Could be worse....

[captainsblog]

Or could be hurricaning,  more to the point.  Traces of Isaisis have reached the edge of our region and it's been coming down steadily since, oh, right around the time I left the Rochester office to go file some stuff.  Fortunately, I have just one more stop before I can get headed home and away from this portion of it; I was supposed to have a client meeting here at 2, but they begged out of it within half an hour of my pulling into the parking lot. I'm rescheduling, but for a phone appointment; fool me once and all that.

One of the two things I was waiting on for an improved August is just about confirmed: Company Y got back yesterday with a final confirmed commitment and quote. It was a little higher than their original one, for reasons I totally understood, but it still comes in at barely a third of that Company X was proposing to charge and, still, close to only a quarter of what X was going to charge if I'd wanted to finance the cost of their insurance over time.  (Y also offered that option, but it would have added less than $100 of cost to do so, and their total outlay is so low in comparison that I am going to pay the whole thing upfront just to avoid the bookkeeping on doing it monthly.)  I left word with the bad news with my salesman from Company X, who is not taking the big breakup well. I'm sure he's going to try schmoozing me into a better deal with him; my feeling on that is, dude, you had a whole year to sell me a more reasonable product, told me this year's increase was Take It Or Leave It.

Bye, Felicia.


The other August-improver should be falling into place today, but I'm not going to jinx it.

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Just a few puppy pix from this weekend: we were down to two of us for the day, so we wound up at nearby Amherst State Park:



The grrls, right before their big breakup. Theirs wasn't permanent, though: Ursula just loves to go running off and getting lost in this park, and this Sunday was no exception. First, we crossed a bridge over Ellicott Creek:



Right, that one. The bridge was lined with these objay darts, which I hadn't seen here before:



Not quite the Pont Des Arts yet, but you gotta start someplace.   As did Ursula, finding her way onto the other side of the fence that divides the park (formerly the grounds of a nunnery) from the modern Motherhouse they moved the few remaining sisters into:



Pepper was just as determined to find her own way, but on our side of the fence:



But in the end, the paths converged, and the band was back together until next Sunday.

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For entertainment since last weekend's cheery film festival, we watched Radioactive, the biopic of Marie Curie. Rosamund Pike is fabulous in the role, but it had a rather odd sequence of future events interspersing its biography, which itself was quite a bit less than historically accurate. And speaking of Pikes, I finally got caught up with the two aired seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, which prominently features the Enterprise's then pre-Kirk captain in a major role. He also appears in several of the Short Treks that were aired during the first two seasons, 15-ish minute side stories featuring one or two of the series characters (and occasionally entire one-offs not involving any).  At least one of these worked its way into a prominent part of the Season 2 Discovery arc, so I guess they expect us to be following them.

At least in space, no one can hear you scream gets rained on.