Dec. 29th, 2020

captainsblog: (Marvin)

The heading isn't particularly 2020-


- as we lost Walter Becker in 2017 and the remaining group's 2020 tour, which I thought about seeing them on, was canceled. But the two subjects for today kinda go together, which is why they’re here on the same day, duh.

To put things in perspective, we ended 2019 on a fairly bad repair note, having a very expensive emissions idiot light on my just-out-of-warranty car show up a few weeks before its inspection was due, and our not-very-old water heater deciding it didn’t want to heat water anymore. We’d just socked some simoleans into an emergency fund, which promptly cried out for an emergency or two to fund.  (We only just managed to replenish some of it at the end of this year, and mightily resisted using any of it for the veterinary disaster of the past month.)  The good news is, both the car and the water heater made it through 2020 (give or take a couple of days) without those problems arising again, but we had our share of improvements, setbacks, inventions and discoveries in these areas as this Year to End All Shitty Years moved along.

At home, the farewells were mostly to smaller things that had given us long and faithful service, from an electric can opener dating to when you needed to open cat food cans with one, to a smashed coffee carafe that was once part of an actual Mr. Coffee maker. Unfortunately, things like microwaves are turning into fungible pieces of junk, as we had to replace one dating only to the 2015 kitchen reno where the repair place said, meh, just buy a new one. Since we haven’t even HAD anything to play audio tapes on for years while still having a ton of them downstairs (some of things never reissued on CD or digitally), we acquired a new Bluetooth-enabled boom box with an actual cassette player in it, which will also be great for outdoor dining….

On the soon-to-be-finished patio away from the Neighbors from Hell.

----

They moved here about this time three winters ago, buying and slowly remodeling the home next door that our dear neighbor Betty had lived in since it was built around 1960.  Until this summer, we got along with them fine, despite the husband being a bit loud (he’s deafer than me) and a cigar smoker. But with the stress of the pandemic, things escalated, mainly on account of a regular guest of theirs, who we first simply knew as “Foghorn Leghorn” (for being even louder than the husband) but later came to learn was his wife's brother. He was not only worse in volume but in content, and after one summer night of particularly bad behavior over there- with their firepit threatening to set his new wooden fence on our lot line on fire and a torrent of racist language coming from their guests- we asked them over the next morning and asked them to tone it down. The missus listened but finally said she wasn't going to be told “what to do on MY property"- after her spouse bailed after a few minutes, telling us we were being "ridiculous."

He is now forever known as Aristophanes, from this old Odd Couple bit.

Foghorn, meanwhile, never shut up on any later visit, and we had reason to believe he was coking up out in his (uninspected) Beemer. One night, first our neighbor’s truck peeled out into our street, followed a few minutes later by his BIL in his car.

Had Foghorn's bad behavior been reported to the authorities? Was his brother in law checking for po-po's before Foghorn left? Did he turn out to have a criminal record and a trail of unpaid child support judgments for the (somehow sweet) kid he had been bringing over to play with his (also very sweet) cousin?

Don’t look at me ::adjusts halo:: 

All’s I know is in the months since, we haven’t seen foghide nor leghair of him.  The wife, meanwhile, has lost her fulltime job and made one of the three local quotes in a recent New York Times article about the horrible effects of COVID on Buffalo; her husband is rarely seen out (other than one late October night I saw him slapping a TRUMP 2020 flag on the back of his pickup, gone the next day), only to have him surface on a neighborhood message board earlier this  month, complaining about a suspicious car in our neighborhood at 3 a.m. who was “not a good person.” He had reason to be suspicious, he said, because "Nothing is open at 3 AM."

 

I had questions.  )

 

So anyway, the result of all that was Eleanor deciding to move our summer outdoor patio from their side of our yard to more in the middle. It was a multimonth project that never finished, but it should need just some minor grading and filling to get it going next year so we can have company out there. If anyone can.

Fortunately, these neighbors aren’t our only ones. We met an 89-year-old from around the corner who always greets Pepper with a “cookie” if he’s out. He saw our BLM sign and told us how much he liked it- because, as an early Italian immigrant to this part of the Buffalo suburbs, he suffered the epithets and setbacks of prejudice as a boy.  We became friends with a retired woman around the corner with three beautiful dogs and a gardener in her spirit for Eleanor to commune with. Closer still is a couple whose husband helped us with some roof repairs last year, gave plenty of advice on the patio design, and wisely begged out of our most recent needed repair- of the house-original oven that died over the summer, the only remaining appliance from before the 2015 renovation. 

Eleanor had found and installed a replacement heating element for it; we knew the problem was element-ary because the broiler still worked- but when the weather got colder, the connection again failed, and both she and Glenn from down the street agreed it would now need a licensed professional. We had initial trouble finding one, as appliance guys wanted electricians to do it and the electrician around the corner didn’t do appliances, but in the end a reliable Rochester client of mine in the electrical business sent a guy over who fixed it in 20 minutes and it’s been good ever since.

Ending with things I've posted about recently: the only repair we didn’t need, winding up among the most annoying, was to our gas meter. THAT cost us 100 bucks on our bill (since removed), three days of waiting around between scheduling and appearing/not appearing, and 30 whole seconds of me watching the guy doing a “safety inspection” that took less time than a flush of a toilet.  The only remaining one is of my front tires, which brought us to a sad end with a longtime mechanic that we hope we can, eventually, repair.

