New day

The King’s Singers are one of a friend of mine’s favorite acapella groups. Personally, I prefer Chanticleer, but these guys are not bad.

I was reminded of this during a little filler video on the local PBS station—evidently TKS are frequent performers in The District They Call Columbia, and a couple of the group were featured in a blurb about how the covid-19 pandemic caused them to cancel gigs at the National Cathedral.

Evidently, “You Are the New Day” is one of their signature connections to this area, so here they are in a socially-distanced rendering of it recorded this month.

2A

It’s been a while since I posted a vanity place, so here’s one from someone in the ‘hood.

Aspirational, really.

Checking it out

Guys, guys, guys—I checked out three books from the Fairfax County Public Library yesterday! You can put stuff on hold and instead of picking it up from the hold shelf inside, you wait in the parking lot, call the library, give them your library card number, and they check out the materials and bring them to a cart outside the staff entrance

Also, they're checking things out for 5.5 weeks instead of three.

I’m in heaven. I no longer have to rely on my home library for reading material. The girl is back in business!

Wading in

Know what, folks? Yesterday was a week-and-a-half. I did get the air conditioning fixed—two fuses cost $118—but this is a stop-gap measure, so I’m looking forward to a week of getting estimates for a whole new system, AC and furnace.

At work, we had the kickoff meeting for internal testing—which was supposed to have encompassed a very limited cadre of users who could provide critical feedback on functionality. However, in the six times that Engineering delayed this start, the list has ballooned to more than 50, so we might just as well open it up to the entire company and be done with it.

Also, although I’d given ENG three days last week to provide their inputs to my PowerPoint presentation, and then gave them until 1030 yesterday (two hours before the meeting) the director AKA Foghorn) announced about an hour after that deadline that he needed the link to the deck so he could “review” it. I told him the link was in the email I’d sent last week, and resent as a reminder yesterday. Thirty minutes later, I looked at it to find a bunch of “don’t blame us” crap, along with two completely new slides announcing a “phased” test schedule, which was news to everyone in product management. And even though ten minutes after that I told everyone to stop editing it, he kept on until I finally downloaded the damned thing, rearranged the slides, cleaned them up and ran through a couple of times in the 15 minutes I had before we went live.

At least he kept quiet during the call.

Well, from that point on it kind of swirled, so I’m just going to leave you with some pix I took last week of a wading bird that was visiting the corporate campus behind my house. 

At the mo, I feel rather like I'm as deep in it as he is.

Gratitude Monday: Mod cons

This weekend was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Mostly because my air conditioning system went belly-up on Saturday. After consulting Google, and messing with the thermostat some, I’ve concluded that the problem does not lie there. A couple of reboots and some fiddling, and it was sending the message as far as the blower, but it wasn’t reaching the compressor outside.

Both the AC and the furnace were old enough to drink legally when I bought the place, so I’m grateful for nearly two and a half years of them working, but man, am I an AC baby. (That was one of my biggest whines about living in Europe: they really haven’t taken to AC. And don’t get me started about Seattle—those people have no excuse.) And technicians from the HVAC company I called three times on Saturday (and once yesterday) did not call back—evidently if you don’t “need service before the next business day”, they can’t be arsed.

But it could have been worse—at around 1830 on Saturday I walked into the kitchen to discover that the microwave, toaster oven, half-freezer and wine cooler were dead. The circuit breaker was fine, so I couldn’t figure out what to do. But I Know A Guy—and when I called him, he diagnosed that one of the GFCIs must have blown. And it turns out he was right. What a relief.

So today, I’m grateful for the comfort of AC. I’m grateful that this weekend the temperature indoors has not exceeded 79F. I’m grateful that I’ve got a recommendation for another HVAC company. I’m grateful for the remote electrical service. I’m grateful that all my appliances are working. And I’m grateful that if I have to replace the AC unit, I can afford it.

Seems like a goodly portion of gratitude.