Just A Little Mischief In The Dairy Section

Steve and I often go to the grocery store together, but since we each get our own groceries, on our own budgets, and to our individual tastes, we go our separate ways and meet back at the car. I use a regular cart, he uses a battery powered one. It's rare when we meet inside the store.

I was just selecting some cheese when I heard a couple of women saying, "Thank you for your service," sequentially to a customer coming up the aisle behind them. It happened to be Steve, wearing one of his military ball caps. He needed room to get past me so I pulled over to allow his shopping scooter a chance to pass. After a glance to see which cap it was this time, I chimed in with my own "Thank you for your service, sir." Just a tiny smile covered  my imitation of a lack of recognition.

When Steve had passed the first two and came up even with me, he stopped, leaned over, tugged on my shirt, and asked, "Can I come home with you?" Two heads snapped sharply up.

I moved away microscopically, saying, "We'll have to discuss that later," and now having room, proceeded to pass the two women and continue towards the next thing on my list.

One of them whispered at me as I passed, sounding concerned, "Do you know that man?" Was I in need of protection? Being coerced? Pestered?

Options flashed through my head. "He seems so harmless, doesn't he?" Or,  "(Big fake sigh) You know, I see him here occasionally, and every time he wants the same thing."  It would have been true. Misleading, sure, but true.

I opted for honesty. "For about 40 years." Whereupon Steve chimed in that we were married. After a bit more conversation, we went our separate ways.

We might have to do this again.

Can YOU Prove You're Not A Robot?

My email company dumped me onto Yahoo several years ago. They must have gotten tired of carrying email from former phone customers. It was enough "fun" dealing with the new format (though the address stayed the same), and adjusting to losing my archives. File was there, just empty. Apparently not everything transferred. Let's just admit too, that as a geezer I'm increasingly irritable at being presented with changes in software being sprung on me with no notice, no training, no knowledge of the new lingo and different techniques needed to accomplish the same things as before. Even worse when some of the things from before that I'd liked no longer have equivalents.

Not all improvements qualify as such.

Yesterday was one such example. I'm used to getting the "prove you're not a robot" challenges that spring up periodically. Usually they confine themselves to websites I'm not familiar with. I'm free to decide whether it's worth my time to continue on in my task or skip it. But this time it was just logging in to my own email. From my own computer. The exact way I've been doing it for... well since I was dumped over here by Frontiernet.net. So far the only real issue with the "dump" - since I don't even remember what I had archived so don't know if I miss it - is that more and more places do not recognize my address as valid and put up their own firewall. That particularly happens if I use a mail link. If I can get a full email address instead of a short link, I can get through. Otherwise....

Suddenly Yahoo demands I prove I am not a robot. (I've got a cold right now. Would a juicy sneeze do it?) What they give is a small  box of 9 pictures, 3 rows of 3. They are kinda dark, and pretty fuzzy. Really poor quality. It wouldn't matter if all the objects I am supposed to click on in the category requested were fairly full sized in the boxes. It does happen. But more often the object is a tiny piece of the background. Palm trees were a good example. You'd think living surrounded by them in neighbors' yards I'd be able to pick them out, right? I flunked. There were a couple shots of whole bunches of trees along a street, and there may have been a palm somewhere in the cluster. I couldn't tell. I couldn't find all the boats either. When they asked for cars, I had to dither for a bit wondering if some trucks in a dock area (I think) were technically considered "cars" or not. Or whether the front bumper of a school bus which squeaked into the next box of a picture counted as a bus? I thought yes. Apparently I'm a robot.

Anybody got some spare batteries?

I have had the misfortune of getting familiar with live chat "help" when I have a problem online. I gave it another try. When I got a window to type in I tried to complain politely, concisely, and clearly. I got a Brittany. She demanded to know my account number so she could help me.

Account number? What number? So far as I know I have no account number with Yahoo. Never seemed to need one. Could she explain?

