Can't... help... myself... must post...

More accurately, "the first American League player to", or "the first MLB player in 52 seasons to".

How do they put it (or perhaps, "how did they put it", I don't keep up with these things)?  Rick Wise says ohayo.  He's probably too much of a gentleman to say anything about Ohtani surrendering one hit.

But I'm confident Louisa Thomas has been corrected by now, even though as of this morning the essay is still unchanged on the New Yorker site.  

At least here, my compulsion to correct is limited to myself and the occasional accidental visitor, plus those multitudinous Singapore bots.  

Technology, parts 1 and 2

Part 1:  Pat likes a certain brand of salad dressing that she buys at Whole Foods.  I like a certain brand of whole-milk buttermilk that I use to make pancakes.  Over the noon hour today, we stopped by WF to pick some up.  

At the self-checkout, there was a new option, Amazon One.  Enter your Amazon Prime credit card, have a camera scan each of your palms, and you're registered.  After registration, check out as usual, but just scan your palm instead of tapping or swiping the Amazon Prime card.  

It all went off for me without a hitch.  No floor on the amount that can be charged to Amazon One, from the looks of it.  Today's bill was 13 dollars and change, and 5% of that comes back in Amazon credit.  

Part 2:  With an eye to getting away from Twixtter, I looked into Threads.  To get an account in Threads, you need an account in Instagram.  I didn't want to use my Facebook account for Instagram, so I entered a different address and filled in all the other required blanks.  The two-factor ID went through smoothly, but instead of a welcome screen, the next thing I saw was a full-screen advisory that my account had been suspended for 180 days for a violation of terms of service.

The violation appeared to be that I hadn't used my Facebook account to sign up.  There were some words about creating fake accounts and anonymous entries, and at the bottom, a notification that I could appeal.  However, if the appeal was denied, my Instagram account would be deleted immediately.

I wanted to know more, and to assure the gatekeeper that the email was mine and is active.  What made them think I was creating a fake account?  I clicked Appeal, and the screen changed to a message that the appeal had been received and I would hear from them directly.  Missing was any space for even a 25-words-or-less statement in my defense.  

So it looks like you have to use Facebook credentials to be permitted to create an Instagram account, and Instagram is required to create a Threads account.  No thanks, never mind.  I deleted the new Instagram account, and I'll just have to get along without Threads.

Lots planned, lots done

Sunday, September 17

Just notes for now.  If I feel like it, I'll expand on them eventually.

Photos of the freshly blossomed purple asters in the wildflower patch around the corner, below the Route 222 bypass.

Photos of the Quakertown, NJ meadow.  Different from last year.  Signs warning to keep out, don't pick the flowers, beware of the bees, and a rope "fence" to delineate the Keep Out area.  Earlier this summer, I walked in a large section of the area that's now roped off.  (Not the meadow part, but the mowed part along the edge of it.)

Quality Time with my good girl Lorna Doone.  They should take off that orange collar soon.

Cookie "Monster" swirling at my feet to greet me.  I didn't offer her the Hand of Friendship, though, not yet.

New cats on the list for photos needed, but several are hiding, can't photograph them

Was able to photograph cats in Suites B, C, E, I, lobby, Community Room

Good Quality Time with Fenek, plus good snapshots and an interesting situation to describe in next month's letter to his supporters.  (YIL about microchip feeders, which open only for certain cats.)

Shoprite:  Whole milk only 3.69, 50 cents or more lower than in PA.  Sale on Tropicana juices, $1 off per bottle, max purchase 4.  So I saved $4.

Back home, downloaded and tagged photos

Practiced 20 minutes before calendar program beeped at me.

Watched Nebraska-Kentucky without falling asleep.  Probably couldn't have done it before losing 15 lbs.

Not bad for a man of my advanced years.

Saturday Evening Post

There was a session of Spelling Bee at 3:00 a.m. due to insomnia.  

At 9:00, Immaculate Grid.  First, the one where I played by the rules and finished with an 81 rarity score.

After that, I looked at the answers and put together another full grid with only non-Hall of Fame players.

Later in the morning, a bit after 10:00 according to the time stamp, I brought out the ingredients for a peach streusel cake.  

Some 90 minutes later (at 325 low-and-slow degrees) it came out of the oven looking like this.

After lunch, one more household task, making a pot of chili.  No pictures.

