Daily growing

 For this week’s pandemic earworm, I’m going way, way back into my youth, when Pentangle just knocked me out. “Trees They Do Grow High” is my go-to Pentangle song, with the guitar brilliance of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. That pure, gorgeous voice is Jacqui McShee. 

I don't care that the storyline is about a deeply patriarchal society in which women have no agency. It dates back to the 17th Century and probably beyond. I just love the music.

 Dunno about you, but I'm cranking the volume up.

 

Collegial communications

  Last week I was fixing to close up my laptop when one of my colleagues pinged me on Teams. It turned out to be one of the more lunatic exchanges, primarily down to autocorrect. Here’s how it started:

 

Now, there coud be a couple of reasons why she might inquire. We’re looking at the final (please God) furlongs of this product launch race, and they may be inquiring of every one in the team  what their libation preference might be. (A couple of weeks ago, the PA to the EVP sent round a email asking “if someone (say e-staff) offered to buy you a drink, what would you order, and why?” My response was Kir Royale, because Champagne is my substance of choice and the apéritif reminds me of so many dinners in France.

(Well, I don’t know whether that wasn’t a good answer, or whether there are two possibilities for booze in my future. Perhaps related to the launch, or to my upcoming first anniversary with the organization; as yet I do not know what rites of passage they have here.)

 But back to the text exchange. It just got better:

 

I completely love the conflation of all whiskey as bourbon. So I told her one of my choices:

And confessed that the Autocorrect mishap was still setting off giggles in me.

 But here’s the cherry on top:

 

Turns out she's talking a yoga mat with a company logo on it. Now that’s way cool.

I can think of no other company for which I’ve worked where I could have had such a Mad Hatter convo with a colleague that left me in stitches. That’s why I love this place.

 

 

Dualities

Sorry, folks. I got caught up yesterday in several Twitter threads by a dual-citizenship (Scots-French) writer living in Dordogne on his various encounters with Brexit loons who do not grasp the irony (and hypocrisy) of being racist xenophobes believing that Brexit keeps Britain for the British while at the same time being outraged that their privileges as EU citizens owning property in France for holidays/retirement will end on 31 December, with or without a “deal”. By the time I extracted myself from the last three months, I was a couple of hours in the hole.

Then I had to make up the time on work-related activities, so I’m at a loss for what to give you today.

Well, there’s always vanity plates. How about this one: a Virginia license plate declaring one’s Scottishness in French?

Seems apropos.

Coffee break

Since the pandemic started, I’ve taken to buying coffee online. I drink one cup per day, so the ludicrous price doesn’t seem so onerous. Most of the suppliers are relatively small, so I feel like I’m supporting small business, even if it is only once every couple of months.

The latest order went to an outfit called Black Rifle Coffee Company. First off, I could do without all the rah-rah militarizing of…coffee. (Don’t believe me, you can hunt them down.) Honestly—it’s like you’ve got to be Delta Force to be man enough to drink their stuff. I get enough of that in the tech world, where everyone competes to talk about how much coffee, and at what strength, they drink.

(Actually, BRCC was one of the recos I got from colleagues. I’m just going down the list.)

Second, I also loathe marketing blurbs that fling a lot of words at you, but don’t give you any useful information. I want coffee I can use for espresso. End of. But, no, I had to slog through pages and pages of he-man crap about throw weight and destructive capabilities.

I only persevered because it was a colleague’s reco.

Well, I eventually chose a type and placed my order back on 30 August. A few days later I received notification that my order had shipped.

That’s not unusual. The smaller companies don’t roast large batches so it can take a while for them to get round to your order. Usually I get the beans within a few days, even when they’re shipped ground.

However, at the weekend I clicked on the package tracker and blow me if it doesn’t tell me that my delivery is scheduled for…14 September.

Eleven days to get from Salt Lake City to Virginia. That's less than 200 miles per day. How do you do that? And no—this isn’t USPS, it’s FedEx. (So much for all the rah-rah about loving America.)

I paid $5.95 for shipping, on top of the $13.99 for a 12oz bag of coffee. And for that I get the slowest delivery of about anything not coming from a third world country?

Something this outfit seems to have forgot about Americans is that we don’t like being ripped off. And we don’t like crappy service. Y’all can take your patriotic guff and shove it right up your French press. I'm moving down my list.

Gratitude Monday: Walking meditation with friends

I’ve been thinking about labyrinths for a while; walking the labyrinth really helps me both focus and let go. For me, it is truly a walking meditation.

Saturday the ghastly summer weather finally broke and I went to the outdoor labyrinth at Holy Comforter Church, which is the closest one to me. It’s in a dell,, way in the back of their property, surrounded by woods and next to a pond. In the past, I’ve seen deer passing by. It’s quite peaceful.

