Dec. 25th, 2020

captainsblog: (CB Xmas)
It's Christmas morning and my wife is chanting her morning Buddhist gongyo- her first since Boz passed.  It's how we roll around here.

So I'm going to take a pause from the paws and other things being looked back on and just focus on this week.  Starting with the choir of the Jeffs.

Proof that the only constant is NOT change, even in a year full of way too much of the latter: We have two gentlemen who come to our house 365 days a year between them, in all kinds of weather. Amazingly, there is absolutely no duplication: Jeff the mailman comes Mondays through Saturdays except national holidays, and Jeff the paper delivery guy only comes on Sundays and national holidays.

Through this year's many dangers, toils and snares, neither has missed a day, or failed to bring us our news, our financial pipelines, and unfortunate (more for them than for us) amounts of junk each. They always get the same gift, and we will always get the same appreciation from both of them.



Mail Jeff got his yesterday and left a thank-you card, as he always does. I did not put Paper Jeff's out last night because of the amount of snow we were expected to get, and even though I was ready to wait up for him to come after feeding the kitzels this morning, he beat me to the doorstep by 6, so it's going to have to be a Third Day of Christmas gift this time.

As for the third Jeff, he's a fellow attorney I know from work.  My gift to him this year was some short and simple advice on a legal matter.  He quickly replied with an email back; on my computer, it came out as simply "Thanks," but the version on my phone made it, as my mother would've said, compicated:



Okay, Jeff, whatever;)

----

I did basically nothing yesterday; took Pepper to the empty dog park with friends on a rainy Eve morning, grabbed takeout from our favorite Italian joint and got a few Wegmans things, and other than that never left the house. Eleanor worked until 3, then headed out for one last errand before the annual shutting of All The Retail Doors.  Ours remained shut, as well, until around 8 last night, when our doorbell rang.

She'd told me, when she got home, that she'd had a little parking lot fender bender with the hybrid.  Backed up and her back bumper nicked a Big Ass Truck in the space behind. Ours probably needs a small poundout, but she saw nothing whatsoever of a dent or scratch on what she'd run into- and with nobody in it, she left and  that was that until it wasn't. The doorbell was our friendly neighborhood police officer; apparently a guy in an adjacent car named Sean saw it- and despite him seeing her get out, inspect the (lack of) damage on the tank and leave, he didn't get out of his car but decided to wait until after she left to go all Parking Lot Paul on her and narc on her to the cops.  The officer was very understanding, just taking down our insurance information in case the "victim" (not even local, with Nebraska plates?!?) wants to report his damage to our insurance.  We are now obliged to do likewise, even though the ding on our car is little worse than the several she's accumulated from other drivers slamming their tank doors into her. This happens a lot when you use handicapped spaces; idiots in the adjacent ones can't see where they're going, and/or they park in the blue-striped inbetweeners and hit her. 

Things we learned from this:

- When your fleet consists of a red Smart car and a plug-in hybrid, they're gonna find you pretty quickly; now if she was driving a white Silverado or something, they'd have never narrowed it down.

- Backup cameras are basically useless, because they fog up in winter weather; I don't even use hers when I'm driving that car except for parallel parking, because my car doesn't have one and I don't want to grow dependent on it.

- Hopefully the tank driver won't turn this into an insurance clusterfuck; I had one of those with the Smart car in a parking lot dinger a few summers ago, where I didn't even see a scratch on me but the other driver claimed my Little Tykes had damaged her Lexus.  JARVIS now has a ding on his Carfax report that lowered its resale value (the bigger ding there being Mercedes not selling or really supporting the brand anymore), and probably Alanis will get one out of this, too.

- Running errands two days after losing a kitten requires extra vigilance; we pray  not to have to test THAT hypothesis any time soon.

----

The officer got here just as the earlier rain was turning into a very Currier and Ives night of White Christmas snowfall. By morning, an areawide "general snow" had dropped about five inches; lake effect will now follow in its usual hit-or-miss fashion, and we could get two feet or nothing at all by late tomorrow.  But the dog still demands her walkies, and so out we went once the plows came and cleared the street and our driveway, fortunately in that order.

One of our neighbors was out, snowblowing his sidewalk. We exchanged greetings and I told the tale of our life of crime from the night before, to suitable eyerolls. As Pepper and I completed our circle of the block, Glenn was still out there, only now he was snowblowing the next house’s sidewalk (not ours- I got out with the shovel before he could even offer).



THAT’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. Kindness.

Profile

captainsblog: (Default)
captainsblog

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25 262728293031

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 04:43 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios