frith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frith) wrote2025-12-11 09:39 pm
frith) wrote2025-12-11 09:39 pmToo Much Stuff
Last night there was a "retirement" supper at a small restaurant of my choosing. I did not want to go, but, "retirement" supper, it's expected, I'm expected and well, I like food, so off I went. The crowd was much smaller than I expected, but that might be because not only was it mid week (some people still have to be at work the next day at the ass-crack of dawn) and because it was snowing with gusto. Everyone there was from my department, including some who had quit or retired years ago (not everyone dies within two years of retiring). We ate, were eating, at least I was still eating. Two different people gave me all their french fries. I hadn't started my hamburger yet. And then, gifts. Too many gifts, like Christmas in Hell. Gifts for retirement from my former boss, gifts for 35 years of service, gifts crowdfunded by my coworkers. So much stuff. My supervisor had called me into his office in October to ask me to choose a gift for my 35 years from a selection of power tools, luggage and various stuff I really did not want. So I said let me see if I can find something online. After finishing work at 3 pm on a short day, I sat down and scoured eBay, and for good measure, Amazon (for people in a hurry). I sent my supervisor a list. Back in his office he told me the stuff on my list didn't cost enough. I told him to, then, choose two, I don't care about spending the entire gift budget. Famous last words. He bought _everything_, including one thing twice. A tagua ("ivory") nut horse (could be plastic, can't tell), a good fortune horse (prancing on money), horse USB night lights (don't look at all like the Timothy-style lamps in the pictures), an opalite (probably synthetic but nice) horse, two solar powered spinning display disks and probably something else. That was just for the 35 years. Then for retirement, my supper paid and a thick pile of gift cards to a frozen food store from my employer, and from my colleagues: more gift cards, slippers, a cushion, a coffee cup, a giant card, a candle in a jar, a big fleece cover printed with a bunch of pictures of animals from work... all in a large clothes basket, most retirement themed.
Well, I didn't eat my second serving of french fries or my hamburger. I had it boxed to take home and perched the box on top of the mountain of swag stuffed to overflowing in the basket. I made it to the car. On the way home I stopped at the nearest supermarket to buy milk, but they'd closed an hour earlier. I got back into the car to discover an angry red car battery icon lit up on the dashboard. Oh crap. I drove home and made it without dying on way. I drove without the radio, heater or windshield wipers, just in case. I lugged the basket inside and somehow managed to spill all the french fries and nearly lose the hamburger as well. I picked up the french fries (some even got stepped on!), carefully inspected them (it's my food and I'm going to eat it!) and stuffed them into the fridge to be eaten later.
Well, I had to do something about the angry red battery icon on the dash. I could tape it over, problem solved? Nah, I shoveled out the driveway again and called the garage, left a message on voice mail. By noon I had a call back asking I leave the car there overnight. So after 1:00pm I turned the key in the ignition. It still lived! The red battery lit up. I still succeeded in getting it to the garage and getting a free lift back. They're going to check out the alternator they installed just two weeks ago. So I'm running low on milk.
But I'm not running low on hay. Danny surprised me yesterday with a delivery of six fresh 30 lb bales of 2nd cut timothy hay. I still have four bales from two years ago. The llama will eat those first. With ten bales total I have all I need until summer.
frith (frith) wrote2025-12-09 04:25 pm
frith) wrote2025-12-09 04:25 pmTheater Of The Mind
I have a hell of a lot of friction when it comes to spending money on things I might want. "Buy now pay later" has no hold on me, nor does it's friend, "pay in installments". I hate to owe money. The only BNPL situation I got myself into was for buying a house, AKA a mortgage, because, well, a house is _expensive_ and if I'm to live with a roof over my head, rent-to-own (the mortgage) beats rent-without-end, especially if it's somewhere not compatible with hand-rearing orphaned fawns. (Is it me or do I use a _lot_ of hyphenated words? Some sentences just don't make sense if certain strings aren't hyphenated.) So anyway, I go to eBay, try to find the stuff made in China or India (free shipping!), browse and browse and browse and buy nothing. I don't have the shelf space, it's too expensive, it's not quite right, do I _really_ want that? And I close all the tabs and get nothing. Then I look at my tiny Bambi saucer of sparkly artificial rocks and I think, y'know, I'd really like an opal, and then it's back to closing tabs and buying nothing.
I'm still zookeeping in my sleep, working with a colleague who retired and died a decade ago, working in a section that was demolished two decades ago, dealing with coworkers who leave doors open (animals wandering reserved spaces, leaving piles of manure, knocking stuff over), hunting for golf carts parked who knows where, dealing with moody vet interns going from stall to stall collecting data or something, sorting trash. I'm not getting paid for this.
My parents ditched their old gas powered vehicle for an electric one. It's full of settings and gadgets. One thing it does is display all the nearest charging stations (which, unlike gas stations, are hard to find). Now if I were a gigantic multinational car manufacturer and I was itching to make even more money beyond just selling an electric car, I'd do the following: make locating a recharging station a monthly subscription service, only show recharging stations that pay a fee to be included on the map in the display in the car, get the recharging station chosen by the driver to pay a cut of the revenue it gets from selling the electricity, make the ability to accept "fast charging" a subscription service paid by the driver, play adverts non-stop during the charging process, make getting a full charge a subscription service, have "dynamic pricing" for the charge service based on either who is driving the car or if that fails, who owns it, also have "dynamic pricing" based on how low your car is on battery power (ergo, how desperate you are to get recharged), and finally, tweak the selection of charging stations so that by the time you get there you _will_ be desperate to get recharged, or risk the car dying for lack of power. Yep, better mouse traps, we get new ones every day. Oh, and expose the plethora of chips controlling every aspect of the car to the elements and to power fluctuations to ensure they fail frequently and require expensive replacements that only the dealer can provide. Do I want an electric car? Hell no, not unless it runs on an electric weed-eater motor from 1980 and self-charges via super efficient solar panels.
My Windows 10 laptop (boo! Hiss! Windows 10!) has been collecting more dust than usual. Not only does it suck all my bandwidth trying to update (can't turn that off) and keeps time like a cheap 50 year-old knock-off watch (probably update dependent), it was corrupting files on and refusing to stay connected to various of my USB keys, including a Verbatim one. Not exactly a no-name brand and they work just fine on my Win 7 laptop. I am leaning toward replacing the OS with Ubuntu (I've never done that before) but that requires a USB key and I'd like to first save the screen caps from that pony game and the hundreds of ComfyUI auto-pastiche images I'd saved to disk, something that would also require a USB key. Fortunately, I bought some cheap 32 GB USB 2.0 keys last week. I tried one on the laptop-from-hell and inexplicably, it worked! I should look for a tutorial and try to learn how to switch OS's.
One positive from the mouse-munched fiber-optic phone line was that I figured out that yes, despite it using my web browser to display the control board, ComfyUI is completely local to my Win 10 machine. Ergo, I can unplug my modem and use ComfyUI to generate huge-eyed alien horse images, without getting bothered with updates and a drain on my paltry bandwidth allotment. Cooking with free-falling robots is back on the menu! The auto-pastiche cake is a lie, but sometimes it looks good.
dagibbs (dagibbs) wrote2025-12-07 05:15 am
dagibbs) wrote2025-12-07 05:15 amYOW -> ORD -> SLC
Perhaps my last business trip?
Or not... stupid Chicago weather.
Or not... stupid Chicago weather.
