The craziest party

I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve had this song in my head for a couple of weeks. I know Three Dog Night was the first group I heard sing it—they wrote it, after all. But I just love Tom Jones’ cover. So here it is.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Weird hygiene

I believe that it’s time for me to tart up the primary bathroom in my house. When I moved in, it was clear that previous owners had slapped up some tiles in the shower cubicle and called it a day. Leaving it essentially as it was when it was built in 1970.

Which is to say, dark, poky and not a little creepy.

The home inspector informed me that the shower knobs leaked, and a plumber informed me that to fix that, he’d have to go through the tiles and the wall. It was easier for me to just use the shower in the hall bathroom.

That was not possible in the first couple of days after each of my knee replacement surgeries, and it’s recently occurred to me that I really ought to consider the walk-in option, as opposed to the step-over one.

So last week I went to a Ferguson showroom and mooned about the plumbing. In the process I came across this, which I absolutely do not get:

Whatever in the world is the point of a three-person sinky thing with only one faucet?

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Unstuck in time

Alright—this is just beyond the beyond.

Giant has Christmas trees (the formerly live ones, not artificial) for sale more than a week before Thanksgiving.

I just do not know what to say.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Fall in

I believe we are just past peak Autumn colors now; probably a week or so later than “normal”. (Which, I hope, means that my cluster landscapers should be out blowing away the foot-deep carpet of leaves in my back yard. Come on, people: I have birds to feed here.)

So here are a few shots of the panoply this year. 

And this is why we need the leaves blown:

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: human connections

Interesting thing happened last week. I’d finally said out loud what I’ve been feeling for months: that I have no skills that any employer would value, so there’s no reason for me to be competing in a hugely cutthroat job market. I’d stopped even looking at the job search alerts LinkedIn sends me five times a day.

But the thought of having to depend on Social Security (which the Republicans have been trying to kill since FDR implemented it during the New Deal), Medicare (which they’ve been trying to kill since LBJ got it passed in the 60s) and my 401k (as we head into administration whose policies the vast majority of economists say will tank the global economy) really wigged me out.

I was in a bad way.

Then, Wednesday I saw a listing for a PM job that I thought I could do, generally useless though I be. But their applicant tracking system crapped out every time I hit the submit button on the application. (Tried multiple times on three browsers.) I looked on LinkedIn for a connection, and there was a product manager connected to a friend/mentor of mine. I reached out to the latter for an introduction, which he graciously gave. Thursday morning the PM responded, saying he’d already passed my “very impressive profile” to the hiring manager, who’s already in interviews, but was interested. He sent me an internal referral link to the application, but I still encountered the submit problem. He also contacted a recruiter, who at least looked at my LI profile.

I can’t tell you how much this basic interest and acknowledgement lightened my perspective.

But then, also on Thursday, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and came across this tweet:

It had only been posted a few minutes before, so I was the first to stick up my hand. The poster DM’d me with the job description and a link to the internal referral. It’s a job I cautiously think I might be able to do, and my background at least carries gravitas in this field. As I was filling out the application, a guy I know only on Twitter, CISO for a law firm and an elder in cybersec, tweeted, “Recommend!”

As of time of writing, I’ve heard nothing further on that first job (remember—they were already interviewing), and I have a screening call tomorrow with a recruiter for the second job. (The tweet got 17 replies, and several were from people also interested.)  I’m not delusional—scores of people go through multiple rounds of interviews for every job in tech out there and still don’t get hired. But the fact that—after months of considering what I need by way of Plans B through R to feel financially secure in the coming chaos, to have two actual human connections, from people willing to help me, is such grace; it makes me cry. Whatever the outcome.

And that’s my gratitude for today.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Those that burn crosses

After a week of taking-the-piss choices for the Kleptocrat’s new kakistocratic high government posts (plus his announced plan to evade the constitutional requirement of Senate confirmation for same), seems to me that the only choice for today’s earworm is Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name”.

So, here it is. Crank up the volume.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

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 his cheeks are full of safflower seeds. (I toss them 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