Get The Don A Bandaid!

I'm sure you'll hear first thing about somebody trying to shoot tRump at his rally last night, if you haven't already. 

Remember this:

Two people died, the shooter and a rally attendee, presumably innocent of the shooting. tRump got an ear lobe leaking a bit of blood.

The Secret Service did their job. Trump thought his job was to roil up the crowd further than they were by giving his fist bump, signalling his followers to get out there and fight.

His followers have been fighting... to keep the most weapons with the fastest firepower in the most hands despite age, sanity, crime records, and what have you. In turn his followers already decided to blame the media for the shooting as they left the rally.

if you want to be useful, folks, let's not stir up civil unrest over this. Somebody, please, just get the man a bandaid for his ear, and a damp hankie for his terrified white face.

DMV Woes

Just when we thought we'd paid all the fees, produced all the documents,  jumped through all the necessary hoops to transfer everything over to Minnesota, we got another letter in the mail today. This one was about Steve not producing ID showing he was "entitled" to own our home. Despite all indications to the contrary, it is registered as a vehicle. He needed to show a driver's license, unexpired, to prove he can drive it... or something. I guarantee you neither of us will ever drive it! I tried sitting on hold on the phone for 40 minutes. I even had to plug in my cell, which had registered a nice charge in the morning. After rereading the letter, I noted the part where we could email them with any questions.

I did come up with one. Because of course I did.

It needed a bit of explanation first.

Here is my email, with certain identifying deletions you will understand, including the precise email address and title number their letter and my response referred to:

*     *     *     *     *

Dear Sir or Madam:
You need my husband's ID (legal name) for the title transfer to go through. Let me supply some history of incompetence:

May 30: We both went the the DMV in (name of town) with the then current owner, (name). She had a document showing she was entitled to sell it after her father's death. After completing her part of the transfer process, I had to go the the county office to pay the property tax and return with documentation. Once back at DMV both my husband Steve and I gave the clerk our AZ driver's licenses, as well as "the letter" (for tax payment) and the copy of (previous owner's) documentation. His AZ DL number was (number), exp.2/15/2027. (Currently punched full of holes during July 1 transfer to MN.) Fees were paid, documents checked, sent away with job completed.

AS  IF....

July 1: responding to a letter, we returned to the DMV as the copy of (previous owner's) document was missing. I secured my own copy of it and turned it in that day. Once more we were told all was in order, after the clerk sat at the computer for around 20 minutes, consulting back and forth with other clerks. ALSO on that day, Steve applied to change his license to MN. Current number: (number). It's for the address of the home we now live in, which all these problems revolve around. One error he noticed as he walked out is they marked him as needing glasses. As he was reading the eye chart he cleared several rows of letters until the clerk laughing asked him to stop, obviously passing and then some. However, he was too annoyed with all the hassles by that point, and being disabled (Check your handicap hanger records) refused to stand around any longer to try to fix it.

That same day, I applied to change the address of my (missing) MN driver's license. I'd changed it very early after we relocated to MN but never got my card. I'm sure you should be able to locate that application however, as the DMV staff informed me it was undeliverable. (We had lots of mail issues at that time, but not your problem.) At the same July 1 visit I also got MN plates for my 2013 Hyundai Accent, switching it's registration from AZ as well.

Now if you are unable to locate the original title application which we got called back to the DMV for, or locate any of Steve's recent records, let me please just ask you a simple question:

ARE YOU LOOKING TO HIRE COMPETENT HELP?

Most sincerely.
Heather M. Rosa

FedEx: Don't Fire The Driver, But...

 We've been getting deliveries lately. Mostly shelving units, unassembled. We'd put one or two together, designate its location and purpose, load it, then go on to the next need. Boxes were getting emptied, broken down or repurposed. Space appeared. It might seem easy to make a master plan and order all in large chunks.Yep, tried that, changed my mind based on what happened with each last shelving delivery. Sometimes we need bigger/wider/stronger, with more or fewer holes in the shelf itself. 

I firmly believe I'm done getting more shelves now. They weren't delivered this time. I went to the store to see if they had exactly what I needed to finish up the job. 

They did. One unit left, sitting exactly on top of and looking identical with the units having one more shelf in them. I'm glad I spotted it where it wasn't supposed to be. I'd found the shelf tag giving its proper price about three feet away over an empty space, but this sat under a tag with a higher price, suitable of course for the additional shelf in each of those other packs. 

