Saturday Evening Post

Forecast last night called for about an inch of snow, and that's what we got.  The day before, I'd seen someone outside the building where PG's dentist has his office, and he was using a battery-operated leaf blower to move snow off some branches behind a dumpster.  It gave me an idea.

If there is an inch of snow (or very little more) and if the snow is icy dry and not heavy and wet, then would a leaf blower clear the driveway and sidewalk better than a shovel?  There's not enough for the big snow thrower, and anyway I had put it back in the shed earlier in the week.  

The batteries had been charged after moving leaves for the last time in autumn, but by today both had dropped by about half.  I plugged one in to charge and clicked the other in place on the blower.  

Answer:  with about an inch of dry snow on the sidewalks and driveway, the leaf blower did just fine moving it onto the grass, at least until the battery ran down, which didn't take long on high.  On low, the snow barely ruffled.  But on high, while the battery still had a charge, I could aim the tube from side to side and hold it just above the surface of the snow, and it moved more at a given time than I could have with a shovel.  A narrower focus of the air would have helped give it more power.  

The best part was that since the sidewalk had been clear before the snow, using the blower cleaned virtually everything off, and the bit of powder that was left quickly melted in the sun.  I burned through both batteries before finishing the driveway, although not much was left.  Using a shovel on that area left more behind, but it was still a thin coating, and once the sun came out, the sun on the dark driveway soon melted everything and dried up.  

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Offered to help PG clean out the refrigerator, which was stuffed with leftovers from Christmas dinner.  I recall reading about a pro athlete who said that now, everyone's giving me things, and I'm thinking, where were they when I was growing up poor?  Then there's the Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith's thick glasses fall off and break just as he has time enough to read at last.  Here at our house, we have lots of food -- much more than we had growing up -- but our appetites have diminished.  

Anyway, some of the excess had to be pitched, some went in the basement refrigerator and the rest went in its freezer.  The glass shelves are now clean, as are the clear plastic bins.  Next, the upstairs freezer.

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Gripping, isn't it?  

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Aldi for milk, bananas and a cucumber.  Walgreens for PG's medicine.  Her prescription plan didn't do much on the price, so the pharmacist checked around and found a "coupon" that brought it down by about two-thirds.  And hey, I found another penny at the register!

Now, time to practice.

Anyone can make a mistake

In the mailbox this morning was a message from Medicare with the information that an electronic Medicare Summary Notice is available.  With the help of the password program, I began logging in to Medicare.gov, but two-factor authorization is in place, so I pulled up the Authenticator app on my phone and typed in the 6-digit code -- and got a message that it was invalid.  

I waited a few seconds for another code, but it also came up as invalid.  One last try locked the account, so I changed the password successfully and started the process again.  

Fast forward through frustration and four-letter words.  I phoned Medicare and said no when the AI asked if I had said I was calling about CPAP.  "Talk to a human", I responded, and seconds later I was on hold with an estimated waiting time of 9 minutes.

In those 9 minutes, I realized that the Authenticator is set up for Logon.gov, which is for SSA.gov, not Medicare.gov, and that Medicare sends its codes via text.  With that misapprehension out of the way, I hung up, logged in and downloaded the eMSN.

My wife heard my frustration during the process, and said she was still glad I was doing it and not her.

I liked it, anyway

Can't believe that the quip is original, but I didn't copy it from anyone, so giving myself credit for it.

And a happy Donald Fagen's birthday to all.

 

They've heard it all already

Last night, with the help of Radio Garden, I learned about the UK territory named the Isles of Scilly, and far be it from me to make any Scilly jokes.   I will note, however, that while the Isles are home to a number of seabirds, there are no Scilly geese.

If I were still playing baseball games, I would have a team named the Great Ganilly Scillonians.  The island is all of 0.05 square miles, or 34.2 acres, but it makes more sense when you understand there is also a Little Ganilly, which measures 6.7 acres.  You should be able to fit a ballpark on 34.2 acres, although I'm not sure about the parking.

At least the Scilly people weren't afraid of what others thought of them, and proudly have remained Scillonians.   

Lest we forget. 

Would you rather...?

