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All in all, this workday went about as badly as it could without nothing really bad actually happening to me, my means of transportation, or any clients or loved ones.

Okay, not entirely true. I did get one thousand-dollar bit of bad news, or rather confirmed what my bank account said was bad news about a week ago. In late November, I completed a bankruptcy for a client covered by a legal plan. There's a set fee for that, which I billed for, and the site said claim approved a few days later. The payment a week after that, though, said

They paid X, not the Y I'd submitted. Y was quite bigger than X. I thought I might've slipped a data entry. I had not. This morning, I checked the submission again against a cheat sheet of client coverages and discovered, nope, that client was only covered for X, which is less than Y cause addition is commutative, right! A month ago, I'd have been in a mad panic over this, but thanks to other good efforts and some cooperation from various parties in getting some long overdue bills paid, now it barely merits a shrug. Also, just this month I've acquired almost as many dollars from that plan's new client referrals than what I "lost"- and they might even still pay all or some of it, if only because I wasn't a shit to them about demanding it. There's also counterbalancing good news outside that arena that I refuse to jinx by writing down anything about it.

No, the trail of shit I slogged through was minor. I planned to spend the workday in Rochester in anticipation of two things: my semiannual dental checkup and cleaning this afternoon, and finally kicking Indigo Girls off my bucket list and seeing them live at a edge-of-town concert venue once used for major Kodak corporate functions back when Kodak had such things. There's another story connected to that event space, not involving me but a friend, that I will maybe find out more about tonight. I won't jinx that with details, either, but suffice it to say that there was an overreaction that even Officer Obie in Stockbridge Massachusetts, the home of Alice's Restaurant, would have thought a bit much.

Anyway.... with those as the bookends of my being here (because I still am- concert posting will follow in a day or so), here's the chronicle of shit:

10:15 am- arrive reasonably early, park in a remarkably free spot next to this firm's outdoor 110 outlet and plug in the plug-in hybrid. (We have now pretty much gotten confirmation that the modest uptick in our home electric bills the past few months is from using the new Level 2 EV charger at its maximum amperage, which draws power faster than Mister Golden Sun can produce it off our panels. So the more we can charge away from home, possibly the better.) I check to make sure the battery is charging. A pretty blue light confirms. I won't get a full charge in three hours at 110 volts, but it'll make an electric dent.

12:30 pm- plan my stragedy for errands before the dentist. I lay out the route: file papers in downtown courthouse, stop at client restaurant for late lunch but save until after dentist, go to dentist, return to office.

1:30 The electric dent ain't hapenin'. Somebody unplugged my car in those three-plus hours. My guess is somebody's client or neighboring patron who rolls coal in his bigass guzzler truck and doesn't like seeing my evil EV. But I still have plenty of gas, so I can go on to my four things. Except I essentially struck out on each of them. Baseball players call this a golden sombrero. The results of each:

Could not file papers in downtown courthouse because the whole building was closed due to a water main break. Which might have tipped Ray off when he saw the garage entrance sealed off.

Passed nasty looking car accident on way to client restaurant. Did acquire late lunch, but stupidly tried to exit the same way as the accident, which by then had also acquired two fire trucks, an ambulance and a beer in a tree. Ducked out the back way, getting totally lost in my former home town of a decade and barely made it to Ron's on time.

Did get teeth cleaned, but xrays revealed a cavity that will need a repeat visit next month. Dentist also revealed, when I mentioned the recent death of a close friend of a onetime close friend of his, that Ron had just heard of the passing of a local lawyer who was a fixture here for close to half a century.

At least I could return to office, right?

That would be a no. Dudes were unloading a bigass table for the lawyers downstairs in the building here, and didn't show, much less show any interest in moving that truck:P I parked it on the sidewalk, prayed they didn't back into it, and when they DID come out, yelled at ME for blocking THEM. It's enough to make ya want to unplug their.... something:P

With a few hours still before showtime, and late lunch meaning no early dinner plans, I decided to look up the departed lawyer's obituary in the local paper.

Don't look up obits in the local paper, Ray.

Still haven't found his, but there was one name I recognized: the father-in-law of a longtime Rochester coworker of mine. I'd never met him, but two seconds later there's one for another father of an even longer-time friend, whose dad I did meet several times and even became Facebook friends with both him and her recently.

I have passed on my condolences to both of the ladies I knew, as well as to people who knew another local semi-celebrity whose death was reported during the Bills' pregame show on Sunday afternoon. This is getting to be way too much of a habit.

But music hath charms, and in about 45 minutes, I hope to be Closer to Fine and to Them:)

Weird week for work. Four mornings I had outside appointments, three of them stupid early (8:30 for me is stupid early), and none of them involved courts or clients. Two were for the previously reported car appointments to inspect mine and replace a cracked windshield on Eleanor's. The others were health-related, one directly and one indirectly related to the neuro workups I've been getting.

Monday's was a long-scheduled Medicare-pays-them consultation with the practice's weight management specialist. This investigation is tertiary to the main problem. The tests so far indicate mild cognitive impairment as my primary condition; and that it may be caused or aggravated by sleep apnea, the secondary one; but, tertiarilly, that may be caused or aggravated by how much weight I'm putting on the respiratory system at night. This is the condition that got to the head of the waiting list first. Before even going, I'd happily noticed that I'd brought things down on my own by close to 10 pounds since my most recent checkin with the practice back in early October. Eleanor came with, and the MD for this program was pleased with how well I was doing early on. After dispelling some myths about weight loss (red meat not necessarily bad, bean-based products not necessarily good), he brought out a sample diet and some ideas for proceeding. It's not calling for radical changes but for reducing some things and adding others.

By a few mornings later after the details had set in, Eleanor was more worried about it than I was. She made a remark about all the things "we couldn't eat anymore." I'd heard that part of the consult differently- that it was a matter of degree more than total exclusion. It relieved her of a lot of stress not having to go that far.

Another of the recommendations was keeping a food diary. No specifics on how often or how detailed, although it probably should try to track some of the specific guidelines for preferred intakes of protein, fruits and vegetables. One remark Eleanor made to encourage me in this venture brought back a weird but funny memory from ages ago:

Her: "One of the benefits of doing it is to raise your consciousness level about what and how often you're eating."

Me: "Yeah, that goes back to my sixth grade science teacher. He told us that HEARING something puts it into your memory, then WRITING it down puts it in a second time, and then READING what you wrote does it a third."

Her: "That sounds like he knew what he was talking about and wasn't on drugs or something."

Me: "Well, yeah, except HE was the science teacher who put 12 year olds in a battery-wired 'electric chair' in the back of his classroom...."

Thanks, Mr. Zura. I'll think of you every time I do this now;) And THAT, at least, was good advice. Even Dexter Morgan solved actual crimes. Just not his own:)

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So who is "Roger" and what does HE have to do with this? Well, he's not a he but an it:

I don't even know where the name came from, but it seemed to need one once we got real chummy over the preceding 25 or so hours. For the Friday visit was to take the next step in the clinical trial I was selected for as an offshoot of this tertiary condition monitoring. This was for further consent forms related to the sub-study portion of the program related to weight, to provide the debit cards where they pay ME for going to the doctor, and, this time, to give them an initial full-day monitoring of my BP to be sure it is within, and stays within, certain pre-trial ranges for the study. Roger rode sidesaddle on me in that velcro pouch from the time of the appointment until about two hours ago; he's connected to a BP cuff that I wore the entire time:

That's him in all his blueness on my left upper arm, his home for the day. So he basically is a portable sphygmomanometer with a battery and reporting pack, connected by that holster to a strap that wrapped around my waist. Once an hour, the cuff goes off. If it gets a good reading, it records it; if it instead pops an E2 code, it will try again in a few minutes. There was no rhyme or reason to when it would go off, and I usually couldn't tell if the reading had "taken" or not until I just noticed it not going off a few minutes later.

Naturally the first time it went off after I left was when I stepped up to a bank teller to make a deposit. I had to reassure the teller, who could see that cord running from my wrist to the strap, that I didn’t have explosives around my waist in a reenactment of Dog Day Afternoon. Somehow I managed to get through the entire day, overnight and this morning without the cuff loosening on my sleeve or the monitor disengaging from the cord on either end. I did catch it on furniture a few times, but never causing any damage to it or me. Also fortunate was that it didn't freak out the dog when it went off making the hum-thump noise that BP cuffs will, not even when she was sleeping next to me all night. And neither it nor I fell out of bed wearing the thing, so that was good, too. I bring it and its readings back to them Monday, and they will then set up more testing, including a full body scan that measures muscle mass and bone density. My gym has a variant on this called InBody and they charge extra to get a scan from it, so this becomes another freebie that could be of benefit even if I wind up with the placebo of the study medication itself.

At the end of yesterday's consult, the same doctor came in that had done my weight management consult on Monday. He's not the lead on the study- that's Dr. Laszlo of song, story and batflight-

- but Dr. B is also on the team for it. His diet recommendations were much stricter for the 24 hours on the monitor than for the program in general. Particularly, he wanted me to avoid any kind of salty food for the duration so the BP didn't go out of the study's qualification range. The few times I was able to see the readings, they all appeared in my usual pretty-damn-good-although-medicated range for it, so I think I probably passed the audition.

There aren't supposed to be any more extended visits with Roger or any other kind of monitoring for the study. Next on the agenda is back to the apnea people early next month to probably get one of their sleep-study boxes connected for a more extended series of overnights at home. I'll need to come up with a name for that one, too; maybe "Brian" in loving memory of the United Health CEO who got murdered on a Manhattan street by a hail of bullets labeled "DENY" "DELAY" and "DEPOSE" on their casings. Oddly, we both have our Medigap plans with that lot, and their usual premium pulls didn't come out on Thursday as usual the day after his demise. We thought maybe they'd apply his $10 million annual salary to pay premiums to keep the masses from any further attempts.

Nahhhhh. They came out a day later. At least we got the DELAY part:P

All is well, generally, but the past 24-36 hours have, for some reason, brought more than their share of glitches.

Both cars needed servicing- mine, yesterday, for installation of its snow tires and its annual inspection, Eleanor's, this morning, for the third try to get a modestly cracked windshield replaced. Usually we drop off the night before, but with me being out fairly late Tuesday night and me then deciding to wait with her car this morning, it was two straight Ups and Attems a bit earlier than we're used to....

and each on a morning where our part of town finally got measurable snowfall. Nothing, mind you, like the OMG Snowmageddon that hit the Southtowns and counties to its south, but enough to turn drivers up here into raging lunatics and highway departments to awake from their long early winter slumber and go, hurrdurr, guess we better get the plows out.

I headed out first, to be greeted by a seasonal display of blinking lights on my dash. CHECK TIRE PRESSURE was first- a regular occurrence of late as the temperature's been going up and down recently. Then, SECURE GAS CAP replaced it on the display; Eleanor filled JARVIS's tank the day before on one of her three ventures out while I was away, and must not have secured it well enough. I fixed that fast before it could set off the check engine light, which in turn would have made the car fail the emissions inspection; fortunately, I did so in time, so I managed to get my new sticker, get the snows on the back, and confirm that the damn tire indicator was going off because one of the sensors was shot. It's been replaced. Now just to remember to re-register the damn thing that DMV started nagging me about in September, three months before it was due.

::goes, reregisters the damn thing::

Once that was done and dusted, I had one errand to run before driving back to work. I'd been dispatched to pick up cat kibble for Da Boyz, so I pulled into the Petco lot on the Boulevard and saw a Mini Cooper stuck in the slush trying to get out onto the side street. Us little guys have to stick together, so I helped her husband while she rocked it and we got it back on the road. I thanked them back, because if they hadn't gotten stuck on their way out, I probably would have.

The roads this morning were even worse around here, but I got to the glass shop on time for the finally scheduled windshield replacement, and they were so fast in getting it done, the whole thing took less time than the two 16-mile round trips to the Safelite place where they didn't fix it. Yet nothing can be too easy, because after I switched cars again and came into work, the glass place was on the phone with me because they hadn't gotten the paperwork moving the insurance claim from Safelite to them. That took another 15-20 minutes of phone time to sort out- and the sun came out with no more snow falling since. Probably now because I can see it so much better;)

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Other assorted foulups, bleeps and blunders:

During my workday yesterday, I saw the dreaded Double Arc Arrow symbol in this computer's traybar. That means Windows has an update comin, and unlike older versions where you told it to start, Windows 11 forces it on you in the wee smalls, saving any open work but putting it into weirdly renamed files that then clog up your system. This time, it was a Blue Checkmark of Death down there instead of the usual orangey color-

-because this one was apparently more speshul than usual.

Windows, yesterday : “We’re about to send a bigass update so you might want to tell us to install it overnight.”

Me: “Great! I’ll save and shut everything down so I’ll be good to go in the morning!”

::the next morning....::

Son of Clippy: “Hi! Looks like you’re not using Teams enough! Would you like me to uninstall that Zoom malware?”

Me: “Fuck you, I’m off to the glass repair shop.”

Windows: “Fuck you back, I never installed it!”

::half an hour later....::

It did finish in time to get out on time, but Clippy was not done with his magic. When I got to work, my printer was showing as offline, as is its custom even when turned on and connnected by ethernet cable. My usual fix for this has been to open Settings and run the built-in troubleshooter officially known as the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). Alas, as they've been threatening to do for months, that troubleshooter had been taken out and shot. No more quick fix. Why fix something that wasn't broken? N@ughty Hack!rs, of course:P

BleepingComputer speculates that a possible explanation for this strategy is that this is a correction of previously updated features that were targeted in zero-day exploits.

A zero-day exploit is a vulnerability in software that is already being exploited by cybercriminals and hackers on the day it becomes publicly known or the developers of the software discover it (hence meaning they have zero days to comfortably work on it). The MSDT had known vulnerabilities that attackers could have capitalized on and then run all kinds of harmful processes remotely on a user’s system.

