Hi! I'm Buhweat! Amemba me?

[captainsblog]

Yeah, it's been a full week without anything here. And what a week:P  Nothing really bad, just an endless series of life's little annoyances.

Sunday was supposed to end in a pair of celebrations: the Bills finally overcoming their postseason nemesis in KC, and I would be watching it with friends at a house concert honoring the memory of a recently departed Buffalo musician.  First came word that Maria was calling off her event due to her own just-onset illness. So I watched from home as Patrick Mahomes and his Merry Bands of Receivers and Refs once again pulled off a fourth quarter comeback and a one-score victory for the 248th time this season. I don't know what hurt more- that Mahomes is the son of a former Mets pitcher, or that the Bills traded the draft pick to KC that they used to pick him a year before we got Josh Allen.

Speaking of the Mets, I felt much the same way about them when they were eliminated one game short of the championship event by a team that seems to get all the breaks:

This was the transition year.

No big signings. No major re-signings. One counted-on player, purportedly back-from-injury, right back on and off the shelf. A dependable final play closer headcasing at the worst possible times. Our MVP candidate mostly ignored by the national media. A tendency to fall behind early and force heroics to even have a chance.

But enough about Milano and Bass and Josh and the rest of the Bills. That was even more the Mets script for 2024 with Senga and Diaz and Lindor. Yet despite so many of those slow starts ending badly, we went from 0-5 and 11 games under to being one of the last three teams standing. Mostly with guys who were new at, even during, the season. While LA spent on the frees and Freeman, it was Vientos and Iglesias and Grimace?!? that made the Dodgers fly from LA to New York and back four times in ten days.

Almost frightening to realise how close the two paths seem. The Bills never even sank below .500 or out of at least a tie for the division lead, but an early two-game skid (more like a 19 game losing streak in baseball) convinced all the pundits outside Buffalo that Miami and even the Jets were the better teams in the AFC East. Miami and the Jets, who the Bills swept along wth New England, their entire home schedule and all the rest of their games except one road game in LA and a meaningless final "week off" for most of their starters.  Buffalo countered Vientos and Iglesias with Shakir and Benford, and Bills Mafia brought a song by the Killers, "Mr. Brightside," to have the kind of organic infleuence that Grimace brought to the Mets' psyche.

In the end, though, "Mr. Brightside" got replaced by "Always Look on the Bright Side," and we once again Wait Till Next Year.

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That's a long time to wait, but I'm just happy to have made it out of the other annoyances of late January.  Beginning first thing Monday morning, this graphic has been in our lives:



That was the message passed to me by Eleanor's car first thing Monday when I set off to a day on the road to Rochester. It said the drivers side door was open. It was not open. A good slam did nothing to clear it. Soon as I shifted into reverse, the car got madder and blinked and beeped and kept that message constantly on the dash. I had just enough time to switch cars and make my voyage in the Smart car- on a day with high wind warnings that blew the poor thing all over the travel lanes.

We both checked the manual (nothing), online forums (almost as little) and both our regular mechanic and the dealer we go to; the car's due for February inspection and they can see if they can figure it out tomorrow when I bring it in for that. Our actual Hyundai dealer couldn't even look at it until the 26th. Of February.  You keep using that word, "service." I do not think it means what you think it means.

The problem is almost certainly along this edge of the driver's door-



We've sprayed the latch with WD-40, blowdried the contacts, and removed and jiggled those little rubber baby bumpouts you can see just below the latch and to the left of the red reflector.  Nuthin. Meanwhile. that display blocks all the other readouts (of mileage, range and other warning) unless the car is stopped, and we've had to turn off the interior light switch and headlights from their "smart" default positions so the damn thing doesn't drain the non-hybrid battery.  The beeping goes away after about 10 seconds and stays off unless you come to a complete stop, so I've become an expert at the California roll (this one, not the sushi one) to keep it down to a dull roar.  Hopefully the car gods will shine on us tomorrow and the stupid thing will come back to its sensors.

Meanwhile, the Smart car's getting a lot more use, and somehow the check engine light has stayed off the whole time.

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Other annoyances have come and gone in the midst of this:

* One fine morning this week when I took her beeping car to court locally and then to the dealer, Eleanor stopped over after I got back to my crime-infested office (more about that later) and tried to fiddle with it herself while it was parked outside. She was able to unlock it with the Onstar-like service we got free at first, kept at $200 or so a year after that, but had just decided to cancel before its expiration this month.  She resorted to that because the extra keyfob for the car was dead.  I stupidly took it on myself to try replacing the battery in it. Once again, the manual had nothing on how to do that, and the only online video I could find was for a different Hyundai model that did not open the same way and had the battery go in completely opposite to the way ours needed.