Going into unemployment retirement from my job, I put together a list of activities that I wanted to retire to.  That consisted of (1) Tabby's Place (a) socializing cats, (b) taking pictures of them, and (c) writing about the Kitten Fund; (2) reading Le Monde and other French print, along with some audio; (3) beginning online drumming lessons through Musora/Drumeo.

Of those 3 activities, what would I rather do?  I believe the order is (1a), (1b), (1c), (3), and (2).

When I have a card of fresh photos, I would rather download them and start the process than anything else.  Download them, tag them (name, suite, color(s), Tabby's Place), move them from the Camera Download folder in Dropbox to the applicable year and month folder.  Use SyncBack to make a backup copy.  The uploading program, whether Dropbox, ACDSee, or FastStone, will change the name of the file from the card to the usual YY-MM-DD HH.MM.SS format.  

When they are all tagged and filed, I would rather go through the images and decide which to keep and which to pitch.  It's not as fun as baking chocolate chip cookies, but I would rather do that and then do the basic editing (straighten, crop, white balance, color EQ, touchup) than baking or any other experience I enjoy.  In a way, I'm not satisfied until the whole process is finished, in a way I'm anxious that somehow all those photos will go away forever if they're not backed up at once.

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When all of the above is done and I've completed the upload to Flickr, my next favorite activity is the monthly supporter letter for the Kitten Fund.  Writing is only enjoyable when I feel like I have something to write about; I briefly wrote descriptions of the adoptable cats, but if I didn't know the cat, I didn't know what to say, and getting to know the cat required multiple visits.  By the time I felt ready to write, I learned that the cat might have been adopted .  So, I dropped that role.  

When I'm responsible for a supporter letter, I always have one eye and one ear open for next from TP about the cat(s).  If someone posts in Slack some images of the kitten(s) they're caring for, I make a copy of the picture and any text that could be used as a quote.  I take notes when I visit, which is usually 2-3 times a month.  At the end of the month, I have a large stock of material, and the only difficulty is whittling it down to 500 words and 5 pictures.  

The structure is (1) Greeting (2) Health update (3) Anecdote (4) Pop culture cat reference, if needed (5) KTHXBAI.  When thanking the supporter, I want to tie it to some other element of the letter, whether the health or the anecdote, and I'd like to make it like -- and this will probably be out of left field for you -- the closet gag from Fibber McGee and Molly.  

They didn't always use it in an episode, but when they did, it wasn't always in the same scene each time, there wasn't a long setup, and they masked it until they wanted to spring it.  Just a scene, they're talking about something relevant to the story, they want something, oh it's in the hall closet BOOM CRASH AVALANCHE TINKLE.  I'm guessing that they learned that it worked better if the audience didn't see it coming from a mile away.  Quick setup, so it's as much of a surprise as possible for a running gag.

I'm telling a story about what one of the kittens did, or giving information about a kitten's health, and then the next sentence explains the need for funds to pay for the medical care or the overhead so the kitten is safe and maybe even happy.  Thank you for helping us do that.  Quick and natural, and it doesn't stick out.

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I would rather do something drumming-related than French language-related.  Reading French becomes tiring quickly, although I've learned enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to read a story and only need to look up the occasional unfamiliar word or idiom.  It reminds me of the TiVo, which has a dozen or more films that have been waiting for me to commit 90-120 minutes of my remaining life to give them the attention they deserve.  It reminds me of the unopened books on my bookshelf, books purchased with the best of intentions.  It reminds me of the 50 videos in my YouTube watchlist.  It reminds me of the dozens of bookmarks in the browser.  It reminds me of the innumerable PDFs in a Dropbox folder labeled "You saved this for a reason."  

If I thought of drumming in that way, I'd probably avoid it, too.  But drumming is like short attention span theatre for me, like the short bursts of Twitter/Bluesky/Facebook posts.  It's not that I can't concentrate, but at any given time there are things that I would rather do than others.  I would rather feel like I'm doing a lot of small tasks that add up to an achievement, than to work on one big project.  

Saturday Evening Post (What am I doing?)

Is it a healthy curiosity about the world, or just untreated ADHD?

No one's ever accused me of the latter, but tonight I'm bouncing from one thing to another, leaving this one unfinished because that one over there catches my attention.  

