captainsblog | Part I: The Current State of Affairs....

This time, I'll begin with the State of Health. No COVID changes for the worse. We're both sore from a morning full of home maintenance fun, and Eleanor called in to our doc today on account of an unrelated condition, which she's just going to keep an eye on for now, since one of the possible causes of it is... stress.

GEE, YA THINK?!?

Another possibility, which has now come up in both of our respective diagnostic journeys of the past month? Diiiverticuliiiiiitissss! Anyway, she's still off work this week, so we'll see if it settles down.

No real changes in our routines from earlier postings. Wegmans has become more of a regular ritual, although each time there's a new layer of protection: these had been promised weeks ago, but finally arrived late last week.

The plexi shields still don't stop idiots from discarding their latex gloves and cart wipes on the ground of the car park, but it's a start. And those idiots are no smarter once they get IN their damn cars. Here, see the Morons on Parade on Saturday, all lined up to get to the one drive-up teller blocking the ATM lane I was trying to use:

Fortunately, checks are still coming in. Work has slowed in the past week, though; there was a flurry of inquiries about business bankruptcies, but little follow-through on them. I did my first conference call from home on this thing called Zoom on Friday, which went reasonably well for a screen full of #OKBoomers; most, like me, just turned the video off and displayed their name, while a few others just had their cameras pointed at empty chairs. This fairly new Internet Thing became all the rage very quickly, and that rage turned on them as the service became the subject of both major privacy concerns and "zoombombing" meetings with porn and racism. One friend tried pointing this out to me as I was installing the proggie:

Ray: And I just spent half an hour reading how Zoom is basically an open invitation to Hackercon.

Lisa: Yes! And if you don't have the settings right, perverts and racists will disrupt your meeting!

Ray: Well, this is a bar association meeting, so we've already got those....

(I told that joke to the room. Got my first baZoom-boom.)

That meeting time was also massively fun because, right as it was starting, my phone started getting bombed with email/text/voicemail about Eleanor's debit card. Even though she hadn't left the house all week, she did use it for a phone order late on Thursday, and by Friday morning, that card number had traveled the globe. Small change stuff showed up on the account- 4 bucks here to some garbled vendor, a zero transaction in Australia, and 24 and change at Amazon. I was on hold to the bank for almost exactly the length of the conference, but when it was done, her card had been canceled, all but the Amazon charge reversed if not declined in the first place. (I've done the paperwork to reverse that one, too.)

Friday night, I completed my first-ever remote execution of the standard package of Future Intentions Documents- will, power of attorney, health care proxy/living will- for a couple in Rochester. I now have a list of instructions for this which, if we're lucky, I'll never have to use again. (I'll still do the third document- the one you'll want to bring to hospital with you if things go bad- for anyone in NYS for no charge, long as you can round up the two witnesses for it.)

It's just a matter of time before other lines of work get into this:

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More Good Humor from the past few days:

Me: "Where's Judas? He took a gig delivering Doordash. Anybody got 30 pieces of silver for a tip?"

Me: Right!

And lest you think I'm going soft on Cossssbeeeee, a meme started circulating last week asking people to I Spy something on your camera that was green/orange/whatever.

I decided to turn this one into I Spy Something Rotting in Prison!

And you have to remember the Disaster Girl meme to get this one, but seeing #ItCanOnlyBeJared's evil eyes at one of those presser rallies last week, I could only conclude that the two were separated at birth:

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That maintenance work from yesterday? We got a call late Saturday that our neighbors on one side had seen rats running between his "deck" (and we use the term as loosely as the deck is constructed) and the remains of the planter on the front of our house nearest to them. He'd put out some traps but wanted to know if we'd do our part to cut off their eating and sleeping options.

Figure One: the planter as it was first thing yesterday. (Eleanor began knocking it down not quite three years ago.) Note the hole that was the probable front entrance of the Holiday Inn.

Figure Two: the same section, only with Not So Much Rat In It.

We've also removed the birdfeeder from outside our front window, dug up a can full of seed leavings that the varmints were going after, and put poison down in the general vicinity.

Our goal is to just get them out of our yard without infesting the neighbors. Maybe Jared is hiring....

(Part 2, turned into its own post after this one got too long, will be about Binged Things in these times, and particularly about things I learned about distant family ties in the past few days....)