This is a pretty major move for Microsoft, coming alongside its much discussed removal of WordPad from future updates. Windows is still the most widely-used operating system for PCs, which makes it a big target for hackers.

So now the fix involves having to get up off my ass and manually restart the printer so the laptop sees it. This is about as First World of a problem as they come, and hey, more steps!

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I've also had a usually reliable online payment to me shorted by over $1,000 for reasons unknown; got our third straight monthly electric bill that's way higher than it's been for years since we got the solar panels installed and can't figure out why; and also now have to figure out why neither of us got our Medicare supplement premiums deducted on schedule today when mine, at least, is showing on their website as having been paid. Maybe it has something to do with United Health's CEO getting shot dead on a Manhattan street yesterday:

A law enforcement official tells NBC News the bullet casings found at the scene had messages on them that were “defend", "deny” and “depose.”

Maybe it was Microsoft who took him out and had him shot:P

Some funny things happened on the way to Rochester and back yesterday. Just not there.

We've had a few fun moments involving the making of caffeinated substances. Despite the omnipresence of K-cups in offices and now even the Wegmans coffee bar, we've stuck with an oldschool Mellita drip carafe, recently purchased to replace a kludged combo of the original filler cone, a gift from my college roommates filler (melted) and a slightly newer Mr. Coffee receiving pot (smashed). It's more environmentally friendly than those little unrecyclable K-packages,and having to make it this way limits our intake a little in the mornings. We've recently changed the routine so that I fill the electric kettle to the 10 small-cup level and throw five scoops in the filler cone before turning in. Eleanor usually is up before me to put the kettle on and fill the carafe once it's boiled.

One recent morning, though, I got to it sooner, or possibly added a coupla cuppas to it to brew later in the morning, and the following exchange ensued:

Eleanor: "I thought you made more coffee. There's none in the pot."

Me: "Huh? It was up to four cups just now."

Her: "Oh.... I was looking from the wrong angle."

This post has been brought to you by Schrödinger's Coffee. For when Folger's is AND isn't enough.

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Moving on to other hot brewed substances:

This series of exchanges about how to make tea went viral, more so when it inspired a riff based on two of Shakespeare's most resilient silly characters. There are multiple screens in the meme, so they're behind a cut. Clicking it is worth it, though:

( Exeunt, pursued by Tea (Earl Grey) and Hotspur.... )

One of my UK friends saw that exchange and speculated that the foursome must be from the US because nobody here has an electric kettle. I immediately offered proof to the contrary:

We bought the original version of that electric kettle when we got down to one working burner on the original late-50s stove until we finally replaced it with a 21st century cooktop. We liked putting the kettle on this way so we still do.

And yes, that's Eleanor's SMTWTFS medicine holder. Get off my counter.

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From brews we drink, onto breweries where we don't drink what they make.

Yesterday promised to be a long day, but on purpose and for a good purpose. A friend of mine, who I met at a standup show in Rochester a few weeks back hosted by two other friends, was headlining her own standup gig at a new-to-me venue not far from the church we were married in. Once I clicked "interested" on its Facebook Event page, I started getting updates, including one in the early afternoon strongly suggesting an advance ticket purchase because of its increasing popularity. I dropped my online order for ten bucks, finished my work afternoon there, and even had time for a 4 p.m. workout at my gym's location there- only to get another notification at the end of the class that the event had been canceled.

I met up with Lisa, one of the friends who'd introduced me to this comic, and we thought about heading over to the brewery anyway if they had their usual evening menu. Nope: they called off the show, not due to weather or illness but because of too-low advance ticket sales, plus they decided to close the kitchen. So what to do when a Rochester brewery comedy show gets called off at the last minute? Head home early and stop at a standup comedy show where Lisa's husband Scott was onstage doing a schtick at a Buffalo brewery?

Nice place, even if I had no intention of drinking the homebrewed product and they didn't have any NA beer at their bar. It might have been a Rite Aid or some other retail in a previous life, but the crowd was decent for a Tuesday night (several other friends had events not far from it that night) and their kitchen was open for at least a nice range of sammich and panini options. I wound up sitting next to a guy who, after the comics left, headed up for his own time onstage-

He turned out to be a local musician named Michael DeLano, who I became Facebook friends with after hearing him on a podcast run by the longtime onetime Buffalo News pop music critic Jeff Miers. He's also friends with at least a half dozen poetry and/or music friends of ours from around here, as are the couple who premiered this Tuesday night open mic last night and will be running it again in future weeks. I quickly connected with them, as well, and look forward to heading back, since it's not only a talented lineup, it starts well before our Old People bedtime.

The only downer of the entire day and evening was going in to the event listening to the Sabres taking a shocking 4-0 lead on Colorado, one of the best teams in the NHL, and even holding three of those goals in front of the Avalanche when the second period ended on my way home. Unfortunately, the young Buffalo team would be outplayed and outpsyched by the more experienced team, and they wound up blowing the four-goal lead to lose 5-4. It felt like the worst home loss in team history, and objectively it was in terms of snatching defeat from such big jaws of victory. It's still early and they may recover from this as they tried to do a few times last year after shitty home-ice showings, but last year, like the 12 before it, all ended with the Sabres looking at the playoff standings from the outside, and few expect that will turn around this year.

Oh well. If they can't hoist the Cup, they can maybe hold my beer, because I'm not drinking any of it:P

Starting with the good-for-now news. We are not in the other part of Frozen Hell you may have seen on the news or the Weather Channel about being buried under 2-5 feet of snow.

That isn't us, either. Local meteorologist Andy Parker took that photo of the "Wall of Snow" as it headed north along the lake shore, getting as far as the Tifft Street boundary of South Buffalo- which is apparently as far as the winds chose to take it. It's either drifted back south or petered out since last night, and only flurries remain in the forecast, although you may well see the residue of the dump on your tv tonight if you tune in the Bills game.

Here, though? Clear sunny skies and chilly air. Eleanor now comes with us for our Sunday trail walk- just under a mile down and back per her app- and we met a lovely woman who saw Eleanor's handmade winter coat and they bonded as fellow knitters. Pepper bonded with her beautiful dog in a somewhat different way;)

All should be clear in the days ahead, although nothing is likely to come in from PA or points west, including something we ordered from Walmart the other day that is likely stuck in Ohio until the 90 reopens in that direction. Because, at last report,....

Watch on YouTube

We'd never heard of a Thruway closed on Thanksgiving weekend....

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That trail walk this morning was our first together in a few days, as we've both been mending a little. A few days ago, we took the dog out on a shorter go around the block; Pepper's been hesitant to poop on many of our Both Humans With excursions because it's so new and different for her, but on that morning she proceeded to take a prolific dump at just about the far point of the circular route. This is when the humans discovered that neither had brought a bag to clean it up, so while I searched for and eventually found a discarded alternative (a lone, wet, ratty glove somebody had dropped), Eleanor hurried back home to get a bag, and did so a little too quickly for the liking of one of her ankles. It had been hurting too much for her to keep up with us until this morning, as she took slower if not particularly shorter walks on her own,. Meanwhile, I did another of my gym's "signature" workouts on Friday and broke my own personal record for rowing non-stop for 14 minutes. It was my first beat of a previous rowing record in some time, probably because I'd only done it once before when they added it to the "benchmark" list six months or so ago. That was then followed by 28 more minutes of fairly heavy repetitions and inclines in the rest of the session; I felt okay afterward, but yesterday my left knee began complaining about the effort and it got worse last night. It's not even noticeable when sitting, and barely so when walking, but I think I'm off the rower for at least a few days until it rights itself.

Not to be left out, early on one of our other neighborhood walks with the dog last week, I noticed she had something of a cowlick in the fur on her back right flank. When the sun was at its brightest as we turned for home, I could see a nasty red spot under that cowlick, which she must have been biting and licking at. We don't know if she got stuck, stung or bitten, but Veterinarian Mom put some ointments and bandages on it and she's been a mostly good girl about not ripping the bandaid off the spot. We're optimistic it will be healed up by the time she's scheduled for a grooming next weekend.

Other corners have brought others' medical news to us. When I briefly talked to my sister on Thanksgiving, she told me she'd picked up some pain in one leg after a gym visit of her own a few days earlier. By the time she called Eleanor yesterday, she reported she'd been giving a steroid treatment for it and she sounded much better. We also heard from Eleanor's brother, who has just been diagnosed with macular degeneration, a condition that can lead to blindness. Since there's a genetic component to it, she wants to make sure they test for it when we go in for our own annual appointments with the opthalmology practice next month. (I vaguely remember being tested for it at some past point and it being ruled out, but "vaguely remember" is something else I have to keep, um, an eye on;)

Then there was this news from a longtime friend of mine, and for years of both of ours. I've known Clea since high school and have been a regular reader of her mystery novels and occasional music reviews for the Boston Globe (her hometown paper since heading for Harvard and never leaving the area) and other online sites. Clea recently shared her own diagnosis, of stage 4 colon cancer from over a year ago, and she reports that it has been successfully-for-now treated, but with the usual side effects that come from such treatment. She shared the text of a piece she just wrote about it for the Globe, paywalled there but readable here:

What do you say to a cancer patient? This is a trick question. The answer is “anything.”

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a question worth asking. Since I was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer in May 2023, I’ve noticed a distinct change in how people behave toward me. In general, and certainly among my close connections, people have been great....I’m far from alone. Even as diagnoses rise, the number of people living with cancer is growing. Three decades ago, survivorship was relatively rare, and cancer survivors made up fewer than 1.5 percent of the population, according to the American Association of Cancer Research. Now they make up 5 percent. That’s 18 million Americans living with a cancer diagnosis in their past.

But as my biweekly treatment — “maintenance chemo” — goes deep into its second year, I’m noticing something else. I have, in some ways, become invisible. In part, that may be because I look very different than I did less than two years ago. My hair fell out, and my current boyish white mop is a striking departure from even my most recent author photo.

But I think it’s more than that. People feel awkward around any illness. Cancer, with its outdated reputation as a death sentence, is a real conversation killer. People say, “I’m sorry.” Often they ask if there’s anything they can do. Then they fall silent.

I understand. Cancer is scary, even secondhand. I’ve certainly had my down days. During one of them, one of the most useful and kind things a friend said to me (and which I keep as a mantra) was quite simple: “You may not have hope right now,” he told me. “That does not mean there is no hope.”

....[W]hile I appreciate the “I’m sorry” response I often get when I break the news (or my hair or chemo pump do it for me), and even more so the sincere “How are you doing?” that lets me vent about one annoying side effect or another, what I really want is just that — to live.

Because the bottom line is I am still alive and I want to be included in your life and include you in mine. So, please, ask about my health if you’re curious. Share those stories.... But then, please, move on. Tell me about your cat’s recent vet visit. The annoying person in your book club. A show you just know I’ll want tickets for — because I’m planning on being here as long as possible, and I do not want to waste more of it on my illness than necessary.

How lovely it was to go to a party a few weeks ago, me, my cancer, and all, and talk about books, obedience training, musicians playing state fairs. In short: anything and everything else that makes up life.

Despite all the DEATH that visits our lives on an increasingly regular basis, we've lost, or even experienced such suffering from, relatively few as close as this friend, who I've seen exactly once in the past 45 years. Her upbeat attitude about it is a joy and a lesson if we do wind up with that particular Reaper getting closer to us or anyone close to us.

Now go buy her new book:) I just did.

Our observance was nice, simple, quiet. That's the way, uh huh uh huh, we like it, uh huh uh huh.

About our only communication with actual humans during the day, other than postings on socials, was a short call to my sister and some texting with our friends who might've but didn't come to dinner. Most of the rest of the communicating yesterday and today from the world of autobots was full of fail.

First came a text that a small office item had come in for pickup at our nearby Best Buy. Even though the store itself was closed for the entire Thanksgiving holiday, I still could have claimed it because they are now using outdoor lockers for such pickups. You just need the code, which the text usually includes a link to. Instead, it just gave me this link to their website:

Clicking that little blue rectangle did not yield the code, either:

Um, it's hard to speak to a team member when the whole store is shut down. I'd timed this journey so I could listen to the annual Rochester broadcast of Alice's Restaurant, and pretty much hit this dilemma just as Arlo was getting to the line about "never having heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving, so with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset...."

Or in my case, into the Wegmans parking lot for a few last-minute items while the final bars of the Massacree played out. It was especially poignant this year because the Alice of the song title just passed away a few weeks ago.

As we sat reading in the mid-afternoon, Wegmans would come to us for a change. A call came in on my phone from an unknown number at 2 p.m., to us and thousands of other Shoppers Club members, just in time for hostesses in eight states to rip Grandma’s cucumber salad off everybody’s tables:

No, Siri, the translation was not useful, but the version that scrolled across my lock screen did explain better: it was contaminated cucumbers that were promising a Salmonella Chanted Evening, the remaining half of one of which was sitting in our produce crisper after putting the other half into a salad dish last week sometime.

I passed on my deepest sympathies to their Service Desk employees, who will now have to spend most of today handing out dollar bills and collecting poisoned pickles. We just threw ours out; the cashier gave me a free 99 cent reusable bag yesterday, so it all evens out. At least two friends heard about it from me rather than from the store; one had just purchased one of their cukes, while the other served it at her Thanksgiving table yesterday. No reported casualties, yet, I'm happy to say.

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No poison on our table for two. Also, no bird or other food coma spread. No football. Just us, sharing crepes and the World's Smallest Pumpkin Pie™ while watching this beautiful film streaming on Peacock.

Set between London in 1969 and that city and two other countries on the 2020 dawn of COVID, it's a story in three languages where love is the universal tongue with some sides of prejudice, anger and regret stemming from events a quarter century earlier.

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Today was another of those Holidays We Get But Others Don't, and as with what happened with a settlement check to me back on the Friday the 5th after July the 4th, having today off caused me to miss something again. Not nearly as bad this time, though.

