned me just as I was about to pull the pin on the grenade (dammit). So where do we wind up but at the counter where the Pronoun Person works. I thought it was nice of the store to hire... different... people. I had no trouble with whatever he wanted to do or be (provided it didn't involve reality tv), but I just needed to figure things out. 2 xmas ball earrings, a uniform pullover in the shape of a dress, a high, giggly, underage voice, and a mustache. And a tremendous cashier, most importantly. But.... he kinda looked like someone just told him about gender, and he wanted to try them out, at the same time. Wife was having a blast comparing earrings. I was just thankful we were getting out of there, because I was tired and he was a great cashier. As is my norm, I wanted a malt. But of course the shop was closed, with the rest of the mall.
I finally figured it out: next time we go through the mall first, THEN she goes to the department store. I'm a little slow, I'm not good looking, sometimes I smell a bit, but I'm entertaining to hang around.
Hey - is anybody investigating where the Flying AIDS came from?
Just askin'