Took a walk, didn't eat any pizza, but did drink a Mexicoke and ate a Dove Bar, for 400 calories.

Here he goes again

I've seen these Kias on the road, and now I know how those Palisades park.

My day

At the end of week 1 of 30-Day Drummer, the instructor told us we could rest, and while I haven't played much today, enough happened that I wanted to write it down before I forget, to coin a phrase.

Installed the new window shade in Pat's office.  We got it the day before at the new Home Depot a mile or two from the house.  The woman in the department with the shades and blinds just about talked our ears off before selling us the product.

Home Depot doesn't appear to have a checkout cashier anymore, only self-checkout registers.  In that area, one woman was responsible for fixing any issues, and I presented her with one.  

I'd collected a bunch of change over a period of months, keeping it in a small glass jar in the drawer with my wallet.  When I took the jar to the credit union, I found that the change-counting machine charged 3% of the total for the service, and I knew where I could do better.  

The Giant supermarket has a CoinBase machine that gives you the option of cashing out for a 3% service charge or getting the full amount ($22.90) in store credit.  I was hoping for Amazon, but Home Depot was acceptable.  However, the HD self-checkout assistant had never seen one of those vouchers, so Pat and I waited until the assistant brought in a superior to apply it to the total.

This morning, I installed the new blind, measuring twice and drilling holes once for the brackets in the window frame.  There I go, playing handyman again.

Out in the back yard, I pulled weeds and cut down budding trees that Google Images notified me are mulberries.  I found a great many of those trees in varying sizes, and as much as I'd like them to grow, I've learned enough to know that mulberry trees grow 40 feet tall and drop lots of berries that stain the shoes of anyone who walks through them.  One mulberry had taken root a few millimeters from the stump of a burning bush that had been cut down on the south side of the house, and I took the pruner to it.  

I pruned a shrub on one side of the shed out back, and dug out some of the weeds on all sides of the shed.  The catnip had died and dried on two sides, so I removed those bushes, but the one remaining catnip on the south side was still green and attractive to pollinators, so it got a reprieve.  Heavy rain at times today, saturating the ground and making the weed pulling easier afterward.

Other quick jobs:  after scooping cat boxes in the basement, I cleaned up some areas on the floor that bore dried cat puke.  Also, I used the Spot-Bot to clean up some areas on the family room carpet that bore dried cat puke.

Dishes were washed by the Braun and put away by me.  I made the bed.  I took a picture of Good Queen Swirly in her new bed and wrote a little story a la "What a Good Cat!" to go with it in a blog post.  

Weight has crept up from 237 and a fraction to 239 and a fraction, so all this physical labor should help get things back under control.  Today I ate only a bowl of raisin bran, a banana with peanut butter, and a bowl of chili with some baked Ritz chips.  The Mexicoke on the Gorilla shelf in the basement remained untouched, well out of the arm's-reach of desire that a past Coca-Cola CEO declared was the company's goal for its products.

Back to work tomorrow morning, and back to drum lessons.  I'm all set for retirement, whenever it comes.  Hobbies include photography, a foreign language, and now, learning a musical instrument.  Pretty standard pastimes for a retiree.  

And so to bed, Pepys-ily.

No trouble at all

While our other three Good Cats get into the occasional scuffle, our Good Queen Swirly stays out of the fray. I have taken to referring to her not only as a Good Cat, but also A Cat Who Never Causes Any Trouble. Even if the catchiness of the phrase is debatable, the veracity is not. Swirly is simply a perfectly well-behaved cat.

Now, there was a brief period a year or two ago when she would mess up the cover on the sofa, but it didn't take long to realize that she was looking for a place to snuggle away and hide. I began to put a soft fleece blanket over top of the sofa cover, leaving her a little room to crawl underneath, and the cover has remained intact ever since.

But recently, Pat saw a small cat bed with a hood, and immediately thought of Swirly. We bought the bed, and when we got it home, Pat asked me to hold onto it awhile so it would have a smell Swirly was familiar with. Then, Pat placed it behind an armchair in the corner of the family room, and we waited.

The result is below. Swirly now takes all her naps in the bed Pat picked out just for her. And she never causes any trouble. 

A recent arrival

Buddleja davidii, aka summer lilac, aka butterfly bush.  Seen today for the first time on the formerly landscaped area that we're letting go wild this summer.    