It was on my bill.

Bill? I don't get a bill. Email is free. At least so far. So she wanted the old phone number - landline - my email was originally set up with. I knew the area code, the exchange, but the last 4 digits???? It's been well over a dozen years since all in the Minnesota house switched to cells and dropped the landline.

What was my email address then? (She couldn't ask that first?) I gave it to her, for whatever help it did.

I also asked why we had to go through that robot stuff. Couldn't we just chuck it? Waive something to get it removed? Nope, no joy there. She suggested, in that kind of a superior tone one hears when they know they are being talked down to by somebody more knowledgeable (true) that it would be a good idea for me to just zoom in on the boxes to see them better. 

First, why can't they send out clearer photos? Second, zoom in?  I added about 11 question marks after that to indicate my inexperience with zooming in on anything within my mailbox. Or my laptop, for that matter, aside from very particular websites. Her solution was to go use another search engine. Which did I have?  Keep in mind that she'd already told me not to leave her window. I was wondering how I could do both simultaneously, like the dilemma of when the cops tell you to keep your hands up and get out of the car at the same time, when first you had to unbuckle, turn the key off, unlock the door and push the handle. It was moot anyway, since I only use one search engine. It's the KISS version of using a computer, emphasis on the last "S".

Some of my answers / return questions to Brittany took a couple minutes. Invariably she'd send a "You still here?' while I was in the process. Finally I just sent her another long reply, informing her I was trying to keep my temper in our communication. Moreover I'd been raised to be polite and would she please stop asking, I'd let her know when I was going away. She finally suggested I do go away... just to try logging in to my email again. Use another tab while keeping her window open. (Already done.) So I went back and this time I found all the hydrants. Apparently there were no tiny ones hiding in the long distance street scenes. I'd never have spotted any if there had been. But lucky me, I got in! Good to my word, I returned, gave her my progress report, and encouraged her to pass along my strong negative feedback. Then I said "Good-bye." 

Now that I wasn't a robot any longer, I clicked on the X up in her corner and went back to my email.

Who knows about next time?

Another Scam In Wonderland

My cell rang. I answered. Pause. Click.  (We're off to a good start here. Typical pattern. Everybody buckled?) 

Me: "Hello?"

Another click. Hum. Then a male voice, unidentified accent. "Hello?"

My turn. I'm not giving anything away. "Hello." We could do this all day.

"Is this  ____________?" using my full name, though so many of them still haven't figured out that Heather isn't pronounced  Heee-ther, with a practically sibilant "th." I never bother correcting them.

"Yes." Make them work for it. 

"Hello, my name is "________ ______" ( entirely forgettable but sounds very American, in contrast with the accent) "...calling you from ______________" (medical sounding business name) "...about your diagnosis of _____________" (something I definitely don't have, never worry about, never had tests for, but hey, sounds scary. Must need immediate attention, right?)

Some days I play. Some days I just hang up. If I feel like playing, it can go something like, "Excuse me, but where did you get my medical information from?"

"It's right here in our records."

"What records?" 

"Your medical records."

"Those are supposed to be confidential. Who gave them to you?"

"I'm looking right here at your records, Heee-ther."

"I never gave you permission to see them."

"I have them right here on the desk in front of me." They never have a better answer than that, apparently hoping I'm panicked enough, or just plain stupid enough to buy into whatever they're trying to sell. I never have taken it far enough to find out. There are better things for my time. A hangnail, perhaps. Studying floaters in my eyes in bright light. Practicing a controlled belch, depending on my recent diet. Three dog hairs on the front of my shirt. Five more on my sleeve. No, the other sleeve. OK, both of them. I just checked. See? Important stuff to do.

