Stumbling Through Adulthood

Why I prefer to shop online:

Online: find item, if it's available, order. Await shipment.

Brick and mortar: find item online, it's available. Go to brick and mortar store. Item is not, in fact, available. It's too late to order online which means... I have to haul my sorry ass down my most hated location in Seattle (Pike Place Market) to pick it up there. And, oh, I had to call to get it set aside. I detest the phone. BTW, when I asked the first place if they had any, since their website said they did, she told me I should have called to make sure. It's like... people don't get it. I don't fucking want to talk to anyone, and certainly not over the phone. This is why I checked online and went to the store to pick it up, ugh.

So yeah. Going to try to see if I can go in with Perry and have him fly a holding pattern (or pick up the item) since there will be no parking within a long distance to the stupid market. Of course, like most places, it opens late, long after Perry is done rowing for the day, so this may not work. With the ridiculous cost of bridge tolls, I try to consolidate trips if at all possible.

1. Orion splashdown: done and success for the Artemis1 mission! YAY!

2. My aunt, for various good reasons, isn't going down to the US for Christmas. This makes me very sad. And my mother will no doubt be very disappointed. I am trying to figure how to handle all this, and see what my sister wants to do etc. Ugh.

3. Twitter is turning into a cesspool. And Musk is planning on increasing tweet length from 280 characters to... 4000. Not 400. 4000. That will make the platform totally unuseable. The thing is... he wants -imo- to transform twitter into Parler or TruthSocial, or whatever hate-filled platform the scum are currently inhabiting. He wants those eyeballs, and he wants to be able to blame the advertiser exodus on liberals. I dunno. Right now, by blocking and carefully curating my feed, I can pretty much manage to avoid most of the hate and misinformation (but not the Sussexes), though Covid lies are getting harder and harder to avoid, but I suspect there is soon going to be a time when I am not going to be able to avoid all the nasty stuff. At which point... I guess I'll leave. Ah well.

The New York Times employees are going on strike all day tomorrow, Thursday.

All day.

Which means, since I will not cross a picket line, virtual or not, no Wordle.

Which means, WAH, breaking a streak that lasted since we got back from Europe (for some reason, something happened when my computer did the Time Zone Dance and things were re-set). 66 days, not our longest, but oh well.

The only part of this that makes me sad? Since the streak started the day after we got back, it's been kinda a time pacer for me. A month since we left Europe. Two months since...

Ah well.

I've been on twitter, on and off, since 2008.

And Elon Fuckhead Musk just closed the building.

The expectation is that Twitter is going to go away, and that, as they say, will be that.

I'm going to miss the people I've met there, and more than that, the people I've kept up there since I left a place near and dear to my heart (*) four or so years back. (*) It was one of those wonderful places with the few Very Awful Scum people, and in the end, their toxicity was enough to make me feel I would be best served by leaving. I made good friends there, and I miss them, and kept up with them on twitter and now I feel like I'm going to lose them all over again.

I'm old enough to remember the trauma of many people when TinyMud went down decades ago, the total loss that. I also remember when livejournal imploded and the communities that were destroyed I feel the same will happen with twitter. Community will be lost and will not come back.

We shall see.

I despise Google.

And Google Maps even more so.

For years now, Google has had the wrong photo for my house. Our house is not visible from the street and instead of showing the gate, the photo showed our neighbor's house.

This has resulted in the police going to the wrong house and multiple missed deliveries, as well as people calling to say "uuuh?"

I've been trying for the past two plus years -once I became aware of the issue- to get Google to change the photo. I sent them the correct photo from their own site. Multiple direct messages on twitter, where they'd assure me it would be done "soon" and... nothing.

They told me while I was on vacay that it was done. Yay, thought I. I didn't check, though.

The first day of the FedEx debacle, I finally thought to check maps to make sure it really was corrected.

It was changed. To show my neighbor's neighbor's driveway rather than mine, thereby making the problem worse.

I did contact FedEx to tell this this and they still were unable to find the place three more times.

I have pointed out to Google Maps that they've... made the problem worse. So far, crickets.

FedEx, only almost a week late, finally got my new keyboard delivered. It only took three phone calls and a whine on twitter.

I like it so far, but it's going to take some getting used to. The strangest thing is that I've moved my large secondary monitory to be primary, and it's so weird to have a large screen right in front of me, rather than my laptop with the major screen on the side.

Biggest problem: I now have two keyboards I need to protect from the cats!

Never got around to writing yesterday, it was a difficult long day.

1. Not doing well. Maybe it's the letdown from coming back from vacation, maybe it's how Perry is hurting, maybe it's just random, but I'm just feeling very down these past few days, and today is really bad. Linnea forgot her computer charger here last night, and trying to get it to her, or purchase and send on, has stressed me out to the point of tears. Ah well. It'll get better. It also looks like my brother and family can't make it for Christmas, which sucks, and that my sister and BIL don't want to come for Thanksgiving, which leaves me stuck making TDay dinner for my MIL and my crazy-ass SIL.