Here's what I mean:  

8:14    Bell Telephone Hour, newly uploaded by someone who has obtained a number of television shows from the early-to-mid 1960's that were recorded to color videotape.  This one is from 1964, and a couple of minutes into it, I feel like I don't want to sit and devote full attention to it for a full hour.  Elsewhere in this person's library, I find a Ford Show from 1961 (again, color videotape) about "Songs of the Sea" that has had far fewer views than the rest in the collection, and I bookmark the Bell show and click that Ford Show up on screen.  It's half as long as Bell, but at 8:21, browser history tells me I was reading an article from Le Monde about telemarketers and zeroed in on the term, new to me, "moulin à paroles."   If color videotape is irresistible to me, so are French idioms.  A "windmill of words"?  Well, yes, if you think of someone talking and talking in a way that puts you in mind of a windmill continually turning, never stopping.  After satisfying my curiosity about that phrase, I return to Ford, but increase playback speed to 125%, including the commercials that use the Peanuts characters (and gave Schulz the idea of making a full-length animation on the subject of Christmas).  

When that finishes at 8:45, I go to still another recent upload of the Bell show, this one from 1961.  The tape was showing its age at the beginning, wobbling through the first several minutes, but again I didn't want to commit to an entire hour and so bookmarked that one on the browser bar.  On the right side of the screen are other algorithm choices from YouTube, and one from Martha Stewart on making lemon Danish grabs my attention and keeps it for several minutes until I realize that making the dough will involve much more muscle that I want to devote to baking preparation.  Fold it, roll it out, re-fold it, re-roll it out, oy gevalt.  

Short attention span is locked in, as I spot a Kate NV song and play it, followed by Walter Becker's Medical Science, then a song from Soyuz featuring vocals from Kate NV.  I find the album in YouTube Music and add it to my library.  That breaks the music streak, and I decide to write this stuff down for future reference, in case I (or anyone else, I suppose) want to remember a representative web-surfing night.  

Now hit Publish, then over to Musora for a lesson, then off to bed.  There'll be bookmarked content waiting for me tomorrow morning.

Another good day

Today, PG made a rice bowl with shredded skinless chicken breast, and I used up the last of the heavy cream in a pot of chocolate pudding.  Penzey's cocoa, Lindt milk chocolate, 1/2 cup heavy cream and 1 1/2 cups of whole milk.  PG generally doesn't relish chocolate of any kind, but she savored her serving this afternoon.

I enjoyed the chicken-rice bowl, too.  Just some Spanish rice with vegetables to go with the meat, topped with taco cheese and salsa.  Can't be many calories in that meal.  Combined with a quick walk around the neighborhood in early afternoon, despite low 30's temperatures and 15 mph wind, that's going to keep my weight down.   I've got an A1C test coming due next week, and I need all the help I can get.

Today's Whatever-Happened-To:  Watched the opening credits to a 1957 episode of Maverick, and getting second billing after James Garner was Erin O'Brien.  

Picked up a prescription for PG this afternoon.  The new law that limits the out-of-pocket cost for prescriptions under Medicare, dropping this year from about $3,500 to $2,000, may have had something to do with the announcement that the premium for her Part D plan would jump from $38 to $62 in 2025.  However, there are competitors that did not follow suit, so her Part D premium went from $38 to $0.00.  (For this year, anyway.  The phrase "low introductory rate" comes to mind.)  Thankfully, no non-generics among her meds, so there was no charge for today's meloxicam either.  

However, we did have to make one change, because the new Part D has what they call preferred prescribers, and her 2024 pharmacy isn't one of them.  But the new pharmacy is just about the same distance from home.  And on top of all that saving, I found one shiny penny just outside the door of the drugstore and another one at the register.  Net gain for the trip:  two cents!!  (Both of which are going in the little jar for Tabby's Place.  Going in the kitty, you could say.)  Maybe we can get them to deliver at no charge in the future.  

Who carries any change anymore?  Even the bridge commission isn't taking tolls in cash starting this year.

PG received a yearly summary of her life insurance policy, which we usually just scan and file.  She had a question this year, though, so I went to the insurance company's website.  There was no ID/password combination in the password app, which required me to slog through the reminder process and the subsequent log-in process, all of which included two PINs sent by email and two more texted to my phone.  At least it's set up so I won't have to do all that any more.