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captainsblogTwo things intersected over the weekend that wound up literally leading us nowhere. Our hope is that both situations are improving on their own.
There was a line of Vaguebooking in my last post about us possibly taking an unexpected out of town trip this past weekend. That came out of a conversation Eleanor had with my sister first thing Friday morning after I'd left for work. Both of them being retired, they tend have more time to catch up with each other than I do with Donna. My sister is halfway to age 79; she's a few weeks older than Donald Trump and they were born in the same Jamaica, Queens hospital. (I joke that had she only known, she'd have toddled over and Antonin Scalia'd him in his crib to save us all this suffering.) She's lived mostly on her own in a Binghamton suburb after her longtime boyfriend, husband and finally our mother all passed away in the 1990s. She's had some chronic health conditions but has kept up with the things that matter to her. For Eleanor, though, the "tell" was Donna revealing that she hadn't decorated her house for Christmas this year.
That merited a trip, or at least the offer of one. We spent Friday clearing our Sunday of chores, made arrangements for pet feedings, checking with one mutual friend to see if she thought it was a good idea (she did), and were ready to leave first thing Sunday morning. Donna, ultimately, was the one who declined: she said she was feeling better but just wasn't up to it. So we remained here for a mixed afternoon of sport (Bills won heroically, another team I'll get to later didn't), an early evening of music with a friend I'll do a later post about, and some catching up on shows we've been waiting to finish.
In the end, it was probably a good thing we didn't go this particular weekend, because the dog had some health questions of her own....
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Pepper's quarterly groom was Saturday afternoon. We'd postponed it a week after we spotted a nasty looking bug bite on her right rear flank. We wanted to make sure that it had healed, but also that there were no signs of anything lingering from the vermin itself. She's on an anti-tick oral med, but nothing is 100 percent, and right after the bite she started an occasional but painful-to-hear yelp connected, sometimes but not always, to her jumping off a bed or sofa. Her regular groomer got her in and out just fine, and all seemed well until Saturday night into Sunday morning.
Somehow, she got shut out on the wrong side of a shut bedroom door, and I, at least, was too unconscious in the night to hear her complaining about that. When I did get up and saw her out there, she seemed very shaky. Literally. It had also gotten much colder outside and our thermostat was down to 67F overnight, so the just-shorn puppy had cold on top of stress. Then the yelps returned. Eleanor dressed her in a "woobie" when she went on our Sunday walkies-
- and she seemed okay out in the still-cold outdoors. It continued for a couple of days; I turned the heat up and made sure her overnight access to human buttocks was not impeded, and she now seems okay. Still, having this come with other health issues going on among various species- and at the time of the anniversary of a loss as well as other friends suddenly reporting Rainbow Bridge visits of their own- made it more of an emotional health issue for the two of us than anything else.
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Then there are unrelated issues, all of which can probably be solved by a powerful enough rocket with a 93 million mile range. None of these have affected me or anyone under this roof in any meaningful way, but hearing about them just adds to the general sense of angst about the state of the world these days.
- A New Form of Money Laundering.
I've posted before about the cluelessness of Those Darn Millennials about their resistance to using oldschool things like paper checks. As recently as this weekend, a client complained about me not taking Venmo and having to go to his bank to issue one of those things:
Turns out the little brats are smarter than I thought.
The latest scam to hit this area involves the physical theft of physical checks from physical mailboxes. That link's probably paywalled, but here's the scrape of it:
Many residents in Hamburg and Eden dropped bills and checks into blue U.S. Postal Service mailboxes in October that never made it to their intended recipients. Thieves stole the mail, “washed” the checks and cashed them for larger amounts.
The stolen mail included school tax bill payments that were never received, resulting in the unsuspecting victims facing unpaid tax penalties and interest charges.
The good news is that law enforcement officials say they caught the thief last month, and the school tax-related late fees and charges for more than a dozen affected individuals were canceled in a unique act of the Erie County Legislature....
Mail carriers across the country have been robbed and injured for their master keys, or “arrow keys,” which can be used to open many blue, stand-alone mailboxes. Police have been inundated with complaints from local residents regarding the theft of mail and stolen, altered and diverted checks. Previously, a sting operation resulted in the arrest of mail thieves in Cheektowaga.
Law enforcement officials said they found a substantial amount of U.S. mail – some sealed and some open – visible in the rear passenger area of the suspects' vehicle.
But these thefts were happening in the Hamburg area.
Schara recalled examples of checks getting an extra zero added to the end of the check amount or a cellphone bill for $56 getting reissued for $1,560 to different recipients.
...The County Legislature got dragged into the situation because residents who had their school tax checks stolen were being penalized with late fees and interest charges. While the towns and school districts agreed it was wrong for crime victims, who tried to pay their tax bills on time, to be forced to pay penalties, they had no authority to waive the charges.
That required a special resolution by the County Legislature under the Erie County Tax Act to allow the cancellation “of all fees, fines and interest penalties charged” to 13 taxpayers living in Hamburg, Eden, Lake View and Evans.
Our own school tax check was mailed, and received by the town, but often the scammers do NOT change the amount. You see "ohl check 1001 for $522.22 cleared!" and don't realize it didn't reach the right payee. This hit close to home- or rather close to office, shit hitting close to home being different /moreVaguebooking- when one of my coworkers had to spend most of the past two workdays on the phone with our bank because a bunch of her trust account checks just got checkwashed. Most egregious was one she wrote to the IRS to pay a client's tax bill. That check got altered and presented to be cashed at a branch of our bank on Staten Island; while they refused the transaction, they let the perp sashay out the door without catching him, and now they're threatening to freeze her entire account until the fraud is stopped. Good luck with that, dudes. I am now switching to electronic payment for anything I can, or making sure checks, whether business or personal, arrive at their intended destination.
And just to add to the fun, a client mailed me a check in the correct amount that I actually received. Only she made it out to the wrong firm, so rather than risk another trip through the postal washing machine, I drove to her home yesterday to pick up the replacement. Nice lady with cute dogs, so it was worth the drive.
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- Dueling Methodists.
Shit like this is why I left organized religion.
For those keeping score at home: "United Methodists" are members of the denomination formed in 1968 that, four years later, banhammered LGBTQs (before they were even called that) in their official doctrinal statements, but grew modestly tolerant of them in the ensuing decades. Resistance to any formal acceptance of marriages or of LGBTQ clergy came from loud pockets of bigotry insisting on persecution- who, by 2022, decided to take their toys and go home, becoming "Global Methodists."
After much infighting, the GMs were allowed for a short window to keep their local buildings and clergy pensions to proclaim the Word of Trump apart from United Methodism. A majority of the former UMC buildings I pass in Western New York have gone over to the Dark Side. I'd attended services and conferences and training sessions in some of them. The Globals have not yet recognized UMs as being in "full communion" with them, meaning United clergy cannot preach or perform sacraments within their buildings.
None of my three lifetime homes of membership have gone Global- Asbury First in Rochester being a proud Reconciling Ministries Network member and Williamsville United Methodist Church posting a welcome on its webpage to refugees from the bigots- but every time I pass either building, I wonder how it got to this.
Meanwhile, they've literally started shooting at each other.
You two fight among yourselves. I'll keep resisting evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
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I was also going to add to the solar rocket payload with complaints about (a) cable and streaming companies that won't let me watch my hockey team and (b) the hockey team they won't let me watch, but I think I'll save that for the next round of explaining the Vaguebooking.