captainsblog | Summing Up 2020 So Far....

Seen yesterday in the Petsmart parking lot:

I was there to pick up a refill pack of Feliway, the pheromone diffuser product we buy to (mostly) keep Evil Cat from peeing all over the house. I’ve always pronounced it Feeliway, to sound like the appropriate “feline.” Eleanor has gone with Felliway, to sound like the appropriate (for Evil Cat) “felon.”

We had Brittany and Katie, two of the poets from the regular now-Zoom sessions, over for dinner last night, and we were talking about this difference of opinion. This morning, I looked up an advert for it (it's in this link), and it’s totally “Fell,” so it appears I was wrong and Eleanor was right. Although it IS a Brit commercial, and they do have trouble with simple words like “clerk” and “vitamins,” so you never know.

We thoroughly enjoyed their company. They're both a little younger than Emily and Cam, and have had more than their share of scary moments with health and family relationships and trying to make it mostly on their own in these dark days. It was lovely just getting away from the weekday grind with them for a few hours.

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That grind for me, roughly alluded to in some recent posts, ended last week with mixed results. I did confirm the new insurance for my practice at a substantial saving that is now paid in full, saving me either $2500 all at once or more like $3500 over time; and while the guy from the original company was initially resisting the breakup, once he saw how much he'd have to come down to come close to matching it, he came around and let me out of the old deal without any further penalty. I'm still waiting to wrap up the other deal for a client that had been promised for last week that would clear up a lot of 2019's remaining issues for us. He's an odd bird: he's impossible to pin down to a specific time and place to meet, but he never completely ignores me, either, and supposedly he was finalizing the necessary initial payment last Friday. Check back tomorrow to see how that went.

Also check back on how the daily decimation of the Post Office is going. On a much smaller but more reliable scale, I have one party who pays for clients on a regular twice-a-month basis. The bills are submitted electronically, can be verified as "paid" the day before the checks go out, and they have arrived like clockwork within two, in a rare case three, days after being mailed here from Ohio. Except this time: we were four days past the mailing date when they were sent on the 4th and nothing had arrived as of yesterday. Unless they've suddenly moved their processing to Utah or Uttar Pradesh or something, I have every reason to believe this is connected to the efforts announced last week to slow the mail so much that, oh, we could NEVER trust it for mail-in ballots (except in Florida):P

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Last night represented our first "entertaining" of the entire pandemic. In a few weeks, I may take it to the next step and actually Go Out: two musicians I adore are doing a live outdoor gig near here on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Both are respected and smart people who I trust not to lead us into a bad situation.

I also resumed my Support Your Local (or Not So Local) Musician effort with this CD which came last week:

I online-"met"Dave Rowe through Stacey, the First Mate on his good sailboat Stinkpot; she had friended me through a mutual friend and I followed their 2019-20 journey through the "Great Loop"- a defined (mostly) inland waterway through (mostly) the US which almost brought them along the Erie Canal near here last year. As they finished their trip in the early days of COVID, Dave was not able to play at gigs along the course, so he did some virtual work and also offered up his back catalog; from it, Stacey recommended this one to me, and I now to you.

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Today has been mostly chilling. The patio project is on hold until all the utilities traipse through and mark their underground lines with spray paint and flags; the gas company came through yesterday right before company arrived, but others need to check in. We've both been reading Christopher Moore's bizarre adaptations of The Bard: Shakespeare for Squirrels is his latest which I got a sweet Kindle deal on last month, and I got the two priors, Fool (mostly Lear but with the occasional Mackers thrown in) and Serpent of Venice (exactly what you think it's primarily spoofing), out of the library.

Our Dog Church today was to a Trail With No Name:

This is another portion of the former Lehigh Valley line which has been turned into a more formal town trail/park a few blocks to the east, At the point we join it, it moves toward, and eventually runs parallel to, the 290 expressway that we can hear each night from our home.

It was originally named the "Power Line Expressway" for its proximity to these, and the highway and the adjacent-to-it Big Blue Water Tower from previous park-ing can be vaguely seen off in the distance.

We got not quite as far as the point where the trail runs right behind our street; we decided to head back once we saw this warning:

SPOOOOON!

Somebody had put some wooden sculptures of dinosaurs along the path:

It turned out to be fitting because one of our dogparents had been out to a drive-in last night with her family for a double feature that typifies this year of COVID: Jaws, and Jurassic Park.

Because what could possibly go wrong? Sheesh.