mdehners | Reading

It was actually chilly in the morning, and didn't get very warm in the afternoon. On my walk, I still saw a lot of people in shorts, but some of the twenty-somethings playing volleyball in the park were in long sleeves.

weofodthignen

Overnight, in defiance of weather forecasts, we had some real rain. Puddles all over the place, and it continued to rain very lightly during the morning. So I got a damp dog on my bed and I don't have to water for a week, unless it flips back to hot enough that I have to hand water trees and flowers.

Yesterday I passed by a car park and a long line of people with fruit-and-veg boxes snaked around it. Presumably grocery distribution. I was on the other side of the street so was able to not appear to have noticed.

weofodthignen

I tried something new and ran the sprinkler in the last position before breakfast, rather than squeezing it in in the evening. Then I did a load of laundry and started to put it on the line ... and it started to rain lightly.

When I got through stuffing the laundry in the dryer, I took out the recycling, and on my return found Monty sitting on the back porch steps. Brought him out food, and Prudence also appeared, so I had to bring her out a dish, too. I guess the porch room was a more congenial place to eat out of the damp than the front porch.

Not much rain though, and we got enough sun in the afternoon for the second load of laundry to dry on the line.

weofodthignen

We shopped. The housemate bought heroic quantities of frozen dinners. I somehow got it all into the freezer in the garage.

weofodthignen

Cool most of the day; autumnally chilly when I got up, in fact. The clouds were boiling over the hills to the south, and I put off watering for a day, but if it's going to rain it's leaving it a bit late. And the sun did break through in late afternoon, at which point because of the humidity it suddenly felt hot.

Saw all three cats, separately. Monty requested an extra feeding, so I gave it to him. (I haven't seen a rat in the garden or even the compost heap in months.)

Since it was cool I had no excuse, so I filled the greenwaste bin right to the top clearing the detritus from under a towering camellia bush. (I picked out as many of the dried flowers as I could and used them to layer the compost.)

weofodthignen

It was indeed cool almost all day. And threateningly cloudy. But no rain. So I mowed the meadow in front of the house, digging out a disgusting black toadstool that I discovered in there. (White puffball-style things that go black overnight. I usually find them when they're a couple of inches across; this was a 5- or 6-inch clump.) With that plus leaves, the greenwaste bin is pretty much full.

Cat food got devoured in quantity. I wonder whether Mama Violet got shut in somewhere and busted out this morning.

weofodthignen

Last night the housemate turned in early and I continued jigsawing for a while—when the fire alarm in my room went off. Not the one in the hallway that we've always had, which tends to start shrieking when the housemate cooks bacon or when one of us lets a kettle start melting. This is one of the ones the city apparently now requires in all bedrooms, new-style with no replaceable batteries, installed by the concierge/handyman team when we first signed up. It was emitting bursts of three tones. There was nothing smoking in my room, and the window was closed so nothing was wafting in. So I waved a beach towel at it with intent. No effect. Got the kitchen stepladder and clambered up, then dabbed with the towel around and on the face of the alarm, and around the nearby ceiling light; my guess was cobwebs or their creator had got in the way of the sensor. It shut up for a few minutes ... but then started up again. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! ... BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! So I went and got the stepladder again and this time I not only scoured around with the towel, I carefully pressed the button in the middle and held it, hoping that the illegible raised letters said "reset". That worked. I didn't have to attempt my third idea, extracting it from the ceiling, swathing it in towels, and leaving it in the basement.

No concerned or infuriated neighbours had pounded on the front door. And the housemate slept on. The dog, however, had taken cover in the kitchen.

I then googled and got two different sites telling me that three beeps followed by a pause is the "universal" signal for "There's a fire! GTFO!"

The housemate was as surprised as me, this morning. Fire alarms in hotels and academic buildings shriek continuously. The one in the hallway shrieks continuously. It had crossed my mind that it might be a low battery signal. Luckily I'd decided that a real alarm caused by a creepy crawlie was more likely, but it was a new kind of alarm to me, and would have been to her if she'd happened to wake up.

Yes, I would have woken her if there had been a fire.

arlie

My bridge club has once again sent me multiple emails, telling me about a bridge game scheduled at a time too early in the day for me. They hold lots of games, and are eager for more people to play. Once a week, they have an evening game. But it's important to them that I hear about all of them. How else will they get more attendance at their 10 AM games?

My online pharmacy feels a need to send me 4 or 5 emails per package they send me. They also require proactive action once a year for each prescription, because they won't send a request for a refill prescription without asking me first.

After an attempt at cleanup, I currently have 45 threads in my INBOX, each containing one or more unread emails. This does not count unread emails auto-filed into other mailboxes, generally because I have strong reasons to believe they aren't actionable. It also doesn't count anything recognized as spam.

I routinely lose important emails among all the junk mail, even with an active spam filter and other filters for FYI and routine verbosity.

Meanwhile, when I delete the obligatory requests to respond to customer satisfaction surveys, I get sent reminders of this pending task I've already decided not to do. If I respond accurately - "now that you've punished me for using your service by demanding I respond to surveys, I won't use or recommend you ever again" it'll be misinterpreted as a complaint about whatever employee I dealt with, rather than a complaint about the demand that I contribute my precious time to their not-so-precious business interests.

Note to the senders of most of those 45 threads: I hope your afterlife involves wading through emails, full of repetitive rubbish of limited interest, to find the one and only email that - if read attentively - might relieve your ongoing agony, in the manner of Dante's afterlife for sellers of bogus medicine.

A few of your messages *are* the things I'm looking for. Most though are e.g. 5 separate threads to convey one piece of information I want, in the manner of my wretched online pharmacy. And that's with the outright spam already pruned.

moonhare posting in

gardening

The garden is all but done, now. We have harvested as many tomatoes as we can, and only a few green peppers remain. The pumpkins were brought in early because of bacterial wilt and rodent damage. Cucumbers were pulled up in late August due to wilt. All in all, though, it was a good season.

We put up ten pint jars and three quart jars of tomato sauce. Salsa was made from the remaining green tomatoes which wouldn’t ripen: two pints canned and a quart-and-a-half refrigerated.

Onto planning 2026!

Current Mood: accomplished

weofodthignen

Boing! went the temps.

They're supposedly going to slide and go crunch over the next couple of days. I can hardly wait.

weofodthignen

It must have rained more measurably overnight, at least in the driveway; there was a puddle there this morning. Maybe that was why the dog let me oversleep.

weofodthignen

It rained on my sheets. Only lightly, but rain!!! Then all afternoon was histrionic skies, high humidity, and the temp bounced up to at least 80 and the a/c fired. I took the dog for a walkies right after lunch and she led me all around the block ... then suddenly got scared when we were almost opposite the house. I think by the dark clouds that were again rolling in, but who knows.

Mama Violet reappeared on the porch. After throwing up on the sidewalk/pavement. (Yes, I cleaned it up.)

weofodthignen

A sudden and dramatic heat wave today. Walking was a bit of a chore. An equally dramatic fall-off in temps is forecast for tomorrow, but I'm sceptical.

This house is for sale locally. $1.5m. Note that the preceding sale was in 2008, for $525,000 out of foreclosure, and that the Street View link goes to what it looked like back then, pre-renovation, when it still had its porch and its little garage. Some real estate sites dated it to 1970 rather than 1930, so I suspect there was another renovation back then.

ravan

Glad Equinox to you and yours!

Officially the first day of Fall, the temperature was still hot, in the 89+ °F range. Tomorrow is forecast to be 94 °F. Ugh. Then maybe rain on Wednesday. I hope we get a good amount of rain this year. The water table needs it.

In other news, I'm still mired in all the paperwork associated with Datawolf's death. The amount of cussing I'm doing at the sheer mass on self-satisfied, smug bureaucracy is astounding. All of them just throw more forms and leg work back at me, like it's my fault that she's dead. WTF, assholes, WTF? Why are you punishing me for having to close out my wife's life? Do you think I like it?

Current Mood: bitchy
Crossposts: https://ravan.insanejournal.com/70998.html

weofodthignen

First bad air day warning since late May, for tomorrow. So I ran an errand on foot today. Next to the payment machine at an under-used car park (may have something to do with both payment machines being out of order since forever), there was a hefty paper grocery bag, which when I peeped inside held two wilting celeries. Nearby, a sagging cardboard fruit & veg box had some elderly kale, a potato, and a green apple. Maybe dumped after the farmer's market on Saturday. So I took the apple and have just consumed it after cutting out the bad bit.

... And I blóted for Harvest. Not with the apple, since it had a bad bit.

weofodthignen

Fluorescent pink markings have appeared on lumpy pavements/sidewalks all over the neighbourhood, and the absolutely worst one, a big heave caused by a tree root with something like a 5" difference in height between slabs, has been fixed with soft gravel. There's also a recent patch where the water line work was happening at the one house; same stuff, already has parallel marks from a construction vehicle's enormous ridged tyres.

weofodthignen

My monstera is extruding another new leaf. I kept looking to catch the first signs, but once more didn't spot it until the furled leaf was poking out. I turned the pot a tiny bit to reduce the poking through the curtains, but I know it's fruitless, the plant will just corkscrew fluidly into the light.

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Reminders of Reminders of Reminders

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