You Can Love Whoever The Hell You Want

By | September 8, 2018
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Carole and I marched in the 2018 Burlington, Vermont Pride parade today. We’re allies of those in the LGBTQ movement and supporters of the fundamental right of all persons to love whomever the hell they want. We’re happy and proud that droves of Vermonters came out to cheer and support and to march in the parade itself.

We marched with a group of parishioners and ministers from local United Church of Christ (Congregationalist) churches, including the minister from our local church here in Richmond, Vermont, Katelyn Macrae.

Love is love. If you have time to spend telling other people who they can love, you need to take a hard look at where your life is going.

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The Most Russian Thing Ever

By | August 31, 2018
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Carole and I went on a cruise of Baltic countries between August 18 and August 27, starting in Copenhagen, Denmark and stopping off in Berlin, Tallinn, St Petersburg, Helsinki, and Stockholm. We took lots of photos, which we shall in due course inflict on you.

But I wanted to share a quick little anecdote while it’s fresh in my mind:

Carole and I went on a small-group bus tour of each city we stopped in. And in each city (except Stockholm) the bus tour included a hot lunch in a local restaurant. We got alcohol with every meal — sparkling wine several times over, beer in Germany and Estonia, and vodka in Russia. Our first Russian meal was at a elegant little restaurant called “Troika” (see photo above) the legendary home of an evening cabaret that we didn’t get to stick around and see. They served us vodka in little shot glasses along with plates of Russian bread, salad, meat, potatoes, and dessert. (We ate a LOT of potatoes in Europe. Every hot meal included them.)

Some of our party didn’t want their vodka — not everyone follows the Russian model of banging down shots of vodka straight with every meal. But I was game, and reached out to take mine, and promptly knocked it over. (The tables were pretty crowded and all our utensils and glasses and things were packed in pretty tightly.)

Everyone around me gasped, automatically assuming that spilling one’s vodka was a major Russian faux pas. But I noted that the tablecloth was well-nigh impermeable and far from soaking through, the vodka was sitting there in a compact puddle, minding its own business. So I grabbed a piece of bread, sponged up as much vodka as it would hold, stuffed it in my maw, grabbed another piece of bread, and repeated the process.

So there I was, frantically soaking up spilled vodka right off a tablecloth with a hunk of bread. I looked up at Carole and the other tourists sharing our table and said “Um, this is, like, the most Russian thing ever, isn’t it?”

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Random Memories: Getting Married

By | August 30, 2018
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When Carole and I got married back in 1997, we started getting tons of phone spam from people wanting to sell us stuff. Apparently Durham County, NC routinely sold a list of newlywed couples to marketers (some of them referenced this fact) and we were the unwitting beneficiaries. So we changed our phone number to avoid getting eight to ten calls EVERY EVENING from people trying to sell us on stuff that newlywed couples apparently were deemed to need (aluminum siding, baby supplies, you name it).

And the phone company happily gave us the number of a MAJOR, um, “credit risk” — let’s call her “Tammy” — who had been using the number up until a week or so previously. We started getting dozens of calls from her creditors daily, way into the evening, sometimes in the middle of the night.

We also started getting calls from “Tammy’s” mother, who clearly didn’t believe that we didn’t know where her daughter was or that her daughter was in any way doing shady stuff that would have Guido and Nunzio and every other debt collector in a five-state radius out looking for her.

I’d always heard that phone companies didn’t reissue phone numbers for X months, but clearly that wasn’t the case here. Nice fresh debts, references to conversations “last week”, you name it. It was useless trying to tell people that we were not the “Tammy” they were looking for.

So we had to change our number again. We asked very very politely for a number that hadn’t been in use for at least six months and this time around all went as one would hope. No weird calls other than those from our friends.

(All this was on top of the power company getting us confused with another customer in our apartment complex who was moving out. When we got back from our honeymoon, our power had been off for about a week. Yeah.)

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Travel and appetite

By | August 17, 2018
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Some days when I’m traveling, my appetite gets extremely erratic. I’m not sure why…my current theory is that my digestion slows to almost nothing when I have to sit for like twelve hours without moving, and it may take several days to get moving again.

Anyway, we’re in Copenhagen, and I’m having one of those days. We got up and ate at the restaurant buffet (and I ate too much, as I always do at buffets). Then we went to Tivoli Gardens, and walked around looking for something to do. Unfortunately, there were two things to do: ride carnival rides, or eat at the restaurants. And I couldn’t work up an appetite for anything.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a 7-Eleven to get some drinks. They had something under the counter called “Raw Balls” that caught our eye, so we bought 3 of those, and I ate one and a bite of another.

So that’s my total food consumption today: breakfast, and one-and-a-fraction Raw Balls.

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Bah. Bots.

By | August 11, 2018
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Am I the only person who hangs up on an incoming phone call the moment you hear that pause at the start that means that a predictive dialer is looking for a human to take over?

You’d think they’d game it to make the system make a little noise during that pause, like a cough to make you think the person who’s calling is there, but momentarily inconvenienced. Admittedly, we’d all learn to recognize those little tricks as well, but it’d work for a while.

I was sitting at my desk at home this morning when the land line rang. Absent-mindedly, I immediately answered it.

Pause. Classic predictive-dialer dead-air sound.

Then a human voice came on the line: “Hello?” Without even thinking I hung the phone up. 

Some time later I tried to check the caller ID to see who I’d hung up on, but for some reason the call wasn’t listed. Perhaps it’d been too short in duration to be captured.