I'm hoping not to need that extra shelf. I can't use that extra shelf. I wouldn't be able to see or reach what's on that extra shelf, since the spacer/posts are all the same length. The use it's being put to, all the stuff left after selling off most of my club supplies and finished projects, had better fit on that smaller number of shelves. It will be close. Currently they fit in a tote plus a box formerly housing a gas grill, with scattered units appearing out of other boxes along with other odd places as those get emptied. Fingers crossed! One hope is that some of it will be going away as various gift opportunities arise, since many of you indicated that you actually liked what you got last time around.

It's your fault if you lied!

I didn't go to the store today just because of delivery problems but it helped. I also needed to peruse the garden section for a better sized pot for the plant (which I actually bought after the first pot) which needs repotting, a Pink Princess philodendron. If I treat it right, it will eventually grow into the way-too-much-larger pot I bought before I picked out the plant.

Quit snickering! Like you've never done that! Besides, after reading up on its needs, I needed different soil for it too.

My problem with recent FedEx deliveries is that they do not follow the delivery instructions the company I've been ordering from has on file. To be fair, I can't see those instructions anywhere on the shipping labels, so I don't know if it's a communication issue between the companies or a stupid driver issue. Doesn't seen fair to blame it on stupidity if nothing's there for them to see.

Yesterday, however, I kinda blew my stack at them. Of course it didn't do any good because I didn't know the extent of the issue until after they drove away. I did know it wasn't in the correct place, the one where it's easy for me to bring it inside. What I did find out as I tried to open that door was that they'd tossed the packages down such that one box blocked the door from even opening, and the other boxes jammed that one in (mis)place.

Four packages, multiple long trips, multiple stairs on both ends, each way. The packages could have so easily been stacked a couple feet away from the door so I - or anybody - could have opened the door, stepped one step down, and easily tucked the three smaller ones inside the door. The big one still would have to have been dragged to the east side of the house and up its stairs, but like I said, that might be a communication issue and not a carelessness one,  or an I'm-in-too-big-a-hurry-to-bother issue.

The more suspicious side of me noted that it was a late Saturday drop (5:30 PM) in a 4-day holiday weekend, and how the packages landed when tossed may have been a passive-aggressive display. Perhaps not so passive at that. (Note that I always had to go for signatures for deliveries, and made sure to strive for customer satisfaction. FedEx drops and splits.)

I decided somebody at FedEx needed to be communicated with from my end. I gave myself a little time to think about it while grumbling, opening packages, grumbling, checking contents, and of course, grumbling. I realized I couldn't truly ascribe motive to the mess, however likely it seemed. I also might have to simply put out a bigger sign a driver couldn't actually pass and which they couldn't ignore, directing them to the actual drop location. It would have to be waterproof of course, all the rain we've had lately. But their blocking the door? Not tolerable! 

(Reminder to self to stress the senior community part of this location, and the extra challenges many of us here face.)

(Pause here to mentally assemble a list of all the things which could possibly happen to turn an annoyance into a tragedy when blocked inside....... Done? OK.)

I googled FedEx to find a way to email them. I decided to simply ask for them to bring to all their drivers' attention that they need to be more careful when piling packages at a door to avoid blocking the door.That seemed to be the one thing that could be addressed for the better. I had gotten my stuff after all, nothing destroyed or lost. And this morning showed that most times I can go ahead to the store myself, find what I need so long as I know it's carried in the store (like these shelves are, when in stock, when properly located), fits in my car, and doesn't come from across the country the way many things I order do, like camera batteries specific to my camera, sent from New York.

Of course, as previously mentioned, it was (now even later) on a Saturday evening in a four day holiday weekend. I was given several options to call different phone numbers for specific problems, none of which were my problem. I wanted to email, send something carefully worded rather than risk losing my temper, something which could be transferred up the chain to the "right" person. I got an apparently untended chat room with formulaic prompts for content, which I was still working on. Once sent, I kept getting formulaic prompts, on repeat, If I already answered a question, it got repeated. I finally decided I could only hope that come Monday, something, somewhere would get through to an actual human who cared. Maybe a memo would go out. Maybe training would improve by a sentence or two. 

By the time the last repeat of a prompt came through that I could tolerate, I was fed up. It was some version in business-speak of what-do-you-want? I answered before clicking off: Pretend that somebody read this!