 

Skipper on Sedum, late afternoon sun

 

The Good TImes are Here and Now

Last night, I was looking around YouTube for songs to learn with reasonably simple beats.  I called up John Hiatt's I Don't Even Try and soon found myself playing air drums and singing (if you can call it that) along.  Then I opened my eyes and saw Pat walking past me into the kitchen.  Usually even with my eyes closed I'll see the hall light come on before she walks downstairs.  Musta really been into the beat.

This morning, as I collected the stuff for breakfast (cereal, milk, juice, seltzer, spoon) I was softly singing (IYCCIT) Walter Becker's Down in the Bottom.  That's another song with a reasonably simple beat, as far as I could tell last night.  I'm sure that the beat doesn't get lost in the music, unlike some other songs that are on the Beginner list at Drumeo.  

Pat commented that I must be happier these days, since I'm singing more.  Interesting observation, and a true one.  Work is going well, home life is great, and I have plenty of absorbing (and useful) things to do in my spare time.  

Visiting shelter cats and loving them, either socializing the frightened ones or giving the social ones a lap and some petting.  Writing, about one cat in particular, and taking pictures when I see something interesting.  At the very least, the good images get posted to a blog where at least a lot of Singaporeans see it, and the best ones are used by the shelter for promotional purposes.

Sometime in the past year, I believe, French got a whole lot easier.  Although I had re-started learning the language in 2002 with the help of Champs-Elysees -- after a couple of decades of inaction -- it was hard to read anything without numerous consults of a dictionary, either the Larousse in the office or the one online.  As recently as during the Covid pandemic, I remember just giving up and not trying anymore.  After one of my credit cards was used by someone with bad intents, the credit card company issued a new one with a different number.  I tried to change the card number on file with Le Monde, but three months later I was no longer able to log in for subscriber-only articles, and I took that as a sign to stop struggling.

Then last year, I found that it was now possible to use Google Pay to subscribe to publications outside the U.S.  Even better, I'd been away long enough that it was possible to take advantage of a lower-cost subscription offer.  And suddenly, and counter-intuitively, after weeks without trying to learn anything, I could read French comfortably.  I still use Google Translate for an individual word, and now and then I do a search when a phrase makes no literal sense and I strongly suspect an idiom.  But now I look at the Times, the Post, and Le Monde equally as much for news.  It's a mystery, but it's also a sense of accomplishment.  I've read the articles that say learning a language helps keep the brain from rusting out.  And hey, you never know when you might need another language in case Trump gets re-elected. 

So there's (1) Tabby's Place, with all the useful things it provides, (2) French, which I can understand in spoken form (as long as it's spoken reasonably clearly) and now can read (with occasional help from Translate).  And recently, adding (3) drumming to the list.  All things I don't have to stop as long as my brain and body hold up.  Maybe I'll never do any drumming except in this house, but it's a pleasant experience to learn.  

And as if on cue, a big brown truck stopped in front of the house, and its driver carried a good-sized brown box and set it down just to the side of the front door.  That would be the new drum throne.

One last thing:  I take care to choose songs sung by humans with imperfect singing voices.  Whatever it takes to keep from sounding pitiful!

C'est cette chanson que j'aime...

Blogger's stat sheet says that there have been hundreds of hits this week on this humble, unpublicized, quiet corner of cyberspace, and they all came from Singapore.  It makes a fellow wonder.  Stocking up their files for future AI?

I spent my junior year of college in a small city in France.  Lots of memories, kept in some small cahiers and presently residing in a small box at the bottom of a closet upstairs.  

But some of those memories are in the form of music, and tonight I learned that one of the tubes of my stay in France was used last year in a TV commercial for a supermarché named Intermarché. (The link contains both the commercial and the original song, paroles et musique. A cette heure, de toute façon.)  

Back then, with my limited French, I thought it was a song like I Will Survive, where the singer was determined to go on living despite having lost their lover.  Now, I see it more as the singer rejecting that lover due to his own égoïsme.  Like the joke with a sharp point that a female stand-up made about a former boyfriend:  "We had a lot in common.  We both loved him and hated me."

Golden Hour, Brown Butterfly

Late afternoon in our back yard.  The sedum has begun to display its pink flowers, and that's attracting plenty of insects, like this skipper.