Of course their scam never works. I have a firm grasp of my personal medical issues, who my Primary Doc is and what he may have referred me for within recent history.  (Practically nothing. Ever.) I also know whether I plan to follow through on some of those rare referrals if they're minor annoyances and/or intermittent. ( A definite maybe. Still thinking about it.) This company's wannabe scammer is definitely not on that short list. The only medical calls I do not personally initiate are scheduling ones from an imaging company, like when a mammogram is due, or a surgery center for something I'm very aware of. Those are more likely anyway to be via emails reminding me to call and schedule whatever. I always know the company name. And the surgery center is more likely to tell me what to bring, how long before the procedure I have to stop eating and drinking, which room to report to.

Today I wasn't quite ready to play. My cough was starting to signal me it was ready to kick in again, since I'd been talking a whole couple minutes. I pushed it back just long enough to snap, "Stop bothering me!" 

I'm sure that'll be effective, right?

Put it down on the calendar for expecting a repeat call in two or three months. Hope springs eternal in the scammer's breast, I guess. Likely another few dozen suckers will have been born in the meanwhile. With luck they can keep my scammers entertained during the interim.

What A Cold Feels Like

Stupid title, eh? Don't we all know what a cold feels like? For like the ten thousandth time already? 

Then again, I haven't actually had one in ages. Even before covid came along I'd quit being exposed to them. No toddlers around, those adorable little germ-wagons lovingly sharing everything they'd picked up in daycare, greeting you with wet kisses and sneezes every time they could. For years I'd lived in an extended time between generations, away from working where I'd interact with two dozen people a day or even more and at a time when nobody thought anything at all about going to work sick, because it was all just a cold, wasn't it? We got our flu shots, so it really was all just colds back then.

Once covid struck, hitting seniors the hardest, the world shut down. Masks got worn, mine still do mostly, special hours at stores were restricted to seniors, and we sheltered in place as much as possible. Shopping happened online whenever possible, and eating out was really drive through and taking home. Movies were whatever played on TV. In avoiding covid we also avoided the common cold.

We didn't miss them. Like a lot of things, if they're not present they do not exist. They need a reason to be noticed. It would almost be tempting to say they decided to find their way back to being noticed... with a vengeance. Our well refurbished immunity fell aside without exposure, and any returning cold had full rein in our bodies to do what it pleased.

Or at least that's how it feels. Maybe it's just that I'm this much older now and none of the above is true. Even though it is. But this latest cold is a humdinger. My nose is an unendingly dripping faucet. In two days I've gotten into my second box of tissues as well as my stash of fast food napkins in the car door pocket when I'm out and about. There's a hint of a sore throat, an occasional spike of about a degree of fever, a headache which wakes me up  from an otherwise sound sleep. My upper lip is so chapped it's split, and chapstick is barely helping. I started with four tubes of it laid in, left from last year, so at least I'm prepared. 

But since Steve got his cold first, I had to go out and buy 4 more boxes of tissues, and we're well into the second. Cough drops too. I buy those ahead, the sugarless kind because I can tuck one in my cheek as I go to bed for soothing and not worry about them rotting my teeth in the process. I returned south at summer's end with the two full bags I took north, ordered two more from a service Steve gets which provides him a budget each quarter for free pharmacy supplies, and still had to actually buy two more large bags yesterday. It's not that they stop the coughing. Any deep breath, or a normal conversation, will set it off. I presume because it needs to be done, clearing out the lungs of whatever is working to fill them up if one doesn't. Coughing is necessary. Mostly the cough drops just make it feel better I guess.

I'd forgotten the bit about those two or three days in a cold's life where you can't taste anything. Eating is done from habit. I might as well clear out the pantry of everything I hate the taste of now while I can't actually taste it. Of course I still pop that chocolate mint in my mouth or sprinkle extra garlic on something anyway. I even drank some of my very favorite diet root beer which I'd finally found on the store shelf after it disappeared back in September due to supply chain issues, then had to remind myself to use up the stuff Steve gave me because it was the wrong flavor for him too and now I won't even notice. It'll be just wet and fizzy either way. At least there's no temptation to stuff myself with holiday goodies at the moment.