Somebody Up There Is Laughing At Me

I'm not sure I believe in "Somebody Up There". But it's looking like somebody up there is trying to get my attention. And not in a good way, unless you possess a particular kind of humor. The mischievous kind.

This one goes way back. In the process of moving, I knew I didn't have room for all my prized collectibles. I knew, and it was confirmed, that many still had value, unlike, say, Beanie Babies. (I never understood that craze. Did you?) I selected some Chinese stuff to keep, along with a bunch of Native American pueblo pottery. An auction house inspected what remained and accepted most of it. The rest went away at several garage sales.

And yes, I'm still unpacking pottery. By now it's been so long that many of them are a delightful surprise to see ... again. I'm missing a stand for one large plate, but those can always be found somewhere. Pretty much everything is intact, so I'm happy with my packing efforts. I'm also happy to have shelf space for more than all of it despite having less total shelf space, period.

The auction house separated my treasures into several different auctions. Some results were exciting, some disappointing. The last one really stands out however, and begins this particular tale. It was held April 24, and had put such a high estimate on the single remaining piece that I was chomping at the bit to find out the results. Even though it came in at the low range of their estimate, it was a nice final check from them. Or was supposed to be.

If you've been following, you know about the mail issues we had. This part goes back before them. I'd been having my auction proceeds deposited directly into my credit union account. However, they'd merged with another credit union, and suddenly the ACH number was wrong. I was having to pay for the credit union to refuse the transfers, highly annoying in itself. But communications with the auction company were annoying as well. For this last check I decided to take the "safe" road and have a paper check mailed to me.

The first one never arrived. Emails were exchanged. Another check was sent. It too never arrived. More emails were exchanged. I finally got the mail situation straightened out, but only just recently. Remember, this goes back to an April 24th sale. With full assurances that the mail would finally reach me, now that other mail finally was (except for certain things which were requested much earlier and dropped in some black hole somewhere) I asked for this third try at sending their check.

It arrived in three days! Only! Three! Days!

I was getting paid for a few other things and waited a couple days for everything to be received and the holiday to pass before driving to the credit union, now about 35 miles from our home. I justified the mileage by doing some other shopping "in the neighborhood" (another 8 miles) at the same time. I endorsed everything, the clerk deposited everything, I left. Busy day, more stuff to do, and I was napping around 3 PM when I got a call from the credit union.

What the ???

She regretted to tell me that the check deposited from the auction company had been taken back out of my account. It seems nobody, not the auction company, not me, not the teller, had noticed that it hadn't been signed by the company!

After more than two months, thinking everything was done and we had no more dealings together, after I'd plunked the collected correspondence into my email trash, I needed to reach out and let them know we still weren't done with each other!!!

The credit union is holding their check in their vault, pending somebody's decision on what needs to be done with it. Mail it to me so I can mail it back to the auction company to sign and mail back to me again? Come in to the credit union, take a photo of the unsigned check for proof and see how they want to handle it this time? (Actually, if I had a smart phone I've heard those photos can be texted to the necessary recipient. However...)

One other thing I did while there was double check and get the new, proper ACH number now for anybody who needs to deal with  them for me, whether for a deposit or bill paying. I'm glad I did. It has a whole bunch more zeros and ones in it, and she printed out a full page for me with the number and other data. Since I have that, maybe we can go that route?

I dug through old dead emails and found the lengthy connected correspondence with the auction company, giving me the proper email address for the accounting team and the contact's name. I guess I'm lucky it hadn't been purged yet, but I haven't been that efficient for a long time. Very carefully I sent her another email. A bit tongue in cheek I started out suggesting she probably didn't think she'd be hearing from me again. After all my last contact was all praise for my finally getting their check. Yeehaaaa! I went on to explain some of the suggestions for dealing with the newest issue as offered by the credit union folks, an acknowledgement that she may well be on an extended holiday like a lot of the country also is, and my expectation of hearing from her as quickly as circumstances allow.

Now do you think somebody up there is laughing at me? No?

Well, after that email got sent off, I went and collected today's mail. It contained another check from somebody else I hadn't expected. I'm going to have to go to the credit union next week again anyway.

Do you believe me now?

No, The OTHER East!

