Relentless. Ruthless. Dogged. (Also, Cats)

[captainsblog]

Some things move along as usual. Morning dog walks continue (with not-every-day afternoon bonus walkies with her just so I get a bit more exercise and the aminals don't drive me crazy begging for early dinner).  New music comes in the mailbox and through the internet. Poetry still happens on Wednesday nights, although now it's virtual on Zoom-



- and Zoey really seemed to enjoy it.  Wegmans was completely stand-up about honoring its promises: today's Eleanor's usual payday, and instead of the usual one-week waiting period for one-half disability payment to start, she got more than her usual amount today. Some of that was the retroactive $2-an-hour bump they gave all their employees for the month of March for working through this madness, the rest being her full hours for last week even though she wasn't there.

But other adjustments have had to be made. Work has been weird: hardly any new business coming in, and the few inquiries I am getting are from people looking to start immediate lawsuits (good luck with that).  So far, fortunately, I've been able to keep all the bills paid, business and personal, except I've taken advantage of the CARES Act provision and paused my payments on student loans for Emily's RIT for the time being.

I got two bits of news about lawyers from my past in just the past day: recall, I left Rochester in 1994 to join a firm here that went back to the 1920s. That didn't work out after a year or so, and for the next 11 years we continued to live here but I was of counsel to a Rochester firm headed by a former Nixon Hargrave partner.   I have now learned that the Buffalo firm recently dissolved (down to six lawyers at the end, three of them among the more than a dozen partners who hired me in 1994), and that the head of the Rochester firm, which I left in 2006 and which shut down a few years ago, just died of hospital-acquired COVID-19.  Still surviving are my original and current Rochester firms, and, well (for now), me.

Lawyers are hardly alone in having to adjust; after an initial inclusion of construction workers on the state's list of  "essential" businesses, the Guv amended that before the end of March to limit all but essential public-health and safety projects to whatever work was necessary to weatherize and otherwise secure other work in progress.  We'd had a neighboring house undergoing a significant renovation project, and we thought they'd paused it when they put weatherizing around the job last Thursday and didn't show up the next day.  Alas, no. Their new marching orders come Monday were to show up in full force and without masks, take the magnetic signs off their trucks so nobody would know who they were, and get right back to work:



When they showed up again on Tuesday, I put a rather unflattering post about them on my Facebook page, mentioning only their shorthand business name. I didn't put anything on their own social media, or on Yelp or anything of the sort, but my mere mention of them was apparently enough for some reputation protection service to send me a troll, who started yammering about why didn't you call them first instead of taking pictures of them from your garage? and people gotta put food on their table. I blocked him, and while I didn't blow them in to any of the authorities who could've whacked them with a $10,000 fine, apparently they got the message, because the past two days they've had just one or two guys out there sealing up the work.

We are allowed to do our own home repair work by ourselves, and I spent a good part of yesterday further tending to the Rat Motel. It seems to be close to shut down after we removed their birdfeeder food source and dug up most of their hidey-holes.  We also did our part to aid in the messaging on our front lawn:



But you don't live in Brighton anymore!, I hear you protest. Well: as you can see a bit more clearly in this closer-up shot of the sign in its native habitat, it's a riff on their rather tall town supervisor. Friends of ours there designed it as a Facebook meme just for a laugh, but enough Brightonians saw it and wanted it made into a lawn sign, so they ordered a bunch; everything over their cost is being donated to the town's emergency food cupboard, and at last report they were approaching $2,000 going to that worthy cause. I decided to be the first entrant in a contest to see how far these signs can travel from Twelve Corners.

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Enough relentless, then. On to the truth, Ruth;)

After posting about the family genealogy the other day, I went further down the rabbit hole of obituaries and family trees you can find at ancestry dot com, which our library (and many others) will be offering free access to during the current situation.  The sources of the tree I linked to the other day were my sister's own notes and the "Thomas Alva Edison Family Tree" on Ancestry (you may need a login to see that), but great-great-grandpa Nick also shows up in some other trees there.  It's an odd hit-or-miss process: diving down one rabbit hole (apparently we're somehow related to people named Fink /shaddap), I found my grandfather Frank, my uncle Arthur and his son Arthur (but not his son Michael), my own father and mother, and my sister Sandy but not Donna or me.  Apparently being dead is the ticket into this particular club.  But through the Finks, I also found reference to the "Aunt Allie" who was Mary Edison's niece and who I remember vaguely from some very early visits to Vermont.  That also brought up a Ruth Bryant, Allie's daughter, who was born the same year as my parents and who lived in Vermont until she died in 2009.  I have some not-as-vague memories of my parents corresponding with a "cousin Ruth," so that must be her. It doesn't show her having any kids, but maybe they, like us, just aren't dead yet.

None of Nick's other trees have led to anybody living. Yet.

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Before we get to the reigning cats and dogs, some moments of humor from the past few days. 

Sci-fi:



Me: Resistance is.... nah, fuggedabutit. You will be social distanced.

Beloved fantasy:



Me: Inconceivable!

And just plain ludicrous fantasy:



Me: Cambot! Gypsy! Tom Servo! Corrrrroooooooonaaaaa!

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Cats and dogs together:



Amazing, how Zoey can be one-fifth the dog's size and still manage to hog an equal share of the bed. But then, it may be Pepper who's confused.  Because we finally broke down the other night and watched that object of such critical snark and scorn:



And I must confess: we liked it.

In our defense:

 

 (1) This was the home release, which had some of the weirder CGI catshit edited out of it, and being on a smaller screen kept some of the kittypart details from being too obvious.

(2) We're prejudiced. We saw it on our honeymoon in the West End. I know every note of the score and every line of the book- and except for a couple of tense/gender changes, a few cuts and a couple of ALW/Taylor Swift additions (shut up, she's good, at least now that they removed the coke-spoon scene), it was roughly 80 percent faithful to the original musical.

(3) Yes, it's bonged out, but WTF do you think Eliot's audience thought of it when he wrote the source for the source?

(4) Just a couple of nitpicks with the text:
- The throwaway line that paired the Heaviside Layer's "good place" with a "bad place" called The Waste Land? Just don't.
- And that line in Dame Jude's final song: "first, your memory I'll jog/ and say: A cat is not a dog" can't be right. Our dog hocked up a hairball at 6 the next morning.  She then proceeded to grab the end of one of Eleanor's balls of yarn and drag it clear across two rooms. At this rate, she'll be using the catbox by the end of the week.

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About to head into the office for the first time in almost two weeks for more than a brief pop-in. Don't worry; I'll be safe and keep a supervisor's distance at all times.

ETA. A hot lead! I may have found Ruth's stepdaughter Cathy, a year older than my wife, still living in Vermont, possibly in the home I remember visiting. She wrote back and is sending Things:)  She also confirmed a story my sister told me, that our great-grandfather Charles was blinded while working in Edison's lab on one of the 1000 failed attempts at creating a functional light bulb.

Comments

[warriorsavant]

I'll see your Borg meme and raise you one https://www.reddit.com/r/risa/comments/cwfc5z/we_are_the_canadian_borg/