♫Mistakes, I've Made a Few, But then again, Too Few to Mention....♫

[captainsblog]

That's not quite the lyric, but I try to do things My Way;)

I'm in between appointments at the moment, or rather between a broken 1:00 appointment and a promised 2:00 one which will fortunately be on my way out of Rochester and back home.  All I've accomplished so far is depositing one check, answering about 15 emails mostly with frustration because someone has been nonresponsive or uncooperative, and finding myself unable to access the Rochester office server or even send emails from my own laptop.

So I'll resume the thread of Mistakes from last week. Here are tales of three recent ones, which either worked out well or at least ended their mistaken-ness.

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Last Friday, aka the Third That Was Sortof The Fourth, after we'd been out slogging round the yard for the morning,  I was jonesing for a burger- which would have been my first since the ill-fated Whopper bite that took out a crown two Saturdays prior. I drove to what I thought was the nearest Burger King at Main and Bailey. This turned out to be more of a Burger Hallucination: that spot's been a Dunkie's for at least a decade.

I thought some more, and figured out that the nearest actual BK to that corner was on the Boulevard- but hey! That one is just before Ye Olde Vitamin Shoppe- that purveyor of health on the site of our fair city's short-lived Krispy Kreme outlet. I'd been meaning to stop over there anyway, since Wegmans has been out of our preferred-dose supply of Vitamin D3 all week- apparently it's the Bleach of the Month among the COVIDiots- but when I went in, they had the gelcaps in stock and in our preferred dosage:) Best of all, when I got home, the burger didn't break anything this time!

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Later that weekend, we had more fun with technology. I am pretty savvy about tech things, but at times I am the walking definition of “PEBCAK.” I can figure out fairly complex installation instructions, but often get stuck at the stage of “It works better when you plug it in.”

This weekend, I outdid even that.



Behold the brand new 2020 era boom box. We got it largely for that cassette player so we can listen to and even convert (thanks, Scott!) old tapes; but it also has Bluetooth, decent speakers to play from other sources, and an internal chargeable battery, so no blowing through 8 D-cells at a time.

Over the weekend, I was afraid we had wrecked the cord on it. I plugged it in, and could not get it to turn on when I switched it to the Bluetooth position, no matter how much I jiggled the cord. But the weird part is, as soon as I unplugged it, it piped right up with “Bluetooth pairing!” It continued to do this, no matter how many different outlets I plugged it into.

Finally, yesterday I discovered the magic solution. It has, of all things, a separate on/off switch, which does not turn the unit off when it is on battery. One flick, problem solved.

“Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard,” signing off:P

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Most recently, I came even closer to breaking something, but it wound up working out okay:)  I was fumbling around on my dresser this morning for something on top of it, and managed to upend a little wooden box which is the repository of about 17,000 old business card/credit card size items. They all fell to the ground, to appropriate curses.

There’s only maybe five of them in there that are still useful, but I muddled through, picking bunches of them up and putting them back.   It holds most of my pack rat collection of things that size- expired credit cards, old work IDs for both of us, my one and only ever-issued union card from Modell's, my last-issued library cards from both East Meadow (punchcard type, barcode added to it right before I left) and Brighton (apparently still the kind in use), various ancient Board of Elections certificates, and wallet-size school pictures of Emily, my nieces and at least some kids I can't even identify. But I also found a $25 Wegmans gift card in there. I figured I probably had a few pennies left on it, and tried to check online, without success. (Pro tip: Wegmans itself does not have an online thingy to check, but lots of supposed third-party sites will "check your balance" for you if you key in the 16-digit code from the card.  I'm betting in most cases those sites will drain the balance in nanoseconds and report to you, too bad, balance zero.)

Just for giggles, I took it with me to the store, and the thing was fully loaded!  It got me a full grocery order yesterday and the rest will take care of tomorrow's lunch!

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Right, off to the 2:00 and then home. Hopefully no more mistakes will be made- good OR bad.