----

What a difference in technology a year makes. Last December, "Zoom" was an old PBS kid show with a funny language, "Teams" played with balls and pucks in places you could pay and watch them in person, and "Streams" were to be fished in, not watched in your living room.  We've come to know all of these new terms, as everything from court appearances to poetry readings to concerts have turned into bits and bytes kept at a total distance.

Other activities have adjusted, including my passion for knowing trivial things. Geeks Who Drink are and still do, but do it from spacebars rather than actual bars.  This piece chronicles some of the others which have changed their ways in the pandemic; one which really hasn't, but which I've continued to enjoy, is another mentioned in there. Learned League rolls on in its almost entirely text-only format. I missed a deadline and sat out one round in the spring, but returned, along with adding a referred friend who's now in the same "rundle" of players and with whom I competed neck-and-neck with through earlier this month; her son is now heading to a level above us, and anyone reading this who wants an invitation should ask now, since they will likely be going to waitlists in the future.

The hardware we use for all this is unchanged, although the occasional updates to them can be timeconsuming and annoying.  Most recently, I brought in one of my two laptops to see if its keyboard could be repaired- several keys stopped working, and of course they were oft-used ones like the left-shift, tab and most recently the T. I had a similar problem, a few years ago, with this one, now kept at and only used for work. Cat hair gets under the keys and gums up the works. It was still under warranty, but had to be sent out for the repair with a two-week turnaround, and Ensurion does not provide loaners. So, Laptop the Second, which has been fine until it suffered the same end.  They just quoted $300-plus to fix it; only about 30-50 of that is the keyboard itself, but just look at what you have to do to replace it yourself and you'll realize that you are, literally, screwed:
 





The more likely scenario is to replace it, but for now I'm going to make do with what I've got.

 

captainsblog: (13_Nevertheless)

Uh Uh Uh!

I'm doing two countdown posts today because I came home early. We called in the stupid car thing from Christmas Eve and we are waiting for the call from the insurance about it, so since we're both off of work, we'll wrap that subject up.  I may split the final two year-end subjects over the final two days of this mizzable year, or perhaps one will be a day off.

Seems right to be talking about.

Work for both of us was as affected as anything in our lives by COVID. Both fell into BEFORE and AFTER with bright-line clarity. Neither of us ever lost a "day's pay" to it as such, although Eleanor did have a couple of abundance-of-caution periods where, due to a slight fever or cough and an inability to be tested (the first time) or to get timely negative results (the second), she was kept home but paid in full for the time she would have been there.  Her hours never changed on account of the pandemic, but her workstation did when they closed their cafe (and she didn't return there after it reopened), and the rules and surroundings changed a lot, with distancing and masking and plexi shields becoming the order of the day.  It's also brought out the idiots who can't deal with being told where to stand, what to wear or how to keep themselves and their fellow humans safe. I get a little of that occasionally, but probably not close to what she sees in any typical week.


On my end, my workload went down in terms of hours, but not as many as I would have expected. The trusty database says as of last Wednesday, I'd only recorded about 150 fewer in 2020 than I had through the same day in 2019.  One reason for the smaller than expected difference? I don't record travel time as potentially billable, and there was a LOT less of that in 2020, both long-haul and local. So while I was feeling hey, you worked a lot less, it was more that I drove a lot less, and spent more productive and recordable time when I wasn't wasting that time. 

My gross will be down, mainly because new collection work dried up and enforcing older claims became impossible; bankruptcies have been steady but the predicted major uptick has been held off by moratoriums and stimmy checks and such.  On the other hand, I saved having to pay out over $13,000 on Emily's parent loans; the balances remain, with no interest added to them since I last paid in March, but talk is loud about Biden knocking at least a good chunk off that principal once his Administration replaces the clown show currently in town. 

The plan remains for me to keep at this until 70. If anything, the changes in technology which have kept me off the road and out of courtrooms may become permanent or at least optional to a greater extent, and eliminating the schleps and the wasting-time waits on hard courtroom benches make a longer haul as attractive. 

The other factor there is health insurance. Despite all the complaints about the ACA and the weirdness of my own company's mockworthy ad campaign-

Congratulations, honorary Redshirt! We're sending you down to the planet to DIE!

-my premiums have gone down each of the past two years, and while they're still way above the $45 a month I paid for full HMO coverage right out of law school, I will again end a calendar year without hitting my full deductible and am a year closer to the Promised Land of Medicare. 

Eleanor is, almost, already there: her coverage through Wegmans is guaranteed until she hits 65 in July, and as we chronicled early last month, she's begun exploring which Medigap plans and Parts of Parts will work best for her once she begins that coverage.  She's down to about 20 hours a week now and has medical dispensation to not be scheduled for more than 4-5 hours at a time, because the wear on the knees, shoulder and -new this fall!- biceps (from curling and squatting 30 pound turkeys despite customers being told to leave them in their !$%^& carts).  She began receiving Social Security last month, which has made up the loss of hours and a bit more; that will go up slightly in January, then down in July once the Part B premiums start coming out. She will likely continue working just to keep mind and body in some semblance of normalcy, although the longer this pandemic goes and COVIDiots are drawn to her, the less appealing that is. She works those shorter hours tomorrow and Thursday; a slightly longer New Years Day will follow, but she gets extra pay that day and it's usually a quiet one. Especially this year, with nobody going out for ball drops or big events and the Bills not playing until two days later.  Last night, they defeated their age-old New England nemesis on the road, pissing off their coach so much he did this:
 



I don't know, Hoodie. They have been trying to reach you about your vehicle's extended warranty;)

----

That's enough for today. I'm tired; but not re-tired.

 

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