Thanks for Nuthin!
Nov. 25th, 2020 04:03 pmAnd I mean that in the best of all possible ways.
My office here just closed. Eleanor leaves work within the hour, and for the next 36 hours, we are away from it all. No bird festoons the fridge. No gathering- not live or Zoomed or Skyped or Teamed. No Trot down Delaware, no Bills on the boob like last year.
Just us- and the five four-legged mooches, getting the same swill they get the other days of the year.

Zini is bonding with the dog, with Zoey, and of course with his brudda- who was a little off kilter the other day as we wrapped him in Baby Yoda swaddling clothes (but he seems fine now:)

- with Evil Cat being the only holdout, and Zini is perfectly fine running right up to HER and goosing her:).
Pepper also got two separate Parp! visits this week. First, with the usual gang, in Amherst State Park:

Here they are, for a team meeting;

Ursula. stalking a stray birthday balloon;

and me, rescuing her from it:)
Then this morning, I took my car over to the mechanic to book next week's inspection/snow tire appointment and have my current pair checked out for winterworthiness. (He says one more should do.) Since our former go-to dog park is blocks away from there, I let Pepper call shotgun and we headed over- as I hoped, it was less crowded than weekends and with more people than usual actually wearing masks besides me:

a few of them, the butt in the lower left belonging to our old pal Diesel;)

and a closer-up of Pepper meeting a few new Ridgeback frens:)
----
In between those visits, I made a longer trip on my own to the forbidden land of Rochester, aka Yellowzone National Park, to do things we can no longer do here in Orange Restriction Country. At least Monday, all of Rochester was still safe; parts of the city and some surrounding towns have since had their infection rates bump up to orange. But I took advantage while I could. First, an actual workout at the Pittsford location of my now-shuttered gym here. I then went to the office there for a 2:00 appointment that the clients screwed up (they thought it was the following day); while I waited for them to get out of work, I booked another online appointment to get my hair cut- and this time I was the screwer-upper, clicking on the wrong salon and being greeted when I arrived with a hearty chorus of "who the hell are YOU?!?" But they got me in anyway, the postponed appointment back at my office went fine if ending a little late, and the two remaining workdays this week have been quieter. I bought lunch for the office today, which was much appreciated as their real estate business continues to go gangbusters. The highlights of my workweek other than the one appointment? Monday;s was getting to read an actual cease-and-desist letter written by a Long Island lawyer to one of that office's clients....
a client who is, I swear, six years old. (She left her toys on the neighbor's lawn and made funny faces at him. Or something. I recommended answering it in crayon.)
... and then getting a call yesterday about a rather complex hearing I'd had scheduled for next week in one of my oldest ongoing cases, which probably was going to be postponed anyway due to live court proceedings being shut down statewide. The call was from the opposing attorney- or, I should say, the LATEST opposing attorney in that firm. He's the fourth they've assigned to it since 2008. As I told the third of them when I called him to wish him well, being assigned this file is kinda like auditioning to be the drummer for Spinal Tap; there's a pretty high risk of spontaneous combustion;)

----
We survived a minor miscommunication over the weekend which, now that it's fixed, is allowing me to post this. I noticed on Saturday that our internet speed was getting really slow. By Sunday, it had reached the point of hardly anything loading when asked. Then we discovered the problem:
There's a rabbit warren's worth of television cable wire in this house. The technology of the wiring itself is little changed since the ones we had running around that Ithaca apartment in the 70s, and most of those wires here predate our 1994 move-in. Either the original owner or our immediate predecessors had wired things around the cellar to get the business ends of the cables coming out of the baseboards, much more of a necessity in those pre-internet days. I honestly don't know how much of it remains actually connected to the Spectrum cable coming in from the pole, so I pretty much leave it alone.
But on Saturday, Eleanor needed an extra outlet for some work she's doing down there, and unplugged an actual AC-powered portion of the not-so-superhighway. She didn't think this would make a difference because of all the times I've remarked about us having "cut the cord." That was a bit colloquial on my part- what we actually "cut" was the set-top box for the television which provided the 57 channels (and nothin' on) at a cost way more than the 10 nonpremium ones (and still nothin' on) we now get through the internet side of the cable pipeline. The incoming signal still needs whatever infrastructure it needed before.
We plugged it back in- "it" being an unlabeled electrical device connected to a splitter box that's also of unknown provenance- and things suddenly seem back to normal. I also took the opportunity to disconnect another rabbit warren of old devices from an upstairs power strip- including a supply for tiny mp3 players we haven't used in years- and brought it down there so she'll have more plugin options.
At some point when we're not all pandemicky, I want to get somebody down there to figure out just how many of these cables and cords are actually needed. We will also look into removing the fancyass Verizon box they installed down there a few years before we did, completely, cut our landline cords, and which was still plugged in for no reason.
Now to just hope the kittens don't get into any of it;)
My office here just closed. Eleanor leaves work within the hour, and for the next 36 hours, we are away from it all. No bird festoons the fridge. No gathering- not live or Zoomed or Skyped or Teamed. No Trot down Delaware, no Bills on the boob like last year.
Just us- and the five four-legged mooches, getting the same swill they get the other days of the year.