A few weeks ago, Eleanor noticed a crack in her windshield. Our insurance steered us to the national chain called Safelite that does minor repairs in your driveway but books the bigger replacements for their garage, closest to us being about eight miles from here. First they made an appointment to come here but then decided the crack was too big to just repair. Then, on eight mile drive #1 last week, they begged out when the replacement they had in stock was itself cracked. They promised to reschedule for 3 p.m. today. I duly appeared at that place and time, only to find nobody knew nuthin about me or it. Calls were made. Turns out they tried to text me sometime yesterday or this morning to tell me the replacement was still not in and we'd have to reschedule again for next Wednesday. That text went to my office landline number, which you cannot text to. I imagine they also emailed me, but that also would have gone to my work email, which I have tried religiously to stay off of on this Actual Coupla Days Off. So now I'm looking for another glass shop to see if anyone can do this as fast, and accepting our insurance, before they break a FOURTH appointment on me. Another recommended place was closed for the holiday weekend today and is not open this weekend, so the soonest this will be sorted will be Monday morning, when it will likely be a digout from anywhere from inches to feet of our first snowstorm of the season, and when I already have a neuro appointment at asscrack o'clock that morning if the Snowmageddon will even allow me to get out of the house to it:P

At least Safelite hasn't tried to give us salmonella poisoning. Yet.

I gave in and responded to the suggestion of adding Larry David as a Facebook friend. No reply, which seems fitting somehow.

As for the other sweet nothings that got pre-empted yesterday, I'll begin with my semi-real connection to a semi-famous performer. A few weeks ago, NPR's World Cafe played some tracks from a to-be-released album by Madison Cunningham (a female singer I'd not heard much from before) and Andrew Bird (a string player we knew much more of). It recreates the entire debut album of Buckingham Nicks, a near impossible to find record that came out right before Lindsey and Stevie joined Fleetwood Mac in the mid-70s. It's called Cunningham Bird, and while I forgot to look to purchase it, I did unexpectedly find it on the Prime Music app on my phone without having to download it. Except to get the whole album, you need the pay-extra-for Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that they're always trying to get me to sign up for.

Just to confuse us, though, it let us listen to a couple tracks from it, and I will now probably either buy the actual CD of the album if we can't find a copy in the library. But meanwhile, Eleanor was listening and thought that Madison sounded just like Kathleen Edwards, another performer we've loved for years and finally saw in person this past summer. It wound up making sense she would sound like her, once I looked at the phone, because it WAS her. As soon as Prime Music finished our free sample, it decided to play "other things you may like without subscribing, you cheap bastard" instead. Once of which was an older track by Kathleeen neither of us recognized. But I'm glad it did, because it reminded me to download her just-released cover of John Prine's "Hello In There" that she posted about just over a week ago. She'd just posted to her real, blue-checkmarked page about ending her tour and looking not particularly glamourous before heading home for what in Canada today is just another ordinary Thursday-

-and I took the opportunity to comment with thanks for the Prine cover and also about the case of Mistaken Amazon Identity. She hasn't responded to it yet, but within a minute, I got another friend request from one of the dozens of Fake Kathleen accounts that have chosen her to spoof, to hack information about people and sell them shitty knockoff band t-shirts.

At least it wasn't a Fake Larry David trying to get in touch:P

----

Other Nothingnesses of note:

Over the weekend, Eleanor picked up a recent film I'd not heard of but knew the subject of quite well:

Gabriel Byrne was the only cast member we recognized, who plays Beckett in his adult to elderly ages, as well as playing his "Inner Sam" who speaks to him, and us, from the moment he declines to give a speech accepting his Nobel Prize for literature until his 1980s passing. It passes through his stages of life from being raised by an overbearing mother; to encountering a late-in-career James Joyce (played by an actor named Aiden Gillen who was unrecognizable from the one other thing I've seen and many franchises I haven't), whose overbearing wife and daughter also interact with Beckett's life; to marrying a long-suffering but in the end overbearing wife of his own named Suzanne. Leaving Ireland for Paris as soon as possible, the real and the filmed Beckett fights for the French Resistance, has his main success with Waiting for Godot, cheats massively on Suzanne with a BBC producer adapting his works and turns the adultery into a bizarrely staged play titled, of all things, Play. Then he dies:

Oops, wrong one again. With no children of his own, control of his remaining copyrighted works became property of his estate, managed by his son of his sole brother, the only other descendant of that overbearing mother, That estate has become notorious for being overbearing in its control of his works, refusing to permit and promptly seeking to shut down any Godot production that is not cast and performed precisely according to his script and stage directions. For whatever reason, the only other 20th century author I can think of which is so carelessly controlling of its soon-expriring IP rights is that of.... James Joyce.

Must be something in the potatoes.

I meant to check if they got estate permission or cooperation for this work (it does show a few seconds of Play), but whatever. It's beautifully done, despite a good quantity of down.

----

Today, for us, will also primarily be about nothing. We abandoned the trappings of this and the other major holidays once the nest emptied; we briefly considered a last-second Friendsgiving hosting when a dear friend of ours and her BF got disinvited from her own Dysfunctional Family table at the last minute, but they've made their own similarly nihilistic plans for the day. We will play a board game, eat crepes, and I might head to see our friend Maria doing an after-dinner set downtown when John's loss will be heavy on her, and everyones', mind down there.

May your hearts be fuller than your guts today and always,

There was a Post About Nothing scheduled to appear here. Inspired by a variety of things, including by getting repeated Facebook friend suggestions of Larry David, apparently the real Seinfeld co-creator and a mutual friend of 10,000 Maniac guitarist John Lombardo. And by the two of us being semi-fooled into thinking that one new-to-us musician sounded a lot like another, which turned out to be nothing but a weird tech coincidence. Also by watching a very good film about the life and work of Samuel Beckett (the author-playwright, not the Quantum Leaper), whose most celebrated work is basically about nothing happening.

Plus some kitty pictures, because Nothing's better than those, amirite?

All got interrupted by some news just received about someone who was Truly Something around here.

A few months ago, we finally got to see a legend of local music opening for Antje Duvekot. John Brady was talented and funny and we left with one of his CDs and a newfound friendship.

Weeks later, I attended a piano performance by another friend of ours- and even closer friend of his, who designed the cover of that CD. On Facebook, I posted a few bars of a song of his that Annie Philippone sang that night after telling us how important his advice and friendship was to her own music journey.

This afternoon, that post of mine started getting reactions of 👍 and ❤️ and 😢. Then Maria Sebastian, another dear friend of ours- and his- shared the news. John Brady had just passed away. The reactions were coming because Annie had pinned my post and video about him to the top of her own Facebook feed. And Maria shared how much Annie, and her husband Don, had done in his final time to care for John and help release his spirit.

So many other connections. John was in a longstanding band with my 40-year friend Bill Savino. Dave Goddard just reminded me that John produced his late wife Stefani Brooks Goddard’s CD, which is also in our collection and our hearts after she was a part of our lives for close to 30 years. Others are adding their mentions of shows or jams or just his being here for advice or friendship.

Our direct connection to him was brief but beautiful. I share the losses felt by so many others with deeper ones.

----

The Nothingness will come in the coming days, especially as we celebrate tomorrow's national holiday as Nothing but a day off, with nobody coming or going, no food comas or football-watching orgies, and just peaceful easy feelings here.

Except for the kitty pictures. They can't wait. My sister gifted Eleanor with a Wonder Woman tote, and Da Boyz immediately Golden Lasso'd their asses on top of it.

Working backwards to begin with through the past several days:

Friday night was my first Last Waltz.

That name refers to a concert that was the last live performance by The Band; to any of a number of recordings of the concert; to a famed Martin Scorcese documentary depicting the concert and its production; but since 2017 around here, has mainly referred to an annual-except-for-COVID-year gathering of local musicians who play the music from the concert and also play the roles of the 1970s performers who originated it. Held in the main hall of the former downtown Methodist church landmark, bought and restored by Buffalo native musician Ani DiFranco and now known as Babeville as a homage to her self-produced record label, it has been a near-instant sellout every year it has graced the former chancel of that building. This past July when the tickets went on offer, I socked one away, getting me in there for the first time to see a lineup of local artists paying tribute to the music and the now established local tradition of this Thanksgivingish performance.

The original concert was on Thanksgiving of 1976 and included a turkey dinner for all the assembled musicians and fans at San Francisco's legendary Winterland concert hall. Buffalo has way too many events tied to Turkey Day itself including a 5-mile race and often Bills national television appearances, so it tends to be scheduled here for the weekend before Thanksgiving. This year, that fell on November 22nd, and the onstage narrator of the performance, echoing voice-overs Scorcese incorporated into the film, started the evening's proceedings with a bizarre tale tied to that perhaps most tragic (so far) of events in American history falling in November. As one other chronicler of classic rock repeated it:

The Band, who were then known as The Hawks and worked as Ronnie Hawkins’ backing band were playing gigs in the American South and played at a venue that Jack Ruby owned in Fort Worth. It was a sketchy place and because they weren’t making big bucks yet, they couldn’t all multiple hotel rooms so they had to take turns sleeping at the venue to guard their guitars and equipment.

The first of two things she doesn't mention in that paragraph, but our narrator did, was that they had to cut short their first set at Ruby's club because somebody launched a tear gas bomb at them. The other is that they were still in Texas, months later and hundreds of miles away from that venue, when Ruby had his 15 seconds of televised infamy two days after the assassination and the band members realized this was the same sleazy club owner they had played for.

As in the show, that same Ronnie Hawkins was the first "guest" of The Band to join them onstage. His rendition of "Who Do You Love" was lyrical and loud and I complimented the performer on it when I headed to the bar right before the intermission.* All of the musicians covering The Band's amazing lineup from that night mainly stood at the back when their numbers were done before all came back for the show's unison finale of the "Bob Dylan"-led chorus of "I Shall Be Released." Buck Quigley, Hawkins's muse for the evening, was one of the singers I saw back there; I'd never seen him perform before but knew his name from the local alt-journalism community. Also in the back was a local singer named Alex McArthur, who'd been up earlier as well to take the Mavis Staples verse on "The Weight," perhaps The Band's best-known anthem. I thanked her for her performance that night and she smiled a bit, but when I also mentioned having seen her at Sportsmen's a few months earlier at another friend's CD release show, she lit up. NOW we were connected.

As I was with others on that stage: local performer, recording artist, member of 1,000 different bands and promoter of numerous venues and concert series as well as his own annual outdoor festival Tyler Westcott, here as part of the Brothers Blue-

- and Frank Grizanti, also a frequent onstage companion of many friends in everything from duos to the Black Rock Beatles, reimagining Eric Clapton's guest spot that night-

Behind him on the drums, channeling Levon Helm, is a new-to-me local percussionist named Pete Holquin, while Robbie Robertson inhabited local music mainstay Doug Yeomans to Frank's right. Joining them on vocals was a longtime musician friend of mine Jim Whitford as Rick Danko-

- shown here to the right of an amazing recreator of the vocals of Neil Diamond. Many of the "guest" performers didn't strive to imitate the voices of their night's namesakes, but this guy totally nailed Neil. As did the guy who played Bob Dylan, but evvvverybody does Dylan, man.

I recorded a few seconds of the final all-hands-on-stage moment and added the following words:

The 11:00 song from The Last Waltz.

There’s a national touring company that recreates this concert all over. It just stopped in Rochester a week or two ago. They’re probably great- polished and professional. And when you wake up in your town, they’ll be scheduled to appear 1,000 miles away from here.

These musicians? Stay.

Just about everyone up there is a friend I’ve seen many times, or a friend-of. They teach, they support, they attend each others’ shows. They could session, or backup, or even headline anywhere, and many have. Yet they stay. And we’re embarrassingly rich for it.

Take bows. You earn them every night ❤️ 🎶

----

Moving on to my personal episode of Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me....

As an offshoot of the neuro testing I am having done (nothing major so far has been found, yay), they were evaluating me for a clinical trial of a related medication. The doctor running the study, who I have yet to meet, is named Laszlo. I have also not yet met the only other “person” of that name I have ever heard of, but I’ll just leave it at this:

If it at some point during the consultation, HE screams BAT! and flies out of the room, I am dropping out of the study.

He did send in a phlebotomist to draw blood, but she did it the non-bitey way.

I got selected for this based on potential evaluation of whether additional weight loss might reduce sleep apnea which might, in turn if reduced, also reduce the number of mild-impairment "senior moments" I've experienced. The actual appointments for me as patients won't happen until early next month, but this study, in which they pay me as guinea pig, got scheduled much faster and that began with an initial evaluation on Wednesday morning, They'd told me to set aside about 90 minutes for it, and I was on time, sailed through the assorted screening questions and vitals, which among other things told me that weight loss was apparently already under way. Since my last check-in there I was down close to 10 pounds. Some of that I attribute to diet changes- Eleanor paying more attention in evening meals for both of us, but also me consciously cutting down, but not yet stopping, some of the snack choices that can really make a difference. Some, also, is the workout regimen- I'm now coming close to, if not breaking, two miles in 20-odd minutes every time I set foot on a treadmill, and the other portions of the exercises are becoming more challenging.

So less weight is nice. More wait, not so. That 90 minute set-aside quickly turned into just over two hours, most of it just waiting for various techs to fit me into their undoubtedly too-busy schedules to get my EKG and blood draws done. Since the latter had required fasting, I also had to leave time to grab coffee and a late breakfast before getting to an 11:30 client appointment at my office just in time.**

The waits would continue later in the week, only this time ending in things not happening at all. Thursday, I had a 5:00 court appearance scheduled for a client in a local town's traffic court. Got there on time, was told I was fifth in line to talk to the prosecutor, but when they asked the client's name they didn't have the file or any ability to do anything productive. Since I had appeared by faxing in a form way before the last minute, they send a letter giving me a new date when there would be a shorter line. A letter I still have not received:P The following morning, I set out to the same town for a car appointment: Eleanor noticed a crack in her windshield, that our insurance covers in full with no deductible. They farm this out to an outfit called Safelite, which at first booked a home appointment to just repair it, but the shop quickly decided its size would require a full windsheld replacement at their shop. I dropped it off and was about to be whisked away by a friend for lunch when they called me back: the replacement windshield was itself cracked, and they didn't have another one in stock. So that was another hour of travel lost, although the lunch I never would've gone to otherwise was nice.

As of now, nothing remains to wait for. The Bills are off this week, there's little going on at work during the short week, and we're not going anywhere for the holiday. So Happy Jack Ruby Day to all who celebrate;)

----

* Never did acquire anything other than water on that or the previous bar visits in this venue. I found it hilarious that this once abstemious Methodist building doesn’t have NA beer at either of its bars-

** Just in time for yet another wait and waste of time for the client and me. The trustee running the Zoom hearing was still plodding through cases from an earlier calendar because nobody's audio was working and their video kept freezing up. Ours was fine once she finally got to us.

Let's start with the fire-breathing nemesis in red. The Bills have been chasing the Chiefs for most of this decade. This was the fifth straight year they met in the regular season dating to 2020, when KC beat Buffalo in an empty stadium. They would meet again in the AFC championship game on the road, the first of our three unsucessful post-season meetings. In the three years after, we've owned them in the regular season, winning all three games in their stadium, but the post-season results were loss (the dreaded "13 seconds game"), broken date (a home loss to the Bengals after the Damar Hamlin near-death incident in Cincy a few weeks earlier), and then a home loss to KC after an injury-plagued defense just couldn't stop Patrick Mahomes.

This past Sunday was their fifth straight regular season meeting, but the first in Orchard Park with fans in the stands. KC came in with a perfect 9-0 record. The dragon threatened to slay a home team without a number of injured players at key positions. Yet somehow, on that sunny afternoon, Mahomes decided to throw his first and last passes of the game to our defenders, and our own halfway decent QB Josh Allen sealed the win with a 26-yard touchdown run that will be on highlight reels for ages.

Our reward is a scheduled week off, a possible clinch of the division and a playoff spot if Miami loses to New England this weekend, and a bunch of bragging rights that will only last if we manage to repeat the feat in the post-season against them or whoever knocks them off in an earlier playoff round.

Maybe KC lost to us this time because Taylor Swift, their most famous fangirl, didn't make the trip down the QEW from Toronto where she'd done a multinight sold-out set of concerts. During the game, some wag posted this video, supposedly of Bills Mafia hacking her sound system during one of those shows to play the Bills fight song over her audio-

Watch on YouTube

- but alas, it proved to be fake, at least as to that performance.

Still, be on the lookout for "Shout! Song (Taylor's Version)."

----

Onto the ghosts, green and otherwise.

Dreams have been intense and weird in recent weeks. One was a recurrence of a relatively common one for me, that involves me finding and buying back my first-ever My Own Car. This was not the '71 Pinto I was too poor and uninsurable to actually own after freshman year of college- my sister bought that one for me just in time for me to total it a month or so later- but an even shittier Ford model from the same year known as the Maverick. I've written about this weird old rustbucket previously and even found a photo that wasn't too far off from it-

That's not mine. Color's not putrid enough, the mag wheels were nothing like the shit tires I had, and it needs a ton more rust. I never even took a picture of the damn thing, despite buying it mainly for a newspaper job in which I had to take pictures. I bought it for $400 from a Cornell employee, and probably spent ten to twenty times that amount fixing everything on it in the next not quite two years. Much was at the behest of shady inspection stations that wouldn't pass the Green Ghost (this was before I or we even gave cars proper names) unless I spent hundreds to replace its parking brake that I never used, or its turn signal that worked just fine if I jiggled it manually. It crapped out on my first-ever ride to Buffalo to check out the law school and went back to Ithaca with a new Basil Ford radiator that probably cost more than the car originally did.

In the Ghost's most recent subconscious appearance, I was tooling along somewhere when one of the tires blew off and I drove up on a shoulder on one of the wheel rims. I filed that memory away until the end of another long Rochester day on Tuesday, when I again had a very late client appointment just west of the northern reaches of the city known as Charlotte (but pronounced Char-LOT). With time to kill before it, I made a stop at my favorite purveyor of music and kitsch, Record Archive. On their new release shelf was something that almost, but not quite, reminded me of that old beast's sound system:

Vinyl coming back, I kinda get. But cassettes? They are way more likely to degrade in quality over time if the tape doesn't just break off in the player if you even have one. The only worse thing I could imagine making a comeback would be 8-tracks, and that is what the Green Ghost came with as an aftermarket add-on to its factory AM radio. The one in that car was permanently stuck on the third program of any tape you shoved into it; each 8-track tape had four such "programs," each with a left and right stereo track making up the eight. Fortunately, one of the few tapes I ever bought for it was the mid-70s Genesis live album "Seconds Out," recorded after Peter Gabriel left the band but when Phil Collins was still singing mostly older Pete-era material. The third "side" of the four-program tape was the entirety of their prog-rock anthem "Supper's Ready," and I played the shit out of that thing so many times I can still recite it by heart.

I bought none of those cassettes, nor vinyl nor even any new CDs there, but I did find two more odd memories to add to a recent musical collection:

That's the duo I posted about a few entries back who we saw here on the night of my birthday. At that show, I bought their most recent CD as well as a tribute album of cover songs by the dear departed musician we followed for decades and they met and married while performing in her backup band. That was the one that it turned out I already owned, and which I then regifted to another musician friend who'd just opened for them at a Rochester show the weekend before.

These were older releases of theirs, and the weird part was seeing that they'd been autographed by the two of them and then traded in to Record Archive for a couple of bucks. I felt like I was in an animal shelter rescuing two lost puppies. Now I want to see them again so I can get them to sign them again to us, as I've done at least one other time with an autographed find from those bins.

----

After the semi-appearance of that ghost, I headed to my two relatively late appointments. After visiting my one pro bono client at his city home, I had Siri direct me to the second one in northerner places I'd never been to before, and that took me past another ghost of my own relatively distant past.

Not quite this distant, though:

That photo is from 1912 from outside Rochester's Hickey-Freeman suit factory. Founded there in 1899, the brand became known as the preferred menswear of presidents up to and including Obama, but with the advent of casual Fridays and reduced workforces, that factory's tie to the Hickey-Freeman brand finally met its end a little over a year ago. Between production being cheaper in Mexico and its inner-city location being less attractive to the workforce, it was just a matter of time before it would give up, what else?, the ghost altogether. When I drove by it in the darkness of a Tuesday late afternoon, the whole plant was dark, fencing surrounding it all, but that metallic crest still visible at its North Clinton Avenue entrance.

Even in my own Rochester time, those doors swung wide at least once a year. Right around this time of fall, Hickey-Freeman would run a "warehouse sale," putting those President-like wares on sale for the only time all year, first-come-first-serve, cash and carry and no alterations. A major portion of the male Rochester business community, including me and all of my partners, would religiously appear at the crack of dawn to queue up for the best pickings. Initially, I think either the whole event or just the first morning was by ticketed invitation only, but we Knew A Guy who always got them for the four of us. It would still run more for an off-price suit than you could get at Sibley's or (don't laugh) Sears, and I got to know a tailor near our home who'd add another hundred or so to the haul to get them fitted, but it was a rite of passage that I was probably expected to participate in to keep my place in that status-conscious organization. In its final years before or just after I left in 1994, it was much less of a big deal, and relocated offsite to more suburban-friendly retail space in abandoned warehouses or future Spirit of Halloween storefronts. Best as I can tell, I still have one remaining trace of those trips: just the coat from a Barneys-branded suit with the Hickey-Freeman crest inside the breast pocket. At the rate I'm going, I might be able to fit into it again someday.

Following the closing announcement in 2023, the brand ran one last onsite sale at the old factory, their first in years, probably for the nostalgia as much as anything else:

When it comes to these factory sales, the once-annual events historically were greeted with great anticipation and large crowds that stretched around the block of the North Clinton Avenue facility.

“A lot of the fun part was right in the beginning,” said David O’Connell, who has been coming to these sales since the 1980s. “(You would) start talking to some people find out where they're from, and there's people from Canada, there's people from all over New York state.”

And people from right here in Rochester. O’Connell joined Rotoli as two of the first in line.

[Rotoli being another last-chance shopper whose parents and grandparents all worked at the factory.]

And the pair reminisced about what used to be.

“The excitement that preceded a Hickey Freeman outlet sale was significant,” Rotoli said. “You'd be talking about it with your office mates, and you'd already have a strategy of getting there, getting your coffee, and getting set up to be in line. It was a big thing.”

Rotoli arrived a half-hour before the store opened on Thursday, expecting a long line.

“And I was like, where is everybody?” he said.

Times have changed.

As they will in the old place. I later learned that a local developer is repurposing it into affordable senior housing and investing close to $2 million in one of the region's largest geothermal heating systems. The legacy will live on in the name:

Tailor Square.

----

After ending that night, as I will tonight, with some musical moments to be reported on later, I spent the in-between two nights at home with our usual evening forms of entertainment. Last night's was getting almost to the end of an Apple TV series called Bad Sisters, an adaptation by a mostly Irish cast and crew of a Danish thriller-comedy of the same basic premise: four sisters-in-law of a Really Bad Guy conspiring to relieve their sister of the pain he inflicts on all of them by trying, and repeatedly failing, to murder him.

Series 2 of this show just dropped, unlike its main dead character who apparently can't be dropped no matter how many times they try to kill him. It splits two timelines between "months before" when John Paul is very much alive, and "present day" when, in the first scene of the series, we first see him in a coffin.

We just finished the 8th of the first season's 10 episodes, which ends with an apparent kill of JP, but with the closing credits using "You're Dead," the theme song of What We Do In The Shadows.

Which got me thinking.... is JP actually a vampire?

Conniving, evil and narcissistic? Check.

Can't be killed by any of a number of attempted methods not involving stakes through the heart? Check.

Can't stay in his coffin after he's supposedly been killed? Check.

Spends all his time on an island? Check.

I'm asking the nobody spoil the remaining two episodes or the next season's events yet, please, but: if he escapes another predicament by screaming "BAT!" and flying out of the room, I'll have been vindicated.

I had a previous possible vampire encounter the previous day as well, but we'll save that for another day, other than to say that the suspect in question is also named Laszlo.

Another weeklong recap, with three of the past five nights ending for me much later than they usually do.

Tuesday was my first Dressup in weeks, for a 9:30 Rochester trial with a client I'd never met before. We'd exchanged documents- "exchanged" meaning "embedded them in a dozen different emails to me the day before the hearing that I had to go in to the office on a holiday to save and print"- and I was there in plenty of time to even get a downtown charging station- that wouldn't work because a car next to me was using the other plug and it couldn't charge both at the same time:P- and met the client for full preparation....

for a case that never got heard. Soon as the judge came in, she saw the other party, told us she knew him from outside the case and couldn't hear it that morning. Neither could anybody else. Thanks for coming, guys.

I'd ordinarily have been happy to get out early, but I'd also booked a 5:30 appointment with another client there, so I wound up stuck for the whole day. Some of it, I just caught up on things, but it also gave me a chance to work off some of that frustration. A week earlier, after coming home early on Election Day, I knew I would either have to get out for some exercise or go to an urgent care and get put into a medically induced coma so I wouldn't obsess over the incoming election results.

I chose the latter and got the bike outside for the first time in weeks:

Wound up obsessing about the results all night anyway, but at least it helped me get a little sleep. A week later, the exercise was inside: our gym has a Rochester location a few minutes from my office, and it was another of their company wide "benchmark days." The app tracks your past records for these, and I knew the "12 minute run for distance" meant keeping a pace of at least 5.5 miles an hour for the whole time (a 10:54 mile pace) and then picking it up in the final minute or so to break my old personal record of 1.13 miles. I didn't, but at least I tied it:

(Those are the coaches' names. No, unlike certain felonious President-elects on their SATs, I didn't pay them to run them for me.)

Even odder? There's a different "benchmark" for your best time running a mile on the treadmill, and when you're at about my speed, they come very close to each other. My PR for that one, set almost two years ago, was 10:54.That's what you get if you set the thing to 5.5 mph and never stop, and since that's exactly what I did this past Tuesday, I wound up tying that one, too.

----

No major accomplishments Wednesday, other than finding out about the one I'll mention at the end. It was, however, when I learned that longtime LJ-now-Dreamwidth friend

greenquotebook was in town with her husband for a couple of days. Steve has recently retired, giving them more time for trips like this one, to see the Buffalo stop of the Shoresy Fall Classic. Shoresy is a slice of Canadian culture spun off from the long-running series Letterkenny that we've watched on Hulu, following a semi-proish bunch of hockey hosers from Oop North. The show's creators run a multi-city tournament in bigger NHL barns for charities in those cities against alumni of the host teams, and Andrea and Steve got to see the show's stars take on Sabres alumni from some very good 100-level seats that night.

Steve grew up near here and remains a Sabres fan through the recent years of suffering, while Andrea roots for them as well at least when they're not playing the Islanders; so when I got in touch about them about maybe doubling down on pucks and seeing the Sabres play St. Louis the next night, her response was, Hell yes! We couldn't get into the lower bowl without a mortgage application, but cheap seats were plentiful on StubHub, and after a successful transfer of them into Ticketmonster, we had our three places in the 300s for faceoff, slightly later than usual at 7:30 because the network stooges at ESPN had claimed this game for national telecast.

Good thing, that. After I picked them up from their near-airport hotel, they kindly took me to dinner at the Dino before the game. I suggested we walk over to Fountain Plaza and take the train to the arena. Nice walk; no train. The above-ground section of Metro Rail is having track maintenance until Thanksgiving, so I walked back to the car and picked them up for the drive to the Seneca One garage. Hey- it helped me get over 10,000 steps for the day 🏃‍

(That wasn't even the biggest count of the day; Eleanor's been coming-with on our morning dog walks and we now often go longer than I used to with just Pepper:)

Back to the evening: we made it in plenty of time for the anthems-

- for the Sabres first goal-

- for some hearty chants of Ref You Suck! after the zebras waved off a late goal by Buffalo that would have tied the game, making a third goal minutes later only a tying one rather than a winning one, but that led to a power play in the extra stanza and a beautiful shot from the Sabres captain-

- so we left happy, quoting the late longtime broadcaster RJ's pronouncement that the Sabres win it in OOOOOverTIMMMMME!

We arrived home safely- me that night, them the next day by plane- and for me, it was one more night of unusual activity.

----

So many friends are active in the local music community. I got to see two of them across Allen Street from each other after work.

Our friend Maria was first to go on at 8. A smaller house in this newer Allentown venue, but I got to gift her the CD from the duo she opened for two weekends prior and share some stories about the songs she was singing. Then, over to the legendary Nietzsche's where our (and her) friend Annie was kicking off a new series of piano nights on the vintage keyboard across from their bar:

She did a few singalongs of Elton John and Billy Joel, a few of her own compositions, but most touching was a cover of a song by a Buffalo Music Hall of Famer we're all friends with named John Brady. We first heard him opening for Antje Duvekot a few months ago in the village, but he's recorded and performed with just about everyone in this community and with many beyond. Annie told us before the song that if she hadn’t wandered into this very bar, ages ago, on a Tuesday night in a blizzard with just one other listener to his set, she wouldn’t be singing there, or probably anywhere in public. She already had her degree in music and was at UB for her masters, but was still very shy about performing, and she and her friend, John's only audience that night, got to talk a lot about how he did what he still does. That helped her overcome that shyness, and the result has been decades of public performances, inspirations of generations that she's taught, and an upcoming CD of her own tunes:)

----

I'll end with an announcement of sorts about leaving a platform I never really joined.

When Twitter began as a Thing, it wasn't appealing. That original 140-character limit, later doubled, just seemed too confining, When I did "join," it was after Elon Muskrat took over and he started requiring you to be logged in to read beyond a single linked post. So I never used it for anything other than lurking, but picked the most offensive-to-him things I could come up with. In addition to my posted name, I also put "cis male" in my profile as soon as he threatened to kick out anyone using such wokeness.

Last week, I began seeing a mass exodus of friends and sites from his sewer site. Part is his complicity in the election, but also part is his announcement of new X (as he calls it and everything) Terms of Service that, among other things, require users to consent to their content being used to train his evil army of A.I. bots. I clicked to read said terms, and saw that, sometime recently, I had been banhammered:

Perfect. I've been kicked out of a club that once had me as a member.

The migration appears to be something called Bluesky. It's run as a Twittersite-in-exile by many of its pre-Elno developers, and has much more of the old site's look and feel than the current crop of Nazis and miscogynists are running now. I acquired an account over there ages ago when it was invite-only, but I think now anyone can get one. This is me, if you care to follow.

Maybe they'll kick me out there, too, eventually. I just hope they don't do it at the last minute after I prepared all weekend to post something:P

We're doing the best we can to keep things close to normal. Not that we were ever that normal to begin with.

One of the first-out-of-the-gate ironies from Wednesday's fallout? Strictly professionally speaking, it was one of my best days ever. I finally got clearance to release a fee to my Rochester office that had been earned over the past 12 months, approved back in September but held in legal limbo while two government officials tried to figure out what to do with other funds in the case. As if that wasn't enough, I got word that one of my collection cases, which I had done nothing to advance a final payment deadline of the following week, was actually coming in early, deposited to my trust account in certified funds without me having to lift a finger.

The workweek ended somewhat quieter than that, when I was stood up by two different clients, either or both of whom I was ready to stay late and see in Rochester at the end of that day. Instead, I got to leave and get home at normal hours, making it easier to keep plans for music each of the next two nights. First was to end my birthday celebration last night: a local performance by a husband-wife folk music duo called the Kennedys. (No relation to the Brainworm Dude that they'll admit to;) Pete and Maura have a long history of performing and touring, including many years in Nanci Griffith's backing band. Nanci asked (or, as Maura clarified, TOLD) them to open for her on her Ireland tour many years ago. they recorded a CD of covers of her songs back in 2014, long before Nancis's passing three years ago. They've since done a tribute song to her titled "Late September Breeze" on their newest album from about a year ago. I picked up both that CD and the Nanci cover album at the event, only to discover a friend had gifted me the latter CD some time ago. To complete the circle, I am going to regift it to our friend Maria, who just traveled to Rochester last weekend to open for The Kennedys. She is planning on attending our mutual friend Annie's weekly Sunday night piano gig at Nietzsche's, which I'm sure is going to serve as a mutual mourning ground for a lot of us in the local music community.

Music also came to the doorstep earlier this week. My sister sent a box full of assorted memorabilia, including a box set of Springsteen live recordings from between 1975 and 1985. The box originally held four cassette tapes, one of which was missing, but no matter; we have nothing to play those on anymore anyway, but I found the same set available from our library on CD and will get it ripped into our collection when it gets here. The Boss is still going strong; several friends crossed over to Toronto to see him the night after the election, one of the shows rescheduled from 2023 after health problems hit his band. I worked today on the applications for getting our passports renewed before they expire later this month, just in case we ever have any similar plans or, worse, need "papers, please" while we can still get them.

----

As is the case with many people, I'm still too numb and overwhelmed to offer any insight into WHY what the fuck happened?!?, happened. Some early data does offer clues, and the two that seem to keep coming up are apathy and stupidity.

Some of both is a logical consequence of the way these elections now play out, with seven states essentially deciding the whole goddam thing. This analysis looks at the big difference between how Kamala did where it mattered and where it didn't:

It’s not entirely clear her campaign was bad, or was merely doing its best in a terrible national environment she inherited at the last minute from her predecessor. In the battleground states where the campaign devoted its time, resources, and ground game the race was mostly close and turnout was stronger — while votes are still being counted, it looks like a 2-point swing would have won her the Rust Belt and the presidency, and just a little more would have added Georgia. Meanwhile, states with little attention from the campaign, like New York or Texas, swung hard to the right by much wider margins, while only a single state (Washington) appears to have moved left at all.

It strongly suggests that, like so many other incumbent parties worldwide after the pandemic, the campaign faced strong headwinds that it was unable to overcome. There was polling evidence (and yes, the polls were more accurate this time) ahead of the election that Harris campaign’s economy-focused ads at least helped mitigate her weakness on inflation, for example. Her favorables also shot up during the race, so there’s some evidence her biographical ads really did help her image. It didn’t add up to a victory, but figuring out the delta between the battlegrounds and the rest of the country, and which attacks on her stung and could sting again, is going to be a long process for Democrats.

We didn't see any of it in New York, other than Trump's Nazi rallies at the Garden and Nassau Coliseum in the waning weeks. Voter turnout here was lower- not enough to give him the state or even our county, but the margins were lower.

There was, and likely will continue to be, a serious disconnect between spin and reality, with voters either not taking the opportunity to be educated about the real issues or not believing what they hear about it. Within a day of the election being called, a longtime local automotive factory, once American Dunlop but now Japanese Sumitomo, announced its closing and the loss of 1,500 local jobs. There's been unconfirmed anectodal evidence of employers cutting back on holiday bonuses so they can purchase as much as they can before the tariffs kick in- tariffs that swing-state voters actually believed wouldn't be passed on to them. Sports franchise owner and Trump adversary Mark Cuban is confirmed as believing this is exactly what to expect:

Will voter's remorse come in once the nonvoters and dumb voters figure this out? Don't ask me; I clearly didn't get anything else right here.

These were my first words, written before spoken, about two hours ago, after seeing the final electoral nails had been driven:

I got very little sleep last night.

The prognosticators and pundits had said quite enough by about 1. I summoned all the serotonin my brain could muster and fell asleep just after 2.... only to be awakened around 3 by some drunken idiot repeatedly blasting LETS-GO-BUF-FA-LO on his car horn, likely in reaction to the call of Pennsylvania. (Thanks, neighbors!)

Finally got in about another hour of a perfectly horrible work dream.

Pepper sympathized and didn't do the 6 a.m. Demand For Daylight Savings Time Feeding, but I got up and fed her anyway, along with a no-coffee breakfast and meds for me. I need all the serotonin reuptake inhibition I can get right about now.

This afternoon, we're having lunch together in the office here for multiple birthdays from around this time, including my upcoming one this weekend. I hope they understand if I'm not overly enthusiastic about it.

For now, though, an attempt at more sleep. Which will be hard. Later will come an attempt at more understanding. Which will be even harder.

I did accomplish that- maybe an hour of dreamless dread. In many ways, this was worse than eight years ago. Then, we didn't know what to expect, and a majority of Americans voted against it, with a difference-making potential 40,000 Hillary voter in four states instead cast for Putin puppet Shill Stein, to put the Future Former Guy over the top. This time, by current counts, not only did he win his hand from the rigged Electoral College deck, he carried the popular vote- and Shill didn't account for the difference in Michigan, or Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania- all states that had beaten back MAGA efforts over the past eight years.

Crazy MAGA favorites lost- Mark "Black Nazi" Robinson in NC (jn a blowout) and Kari "I Never Lose" Lake in AZ (not yet called but it looks good for her going down to defeat)- but voters in both states split tickets to vote for Orange Julius anyway.

He has 52 votes plus the tiebreaker in the Senate, rendering its lone two women R moderates silent. How long you think your precious filibuster is going to last, Manchin? The House is closer but chances are both chambers will turn into stamps of rubber for anything Dear Leader wants.

Congratulations to the states, including mine and at least two of them red, who enshrined Roe-like choice protections into their state constitutions, joining the likes of Ohio and Kansas who already had. It will mean nothing when Back Alley Don, or his successor after he croaks, signs the nationwide ban he lied about opposing.

We will be asking why for days, weeks, years. My first thought is not far off from one of the first thoughts I had on this occasion eight years ago as I sat before a keyboard in a similar stupor- a rare-for-me public Facebook post that is still there, at least for now:

The days of dynasties are done. The Bushes and now the Clintons have been rebuked. And no, Michelle Obama is not the answer, either. The worthy successor is not Bernie, or Elizabeth Warren, or anyone you've remotely heard of. It will be an unknown toiling in a lower office or state house; hardly anybody knew who Bill Clinton was in 1988, and even fewer knew who Barack Obama was in 2004. That under-the-radarness is essential to combat the noise machine and bundles of cash. Or it will be someone who IS known but has never spent a day in politics; we've proven that can be done now. So watch for that person, and quietly let him or her position for 2020.

We didn't do that in 2020. We got a good guy, who barely won, had to overcome an insurrection and a hostile Congress and still got more good done in his four years than anyone since Roosevelt. When age caught up with him, he passed the torch to someone who was just known enough to be haunted by past positions but not well known enough to overcome the haunting. She was competent, funny, engaging- and not what a majority of Americans were willing to prefer to a convicted felon.

A convicted felon who was a reality show star, joined by a trashy novelist. Those pools have to be in the conversation for 2028- someone who popular culture will embrace, and amplify, to get to those votes. Assuming we even still have elections then.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a birthday party to go to:P

Two events have filled my consciousness since this past weekend. First was on the immediate home front, the other in the broader sense of home that is, we hope and pray, ending with certainty by this time tomorrow if not sooner.

Over the past eight years, we've had to endure lies, bullshit and general bad behavior from both DC and the house next door. While the further bullshitter has gotten worse over time, we've reached something of a détente with the couple that live in the house next to us, the one much closer on the bedroom end of ours. Things began badly not long after they moved in, a few years after our beloved longtime neighbor there sold it to a pair of paisans who've been renting it out ever since. When they set up a hot tub and fire pit within literally inches of our bedroom window, things got rather ugly. Code enforcement officials were called, names were called, lawyers became involved. They've since moved most of their bad behavior to the navigable international waters of our county's western shores, with a motorboat and a pair of jet skis taking them out of our hair for most of the summers. We've even come close to being on speaking terms over things like our dogs and, to the present point, the tree line that is along their side of the fence separating the two houses.

Here's Eleanor's summary of how the current sequence of events began (names somewhat obscured to protect the probably not innocent):

About ten days ago, he texted me saying he had contacted the maintenance guy for his house (he rents), asking Tony to get in touch with me about trimming his trees so they don’t hang over our solar panels. Tony eventually came to our house, we introduced ourselves to each other, and he politely declined to do the job, with enough explanation that I understood. I appreciated that Tony came in person to talk. I was flummoxed that they would would make a gesture of such an offer, because I saw it as completely out of character.

I told Tony I would take care of the overhanging branches.

Tony: You might not want to do that.
Me: Have you seen the patio out back? I built it.
Tony: It’s beautiful. You built that? Well, you know what you’re doing!

She does. And she does with an eye to maintaining safety of both person and property at every turn. She continued:

So it noodled around in the back of my mind. I took measurements. Photos from various angles. Looked in the wrong place at first for a rental ladder. Then, this weekend, the factors fell into place.

The weather was fine, the neighbors were away. Here's the "before" of the situation:

Patient is a well developed, well nourished pear tree that is overhanging the neighboring gutters and solar panels. Surgery recommended.

It's that one big branch hanging over at a 45 degree angle that had to go. The surgical instrument was not a chain saw but a much smaller and efficient battery-operated device that can be held in just one hand called a Sawzall. The operating platforms in our inventory were a 13 foot extension ladder that needs to be leaned against a solid surface to be safe and a 6 foot stepladder that can be planted directly on the ground. On Day One of this project, Eleanor quickly confirmed that the stepladder wouldn't be tall enough and the extension ladder could not be positioned safely to get to the key cutting point on the branch. Nor were we able to find a taller stepladder to rent or borrow. Still, some of the branches closer to the house could be cut back, and were.

Goin' UP!

Note the privacy "fence" and umbrella behind her on their side of the chain link. Neither would have handled the weight of the extension ladder, and we did not get permission to plant it on the main trunk of the tree on their side, which would have also involved taking down the umbrella (it's never been lowered in eight years, far as we can remember), moving other fiddly bits on the "deck" near it, and risking that the "deck" (made entirely out of shipping pallets with little supporting it underneath) might collapse it and/or her. So she got a few cans worth of the closer branches cut back and we called it a day.

Then came Sunday, and a ten foot stepladder became available for rent at Home Depot.

Those tiedowns kept it remarkably secure for the five-mile drive home, and there was just enough room next to it to pop the left rear seat up for me to sit back there and hold onto it for the journey. Then it was Up, Up and AWAY!

It took remarkably careful engineering and execution to cut into that branch so it wouldn't fall on (a) her, (b) our roof or (c) the crap on their side of the fence. With a combination of precise pre-cuts near the final tipping point and a rope to hold the limb following its severance, it fell, as gently as something that big can fall, to the ground without any harm to woman, beast or any personal property.

The smaller stepladder was for my smaller contribution to the process. Among the potential perils of all this was the internet cable coming down from the utility pole. My job was to remove a series of tiedowns holding it to our side wall so it would drop out of the landing zone. I did, and it hung safely out of the way when the execution was going on.

The "after" is in two places:

No hangover at all anymore, and the cable is reconnected and working fine.

And that's most of what came down; maybe a can or two remain to be filled after garbage pickup Thursday.

----

That is not to be confused with the garbage we pray will be removed by the end of the day today.

I do not want to say anything that might jinx the situation. Eight Election Days ago, I was even more optimistic, having spent almost the entire polling day in a battleground location in Pennsylvania, seeing none of the MAGA interference I was there to help prevent and a joyous amount of optimism among those who voted safely. I got home just as New York's polls were closing- no early voting back then, but I did cast mine stupid early before leaving- and turned in knowing that Hillary had at least appeared to have won the county I was working in.

It wasn't enough. Eventually she would lose the state and even Erie's county by just under 2,000 votes. Four years later, Joe won that county by a bare 1,400 votes and did well enough statewide to carry the state and the election. I am not traveling there this year but will be checking that particular outcome as a sign of how far we've come and how close we came to going back.

Two days ago, the Bills defeated a hated rival on a last-second field goal- by a kicker who's had troubles with some of his shots this year but, when it mattered most, nailed the longest kick in franchise history to seal the victory. If any recent event portends what lies immediately ahead, we can only hope it's that.

I was already into elementary school for several years before the dawn of Sesame Street, so most of my recollections of that program came from parenting days. There are much older memories of Captain Kangaroo and Wonderama and the local version of Romper Room, not to mention dozens of cartoon classics either run straight or broken up by live segments with local television hosts, sun-lighting rather than moon-lighting on daytime kiddie shows like WPIX's "Officer Joe" Bolton and "Captain Jack" McCarthy.

(I still get a kick out of the Mets' radio announcer crediting one of his station's production assistants of that name as "Captain Jack." The kid's probably 20 and has no idea who Howie's talking about.)

In between, I did catch some of the early years of another primordial PBS educational program, Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Maybe it was on later in the day on channel 13 so I could watch it after school. It wasn't as silly as Sesame Street or as smarmy as Miss Somebody on Romper Room, and it had just enough singing and make-believe to be fun but not too much, and that kept it slightly close to reality for this already cynical eight-year-old.

In addition to its daily opening and closing songs of "Beautiful Day" and "Tomorrow," Freddie-Ro had a few one-offs for special occasions, one of which remains burned into my brain. If a famous guest was coming to his living room, or a puppet character was returning to the other end of the trolley, we'd be serenaded with his theme for just such occasions:

♫Today is a very special day
A very very very special day
A very very very very very very very very very very very special day♫

Okay, it's no "Bohemian Rhapsody," but seeing how I still have it in my head over half a century later, it's clearly as infectious as a Rickroll.

You're getting these random memories because today is, indeed, a V V V V V V V V V V V V special day on my calendar. One looks forward, the other back.

----

They didn’t know it at the time- hell, I didn’t know it at the time- but two friends were with me at Sportsmen's Tavern three years ago today, on what turned out to be a very important milestone day for me. That year, Halloween fell on a Sunday, and Sportsmen’s hosted a fundraiser for breast cancer research, as they just did again a few days ago. Our friend Maria was one of the performers-

- and my longtime friend Ellen, who I've known since law school, was up on the balcony next to me. I had a beer or two with the burger or wings or whatever it was on the menu that I don’t remember. I do remember, and today I celebrate, that it was the last time any alcohol touched my lips, and my three years of sobriety began.

Despite not showing willpower about other things or being able to drop all of my bad habits, this one just went away without even a whimper. I haven’t missed it, I’m never tempted by it, and I’ve been to dozens of bars and sporting events and concerts without wanting to drink, much lees needing to. I know most of the brands of NA beer and which places are easier to get one or more at, and I celebrate milestones now with sparkling grape juice, if at all.

I’ve managed to do it without meetings or sponsors or chips or anything to keep me in line. I just don’t do it anymore. I've thanked them both for being there, and they've both responded and recognized the accomplishment.

----

The other very special about today is what will happen when the clock strikes midnight. For these are my final few hours living under the thumb of private health insurance. The last piece fell into place yesterday when the welcome package came from my Part D drug plan. Same scrips, same pharmacy, but little if any cost going forward for what I'm now on. I've paid my first Part B premium already- if they don't take it out of a Social Security check, you pay three months at a time in advance- and my first Medigap supplement premium comes out next week, but the days of preapprovals and high five-figure deductibles are now nine hours away of being behind me. I end my final year with Excellus having consumed just under $2,800 of the $7,500 deductible. They already have me showing as "Termed 10/31/24," so I don't even know if they'd cover me if something happened today.

I'll drink to that not happening. Or rather I won't.

The first two are from the weekend, the last from a bad experience earlier in the week that ended more happily on Saturday, as well. I guess I'll start there:

That's me, just days away from Medicare, paying for my new $3.70 a month drug plan with a coupon book and ranting at the universe when it wants me to pay for things using electronic payments.

I gave this whole financial world some exposition not too long ago, mostly connected to the wonderful world of PayPal. They were the first of their ilk to monetize the phenomenon of "the float." That's the time between when a transaction is complete and when the payment for it actually gets deducted from the buyer's funds. In the old days, the float benefited the little guy: you could safely deliver a check to a merchant or utility or credit card company on a Tuesday, even if you wouldn't get paid until Friday, because it would take those three days, at least, for your paper check to move physically from the recipient's bank to a clearinghouse (Utica, I seem to remember, was a popular one for these around here) before finally being "presented" to your own bank for withdrawal. Sneaky little merchants, et cetera, have largely digitized or otherwise automated that process, and now if you hand Wegmans a paper check- you still can, though Tarjay and others have stopped taking them- it is automatically converted into an electronic debit that can hit your account as soon as the same day.

Nowadays, the "float" works against the little guy. Those "billpay" services that banks offer to their checking customers, usually for "free" in quotes? It's in quotes because they debit the customer's account instantly, but then take their sweet time turning the payment into, often, an oldschool paper check that it then mails to the eventual recipient from some remote outpost in Either Dakota that won't get credited to the customer's account with the recipient for days. Same thing with Paypal and its ilk: those shekels for a concert ticket or fund transfer come out instantly, but the recipient has to either wait 1-3 business days to access the funds, unless they choose the "instant transfer" option (if it is even available, and it isn't always) which then deducts usually a few dollars or a few percents from the amount to be received. When the Mafia does this, it's called "vigorish," or just "vig" for short. Now one of the leading services of this kind is called Venmo, or "Vigmo" as I like to call them. They do not compete aggressively on price or service with the similare offerings of PayPal- because for over a decade, they're owned by the same company! PayPal was originally owned by a consortium of techbros including the Magical Elon Musk, and eBay's billion dollar purchase of it a decade earlier than the Venmo merger was one of the major propellers of that moron into the upper echelons of billionaire air.

Venmo's the one that caused me the most aggravation most recently. One of the work events that got me writing that last post was this little tale, about

a legal plan client who only has to pay his filing fee. I get the rest when he actually completes his paperwork. He met me two Fridays ago, with the promise of "drawing" one of those "check" thingies. Oopsies, no check. He'd bring it Monday. That was my World Tour Via Syracuse Day, and I could've detoured to Rochester on my way home to grab it. Oh, noes, my kid's in the hospital. Friday, for sure! Indeed he was there this past Friday. I'd previously offered him the PayPal alternative, which I had to painstakingly explain to him. I don't get notifications of Elon getting the money, so I'm OCDishly checking the backup email address I use for it and pretty much only it. Nothing. Finally, I text, and he now decides he'd prefer Venmo.

Yes, I have that, too, mainly for literal 10-15 dollar transfers to musicians like Jory. It's linked to a credit union checking account we use, except for small Joryish things, only for one monthly transfer to that credit union. Still, the client is always right and all, and within minutes, there was the filing fee! "Was," meaning "the client gave Venmo the money." For once, I was ready to eat the five bucks and change for the instant transfer:

"Not available with this financial institution."

Ultimately, the funds were made available back in June, and I worked on his case for a bit until he decided to go in a different direction. His legal plan paid part of what I would've received if he'd gone all the way through the case, and once I got that, I was ready to write him a check to refund his filing fee.

No can do, bro. He Venmo'd it in, he wanted it Venmo'd out. That entailed a late-day side trip to that selfsame credit union to deposit his filing fee INTO my account there so, two days later once the credit union made my own money available, I could send it back whence it came.

No could do that, either. I spent half a workday morning hitting a "send" button on both laptop and phone, getting three different Venmo error messages, none of them explaining why it couldn't do that one simple thing. Meanwhile, he's sending Where's my money emails and NOW offering to take a check for it. Finally, the damn thing went through, but sheesh.

I am not going to offer this "service" anymore. So long, Venmo, and thanks for all the vig.

Occasionally, though, I may still use it when it's the only option to pay for something. My gym is in the midst of its annual late October "Hell Week" series of classes. I've been doing this event since 2016, my first full year going there. Until 2021, you earned some cred and some swag by completing five of their amped-up classes over an eight-day stretch ending on Halloween. I skipped the event in 2020- because between the pandemic and the election, “Hell Week” felt redundant- but picked it back up in 2021 and tomorrow will finish the 2024 event, now requiring only four classes in eight days.I always tried to avoid the final day, which originally featured the dreaded "burpee buckets." You drew a card out of a trick or treat bucket, and could be ordered to the floor for 10 burpees, or as many as 100

Because I'm always in search of extra punishment, I saw that Saturday's schedule included a 90-minute extended version (most classes are only 60), with donations requested for a local breast cancer charity. The only way to pay was, what else?, Venmo. I had the same issues sending THAT much smaller payment to the coach as I'd had with the client. I even screwed up at one point and wound up accidentally requesting 25 bucks FROM her before my donation finally went through. The class itself was a good one, and no burpees were visited on me in that one or the other two I've done.

----

A few days after all that payment agitas began, our state finally opened the doors of its early voting polling places. There are fewer than on Election Day proper- eleven of them in the City of Buffalo, but only one in each of the smaller cities and the many towns in Erie County- but you can cast your ballot at any of them. I accidentally discovered yesterday that the Board of Elections headquarters downtown is itself an official early voting polling place with no wait at all to cast a vote, but each of us had already spent well over an hour on the weekend waiting in much longer queues.

Eleanor went first thing Saturday to our town's senior center one building over from the Amherst Main Library. The line stretched almost all the way across two parking lots to that library. She asked for a recommendation for one with maybe a shorter wait, and I suggested the city location closest to our town border, in a community center just past the original UB campus on Main Street. It still took close to an hour, but the wait was all inside and the cameraderie in the building was pleasant for her.

I tried my hand at the ballot the next afternoon. The Bills had a west coast road game starting at 4, and I brilliantly thought I'll go right before the game when the line will be shorter!

See all the people who had the exact same idea! At least it didn't stretch past the building by this time, and an hour later, my vote was in the books, the Bills had the first seven of their eventual 24-point lead, and my 31st consecutive Erie County general election was in the rearview.

Put it in the books!

A poetry friend lives one town over from us and had a slightly different experience at his polling place. He observed that

unlike 2016 and 2020, no one in sight was wearing MAGA gear, but there was a woman not in the queue walking up and down the line on the other side of the sidewalk perusing the line for "Venezuelans." (There are 500 migrants temporarily living in a Cheektowaga hotel near the airport. They will be returning to NYC by the end of the year).

When I asked here how she could pick out the "Venezuelans" that might be voting illegally, she said "Well, they wouldn't be speaking good English. They would be speaking 'Venezuelan'... "

"Um...There is no such language," I said. "They speak Spanish in Venezuela."

"Oh," she said. "I didn't know that!"

Don't feel bad, Bob. There were something like 70 million in the last election who were just as stupid as she still is. Blessedly, we have every reason to expect, from the size and composition of the voters here and elsewhere, that they will be seriously outnumbered this time.

----

The Bills were still playing at 6 when we hit the last of this post's V-ehicles: the vocals of a dear friend of ours.

Annie was wearing a number 21 Bills jersey. Probably not a homage to Jordan Poyer, the longtime defensive back who left for Miami after last season, but in honor of the 21 years since she and the owner of that bar rolled that piano down Allen Street from a onetime vaudeville palace and set it in the front room of Allentown's equally legendary Nietzsche's. She's been behind those keys almost every Sunday night since then. While we only just met her in person this past year, both of us were friends with her dad back in Rochester over 30 years ago, and he's still hanging in as he turns 90.

The bar's afternoon jazz band was still breaking up their instruments when Annie got there, so I had time to investigate the famed ceiling that I've found autographs on from her, many other friends and a few rock legends who have performed there over its 40 years as a beloved music venue:

We stayed for about half her set, which began with some original compositions that will be on a CD she promised will be coming out over the winter. I am looking forward to grabbing one from her at a Sunday night show after it does.

I only hope I don't have to pay for it with Venmo:P

Let's start with the best part. It's the third week of October, and the Mets are still winning ballgames. That leads to the inevitable call of their radio voice at the end of each successful game, which was later immortalized on his bobblehead that I managed to acquire after its handout last year:

Watch on YouTube

The line has become so famed, there are memes about it:

Blessedly, not only are the Mets still playing into late October, we still get the knowledge and talent and wry humor of this Mets Hall of Fame broadcaster over AM radio or an iPhone app for every game. Television has taken that from us, unfortunately. In my first season of post-season baseball back in 1969, NBC carried the post-season games- then just two five-game League Championships leading to the best-of-seven World Series- but local broadcasters were also allowed to continue their coverage. That led to this advertisement in the New York papers, which I remembered from Newsday but just found a copy of in the Times digital archive:

By the time of the Mets' next successful championship in 1986, that co-sharing of rights was long gone. NBC still carried the games, but Bob and Ralph (Lindsey departed) were relegated to radio. I watched the final pitch of that 1986 series from Rochester with the tv sound off and Bob's call of Jesse Orosco's final pitch coming in through a tin-foil-enhanced antenna to pick up the WHN AM broadcast from New York.

In the (ugh) 38 seasons since that last triumph, the post-season, and broadcasters associated with it, have expanded into a murky mess of multiple teams, formats and networks. Four of 24 teams made it to the 1969 post-season, the first with more than just two. Now, 14 of 30 teams are still alive on the final day of the regular season, and the Mets even made it 15 thanks to a hurricane-caused pair of rainouts that extended that final day by a day. The resulting post-season games up to the World Series itself are divided among TBS (which our HBO subscription covers), ESPN (which our Disney+ subscription does not include), and two FOX channels: their overair one that we can get with rabbit ears, and their cable/subscription offshoot FS1, which we can't.

All but one or two of the Mets' post-season games have been on things we can't watch in this house,on those channels we don't get. But why don't you just buy the MLB tv package?, you ask? It's only $29.99!

True. But....

Now that is different from the regular season, when you can't watch any game in your blackout zone whether you have a pay tv provider or not. In Buffalo and most of upstate, that means we can never use that app to watch the Mets or Yankees, or the Pirates or Indians no matter where or who they're playing. (Strangely, games involving the Toronto Blue Jays, the closest MLB ballpark to us, are not blacked out.) There's some element in it of protecting crowds at the home stadiums, but it's mostly to protect the cable companies that pay the teams or their rightsholders like SNY for the games. Those local television broadcasters are now out of the post-season game, so the MLB app instead protects the cable companies anyway by only inviting in viewers who have a cable package.

So the end result of all this is I've wound up just listening to the games for the most part, and that's fine. Howie and his broadcast partners in the booth and on the field after games are joys to experience, win or lose. There's none of having to endure Yankee honks like Derek Jeter on the telecasts. Even the few games that have been on overair FOX, I' ve turned the sound off and listened to Mets Radio even though it's usually a pitch or two behind the video.

So it will go tonight.

The last time the Mets and Bills played on the same day, each in a not literal but practical "must win" game, was Monday. Some nails were bitten in each, but the good guys prevailed in both.

Now the Mets face a literal "must win" game that will begin following the Bills returning home with their shiny new receiver in a "they better win" contest. Which I could watch on overair television, but found the first half of shitty play from them to be unbearable. They redeemed themselves nicely after halftime, scoring 34 unanswered points and eventually making it look easy. That's one put in the books. The Dodgers won't be as easy an opponent for the Mets tonight, but one of their longtime Met-killing position players is out of the lineup and they're pitching another "bullpen game" to save their best starters for Game Seven and/or the Yankees in the World Series. At this point, I don't even care all that much what happens in the Bronnix if we somehow manage to get there; I'm just sick of the attention slobbering being done over LA's $700 million man Shohei Ohtani. Even other sports are being interrupted with news of him hanging around a batrack:

(Sabres lost that game seconds later. Thanks, Ohbama:P)

I'd love nothing more to see him sent off after tomorrow night to a golf course. Gambling parlor. Whatever.

----

Then we get to the literal kind of books, which we haven't been putting things in but putting away.

We have a lot of them. Some going back to our own childhoods, many to Emily's. We each have assortments in the living room and this office, but most have been sent to the cellar, organized on shelves alphabetically by author.

That's the current configuration, achieved over several dedicated efforts at updating the collection's size in recent weeks. I took the first crack at it a few months ago. The shelves needed to be expanded to make room for more recent arrivals, and there was also a need to move at least part of one of the shelves right next to the cellar stairs. The cats kept using it as a shortcut to their litterboxes and knocking over the books on it. So I re-appropriated one other section of dat dere plastic sheving, stuck it more or less where you see John Irving and PD James in the right corner, and then reorganized to fit everything while leaving some room.

Which was fine, until Eleanor gave it some closer inspection toward the beginning of last week. I've worked in libraries, and followed their standard method of filling each individual bookcase from top to bottom alphabetically before moving on to the next case.

Like so. I thought we'd always done it this way among the maybe 8-10 bookcases down there, but Eleanor preferred a method that would continue the alphabetizing across the entire top shelf of all the cases in each of the two locations (one along the cellar stairs, the other along the wall at their bottom):

- which is, as you can see if you squint, how it wound up in the end. Unfortunately, letters in a word document representing "last name of author" are much lighter than "the actual books," and when I got home from a day of work midweek, she'd already lifted and resorted dozens of the alphabet from one method to the other, with some still awaiting their final home. Making things worse is that I'd somehow managed to mess up the method I was using, with the confusion mostly coming in the R and S letters of last names (fun fact: there are a LOT of them, as "Saint" and "Robin/Robert" prefixes are very common). She was exhausted from the effort and frustrated that I'd left it that way when I made the effort a few months back.

So when I had a workday toward the end of last week where nothing seemed to be going right for me, I just bailed on the office, came home for lunch, and went down there to help her finish the job. Even she had misplaced some of the sections- it does tend to all blend together after awhile as you focus on the micro of "does Robertson come before or after Robinson" and not the macro of "where the fuck do ALL these R's go?"- but together we got them into the final desired pattern, leaving enough room for more to be added later without having to reinvent the wheel or the alphabet.

Maybe we can invite Howie over to the house to bless The Books- but only after the World Series is over;)

That’s Al as in Yankovic, not AI as an artificial intelligence. Although there may be some of that, causing some of the things I’ll mention here. I wound up working out of town on the semi official holiday Monday, and then had a usual Rochester day yesterday. Each produced more than its share of weird.

Monday was for a long postponed deposition of the two parties to a long-standing case I substituted into last year, which in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have agreed to take. It’s a messy business between two people who really can’t stand one another. It will ultimately involve spending time in a courtroom in Belmont, New York, perhaps the most remote county seat in of all of upstate New York that is not adjacent to Canada.

A deposition, sometimes referred to as an EBT for “examination before trial,” is the complete opposite of what you normally see in trial scenes on TV. It is not the time to tell your story as a witness, but for the other lawyer to get damaging information out of you. He or she is the one who questions you, not your own lawyer; objections are extremely limited; and nothing good you say will ultimately help you, but any negative or contradictory testimony you give could come back to haunt you.

This client insisted on meeting with me before we went to these depositions on Monday, so she could “revise” based on what we talked about. We did that here last Friday. She was not talking about revising the truth, but so she could update her outline of notes for her presentation. I immediately told her that she could not use any of that during her deposition testimony, or at least that nothing good would come of her trying to use that. I told her that she should stick to the specific questions that were asked, and only answer a given question, not to get into the classic superhero mistake of monologuing.

Which, of course, ultimately she did anyway. After several missed attempts in September at agreeing on a date last week, we settled on this past Monday, since the courts would be closed, and we would be less likely to have conflicting appointments. The venue for the deposition was the office of the other side’s lawyer in Hornell, New York. While not quite as remote as Belmont, it was still a good 90 mile journey, including a lot of back roads under any of the various scenarios Siri presented. I chose one including a stretch I was slightly familiar with as far as Geneseo, and despite getting stuck as always behind several slow-moving semi's avoiding tolls on the 90, I ultimately got there only about 10 minutes late.

I’ve been doing these stupid things for going on 40 years, and thought I had run into every contingency. Clients not showing up; lawyers not showing up; both not showing up; everybody showing up, but somebody storming out over a supposedly improper question; at least once, a lawyer insisting during a raging snowstorm that we could NOT leave. Until Monday, though, the court reporter was always there. You know, the one who takes down the witnesses' formal statements:

Except she wasn't there. Kinda hard to get going without her. She was at an urgent care, probably near her home base in Wellsville, a good half hour away. (I would later hear the words "stage four cancer," never getting clear if she or a caregivee was the one diagnosed with that.) We ultimately agreed to do it by Zoom, with my laptop serving as the camera for her to take down my client's words and then the other side's. It wound up going technically okay and well under what I'd estimated it would take for both sides to get their questions in. Of course, we could have done it that way from separate locations in the first place and I wouldn't have been stuck behind trucks for the better part of three hours getting there and back.

Trial will likely be sometime next spring after that part of the Southern Tier digs out from its usual 20 feet of snow. Maybe the judge will show up then.

----

Yesterday, into today, brought more hiccups, of the purely technical kind.

First was another Zoom hearing, done from my elderly, legally blind, pro bono client's home. That also went fine in terms of the tech, the time and the substance. I had just enough time to slog down lunch before getting to my Rochester office before a first appointment with a client, and that's when the gremlins began to appear.

This laptop connects by wifi to printers in my three locations- home and both offices. For a few weeks, though, it's given me trouble at all three places. The printer shows in Windows as "offline" despite being on and connected to the wifi. Almost daily in each place, I've had to goose each printer by playing "run the troubleshooter" in the Windows settings app. This does usually work, but for how long will it?

"Learn more" tells you nothing about where or when. It's just another of those Microsoft games of "if it ain't broke, move it." In the office before the appointment, though, both printers I can connect to were giving me, not "offline" messages but outright "error" codes, and the trusty pre-retirement fix warn't working. I finally gave up and met with him without printing his initial documents, but no worries, since multiple copies of them magically showed up after he left:P

Meanwhile, one of my coworkers there asked why I hadn't answered her email from last Wednesday that she just re-sent. Um, that would be because I never got it. Nor did I get it the third time. I finally resigned myself to giving her a backchannel AOL address I still use all these years later, but that's when I saw something in another of Microsoft's magical products, Outlook 365; because yes, gods love him, Bill Gates decided to give me two separate junk folders AND a trash folder.

Junk Email is the one that seemed to attract the junk. All the Viagra and Ozempic and sweepstakes shit that Spectrum seems incapable of filtering out. That's the one that displays a number in it when one arrives that has been pre-blocked as junk, and which I check several times a day before right-clicking it to "empty folder." Plain ole "Junkmail" never, ever displayed an incoming message count, but when I clicked on it this morning, there were all the inquiries from my coworker. Plus a couple from a client on my biggest active collection case. Plus at least one from the neuro practice. Those have all been moved to my inbox and their senders marked as "safe," but whether this will work or not, who knows?

----

At this point, I figured quitting while I was marginally ahead was a good plan, and good thing I did, because if I'd hit my bank's ATM after 4 p.m., I'd have been well and truly fucked.

One check to deposit. Endorsed with a stamp, drive-up ATM free and working- or so it seemed. These have gotten way more sophisticated over the years since the original "Mister Money" days of Marine Midland in the late 70s. No envelopes or deposit slips are needed anymore, and some, including this one, even allow you to deposit cash and checks in a single pile. You watch as it totals the bills and scans the checks, kicking back any that appear damaged and zooming their display if they can't read an amount on a check. Usually, it takes about 10 seconds to tally my usual pile of, at most, a half dozen pieces of paper; you then press "complete deposit," wait a few seconds for PROCESSING, and you get your receipt out and card back.

Not this time. La Machine was stuck on PROCESSING for a good five minutes. Occasionally I'd hear a hiccup from the other side of the wall, as if it was saying I'm tryyyinnnngggg! Well, good on you and all, but it was getting on 3:30 and "banker's hours," these days, generally end at 4 except maybe on Fridays. So I pulled round to the front and told the tellers what had happened. The good news was, they could retrieve the debit card that Money Monster thought was cookie and ate up yum yum yum. The better news was, my account showed the deposit of the check, which remains posted as of this writing. Only bad news was, I had to rely solely on their word for that until this morning, when I was able to print an online version of the receipt for the deposit....

once I goosed my goddam printer into not being OFFLINE anymore:P

Just for giggles, I drove past the drive-up ATM one last time to see if they'd switched it to OUT OF ORDER. Nope. Still waiting for more cookie. Just not mine.

----

Today, alas, I had no deposits for any machine to eat, despite one being promised; I am authorized to settle a good-sized case against a local business that just got sued by the Buffalo Bills for way more size, so who knows it it will settle; and I finally got the neuro practice to send my bloodwork from the end of May that they said was fine before, it would appear, they even saw it. And mostly,. it was; one elevated count from February was barely a tick into the borderline range and way down from 2-3 months earlier. Otherwise, cholesterols were all in range except for something called VLDL, which must be "terrible horrible no good VERY bad," which was again barely above the reference range of normality. Not that I'm often referred to as normal, anyway;) They will be delivering some sort of home-based sleep testing machine for more than an overnight trial (two weeks this time) and a January followup on its results has been confirmed.

