Construction season has begun. I expected this sort of thing to be going on outside, but not inside.
This was going on next to my cubicle when I got to work this morning.
They started disassembling the cubicles across from me last Monday. Silly me for assuming they would have done a better job of cleaning up after themselves.
Someone on Reddit posted about this entry on the FamilySearch tree. It’s delightfully entertaining. First, the “Important research has been done on this person,” note. Understand that anyone can add anything they want to the FamilySearch tree, but it should be factual and supported by some sort of evidence. I’m not criticizing people’s beliefs or religion. Believe what you want! I certainly do. But this has no place in genealogy.
Must we? And the arguments in the change log about definitive proofs and whether or not Joseph should be linked as his father and whether or not he really married Mary Magdelene and did they actually have children. There’s a place for those discussions, but I don’t think this is it.
This is my favorite part. Under “Facts,” which ought to be at least somewhat fact-adjacent, right? His physical appearance: “Curly bright silver grey hair. Aquamarine blue eyes (Post resurrection reports)”
I’m seriously tempted to replace the profile pic with Black Jesus. I’m feelin’ fighty.
I had to walk across campus to Parking Services. They’re located in a parking garage where I cannot park. I might have been able to find a spot in a nearby parking lot, but none of the lots on the online parking services map indicate which parking passes can park in that lot, which makes the map absolutely useless.
So I walked over there, which took me longer than it should have, because I had to navigate a giant fence maze in front of the student union. Once you committed to entering the maze, you couldn’t get out until the end. There were no side exits, which meant I went way out of my way. The whole thing was super annoying.
The most annoying part of it was that my parking permit should have been mailed to me. It was returned by the post office because IU’s Parking Services’ mail merge program cannot cope with the apartment field that IU’s master address form provides. It just completely omits that field when printing labels, so my apartment number was left off the mailing label. I tried to explain what happened to the clerk at Parking Services, and it was like talking to a brick wall. She said they’d had mail returned from other apartment dwellers, but had no idea why. Lordy! Your mailing software is BROKEN!
I’m pretty sure the problem is at their end, not mine. And then she told me that I should always pick up my tag in person, because everyone in her office is so nice and it’s a pleasant experience. Considering I cannot park anywhere near their office, that’s not going to happen.
A book on sketchbooks, written by a man, contains artwork mostly by men. Not at all surprising. Call them “visual journals” and the author will much more likely be a woman, and the artists represented will be mostly women. Art is for men, but craft is for ladypeople. I’m reminded of a Joanna Newsom interview in which she said that men were harpists and women were harp players. We don’t let women play in male spaces (still!), but we also devalue the spaces where women are allowed to play.
(I may not even have noticed, except I started to wonder how many drawings of teen boy sexual fantasies there would be in the book. A lot. And all of them drawn by men, so I looked at the artist bios and did a quick tally of the genders: 31 men, 10 women, and one non-binary person.)
Did I mention that we had a lightning strike last weekend? It fried my modem, requiring a call to Comcast (I hate phones!) and a visit from a technician to install a new
modem, because our local service center no longer carries equipment.
And then I found that the Ethernet card on my computer had also been fried. I got a USB wireless adapter, for short term, but ordered a new Ethernet card from Amazon. That arrived today.
I turned on my computer, to uninstall the old Ethernet card, shut down, physically installed the new card, tried to tuen the computer back on, aaaaand bupkis. I think the motherboard is dead.
The food news is that the hard drive is probably fine, and if it isn’t, it’s pretty well backed up. I may lose some email and a couple of day’s worth of work, but that’s not the end of the world. Being temporarily computerless might be the end of the world, though!
The baby bear made a feet bouquet, while he was napping. Is there anything cuter?
We have our yearly all day in-house conference at work tomorrow. They are allegedly serving pastries and coffee in the morning, but the last time I attended, they said the same thing and there was bupkis.
They won’t tell us what the lunch menu is, but every year they serve the same revolting vinegar-drenched artichoke heart veggie wrap. It’s absolutely inedible, so I’ll be packing Pop Tarts and a PB&J sandwich. Better safe than sorry.
I’ve been looking at ways to trim some of my bills, and lo and behold, my newest Comcast bill had gone up about $40. So that’s an obvious place to start. Before dropping cable, I wanted to make sure a Roku stick would work for me. There were a few glitches, but I finally got it working.
If you’re a Doctor Who fan, I recommend checking out the BritBox app. You can stream the classic episodes with it.
(And yes, I know I can call Comcast and probably get my bill reduced. I did that last year. I’m just kind of annoyed, plus we’re moving into the summer TV black hole season. Now is as good a time as any to ditch cable.)
I have been drafted into the lefty army. Hopefully just temporarily.
Parking Operations will ticket you if a tire is touching the white line. I can only imagine the driver got out of their car, looked, and said, “Screw it, I parked inside the lines and that’s good enough!”
I’d be so mortified I’d have to re-park.
[Also note that the passenger side of the car is beat to hell. There’s probably a good reason for that!]
Thomas went to a new vet today. He was urinating every 15-30 minutes yesterday evening, so I called my vet. The earliest appointment they had available was Monday. They would take him as an emergency between 8-5 today, but that would cost an extra $80, on top of the $38 office call fee.
Um, no. I’m still a little bit angry about the receptionist offering an appointment FIVE DAYS LATER, for a suspected UTI. A UTI is not an emergency, but it’s an urgent care issue, and if an owner doesn’t understand that, the receptionist should explain it to them.
I’m also annoyed that my vet–a practice I’ve been going to for ten years, is no longer able to provide urgent, non-emergency care. That’s unacceptable to me. I’m not asking them to drop everything to examine my dog, but they shouldn’t be so booked up that they can’t fit in urgent care cases. And they should have office staff who can triage those appointments, putting the non-urgent ones farther off and leaving a few slots open for more pressing problems.
So, I called another practice, and they were able to get Thomas in as a new patient this morning. They also had a couple of new client discounts that brought the bill down to $57. It would have otherwise been $87, which would have still been very reasonable!
You know how this story ends, right? After being stressed out about Thomas and pissed off at the old vet practice yesterday, I got no sleep last night. And of course, Thomas was back to peeing normally today. His urine looked normal under the microscope and everything else looked great. They did a needle urine draw, so they had a sterile sample to culture. Results of that should be back Monday, but I expect they’ll be negative.
All that angst and drama for nothing!
red paper boat 