Gotta go

While waiting for the Trader Joe’s to open a while ago, I walked around a new neighborhood, and apparently poop is a thing there.

Within a couple of hundred meters, I saw both these signs:

But evidently the dogs don’t read:

As an aside, I cannot count the times I’ve seen little plastic poop bags, neatly knotted at the opening, left along sidewalks. Like people feel they’ve discharged all their responsibilities by picking up their dogs’ detritus, so they’re not obliged to carry the bags with them to the nearest trash bin.

Well, I suppose it would interfere with their texting.

An apostrophe too far

Whenever I come across some mailbox with something like “The Johnson’s” on it, I want to park my car, walk up to the front door and ask the occupant “The Johnson’s what?” Because the plural of the preponderance of English nouns is formed by adding an S; it never involves an apostrophe.

But I don’t, because I don’t carry a whiteboard around with me. Also, I don’t fancy getting into a fight over it.

And I know it’s pretty much a losing fight—the barbarians are winning this one, and it’s getting worse.

Viz. this sign found at a grocery store in California:

I hope it’s someone taking the piss, but I fear it is not.

Frozen

Here’s how cold it’s been in the environs of the District They Call Columbia: I noticed this frozen puddle of water on Monday’s walk:

I thought the pattern was kind of pretty.

What I do not think is pretty is this:

I’ve seen this person/sleeping bag along the W&OD for a while, and it’s appalling and outrageous that in the jumped-up People’s Republic, there folks sleeping rough even in these miserable temperatures.

Roadside fare

Some time ago, on my usual egress to the W&OD bike trail, I came across something interesting.

It was a couple of months after Halloween, and the pumpkin hadn’t been carved. I wondered if perhaps it had been put out there for squirrels, woodchucks and other critters, but if so, they hadn’t been particularly interested. Viz. the half-hearted nibbling.

Well, a few weeks on—and a couple of snowfalls, freezes and rain—and here it was yesterday:

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Still not clear to me whether anyone’s actually eaten it, but I’m guessing it has far fewer seeds than it should have, so maybe…

Gratitude Monday: a dream

Today’s the day we in the United States commemorate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., a black man who had a dream of equal opportunity, and who was murdered because there are people (many, as it turns out) who viewed—and still do—that dream as an abomination.

Having a racist, ignorant, corrupt, misogynistic kleptocrat in the White House has encouraged and emboldened white supremacists to emulate his vile willie-waving in ways I have not seen for decades. Maybe that’s an upside to this dystopian nightmare—that the façade of progress we’d seen in the courts and legislature of the country has been revealed to be just that: a veneer covering the same old nasty, rotted wood of fear and hate that’s festered ever since the Confederacy went down in fire and dust.

Maybe this is something to be grateful for: that we can see the termites scuttling about in rages and stained tee-shirts, and that we can take action before they eat away at the foundations of democracy. We once had giants of strength and compassion, like King; men and women with moral compasses and courage to do the right thing. We can hope there are more to carry us forward, while still there’s an earth left.

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.