Vehicular aspirations

This is from a while ago, but it’s been about a week and a half at work, so I’m just slapping this up today.

I thought the conceit of driving around the smallest car you can buy with such a big-dream declaration was kind of very American.

Iacta alea est

Man, when it comes to pettiness and desperate attempts at willie-waving (no matter how small the willie), Republicans just take the biscuit.

(Although Nancy Pelosi has a bigger and steelier set of cojones than everyone in the GOP put together.)

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy, nasty ride, and my money’s on there being no bottom to the slime in the Senate

Also: he's been impeached since 18 December.

Customer feedback

I’ve been using a spreadsheet to manage my to-do list for an alpha test at work. Because we’re an Office365 shop, we use Teams for collaboration, and when you upload a file to Teams, it goes all SharePoint on you. I do not like the user experience via SharePoint, so I’m constantly moving my files out of there and into the application (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) to do the actual work.

Well, on Monday I noticed the middle option on this pop-up for the first time:

No, dudes, you do not want me to tell you what I think of Excel. You do not.

Honkers on the move

Canada geese are the dark side of our neighbors to the north. They hang out in gangs and seem to do nothing but shove native birds out of the way and crap. And they seem to like the People’s Republic right much; they’ve decided that NoVa is as far south as they want to go of a winter.

I haven’t actually seen them a lot this year, but the other day I went for a walk and discovered them congregating on the grounds of the corporate HQ near my house.

TBH, all I could think of was what they might taste like roasted.

Gratitude Monday: eyes and ears

A few weeks after I started my new job, I got new glasses. I really needed them—so much that I’d intended to reactivate my vision insurance at my old job, but then I got laid off before the new “health” year kicked in. I’d been coveting Lindbergh frames for a couple of years, but there are only a few places in the District They Call Columbia and its environs, and way fewer of those that accept VSP.

(I’d gone to one of them in 2018 and costed a pair: with my prescription, the Transitions and whatnot, they’d have been $1500+.)

Well, this time, I scoped out a couple in Annandale and Arlington, and just went ahead. With the insurance, they were $755—and you never know exactly what VSP actually pays for—but I wanted them, so…

While I was getting the eye exam, I also got a prescription for computer glasses, since the ones I’d been using dated from about 2013, and they, too, were out of date. I took the prescription to Costco, since VSP only covers one pair of glasses per year, and I did not fancy forking over $$$$ of my own money. I ordered two pairs—one for work and one for home—and picked them up the following Saturday during a blitz of errand running.

Great, huh?

Except that when I got to work the next Monday, I didn't have my mobile phone. Back at home, I tore through the place, but couldn’t find it. Then I started calling round to the places I’d been on the Saturday—Wegman’s, Walgreen’s… No joy.

Damn.

Now, I do not live on my mobile, but still, it’s a nuisance to have to replace one, and this one was only a couple of months old. So I went through an exercise a friend of mine uses: picturing when was the last time I could remember using it. Well, yeah—I’d checked emails while waiting for one of the optical guys to help me. So I called Costco Optical, and the fellow who answered said, yes, a phone had been found at the end of the day on Saturday, and it had been turned in to the administrative office.

I called the office and described it: Pixel 3 with a black rubber card holder on the back, stamped with the Tesla logo. (Swag from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.) Yep—my phone was there. On Tuesday morning, I popped over, got my phone and put it on the charger, because it was completely dead.

So today I’m grateful that I have insurance that mitigates even some of the cost of glasses; that I was able to get computer glasses for home and work without taking out a second mortgage; and that the Costco guys turned in my phone and I didn’t have to buy a new one.

New to the 'hood

Some new people moved into the neighborhood recently. They seem…interesting. Aside from the pink flamingo in their kitchen window, they put out this:

  

Yo, ho, ho.

New in the hood

Further to Tuesday’s snow, here’s what I found in one of my neighbors’ front yard when I got home yesterday:

They must have scraped snow from all the yards to get this. I’m impressed, even if it’s listing some.

Also: extra points for the crown o’ lights.

A light dusting

We had our first snow of the season here in the District They Call Columbia. Schools let out early, the Feds sent people home at 1300; it was A Thing.

It was pretty heavy when I left work around 1500, but started lightening up an hour or so later.

I did get a chance to toss out some seed for the birds, and was rewarded by a swarm of juncos, creepers and cardinals. And I noticed that one of my plants looks like Cthulhu under the snow.

We may have rain today, so at least I won’t have to shovel anything.

Impulse buy

I was in the local Harris Teeter supermarket last month and was stopped dead in my tracks by this display:

I mean—what’s up with an entire rack of ping pong balls in a grocery store? And it’s not even a sporting goods aisle, it was on the end of this one:

It just seems kind of random placement. I wonder how many people round the corner from kosher foods to cereal and realize that what they really, really need is a package of six ping pong balls?

Gratitude Monday: pitching in

Well, here we are, not even one week into 2020, and Australia is aflame, Tasmania is drowning and Cadet Bonespurs is poking the Iranian bear to distract us from impeachment.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: my employer is at the forefront of helping governments, companies and organizations defend themselves from the cyber attacks that Iran is known for, and which will inevitably form part of the Iranian response to the crackbrained actions of this administration.

Also, my employment enabled me to make a donation to the Wildlife Rescue organization, which is working to save as many critters as they can from the catastrophic wildfires in Australia.

My contributions to cyber security and to organizations that are fighting the effects of climate change are small. But I’m grateful nonetheless that I can do my part.