I idly wonder who it was… but I don’t really care. They didn’t call back. Can’t have been very important.

(I’d turn off our land line entirely but having it is how we get DSL.)

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Unread Email

By | August 10, 2018
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  I work for a software company. I travel all over the USA consulting with and training our customers. As a consequence of this, it’s not uncommon that I get a glimpse of someone’s email — usually because they’re connected to the projector and happened to need to go into their email to look something up. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to restrain myself from going “you have HOW many unread emails?” Earlier this week, I was at one such customer site. And one of their staff did exactly what I said above — launched their email while connected to the projector. And right there on the screen, next to their inbox, was the indicator that they had 20,000 unread emails. Twenty freaking thousand. And this was otherwise a very competent, intelligent person who was a pleasure to work with. We’re not talking some computer-challenged person who calls the Web “the google” or thinks that everyone still uses America Online. I wanted to say “you know, it might be an idea to just mark everything older than a month read, and get a fresh start, so you can actually use the unread indicator for its intended purpose: letting you know you have new email.” But I didn’t. Wouldn’t have done any good. There are two types of people in the world: hoarders and non-hoarders. Even in the world of email. A hoarder is terrified of getting rid of anything because it might be important some day, and that includes all those unread emails. The idea of marking everything over a month old — or, heck, over six months old — “read” would be in their eyes equivalent to tossing out the chemical process for turning lead into gold. Now, if you’re reading this and you have lots of unread email in your inbox, you may not fall into the “hoarder” category. You might just get a lot of email, or you might be one of those people who feels that every email deserves a deep and personal and well-thought-out response. I try to keep my inbox all but empty. In my personal email, I have Gmail rules to file new emails to folders, and I use the “is:unread” search to review them. If I look at them and go “You know, I can live without that” I just mark ’em read. I recently started unsubscribing to every mailing list I’ve signed up for over the years because, in the sober light of day, almost none of them really added any value to my life. As for personal emails from actual humans, it’s generally not hard to identify those that do need a response from those that don’t. And I just don’t let myself fall behind on those. As a result, the only stuff that ever winds up in my “inbox” folder proper is stuff from people I’ve never heard from before, which therefore don’t hit any of my rules. And I file those, and set up rules if appropriate, and my inbox goes back to its pristine emptiness. As for work emails, well, I’m terrified that I might miss something critical… which in my job, might mean that I show up 3,000 miles away from where I’m supposed to be. I have Outlook rules that file all the corporate heads-up messages and “we’ve hired a new VP for a region of the company’s operations you’ve never heard of and will never interact with in any way” emails to a folder where I can happily mark them read and ignore after a quick glance. Other stuff gets automatically sorted into folders by customer, so I can quickly review everything relating to a given customer without having to go searching for it all. If I encounter something that’s important that I be able to find quickly, I don’t leave it unread — I flag it using an Outlook category like “Critical” or “Project Code” or “Really Important To Not Forget”. And then I have search folders where I can quickly go to those messages. And when they’re no longer important, I remove the flag. Marking things unread just because you think they’re important is so … weird. How can you then tell the true unread stuff from the stuff you’ve read before and just need to be able to locate quickly? Which, incidentally, you can’t because it’s all mixed in with several hundred or thousand other real unread email messages? Makes no sense to me. But on the other hand, there are people out there who eat dirt and people out there who keep sewer rats as pets. It takes all kinds to make a world.

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Blood

By | July 21, 2018
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As of today, I am a lifetime ten-gallon blood donor! (And our little Red Cross spokes-ape, Hemo, is very proud of me!)  

 

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Ick

By | July 21, 2018
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There is nothing — and I mean NOTHING — more pleasant than stumbling across a bag of old this-and-that (miscellaneous camera gear, and suchlike) which cats have taken to peeing on. For months, as far as one can tell. Our cats have been sabotaging us by going in places we really would rather they not — but this is probably the worst I’ve run across yet. The stench of concentrated, aged … well, you can imagine. I think we’ve got a fix for it, though. A week or so ago I finally convinced Carole to go back to Pestell cat litter, which we used to use, in place of World’s Best, which she preferred. Carole’s been unwilling to consider a change (she is nothing if not a little bit stubborn) but we’ve had too many “they’ve did WHAT WHERE?” incidents lately. A week ago we did a trial run of Pestell in one of our many litter boxes, and in that time, the cats have used that one box almost to the exclusion of all others. Carole likes World’s Best because it produces less dust and because it seems to be less heavy for the same volume of litter. I like Pestell because the cats seem to like Pestell. He who ignores cat preferences does so at his peril. Given the results over the last week, we went out today and bought five more bags of the Pestell. If I’m right, these little peccadilloes should soon be a thing of the past. But for now, I’ve got some very smelly old camera parts (underwater diving case, etcetera) airing in a corner of my office. (Fortunately, the bag they were in took the worst of it.) Ick.

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They’re heeeeere!

By | July 14, 2018
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“Take Steps In Their Shoes” 2018

By | July 13, 2018
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Hey, everyone! “Steps To End Domestic Violence” (our local Vermont non-profit supporting victims of domestic violence, as the name probably indicates) is holding its annual fundraising walk, “Take Steps In Their Shoes“, on October 6. I’m registered to participate and I’d greatly appreciate your sponsorship. All funds raised go toward the fight against domestic violence and in support of victims. You can sponsor me here: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/steps-to-end-domestic-violence/take-steps-in-their-shoes/carole-the-otter-furr If your employer matches donations, that’s even better! Their tax ID is 03-0283657 if you need it for your matching.    

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