All in all, aside from tonight's headache, possibly a side effect from the Nyquil I bought this morning and have been dosing myself with all day, and I almost never get headaches these days, all my symptoms are just inconvenient. The piles of soggy used tissues need dumping to make room for the next pile about every half hour, and I can't chat long with people I'd like to talk to, including Steve, Rich, and the dog. I have to remember to go to the bathroom more often than I think I need to because of the coughing. It's a very good reminder when I forget. And I try not to feel sorry for myself because I missed the club party last night. I don't know yet if my tree won one of the prizes or whose trees did. I emailed my very brief speech to a fellow officer (assorted thanks, that kind of thing)  to say in my stead, and didn't have to wrap the things I bought for the present exchange because they are still here. Somehow, I was smart enough to buy things I'd actually like to get for myself instead of coming home with something I have no use or desire for, so that's actually a win, I guess. Last year what I got was a string of Christmas lights with a battery to wear as a necklace. Seriously. So another win, staying home, right?

But I still won't know if one particular woman drank enough wine that, like last year, she got the courage to join a group of other women on the dance floor for some fun. (Why don't the men dance?) She had a particularly good time last year during "YMCA" with all the right arm moves, so much that it was repeated until they all ran out of steam. I had noticed that that song was on the request list in the club last week for songs from our hired DJ. I also won't know how much of a problem another member's husband may have been because of combined severe short term memory issues and his loud voice "compensating" for increasing deafness. It happens. Several members use the club to get temporary respite from caregiver duties. Most of them become widows after a few years or find a way to afford long term care. Or both. Few men lose wives the same way, but that happens as well of course. The annual party is often the only time we meet the spouses, though a few couples both join, and some members simply are single.

I do hope all had fun. I'm sure the potluck was fantastic, since it always is. Since I have a key I'll pop into the club during a time when nobody is there to bring home my tree without sharing my cold, and see what's what there. With luck and good self care I should be back in a week and find out how it all went.

Annual Hair Pulling

I have to be careful, as there is less hair to pull these days. But I go through this every year, under the delusion that it just has to get easier this time, right? I should be experienced. The process shouldn't change.

As if!

I'm referring to the annual holiday cards. The photo was picked out as a top contender the second I started shooting the very brief scene. The only other contender I've already posted here, so what would be the point? And, no, I'm not duplicating the card's photo here, even though I know how. I'll just tell you about the frustration.

I started out in Walgreens. It's closest. There is one photo machine, and it has a chair, which is a bonus. It also became apparent very quickly that it had super high prices for the amount of cards we want to send out. While I was letting the cost sink in, I got a recorded phone call from Walmart that my prescription, ordered just two hours earlier, was ready to pick up. That's my excuse for that decision being made.

Note that I've caught Steve's bug, though managed a milder version. It's enough that we'll all be missing the club X-mas party tonight, because I won't share it. One of the people I'd be closest to caught covid early and has had ongoing lung issues ever since. She can't be around people coughing , and by evening, I can't stop. Typical cold for me. Hospital for her.

We've also run nearly out of sugarless cough drops, tissues, and several other things needed to handle a second cold in the family, so Walmart was a planned shopping stop. May as well add photo cards to the list. After getting everything else on my list, and still managing not to cough inside the store yet, and not having my nose drip all over inside my mask, I headed to the photo department. Cool: 4 machines. Not cool: no stools or chairs. I decided to head home and not push my luck avoiding sharing my germs. While driving I finalized my plan for how it should look and what it should say in my head.

Now that is always an invitation for frustration. They never provide what exactly it is I want. The first thing every year is to avoid Christmas themes. We celebrate, but culturally, not religiously. A tree with decorations and sending gifts is fine. We even listen to some traditional music, with Nutcracker top of the list, and anything else for the nostalgia of it. We watched "A Christmas Story" on TV last night. Somehow it was much funnier than when I watched it the first time. But anyway, the card theme can be winter, or Happy Holidays, or whatever. Much is celebrated this time of year, including the New Year. So something for everybody.