2. Our old Sonicare toothbrush is slooowly dying and it pauses during brushing from time to time, so we replaced it with the Sonicare DiamondClean. Bought a two pack of handles from Costco, one white and one pink, since Linnea also needed a replacement. Well. That was not a success and I'd return it, only I know Linnea wants hers. The new model? Has, like, four modes, BUT the times are divided into 6, not 4. I mean, who the fuck divides their mouth into 6 zones? Not me. They use 6 20-second intervals for 2 minutes of brushing. Since my mouth isn't hexavalent, I've now reduced my brushing time by 1/3. And I think David is going nuts because it doesn't appear to "reset" and he's been apparently getting 8 intervals. Hate this thing already. I'm going to go back to my 3/4 dead handle until it is 100% dead and not working. Also, an app for my toothbrush? Fuck. Off. I hate it when companies "innovate" and instead make a product less functional than the previous version.

3. Yesterday morning I drove Perry to rowing (he was nervous about driving) and waited for him, damn, I'm a sucker sometimes. Anyhow, on the way in we saw the full moon setting. I have seen orange moons in my life, some of them quite impressive. This? I had never seen a moon that orange, deep pumpkin orange, likely from all the smoke in the air. It was impressive. Alas, driving, so no photos. Linnea saw it too and agreed. By time Perry texted dh to grab the camera and go out to check it out, it had hidden behind the trees.

A three crappy things for a Thursday in August.

1. Two very young women, daughters of women I deeply care about, are having health crises. Too young for that shit.

2. When I was pregnant with Anne-Chloe, I joined a mailing list (actually I joined two. This applies to both). It pretty much went extinct with occasional bubbles since fucking piece of shit Facebook but we still keep in touch via email. One of those women died on Monday. She was our list baby, the youngest of our group, not even 50. I'm stunned and hurting.

3. Linnea has been having some stomach trouble for... well, she's always had a sensitive stomach, but over the past few months, things have gotten worse, and it pings her anxiety as well. Symptoms are vague -stomach aches, shakiness, what she's been calling nausea but isn't- but pretty persistent. That said, even with all this, she's full on rowing without feeling weak while on the water. It's all very real but I can't see a pattern. We saw a PA a few weeks ago and his primary focus was on her admittedly crappy diet. Not my fault. I provide healthy food. She often chooses not to eat it. She cleaned up her diet -almost to excess- but something was still going on. First step was an H. pylori test which unfortunately came back negative. I guess next is a referral to a gastro. I'm going to request she be seen at Children's, of course.

Fuck this shit.

A few weeks ago, I think I mentioned that the Prius was dead. Dh was able to narrow down the possibilities of what it might be to a few: easy to fix, moderately difficult to fix, expensive AND difficult to fix.

He needed to get some additional equipment to finish diagnostics, and he was busy last weekend. He finally got to it this weekend. The Prius was running for part of that time (the code reset or something) but last Monday when Perry and Linnea were headed out to rowing, the big Red Triangle of Doom was showing. So it became this weekend's top project, along with prepping the deck for staining.

When the Prius first died, I had, approximately, this conversation with Perry, who was asking what we could do. I said "Well, we could take it to Toyota and have them figure out what is wrong and charge lots of money to do that. Or we could buy a bunch of diagnostic equipment, electrical gloves, and make sure we know where you are likely to be hit with a 600V discharge from the battery, and try it figure it out ourselves. Which option do you think your father decided on?"

So. We have diagnostic equipment, better multimeter, and useless gloves because the places fingers need to be are too small for gloves.

The Prius battery is sitting on the workbench on the outside porch. Perry and dh are currently measuring voltage across all 28 left-and-right cells. Looks like so far they've identified 3 bad cells, two bad modules.

I have no idea yet what the repair process might look like, but I except it will not involve a Toyota dealer.

That said, two things:

1. I love that my spouse can do shit like this, even if at times I wish he wouldn't.

2. I'm really happy to see Perry helping and getting into it, even though it's not a video game. He likes puzzles. I doubly glad because it means I don't have to help. The novelty of a measuring voltage on a multimeter wears off real quick.

1. Making a Kouign-Amann butter cake for dinner tonight. We decided on Breakfast for Dinner for Father's Day meal. At this point, both Perry and I are pretty comfortable with most part of a butter-layered dough thing, but lol, we had to get dh to help us with the instructions on making the parchment paper packet for the butter. ETA NOT the best recipe, I think we'll go back to our tried and true one (Chef John's. We also like his croissant recipe).

2. Dh and I made appointments to get a Tdap jab for Monday at Costco. I think I've gotten about 5 reminders, at least one or two a day, LOL.

3. I am completely obsessed with candymakers on Instagram, mainly stickylollies and candylabs_mtl . I highly recommend them.