 Moving includes ordering a lot of new stuff to be delivered, especially when you leave one place while not quite sure yet what the new place will be like. Packing to leave is a version of sorting what is loved, absolutely needed no matter what, and will fit in whatever kind of conveyance you can arrange for the task, from what you can either sell or donate before you leave. As a result we arrived in our new permanent home with both things we can't use and needing things we don't have. Hence the deliveries.

(BTW I have a lovely light blue Persian rug that has no place on our carpeted floors. Anybody? Needs just a bit of cleaning....)

The new home can be confusing at first glance. There is a door facing the street, up a few stairs to a tiny porch. It opens on the utility area, if your idea of a welcome is coming face to face with the water heater, laundry, and furnace. Our real front door follows the sidewalk along the east side of the house to a significantly larger porch with a very nice overhang to keep at least some of the rain off you, and opens to the living room. There's an actual "Welcome" sign once you open that door. 99.7% of the time we mean it.

To deal with possible confusion...OK, fooled us too the first time... we taped a sign in the window of the utility room door. It says "USE OTHER DOOR PLEASE" and for those still confused, has an arrow with a bend in it showing the way. 

Apparently it can be missed.

I've been ordering a lot of stuff from one company for the house. Mostly it's things not available in our other favorite shopping place, local thrift stores. Or perhaps things that don't fit once assembled into the hatchback. Or are heavier than my arms feel like dealing with for as long as it takes to drag it out of the car, along the walk, up the few stairs, and inside. A lot of it is shelving, assemble-it-yourself kind, "yourself" being my youngest son of course. We've been seeing a lot of him lately, even more than when we were living with him temporarily.

(Hmmm, maybe we should move more often if this is what it takes?)  

NOPE! Been there, done that, got the wrinkled tee shirts. Good thing I know where the nearest laundry is, eh? We even remembered to save the laundry baskets with wheels on them.

The company in charge of shipping has noticed our move, and asks on its form if we have any special instructions for delivery. Boy howdy, do we! Often what is meant by the question is whether it's a gated community with a code, or is there an apartment number, or must it be left with, say, a concierge.

Like we'd be fancy enough to have a concierge! 

My directions are simple: leave on larger porch on east side. Simple, right? Larger porch implies there is a smaller one to be ignored.  East side helps the delivery people who can't figure out relative sizes by eyeballing them distinguish between north side and east side. Or vice versa, I guess. But a couple days ago I was reminded that some people have no sense of direction, when a FedEx driver left two boxes outside the utility room. 

You know, the one facing north.

The OTHER east, I guess.

I'm just lucky that neither box was too big nor too heavy for me to wrangle inside the narrow space and around the corners to bring them inside before it rained... again.

My son will assemble them in a bit. This time it's a pair of inexpensive rolling chairs. Tomorrow it will be shelf units matching what we already ordered before and, once divided, will both raise their heights one shelf and provide my (still) only houseplant a home in a window. We'll see my son again then too.

Maybe we should plan on feeding him?

An ATM Hack

No, not the criminal kind. Honest!

I was out with a friend yesterday who needed some cash. Being early birds, we arrived at her local bank branch before it opened, changing our plans, which required cash. Of course it has an ATM inside its first set of front doors. Just one teensy little bit of a problem, however.  She can't remember her 4 number pin. 

I shared our secret with her.

If she's like me, it wasn't all that hard the first time she set one up. But those darn security conscious banks are regularly asking you to change it. If you need to replace your card because somebody got a hold of your card number, again, change your pin for a new one as well. It never ends.

Numbers are particularly hard to come up with and remember. Nearly all the time, 4 numbers carry no meaning in themselves. I drew such a blank the first time I needed to come up with one about 40 years ago, I just plugged in 3-2-1-0. Hey, I was unique, wasn't I? I mean, everybody else goes 1-2-3-4. I wasn't everybody. I kept that pin for over a decade, and am only revealing its big secret now because I'd never do that again.

Steve uses a bank he's very loyal to, despite their well known abysmal record of security for their cardholders' information, among other things. It's the one reason I never would give them a credit card number when I tried to cash a check there, even one written on the bank, and required because I wasn't a customer myself. I couldn't even endorse a check over to Steve to deposit without that. They mailed it back!

