captainsblog | Dec. 17th, 2023

Let’s start with mine, particularly the eyeballs within it. Thursday brought my annual full-blown ophthalmology appointment, three days after Eleanor had hers at the same place. We were a little confused, because the weekend before her appointment, they sent her a bunch of text messages with a link to some forms to fill out. Some of them wound up even being duplicates, because they were just in the process of being taken over by a bigger Lawn Guyland medical practice. Hers went fine on Monday, but despite both of us trying to call to confirm my appointment, we were never able to do so until I walked in the door.

Fortunately, it was on. They just didn’t have a mobile number for me. They do now. Boy howdy do they, because I’ve gotten an endless number of requests for surveys from them since I finished. This was my first appointment where I was actually checking on my Big Pre-Medicare Gamble of 2023. As I have mentioned, when my last year of private health insurance tried to sock me with a 30% increase, I switched to a plan with a higher deductible. If I had found out that I had surgery for cataracts in my immediate future, I could still switch back to the old one before the end of the year. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like that will be happening. I’ve had the beginnings of them for several years, but they are still in very early stages and have not gotten appreciably worse since a year ago. My distance vision has actually improved to the point where they can take the corrective lens restriction off my drivers license. I never even notice a difference when I’m wearing them, and it’s just one fewer thing to forget or lose.( ETA: Like forgetting I already told that joke in the previous entry here:P) All the other testing came out fine, so at least in terms of what I can see, I’m good for the foreseeable (heh) future.

It was also somewhat bizarre going in there on Thursday because it was the practice's annual Ugly Christmas Sweater Day. One of the nurses was decked out as a tree, another had a complete nativity scene bolted to her belt. Seemed a weird place to hold such an event: half the patients can't see for shit at all, and those that CAN are getting drops and can't see for shit on the way out.

I also got to do some Street Team promotion for one of my favorite singers. Somewhere in the middle of the dilation and staring at the balloon in the machine, the tech noticed I was wearing my Lake Street Dive shirt from when I saw the band at Babeville a few years back. She’s a fan. I then told her I wore that shirt when I last saw Danielle Ponder and met other Rachael and Duck fans at that. She had not heard of her, so I told her a little bit of Dee’s amazing story. I smiled as I watched her move her pen from my chart and write her name down on a postit:)

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Moving on to later on Thursday: once my eyes recovered from the drops, I put in an afternoon of work and ended with a run to the big Asian grocery on the Boulevard that has taken over the better portion of the town's original WalMart building after they moved to a bigger spot closer to the middle of Amherst. I go in there every 1-2 weeks for their carrots, which, as you can see-

- are a more BigAss™ variety than anything you can get in an Occidental grocery. (We cut them up for snacks for the dog.) But it's the ambience that leads to this post, particularly two things from that visit.

Usually, it's grab-and-go with no wait, but at certain times, they get busy. Often, Asian restauranteurs are filling carts with the merch they will cook and serve. I got behind one of them on Thursday evening. Among his provisions was a package of salmon heads. He saw me and my lone bag behind him and offered to let me jump in front. "Are you sure?" "Yes, please." "Thank you!"

I doubt if there has ever, in human history, been a paragraph written with "random act of kindness" and "salmon heads" in it, but here we are.

The other odder moment was when I then got to the register. My orange yumminess came to $4.53, and I handed the cashier a fiver and three pennies. She rejected one of the latter because it was Canadian. I've never before had any establishment reject binational coinage, especially that small and not even made anymore (Canadian commerce now rounds up or down to the nickel). United Statesians and Canadians may be unique among neighbo(u)ring nations in producing coins of the same sizes and denominations under a dollar, the Canuckistanis being of slightly different weight so as not to work in parking meters or vending machines, but the general rules among local merchants for those small coins, had always been take a Hoser, give a Hoser as if it were pure American legal tender.

It gets to be a bigger deal above 99 cents. Canada, like most civilised nations, went to larger coinage for their former smallest bill; Ottawa even doubled down and now has both the "loonie" for their $1 value and the "toonie" for twice that. The US Mint has tried to roll out similar dollar coins with complete resistance from the same Luddites that refuse to allow official rounding to eliminate the precious Lincoln Penny. (All the day you'll have good luck! A penny saved is a penny earned! Especially if you mine zinc, which the gummint buys for more than a penny a penny.) Even when their $1 bills were around (I still have one from 1954 with a very young Lilibet on it) and now when their still-circulating prettier larger ones are in your wallet, you're generally going to have to exchange them or take a register reduction to the current Canadian exchange rate of around 75 cents to the greenback. Back in the day, Buffalo bars would entice viewers and listeners across the Niagara with the promise in their commercials of "Canadian money accepted at par." I always wondered what would happen if a Colombian-British Columbian drug lord showed up with $100,000 CDN in a suitcase, walked in for a beer and demanded change.

But back at the far lower-stakes venue of the Asian grocery register, I fished out another Lincoln penny so I got quarters back. for my $5.03 legal tender. At least the fishing didn't bring out a salmon head.

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Finally, on Friday we arrived at screw heads:

It was my only Rochester trip of the week, a 13 hour day with multiple stops made, at least one other postponed, and two holiday events for lunch and dinner. The first of those was that city's bar association bankruptcy lawyers sitting down in person for the first time in four years, for a long-standing annual tradition of a holiday lunch. These used to be Big Productions, usually in a hotel ballroom, with choices of entrees, skits and roasts of various members of bench and bar (I was never a participant or victim of those), and a "state of the court" address by the incumbent, or soon to be incumbent, Rochester Bankruptcy Judge. The one of those I remember the most was December 1991, right before the inauguration of the "new guy" who would hold down the bench for the next 20-odd years. He was ex-military and had promised a more tightly-run ship than had endured under the "old (cranky) guy" who dated back to the days of spoils and patronage before the current Bankruptcy Code. Just as the Judge-Designate was getting going, one of the oldest of the Old Boys wandered in to take his seat.

Oh, Mister X, I see. Late again. And without papers.

X lasted through that new judge's tenure, but it was clear from that day that the fun was over for him.

It's been less fun for all of us with the even newer guy who replaced that judge in 2011. He's the one who has cost me the most winks of sleep in the past four weeks, and this was the first time I've been in the same room with him since maybe very early 2020. He greeted me, shook my hand, and was, as my mother used to refer to our oldest sister after one of their fights, nice as pie. He had little of substance to say during his "address," and the saddest part of it is how old and small that old gang of mine has gotten. No ballroom- this was in a basement conference room at the bar association's new HQ on the east end of town. No choice of chicken or fish, neither of which was on the tiny buffet we got to load plate from. No skits or roasts. Lots of empty chairs around a single squared table. One or two, perhaps, under 40, and most of us north of 60. Nobody's going into this practice anymore, and it's not too crowded. Some from the bankruptcy bar I knew to have passed in recent years. One I thought I saw was just another old graying guy; the longtime friend Lou, who I thought he was, wasn't there, having had a stroke recently, I was told.

Told. Which rhymes with old. Which is what I'm getting too much to be doing so much of this.

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After that, the Rochester office shut down early for its own holiday event, an now-annual tradition at a local laser tag joint. I got some modest work done before everybody went home to change into more suitable activewear, but chose to do my switchout at the Pittsford location of my gym. It was 2,000 meter row benchmark day. What better way to burn calories from two holiday meals than stopping in for an hour on the way?

There's an app for that, which tracks how you've done at this event over time. The goal is always to "PR," that is, set a personal record relative to how you'd done before. I managed that, by two whole seconds!, but the bigger thing for me was going back to when I started this challenge, just over two years ago. In those 27 months, I've either gotten better or luckier, and have shaved just over a whole minute off the time it takes, from 9:14 down to Friday's 8:13. None of these are getting me into competition with anybody but myself- the kid next to me was done in under seven minutes on his first try- but I was not the last one off the machines, as I probably was when starting this nonsense.

The Pittsford location is behind in their social media postings, so I won't see what some of the others do in posting "leaderboards" for different age groups. On most prior occasions I've done it in the Buffalo studios, I've proudly posted as the winner of the 60-69 male age group. My strategy for that each time has been to be the only one in the 60-69 male age group. Hey, if you can't outrow 'em, outlive 'em!

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Suitably unsuited after that, I headed to Lasertron. No shooting at each other with laser packs this time; the before-dinner event was darts, which I did okay at. Then came a spead of mostly pizza and wings, and the annual gift exchange. It's a Secret Santa variant that starts with the same "get something for somebody" gift selection. I usually suck at this, but as I mentioned last month, Eleanor had come home with an impulse purchase of this boardy wordy game-

- which seemed perfect for the occasion, so I bought another one for the exchange. To top it off, I'd begun my day trying to use the last of my (much appreciated) Dunkin' Donuts gift card from my sister, so I got breakfast for the road there. The drive-thru line was, as they say in Dunkieland, wicked!, so I went in to the store. Bad move. I'd recently read that these places overprioritize the car line, and that was entirely true. When I wound up with like a dollar left over on the card, I put it toward buying one of their 10-gallon ceramic coffee mugs and added it to the gift basket for the event.

Back to the How of that: in Secret Santa, you're choosing for a specific co-worker. Here, it's luck of the draw. All participants draw a number. First up can pick any wrapped gift and opens it. Second player can pick from the table OR steal the opened gift from #1; if stolen from, #1 picks a new one. Third up can either go new or steal either of the first two. So the trick is to draw as high a number as you can. Pro tip: don't gamble if your luck sucks, and mine is, so I don't; but this time, Unlucky Ray drew #17, the highest number in the bag- which meant I could steal anything I wanted after everyone else had gone and with just one unwrapped gift on the table, subject to it being stolen by any of the other 16 recipients other than the one I stole from once theirs got stolen.

Choose wisely is the rule. This year, not much to choose. Way too many Christmassy coffee mugs. Several bottles of booze. Collections of board games, most old conventional ones like Yatzhee and Sorry! A self-help book by local billionaire Tom Golisano (chapter 1: buy a shitty hockey team out of bankruptcy and make it shittier), stuffed with scratch-off lottery tickets (see pro tip above). So I settled on the theft of this one from my very table, suddenly getting Eleanor her first and only non-Christmas present:

This steal led quickly to a flurry of larceny among the other 16, mainly focused on a few particularly cool toys in the mix, but I watched as the thieves offered to split the hauls with their victims so none of their kids would go home sad. In the end, nobody reclaimed Eleanor's gift- including Eleanor. See that word METRIC? They don't work with her existing sets- but Lowe's, inheritor of the Craftsman brand, gave her store credit for it yesterday so she can choose her own adventure there. Maybe even find something to drive in the screw heads.

Tighten them up, yum!

That round done, and the gift safely stowed in my car, we ended with the newer traditional end to the event: axe throwing. This is the third year of this at the event. Year one, I was anxious about making a fool of myself at it, but it turned out I handled the thing pretty well. The move is essentially a dumbbell tricep extension, only you let go of the weight. If I recall, I did okay last year, as well. This time, though? I tossed brick after brick, bouncing the thing off the wood. I tried both sizes, putting more and less oomph into it, standing on the line and far back. Nothing worked except one practice throw that stuck. Maybe it's from the 2,000 meters earlier, or from my overall improvement. I'd practice, except where, and what would be the point?

I think it's down there below the arrow:P

Home by 9:30, a recovery day for both of us yesterday, and today brings catching up on things of work and home and the Bills trying to take heads off cowboys at 4:25.