Zini is bonding with the dog, with Zoey, and of course with his brudda- who was a little off kilter the other day as we wrapped him in Baby Yoda swaddling clothes (but he seems fine now:)

- with Evil Cat being the only holdout, and Zini is perfectly fine running right up to HER and goosing her:).
Pepper also got two separate Parp! visits this week. First, with the usual gang, in Amherst State Park:

Here they are, for a team meeting;

Ursula. stalking a stray birthday balloon;

and me, rescuing her from it:)
Then this morning, I took my car over to the mechanic to book next week's inspection/snow tire appointment and have my current pair checked out for winterworthiness. (He says one more should do.) Since our former go-to dog park is blocks away from there, I let Pepper call shotgun and we headed over- as I hoped, it was less crowded than weekends and with more people than usual actually wearing masks besides me:

a few of them, the butt in the lower left belonging to our old pal Diesel;)

and a closer-up of Pepper meeting a few new Ridgeback frens:)
----
In between those visits, I made a longer trip on my own to the forbidden land of Rochester, aka Yellowzone National Park, to do things we can no longer do here in Orange Restriction Country. At least Monday, all of Rochester was still safe; parts of the city and some surrounding towns have since had their infection rates bump up to orange. But I took advantage while I could. First, an actual workout at the Pittsford location of my now-shuttered gym here. I then went to the office there for a 2:00 appointment that the clients screwed up (they thought it was the following day); while I waited for them to get out of work, I booked another online appointment to get my hair cut- and this time I was the screwer-upper, clicking on the wrong salon and being greeted when I arrived with a hearty chorus of "who the hell are YOU?!?" But they got me in anyway, the postponed appointment back at my office went fine if ending a little late, and the two remaining workdays this week have been quieter. I bought lunch for the office today, which was much appreciated as their real estate business continues to go gangbusters. The highlights of my workweek other than the one appointment? Monday;s was getting to read an actual cease-and-desist letter written by a Long Island lawyer to one of that office's clients....
a client who is, I swear, six years old. (She left her toys on the neighbor's lawn and made funny faces at him. Or something. I recommended answering it in crayon.)
... and then getting a call yesterday about a rather complex hearing I'd had scheduled for next week in one of my oldest ongoing cases, which probably was going to be postponed anyway due to live court proceedings being shut down statewide. The call was from the opposing attorney- or, I should say, the LATEST opposing attorney in that firm. He's the fourth they've assigned to it since 2008. As I told the third of them when I called him to wish him well, being assigned this file is kinda like auditioning to be the drummer for Spinal Tap; there's a pretty high risk of spontaneous combustion;)

----
We survived a minor miscommunication over the weekend which, now that it's fixed, is allowing me to post this. I noticed on Saturday that our internet speed was getting really slow. By Sunday, it had reached the point of hardly anything loading when asked. Then we discovered the problem:
There's a rabbit warren's worth of television cable wire in this house. The technology of the wiring itself is little changed since the ones we had running around that Ithaca apartment in the 70s, and most of those wires here predate our 1994 move-in. Either the original owner or our immediate predecessors had wired things around the cellar to get the business ends of the cables coming out of the baseboards, much more of a necessity in those pre-internet days. I honestly don't know how much of it remains actually connected to the Spectrum cable coming in from the pole, so I pretty much leave it alone.
But on Saturday, Eleanor needed an extra outlet for some work she's doing down there, and unplugged an actual AC-powered portion of the not-so-superhighway. She didn't think this would make a difference because of all the times I've remarked about us having "cut the cord." That was a bit colloquial on my part- what we actually "cut" was the set-top box for the television which provided the 57 channels (and nothin' on) at a cost way more than the 10 nonpremium ones (and still nothin' on) we now get through the internet side of the cable pipeline. The incoming signal still needs whatever infrastructure it needed before.
We plugged it back in- "it" being an unlabeled electrical device connected to a splitter box that's also of unknown provenance- and things suddenly seem back to normal. I also took the opportunity to disconnect another rabbit warren of old devices from an upstairs power strip- including a supply for tiny mp3 players we haven't used in years- and brought it down there so she'll have more plugin options.
At some point when we're not all pandemicky, I want to get somebody down there to figure out just how many of these cables and cords are actually needed. We will also look into removing the fancyass Verizon box they installed down there a few years before we did, completely, cut our landline cords, and which was still plugged in for no reason.
Now to just hope the kittens don't get into any of it;)