My boarder

In addition to the beautiful, I’m also looking for the cute. So meet Scooter, who is a part-time resident of my back yard.

You will note that he is dining on safflower seeds. (I toss out safflower seeds for the ground feeders, as squirrels don't like them. But apparently chipmunks do.)

©2024 Bas Bleu

Look for it

I was on my morning walk Monday (a day in November when we reached into the 70s), when I glanced down and caught a glimpse of some sparkles on a leaf. I was already about ten paces further when I stopped and literally muttered, “Go back and shoot it.”

So I did.

It’s beautiful, and I need all the beautiful in life I can get.

  

©2024 Bas Bleu

We value your feedback

Here’s a follow-up to my saga about getting my flu vaccination. The gist of it was OneMedical (now owned by Amazon) screwed up on the dosage, even though my records indicate I get the high dose and I specified high dose when I made the appointment, and I had to return the following day to get the job done.

When they sent me the obligatory Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, I gave them middling scores (indicating I am not a promoter of their product or service, based on my recent experience). I also laid a few choice words on them in the verbatim sections and answered “yes” to their “may we contact you for more information” query.

So—here’s their outreach: from “Valerie” at “Amazon OneMedical” (all previous communications have come from the OneMed only domain):

I would have said that this was AI generated, except I don’t see much intelligence of any origin. It absolutely does not address the issues I brought up and I am at a loss as to what she means by “a greater experience”. Possibly, English is not her first language.

However, as in all the Jeff Bezos empire, she gives the appearance of a response, without the expense of the substance of one, so all’s well, eh?

 

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Gratitude Monday: It's called service for a reason

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to understand how to live normal lives again.

Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of wartime service. Along with truth.

I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more elaborate than any other.

But that’s the dead: the living (more or less) returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.

We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our longest-war-ever was not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were, keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.

Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of only two days that we pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of them. They are not now, nor have they ever been, suckers or losers; they are men and women the practice of whose profession is called “serving”, a concept unknown to the members of our future administration.

Who also do not understand the concept of gratitude.

©2024 Bas Bleu