I’ve not been there in a while—in fact, the last time I walked a labyrinth was in Dublin, more than a year ago. Must have been more than two years, at least, since I’ve been to Holy Comforter. First thing I noticed was this Little Free Library:

That wasn’t there the last time.

I settled myself for the walk, focused on my tetrad of thoughts and began. I have to say that I was having a bit of a challenge with balance; slowing down my pace was really unsettling. I suppose that says something about the speed at which I’ve been moving these past few months at work. But about a third of the way into the center, I began to feel steadier.

The thing about a labyrinth is that every time you turn a loop, if you look straight ahead, the view is just a tad different from every other turning point. If you try, you can see something different every time, even on an indoor labyrinth. I saw distant woods and close woods, church buildings and pond, ducks quacking and crows cawing.

I always spend a few minutes in the center of a labyrinth, to contemplate (to the best of my ability). Check in with the universe, as it were.

I was doing that when I became aware that the duck-quacking on the pond seemed to be getting louder. I looked around and found the reason for that:

A nice young couple had come out to join me. Perhaps in expectation of breakfast; if so, I disappointed.They stayed around even as I executed three yoga poses—Warrior I, Warrior II and forward fold—and then wandered away when I began my return walk.

When I left the dell to head out for Saturday Errands, I felt both more energized and more peaceful than when I’d got there. Perhaps it was the ducks, or the weather, or just the resumption of a practice that means a lot to me. Whatever—I’m grateful that I was able to do it after all this time.

Spiteful and hateful

In 1972 when Randy Newman released “Political Science” it could have been considered satire. I mean—there we were, ass-deep in the Vietnam morass, a crook in the White House, a presidential election marked by actual criminal activity, the streets awash in protestors, cops shooting them…

So of course it’s even more to the point right now.

Here he is in a performance in London in 2011, when we were riding low on Shrub’s endless war. History is a damned psychedelic spiral, I tell you.

And I would not put it past the Kleptocrat to decide—as a farewell gesture after the election—to indeed drop the big one. Just because he can.

On the frontline

So this happened at work yesterday:

An email came into my queue that looked bogus: it purported to be about some purchase order. And I didn’t recognize the sender. And it was supposedly via “Dropbox Secure Transfer”. And my company doesn’t use Dropbox.

So I clicked on the report phishing button, as I’ve had occasion to do a couple of times in the past, and immediately got this reply:

On the one hand, this really wasn’t much of a brainer—if you’re going to try to tempt me to click on something, at least pretend to use an application that’s approved within the environment. (I actually contacted Help Desk before downloading my home printer driver on my work laptop; this organization is serious about not infecting devices and networks with unauthorized miscellanea.)

On the other hand, people—do not click on links from senders you don’t know. And even don’t do it from people you think you know. Phishing is one of the easiest ways for threat actors to do really bad things to your PC, to your address list and to your company’s network. I read two to five stories a week about ransomware, malware and other crap that shuts down hospitals, governments and companies where the point of entry was some employee clicking on a malicious link.

I’m glad I passed the test. And I hope you stay vigilant, too.

Altered reality

I’ve noticed this odd business model on a lot of Internet “media” sites. Before you can see what their reportage is like, they want you to remove your ad blocking browser extension.

Dudes—that’s like asking me to lower my shields as the Klingon warbird approaches. Not happening.

But at the very same time that they block all view of their web page, they expect you to sign up for notifications.

Dudes—I have enough spam from companies I once bought a pound of coffee from. I’m not adding your nonsense to the blitz.

It’s been my experience, on the occasion that I fire up Edge to take an unprotected look at the site, that their notion of “journalism” is to repurpose a CNN report, so I’m not missing anything. But I’m gobsmacked that they at a single stroke block your view and ask, “Hey—you want more?”

I wonder how often that actually works?

Family values

It’s been a while (like years) since I focused on how people choose to depict their home lives on their motor vehicles, so how about a dose today?

This family, for example, is quite active:

 So is this one, but in a different way:

This one has a rather interesting outlook:

As does this one:

These two, now:

Gratitude Monday: the little things

Given the complete and utter clusterfuck that is the United States under Cadet Bonespurs these days, sometimes it’s hard to pull gratitude out of life. However, when this happens, I turn away from the macro and look to things immediately around me.

Viz: yesterday I went out to feed my compost bin and saw a spider web glistening in the morning sun. And look who was there:

Now there’s someone who takes pride in her work. Inspiration, no?

Also, Friday’s yoga lesson focused on core muscles, which I sorely (ha) need. And lo-and-behold: on Saturday and yesterday I really felt those muscles. Which means they’re still there, and they still work.

So there’s today’s gratitude: artists and abs. I need them both.