We came up with a work-around for that, solving my problem without risking my security. But Steve continually has a problem with his card number illicitly being used, requiring him to get a whole new card from the bank. (That was way more than inconvenient when we'd just moved and mail deliveries weren't. Delivered, that is.) If I can count correctly, he's had ten cards replaced since we've been living together. I may be underestimating. He usually has me drive to the ATM for him and plug in his code when he withdraws cash, a royal literal pain with my short car and arthritic shoulders. Those things are designed for those tall monster fuel hogs. But each time he has to change it, I get his new code to punch in. 

He shared his secret with me for remembering all those new pins. They aren't numbers. They're four letter words! Just look at your phone pad and translate them back to the number each letter sits on. "J" is a 5, for example, if your word has a "J" in it. It's easy for both of us to remember the words. Some times they are actually what are colloquially referred to as four-letter-words. It might just depend on how annoyed either of us were - because yes, I do that now too - when the need for a new pin number came up. Go ahead, use those anyway if it helps. The machine isn't going to know what, say, 7448 translates back to.

I bet you can figure it out, eh?

I bet you won't forget it either. Go ahead, neither of us is currently using it.

I Feel A Rant Coming On...

How dare they!!! Who do they think they are, rewriting the foremost principles of the constitution with one idiotic, thoughtless, nay, criminal verdict? Oh wait, it's not just one verdict, just the latest before they skip town. They've been dismantling our Democracy for several years now.

In case you've been in a coma the last 30 hours or so, I'm referring to our formerly respectable Supreme Court. You know, the one whose majority no longer trusts women to make decisions about their own bodies and is allowing each state to make their own rules about what we may or may not do, mostly based on ignorance, making power grabs smothered in warped religiosity. The same Court which has been making it impossible for this government to work for our betterment by allowing businesses (because they're "people" too) to pollute without restraint and destroy first their neighborhoods and soon this whole planet, just for the sake of ... what? Better stock prices? Higher CEO pay? Their own imagined luxury retirement where by some miracle they have a nice spot tucked away on this planet where a few people can still breathe an atmosphere with a healthy ratio of CO2 to O2, with no weather disasters which are worsening each year, destroying agriculture, habitat, and survivability? Yeah, that Court.

Perhaps they imagine that granting unlimited power to a single person without repercussions is just a technicality, that nobody would take unfair advantage of facing no criminal repercussions, and we would never elect somebody who is a power hungry narcissist anxious to take revenge against their imagined enemies who simply don't march in lockstep with them. Maybe our Founding Fathers only imagined the destruction even back then, when a single person empowered as king could wield hell upon their own country as well as those they wished to conquer, subjugate, enslave, control, or destroy in whatever way they could. After all our founding fathers had only just finished a war against George to get out from under his cruel thumb, and couldn't possibly have long enough memories to work to prevent it happening again, from inside this time. Right? Did these current appointed "Justices" forget our Founders came up with principles like everybody being equal under the law? Nobody got to be king. Of course they made a few glaring oversights back then, like women and African descended persons being property, only fractions of human beings, needing to own property (without regard for the people already inhabiting it) in order to even have rights and value. But we've been working to fix that for over 200 years now, and until recently we'd been doing a steady if not rapid job of fixing that oversight. After all, people with ultimate power over others will wind up abusing it, one way or another.

Do these "Justices" somehow delude themselves into thinking we've grown past those abuses? We only elect sane, responsible, thoughtful people to power? Crooks can't get past the system and reach the seats of power? Were they asleep since 2016 when a certain now 34 -times convicted felon took office? Did they take a holiday in the Bahamas on January 6 of 2021 with no benefit of news or internet, thinking they were just avoiding a loud party across the way?? Come on, people, are we going to believe they're mostly just stupid, ignorant, blind in their high thrones of power? Will we look at their reaping all kinds of riches and gifts from "friends" who just happen to occasionally have cases before the court which coincidentally just happen to be decided by the majority in their favor, and think instead about what we're going to do with our friends Friday after work that week, everything's fine?

Ask yourself what will be the next legal constitutional domino to fall? Can you see how it will affect you and yours? Do you fancy yourself in one of the "immune" or "protected" groups? Do you honestly think there ARE any protected groups any more, when the whims of an offended narcissistic madman can take anybody down, should he regain power? Could air that isn't breathable be somehow separated from the rest of this planet's air just for you? Do you really think enough people are paying attention to realize where this could be headed and keep a felon out of the Oval Office? We let him in before, didn't we. We also kept him out once. But now they are apparently endorsing all his criminality as just an ordinary part of the job.

Are we really going to buy that? 

Are we?