Once that is selected for, I needed a 5x7 option rather than a 4x8 one. It's a single photo, not a collage. The photo is squarish, so the 5x7 had to be vertical. A horizontal presentation cut the photo in half and not the best half. Everybody insists that text goes across the top and/or bottom, leaving a narrow slice of the photo. I had to find something else. Up to this point is wasn't too difficult, although the Walmart website kept insisting on offering boxed commercial cards instead of something from the photo studio no matter which option from their menu I selected for. Eventually I decided to start my search by department and not item.

You think I'll remember that for next year?

I thought I found the right card - right enough, anyway - and started trying to put my text on it. Everything went wrong with that. It wouldn't give me a way to delete existing text. I couldn't type new text, or get it in the right place. It's default setting was to place it over the photo! My only choice was to shut down my laptop because there was no option to exit or cancel otherwise. After cooling off, waiting, then turning my computer back on after a forced quit, it returned to the exact same page. I just needed to go back to my Firefox menu and pick a totally new site to visit. Weather was a good choice. It's quit raining, for a while.

I decided to try Walgreens online. $Ouch! Then Target. Slightly cheaper $ouch! Back to Walmart then. This time I got into a different selection of cards, finally found one that would do. and fought my way through it. I do mean fought! It still didn't want to put things where I wanted them to go, made me fight for the size of font which reset my previous choices of where and what to say as well as sticking it back over the photo. At least this time I could detour back to a previous page, work my way through again, and eventually make progress.

Final choice: home delivery? Or store pick-up? I thought home delivery would be fine,  until I was just about ready to pay. That's when they got around to letting me know it was guaranteed to be here by... January 11! Luckily it let me change my mind. They want to text me when my order is ready in the store, but I didn't provide a phone number for a phone which doesn't text. It should be done right about now as I finish this. I plan to have lunch first, hungry or not and with no taste buds functioning at the moment, Then I'll ask Steve once he wakes if he's interested in coming along. Finally I'll see if my nose has dried a bit in the meantime or not. 

But cards should be out this week. That will be the easy part of all this. Until the bad addresses come back. It's always people we can't contact any other way. One would think the list gets shorter each year, but it gets longer. Kids grow up, move out. New friends are made. If you think you are missing your card from us after another week, send one with a GOOD return address. We haven't moved.

"Dog-Boning"

While in the interim between the club's Fall Festival and next Monday's X-mas party (where official duties are I basically just attend and say a few words), I have been back working with glass. The pieces needed for me to finish the latest wind chimes for gifts are ready for assembly, one needing some wood finishing for the top support (saguaro rib) and the other with a circular top needing its plan for putting it together.

I had a good supply of glass left in large pieces, along with a request to teach wind chimes to fellow club members. With the newest diamond drill bits performing up to my standards, I was ready to take advantage of the hiatus by finishing cutting and baking pieces of glass to finish off the supply. 

Or so I thought. But the person asking me to take over the class she'd been teaching also donated a huge amount of large glass pieces to the club to work with for the classes. The original reason wind chimes had been developed as a class was a way to get rid of quantities of donated glass. The club had been doing glass fusion in small pieces for jewelry so far, but for that you MUST know the COE of the glass, aka coefficient of expansion. Glass expands and contracts during heating and cooling. It is after all, a liquid, just a mostly very slow moving one. It's long been noted that 100-year-old houses with equally old windows in them have glass that's thinner at the top, fatter at the bottom. It flows. Downhill. Wherever that piece of glass on a flat horizontal surface thinks that is.

We speed that process along at kiln temperatures. The glass goes into the kilns with cut edges, sometimes ground ones with the right equipment. But in the kilns, glass has a mind of its own as to where it is going to flow while it melts,  expands, and contracts. It flows, sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes comically, cartoonishly. A straight cut piece can curve into a crescent. Another piece won't move at all, won't get a top gloss, just sits and hardens, keeping any jagged bit that was left unless ground down later.

