Under Pressure

[captainsblog]

(Doom doom doom dee dee doom doom....)

Nothing like starting your Monday morning with the idiot light on your car telling you to check tire pressure. At least the humidity broke and the rain held off so I didn't do my rolling round in the driveway in a mud puddle. It did eventually pour at the end of the day after Eleanor got home, which just added more to her already fun day.

Starting the day that way did put me in a bit of a snarky mood, which I took out on a company which was giving a new client a hard time. He'd paid for a "fully insured vehicle service contract" when he bought a used truck, which they then promptly reneged on. I sent them this; anytime you can quote Inigo Montoya before lunchtime, your day is bound to get better:




Around that time, I was also getting reports from home about Eleanor trying to track down a new heating element for our ancient electric oven. We've been going to a walk-in place not far from home, which had been pretty reliable, but for some reason the woman behind the counter was just giving her a hard time about the part. We don't have that, she told her, while Eleanor could see some hanging on the wall that looked similar. Why don't you just go on eBay? Sure, lady, and maybe we can find you a #$%%& MASK on there, which you're not wearing while serving the public.  Eleanor's taken the project to heart and is going to track SOMETHING down to do the job.

Then she went into work for the first time in almost two weeks after getting the negative COVID test. Some things had changed since she was last there; her store no longer has the single queue with monitoring, cleaning is done less often, and more COVIDiots are coming in, or at least they're being emboldened by the deniers at the top of the chain.  She was in pretty rough shape by the time she got home right before 6.

Fortunately, I was in better shape, since the tires wound up being not a big deal. I took the car back to where I'd just had the snow tires (finally) removed last month, and they refilled three of the four that had gone down a little since then.  I next headed to the Wegmans on that side of things.  As I walked back to my car, I saw this Ken/Karen of a parking job. By the time I took this picture, someone had very carefully placed a shopping cart right up to the Subie and tied it to its side-view mirror with a plastic produce bag:



As I pulled out, I had the sheer joy of seeing the guy come out and ask, “who did this to my fucking car?”

Don’t know, dude. Could’ve been anybody. You’re just lucky he didn’t have any zip ties.

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Eleanor felt the need for an extended Buddhist chant after all of her day's bad experiences, and asked if I had anything to do while she did that. Well, yeah: Tax Day is now Wednesday of this week, and after finishing some of the Big Ugly business calculations last week, it was finally time to sit down and figure out Da Damages. 

My assistant kept me from getting too upset as the numbers came across:



I'd miscalculated the amount of energy credit we're getting for Eleanor's plug-in car, and that added about $2,500 to the bill all by itself.  It's big and ugly, but unlike last year, we talked about it this morning and we've gone over the different ways we can handle it.  If all falls the right way, it could be paid off by the end of the month. Otherwise, we have various things to tap into.

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We ended the night watching Charlize Theron's latest film, Old Guard. I'd read nothing about it beforehand, so had no idea what the historical background of "Andy" and the others was.  Speaking of historical, I also discovered that we were quite timely in waiting until Friday to finish watching the stream of Hamilton; July 10th was the 214th anniversary of The Duel Where It Happened.

As for the history coming out of 2020, our friend

uninvitedcat sent me a link to this video, which is becoming quite the rage in all senses of the word across the Pond:

 

Watch on YouTube

Oh, and Grammarly can go F ITSELF, too, while we're at it:P

 

Comments

[uninvitedcat]

I’m wandering around the house singing that song to myself!