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  1. My wife left the house today at 615am for a 9 something flight.  After attempting to take off twice they scrapped the flight & changed planes.  4 hours later sh finally got out!  Not a happy camper.

    My sister sent me a video of some dumb tourists in Hawaii taking the navigation app a little too serious.  They put a fun spin on this bad situation.  This is exactly how many of my friends & family sound!

    https://m.facebook.com/100070997841200/videos/underwater-valet-service-titanic-underwater-valet-samoancrab-mermaid/975906493542744/

  2. Fox News —

    After a dearth of encounters, last night one was yammering like crazy down the block at bedtime, and both nights before that had sightings that got our dog worked up.

    I also found half a snake in our backyard a couple of days ago. I’m not sure who was responsible for that.

  3. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the crows raiding my Easter/Spring wreath. I swapped it out for a wreath I purchased at Target. It was pretty plain, some greenery with lilac looking stems. Some House Finches decided it looked like good nesting material and destroyed it. I don’t know what has gotten into the birds around here lately. This has never happened before.

    • Has there been any new construction in your neighborhood lately? One of my sisters once told me that somewhat near her, but not next door, a developer cleared a swampy little grove of trees and put in three or four houses. The whole neighborhood was suddenly plagued by woodpeckers, because they used to use that little plot to peck out their mating calls, or pecks, and in desperation started pecking on the nearby houses. They eventually went away, but, according to her, woodpeckers get amorous when the sun sets so they’d be awoken at 2 am by a woodpecker or two pecking away at the gutter that ran along the roofline of their bedroom. Very “Mutual of Omaha Presents: Wild Kingdom.”

  4. The latest on-site week is in the books. I just realized tonight that what makes them so awful isn’t just how exhausting they are, but also that I’m super on edge the whole time I’m there. I mean, I’m not the most even keeled person anyway, but I’m constantly a half step from losing my shit for eight straight hours every day. If they’re planning to bring us all back full time (as I suspect they are when the install goes live next year) I’m going to have to seriously consider informing them of my CPTSD and threatening legal action if they don’t grant me an accommodation.

  5. I’ve been super exhausted all week. Not sure if it is the “cold”/CoVID affects but damn.

    I ended up sleeping from 8am today to 6pm with a couple of washroom breaks and I still feel a bit tired.

    My parents are calling me to help for the stupidest shit lately. Today it was about their car key fobs. They thought they needed to go to the dealer to “reset” them. I ended up at their place this morning and showed them no they didn’t.

    I did not expect a being stuck in the usual plot of an  “Everybody Loves Raymond” episode and it is even less funny in real life.

    I’m trying to make peace with myself when they call screaming about their microwave (pull the damn plug and plug it in again!) I keep telling myself that they’re getting old and I have to be a better son (not that I am a good son). On the other hand, I just wished my parents (mom in particular) weren’t so damn hapless with technology.

        • One of my biggest regrets in life is that my mother didn’t really live long enough to embrace the internet. She died in 2001, shortly before 9/11 (I’d love to know what she would have made of that) and considered the internet the sole province of scammers and smut peddlers. She used to tell me all the time, “Stay off of that internet.” “Mom, I have to go online as part of my job…” “You can just call the New York Public Library and they will answer all your questions. That’s what I do [in her town/my hometown].”

          I can kind of imagine what her online behavior with me would be like. One of her hobbies was reading obituaries, and every so often I’d return home and there’d be a letter from her with no note, just a clipping from the hometown newspaper that would be the obituary of my third grade teacher or whatever.

          Oh, I miss that woman every day.

          • It’s just sad and annoying at the same time while watching your parents decline knowing that is the fate I’m awaiting some 30 years in the future.

            That’s my parents (technophobic and anti-smut)

            Ironic because my dad’s 93 year old older brother won’t shut up on FB and acts like a teenager on his iPhone.

            • Oh, she was a force to be reckoned with. She adored Better Half, despite him being Black and male, because as she said to me more than once, “Hang onto him because he has smarts and has a bright future. Not like that other friend of yours [referencing one of my college boyfriends, whom I made the mistake of inviting to stay in The Ancestral Manse during a Christmas break when my mother and I were going through a particularly tense period when I divulged my plan to decamp to Germany.]”

              My mother was very strange in that way, and had kind of uncanny prescience. She met a lot of my pre-Better Half boyfriends and liked most of them. When I was a senior in high school I met an older guy (he was 24 to my 17 or 18) who had his own apartment where I would hole up in on weekends. She thought he was great. That college boyfriend whom she detested was extremely good looking and I loved him but he was very promiscuous, I later learned. He eventually contracted AIDS and died from it in the mid-90s. He didn’t pass it on to me, thank God, so the carrier probably met him after he left me. When I broke the news of his death to my mother, her only response was, “Well, are you surprised?”

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