With all those different reactions, the second rule of glass fusion is to NEVER EVER mix pieces with different COEs. (The first is everything you need to learn about safety.) If you put a 90 on top of a 96 and hope they fuse together, most likely they will shatter upon touch once cooled. Or a 96 on top of a 90. It's not guaranteed, but very likely, so why waste time, glass, and the energy to run a liln to risk it?

Donated glass almost never comes into the club with any COE notations. We buy ours from a manufacturer's catalog to be sure, and mark it immediately before setting it out for sale. We can't combine unknown with unknown, so have to find uses for single pieces of it. Wind chimes are great for the task. We might also do slumping, where a large piece of glass sits on top of a coated, hollowed out ceramic form and slumps down into it, making a candy dish, candle holder, or whatever else the form was designed for. 

But even with flat cut single pieces, you get whatever the glass gives. Sometimes it's "dog-boning", forming whole new shapes. A long rectangle might contract in the middle and expand on the ends, like a dog bone. Hence the name.

The blue piece in this photo is a very mild version of this, barely enough to notice. The purple and cream again is very mild in reshaping itself, but also shows how, with known matching COEs from purchased glass, one piece laid on another can just sink in smoothly. Note that the "smoothly" part is not guaranteed, sometimes they just stick to each other and maintain height differences. The three green pieces are extreme examples of dog-boning.  The two with narrow necks and wide opposite ends originally were trapezoids, slight difference in width top versus bottom. The bottom left one was cut in a diamond shape. Everything shown had four straight line cuts before coming out of the kiln. You learn to live with a level of chaos. That, or go do something else.

Oh X-mas Tree, Oh X-mas Tree

 It's finally done. It's not as good in real life as it was in my brain as I put it together, but it's taken all the time I plan to put in on it. Tomorrow it'll be taken over to the club - Rich will carry it gently while I open the doors - and I can drop it off in relative privacy. It'll be identified, like all the other trees, by just a number for the competition. I just hope everybody looks and doesn't touch, since the tiny chain I used to simulate tinsel tangles in EVERYTHING! I've seen a couple of the early trees already entered as of Friday morning, and really like one of them. The other seems to rely on having some kind of light on its bottom for its special something. Not sure if that will show during judging, since that lasts over 4 days and batteries have limited life spans. The red paper at the bottom is the list of rules for everybody.

Here's the basic form:

 

Shadows turned out to be an issue, not noticed until I was taking the completed-tree shots, so there was no chance to do a better image of the form than this. It's 4 wires stapled on to a wood form, wired together again at the top, and curled around at the top with enough curve to prevent scratching while handling and hold any decorations added. One of the first entries submitted has 5 wire stars at the top, one hanging from each loop.

This is my final, horizontal wires rounding out the tree, colored wire chains winding around to define (loosely) the tree shape. A double facing wire poinsettia ornament is wired onto the top of the tree. Under that, a first wire garland is wound top to bottom as an impression of colored ornaments on green tree. A "tinsel" garland overlies that, and some wire stars and red/white wire candy canes are secured here and there on the tree.

Finally, a close of up the base, now covered with felt in two layers with cutouts in the bottom one to eliminate bumps from wire and staples. Then a fan of more candy canes, a box with a red wire bow, and a sleeping cat on the bottom, emerging from my Acoma pottery effigy collection  for a spot more welcoming than a plastic stand on a shelf.

I still haven't decided if this will be the holiday card photo for this year. Had it matched my imagination, no question. Even redoing the decorations a couple times didn't correct for what the mind demanded should be. It takes up a space about 16" tall on the dining room table, much more comfortable for me there than still inhabiting my mind as I try to fall asleep making mental improvements. 

I still have wind chimes to put together. And mail.