And I haven't gotten my Medicare card stuck in a machine, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Last Monday brought my long delayed, and once postponed, follow up visit with the actual MD neurologist, who has been looking at my various test and image results. He began by ending the suspense and telling me right off that there were no significant indications of dementia. The MRI looked fine, the cognitive testing was all within normal parameters except for one born-in reflex,which can sometimes be an early indicator of demantia or any number of other things. One of those other things that was also tested for was sleep apnea, and that is where we are going to be doing some further study over the next few weeks. Eleanor, who came in with me, was somewhat distressed to hear that the monitor picked up 12 apnea incidents in the overnight they tested. We were relieved to hear that that is only a bit above baseline, which is more like five. They see some patients with incidents numbering in the 70s. There are some options for dealing with that not necessarily involving a machine, that involve diet and weight loss, which they booked me for a consultation about. In December, the soonest you can get. They also referred for further sleep study referral "in two weeks" for which the first available appointment seems to be more like "three months." Either way, that gives us plenty of time to research fish and flaxseed oils and make some diet changes on our own. Eleanor was less than impressed with this doctor's bedside manner, not having any real good ideas about specific supplements and suggesting we just ask somebody at Whole Foods. That just seemed one step short of “go look it up on the Internet.“

Which, now, you can do, if you care to read his notes that I downloaded from their portal once I cracked the sekrit code to find them there. Imagine how the REALLY cognitively impaired people can figure this shit out:

( Our first contestant on Beat the Reaper is.... )

At least that's what HE thinks about the bloodwork. It's not available on their portal, but the almost thousand bucks over co-pays I owe them that they've never billed me for? That's easily found. My previous bloodwork from my last physical in February is on our primary's portal, and those numbers were decent. My LDL "bad" cholesterol was 91, well within the 30-100 range of normality, leading to his suspicion that I'm lying about not drinking a drop going on three years at the end of this month. I'm not. No meetings, no chips, no sponsor; just "no." I did an extended workout this morning followed by celebratory mimosas; mine had sparkling grape juice in it.

The February HDL number was 49, near the low end of normal for "good" cholesterol, hence the encouragement of oily things to improve it. My only out of range blood reading in February was triglycerides- that being 207, 57 above the top range of normal. A year earlier, they were only slightly above normal. Whether this guy missed a high reading from the bloodwork they did or it just was lower when we just had it done, I don't know. Neither he nor our primary seemed overly concerned with it.

I told Eleanor, the day before going into this appointment that, I really wasn’t particularly nervous about what we would find out. I knew it could be anything from “you’re fine“ to “you have a brain tumor and you’re going to die," but that the worst prognosis I could imagine coming out of it was “we have no fucking idea.“ It was relieving to get some thing at least eliminating the bad things while still suggesting they had at least something of a clue, and nothing, at least nothing up there, is likely to eat up the remaining five grand of my insurance deductible until I switch over at the end of the month.

So for now it's one more supplement, maybe an equipment pickup, and some waiting until Medicare will hopefully still be there next month.
——

The “weird” part of this post comes from an upcoming event. Not coming up anytime soon, but planned for, at least:

For many years starting in college, the most demented part of my life was listening to a Sunday night radio show of comedy bits from an LA disk jockey who went by the moniker “Dr. Demento.” He played many already known-to-me favorites from Monty Python and George Carlin, but also introduced me to the practice of Tai Kwan Leap, to Fish Heads, and, sometime in college, to a nerdy California kid who started recording popular song parodies in a bathroom (for the acoustics) on his accordion.

The good Doctor is still with us, but his show isn’t, long ago a casualty to tight radio station formats that would not allow an hour or two a week to be set aside for comedy. That nerdy protégé of his, however, went way beyond the accordion and the acoustics of a bathroom- to full, professional recording studios and stage productions, becoming far more famous with his hilarious but good-natured sendups of Madonna and Michael Jackson, among others. He has been the subject of a biopic with Daniel Radcliffe portraying him, and his tours have sold out decent size arenas in and around major metropolitan areas....

Of which, alas, we really aren't anymore. Weird Al Yankovic has made stops on the edges of both the 585 and the 716's cores in recent years: at Canandaigua's Finger Lakes Performing Arts Center in 2016 (I refuse to call it by its naming-right-pimped "CMAC" name honoring the producer and owner of the local cheap fortified wine brands like Wild Irish Rose), and closer to here near Lake Ontario at Artpark in 2022. When he announced his 2025 tour schedule, neither of these venues was on it, instead selling out to the bigger bang-for-buck venue that's equally inconvenient to both Buffalo and Rochester. That would be Darien Lake, or Crackerbox Palace as I prefer to call it. I wrote in some detail about my last visit there in 2018. It is a wretched drive to a more wretched parking lot to a Trail of ~~Tears~~ Gravel that lead to security (check you've got your keys, yo) and either covered reserved seats or splotches of grass among thick heavy clouds of the other kind of grass. And that was back before the shit was legal!

The closest other alternatives this time were Saratoga and Toronto, with NYC and the Not Actually In Woodstock site of Bethel Woods being a bit beyond those. I've resigned myself to the closer trip, though, and come a Friday night in the late of next July- assuming we're not under the rule of the Republic of Gilead by then- I and some lucky someone will be sitting in covered seats out there trying not to get too high from the hippies either side of us.

I'll be preparing for that show with something closer to fish oil than to "Fish Heads" by then, assuming I can still remember who he is. Not to mention who I am.

No, I am not having one. At least not until after tomorrow when I’m finally seeing the neurologist. It is more that I performed a little microsurgery of my own on Friday that reminded me, as much as anything, of this old game:

Watch on YouTube

The patient in question was my computer, which over the past several weeks has been running rather hot on the bottom. Anytime it went to sleep or had to restart, I got a warning about needing to check the fan. I found the part online, and wound up getting it on Thursday for free, thanks to an interaction with another branch of the medical profession I’ll get to in a moment.

Unlike an ill-fated attempt to replace a keyboard on a different laptop a few years ago, (abandoned once I discovered they practically welded it to the motherboard), I figured this would be a fairly easy go, because the fan is right on the bottom. All I needed to do was REMOVE SCREWS. Only about a dozen of them this time, and the bottom came off, fairly easily, revealing the fan that was also fairly quick to disengage. I half expected to find it was full of cat hair and other junk, but it came out remarkably clean. I then went to install the new one, and was momentarily flummoxed by not being sure where its teeny tiny little plug had to be inserted. To give you an idea of how teeny tiny, here’s the one I took out, with a quarter laid on top of it for reference:

Fortunately, before I broke anything, and after looking at a few YouTube videos that were absolutely useless, I saw that they had cleverly labeled the spot on the motherboard to insert the plug with the word FAN. I did that, replaced all the REMOVED SCREWS, plugged it back in and turned it back on, and this time got past the warning about the fan without any problem. I do seem to have lost one fairly large folder on the hard drive, that was mostly full of junk that I should’ve gotten rid of anyway.

I had to laugh when I saw the word FAN in there, because it reminded me of a trip we made to the credit union a few days earlier. We had first gone in there a few years ago to get a home equity loan to pay off our solar panels that were about to start accruing a stupid amount of interest. The mortgage representative we dealt with their was a very nice young woman, but I had to ask her about a photo she had on her wall, of a dog, presumably hers, labeled DOG. It was the last remaining trace of a prank her coworkers had pulled on her for her birthday. When she took the day off, they labeled everything in her office. STAPLER on the stapler, PHONE on the phone, and naturally DOG on the photo of Fido she had on her wall. We had gone back in there the other day and while she wasn’t in her office, the DOG photo still was, and still had the label on it.

We were in there this time for a piece of business, only marginally related to the home equity loan (which is right on schedule and which we will be beginning to pay down faster now that some other things are paid off and my medical expenses will hopefully be going down). It was to deal with a remaining trace of the odd place credit unions have in US banking history. They were originally intended to be limited to employee servicing groups for particular organizations. You had to be within the “field of membership“ to get away from the predatory practices of commercial banks and savings institutions. I still have my Cornell credit union account from over 40 years ago, but I only qualified to join it back then because I worked for the university as well as studying there. Over the years, credit unions have expanded those fields, and pretty much anybody can now join any of them. To get this home equity loan, we had to join one now called Summit, which began in the middle of last century as the in-house organization for employees of Rochester Tel but is now open to anyone who lives, works or worships in Monroe, Erie, or any other number of counties. The one vestige of that old-school membership thing is that you still have to own at least one “share” in the credit union, typically consisting of a five dollar savings account deposit. We did that when we took the loan out, but "we," it turned out, was only just me. They did not put Eleanor on that account, or the associated checking account with a debit card that we use to pay that loan on the first of every month.

In order for Eleanor to use it, we found out she would need to come into the branch with me in person. PATRIOT Act and all, don’t you know. The reason she will begin using that checking account with debit card is on account of a different stupid piece of federal legislation that ties back to me going on Medicare next month.

----

For all of the 18 years since I’ve been a solo practitioner, my health insurance has been a wildebeest that has included the letters HDHP. That stands for "high deductible health plan," and it also stands for “not getting very much for paying them thousands a year.” You pay a premium, either monthly or quarterly, to what is basically a protection racket. They do not pay out anything on your behalf, except for a small amount of annual stuff that has been required by Obamacare since that went into effect, until you hit your deductible. The only other real benefit is you get the reduced prices for services that the insurance companies negotiate with the providers. My deductible rose over the years from around 1,000 bucks a year when I first started to just over 2,000 in the final year I had individual coverage. Fortunately, I never hit that amount and except for 2020, when an odd ache and pain came up right before the pandemic and went away before it was ever diagnosed, I never even came close. For my final pre-Medicare year, I've switched from "silver" to "bronze" with a whopping $7,500 deductible. Fortunately, I've kept away from horsepitals and loathsome diseases to keep it to a dull roar through the end of last month:

The carrot that goes along with that stick is you get to deduct a significant amount from your taxes every year for contributions to a “health savings account.” This is one of the consolation prizes they offered to George W. Bush when he couldn’t completely privatize federal health insurance. You get a debit card, in this case, one for each of us because you can also use it for a spouse or dependent, and can fund it with deductible tax dollars as long as you are on an HDHP, It can also be used for prescriptions, dental, chiropractic and, since COVID, even over the counter meds. Without it, we would only be able to deduct those expenses if they exceeded 7.5 percent of our gross income for a tax year, so even though the idea of "saving for your dread disease" is positively gruesome, it's worked out okay for us.

Only problem is, I've already taken the maximum pro-rated 2024 deduction for contributions to it, since you can't contribute anymore if you're on Medicare. There's still some scratch left in it, but once it's gone, it can't be replenished. So we're going to use the Summit checking account for the same purpose- just "funding" it enough to cover our remaining deductibles, prescriptions and dental care, which will be way less than the more than $7,500 a year we're exposed to now.

----

For the next 26 days, however, I remain an inmate at the Excellus Penintentiary. If, gods forbid, I wind up in a bad place in those few remaining weeks, that "remaining deductible" could come back to bite us in the bank account. I did at least get to put the walking boot on their other foot last month, however insignificantly.

I'm sure Excellus knows I'm leaving them on November 1st. Certainly their non-Blue Cross subsidiary in Buffalo knows, because Univera has been bombarding me with signup shit for their sneaky Medicare Advantage program. They call, they even sent an actual handwritten birthday card with a first class stamp to try to schmooze me back into another year of privatized health care. Ive already signed up for traditional Medicare A and B, with the same Part B supplement Eleanor has that she's very happy with. Other than them making me finally join AARP, I expect to be happy with them as well and have no need for Excellus or its minions to offer me anything after Halloween.

Still, they kept me on their regular list of pre-Medicare member promotions, and one of them was something called Wellvie. They would give me a $25 Amazon gift card if I signed up for an online program they were offering by that name.

That showed up in the mail at home last month. It is a bribe. This flyer, and the slightly more detailed page that came with, pitch it as "Explore all your options!" What it really means, though, is "Let's scare you with stories of botched operations and post-op pain and infections to get out of paying for surgery and making you go through injections and therapy for as long as we can get away with!" Which is what private health insurance companies do. It's their reason for existence. And the name HAS to be a play on good ol' Dr. Marcus Welby, your friendly family physician who would come to your house and treat you without having to get pre-approvals from Humana.

I figured, what the hell?, I'm leaving their evil clutches anyway. So I signed up and watched an online Power-Pointy display for about 15 minutes. Yes, surgery is scary. Sepsis and salmonella and sutures, oh my! You should get second opinions! Maybe even third and fourths! You should have a surgery buddy to be scared with you! Or you could, you know, just die before they put you under so we don't have to pay for the shots or pain meds either!

The presentation finished, the survey completed, I watched my email and claimed my 25 bucks, which popped right onto our Amazon account . It paid for the new fan in the computer. Which I, personally, operated on.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

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Metphistopheles

May 2025

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Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 06:04 pm

A Head Full of Ideas that were Driving Me Insane....

...and a Mouthful of Cotton Candy

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Different as Night and Day. We hope.

Roger and Me

Things Going Bump. Slide and Hiccup

Cawfee Tawk and Hold My Breweries

Hell-th Report

I Never Could Get The Hang of Thanksgiving Thursdays. Or Black Fridays.

Nuthin from Nuthin Leaves Nuthin....

(Not) Being > Nothingness

"The Weight," The Weight, And Way Too Many Waits

Dragon Slayed, Ghosts Encountered, and a Possible Vampire

Busy Days, Pucks, and Why Twitter Sucks

Birthdays and Doomsdays

Uncomfortably Numb

Very Tall Ladders and Golden Escalators

Kin Yew Say Speshul? Sher. I Knew Yew Kewd.

Voting and Vocals and Venmo, Oh My!

Putting it in the Books! Also, PUTTING the books....

More Weird. No Al.

Forgot to Stay....De....MENTED! Still Weird, Though....

Operation!

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May 2025

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