* She, fortunately, fixed that problem on her own when I was at work the next day, but she promptly came up with two computer problems of her own. First, her laptop power supply appeared to be nonfunctional, and the replacement she found, and I promptly ordered from Best Buy, didn't have the right tip for it. Then we discovered that the problem was with the other end of the cord- the one connecting from the transformer to the AC outlet- and we didn't need the whole replacement supply after all. Next, she turned on her laptop yesterday morning and discovered that Google Chrome was gone, the saved websites on her desktop all displaying Microsoft Edge icons.  I dug down into her hard drive and it wouldn't let me open the program from where it was stored.  In a fit of defiance, I opened Edge to use Bing to download a clean version. Clippy was none too happy about this: BUTBUTBUT MICROSOFT EDGE IS BUILT ON THE SAME TECHNOLOGY WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO....

Shut up, ya damn paperclip. Once reinstalled, Google instantly resynced to her own history and open tabs, but hers still won't display its icon-



- on the taskbar, desktop or anywhere else.  I still have it on mine, but I may not yet have been fed the Windows update that created this Microsoft mischief.

* Not to be outdone by tech woes, my body decided to get into the act. Overnight Thursday into Friday, my left ankle started going off. Maybe not like the Fourth of July, but certainly like a more minor civic holiday. No idea why: I hadn't fallen, overexerted at the gym the previous day, or eaten anything that seemed likely to aggravate that kind of pain. The only possible cause was a sudden uptick in the temperature that gave us a butt-ton of rain all day Thursday. I took some extra pain meds, hydrated, and took it relatively easy all day Friday and by yesterday morning it had gone back to whatever circle of hell it had decided to visit from.

* Finally, the plumbing decided to join the chorus. We use a maintenance drain treatment that they recommend doing on the first three days of each month: warm the pipe with hot water, pour a few ounces of this goop down, then flush with warm water.  This time, the "warm the pipe" step produced an actual backup in the sink, so we switched to a more powerful drain bomb. ITS instructions were to pour a lot more of our goop down, wait 30 minutes, then flush with hot water for five.  I poured and watched the near-full sink just sit there for that half hour. The flushing with hot water appeared to be useless as well- until after a minute or so, the level started going down and staying there.

On the whole, then, we've dodged more bullets than the one that hit the door sensor, so I shouldn't complain so much.

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Besides, you get better results when a judge does the complaining.  In December, I posted about the check-washing kerfuffle one of my co-workers here has been trying to deal with.  This morning's online paper finally picked up on the story now that a retired local jurist has been hit by it- from our office's very own mailbox:P

A retired judge learned the hard way about the theft of mail from the stand-alone blue mailbox in her Snyder neighborhood – just one of many now apparently compromised.

She wants others to avoid her trouble.

Lisa Bloch Rodwin went to the U.S. Postal Service collection box on Jan. 8 to mail a $30 personal check to an urgent care center for a medical co-payment. A week later, her bank called to ask if she wrote a $2,220 check. That came as a sour surprise, because she did not write a check like that, at all.

Someone altered her $30 check into one for the much larger amount and to a woman she never heard of before. The retired Erie County Family Court judge became another victim among the hundreds in the Buffalo area who have had the envelopes containing checks they put into the blue collection boxes stolen, altered and cashed, rather than delivered to their intended recipients.

...In October, three suspects were charged with stealing mail after postal investigators set up overnight surveillance at one of the locations regularly targeted by thieves: the Cayuga Branch Post Office, near the Walden Galleria. Four blue collection boxes are in front of the facility.

About 1:30 a.m. Oct. 2, law enforcement spotted an SUV enter the post office’s driveway from Cayuga Road and drive up to the blue mailboxes outside the post office, according to court records. The SUV stopped next to the back side of the row of blue collection boxes, where each blue collection box contains a locked access door for Postal Service employees to remove the mail for processing. Two people got out of the SUV, and one of them appeared to use a key to open the door and remove the contents from the boxes. The other person acted as a lookout.

Cheektowaga police later intercepted the SUV, finding a substantial amount of U.S. mail – some sealed and some open – in the rear passenger area. Police also found an arrow key on one of the suspects. The defendants have been released from custody with conditions.

Bloch Rodwin’s check was stolen in January from a different collection box.

She said a manager at her bank told her that 10 customers had their checks stolen from the drive-up blue collection box in a parking lot near the intersection of Main Street and Harlem Road in Amherst.



Yup, that's ours. We never put anything in there anymore with checks, personal information or anything else we reasonably want to arrive at its destination. Coworkers take the outgoing mail to the post office twice a week, and I drop off or otherwise deliver anything that doesn't fit that schedule.  Our property taxes are due later this month and that check's going straight inside to the town clerk.

Because I don't mind Buhweat Wookin Pa Bub, but damned if I want him looking through my tax records.