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D.O.P.-T.

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.

Entry tags:

commercial behavior

Reminders of Reminders of Reminders

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.

Current Mood: accomplished

Entry tags:

garden

Summer’s end

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!

D.O.P.-T.

Boing! went the temps.

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

D.O.P.-T.

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.

D.O.P.-T.

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.)

D.O.P.-T.

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.

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

Entry tags:

Happy Equinox

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?

D.O.P.-T.

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.

D.O.P.-T.

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.

D.O.P.-T.

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.

D.O.P.-T.

The fruits have been chopped off that vine. Maybe for eating.

Both Monty and Prudence showed up for breakfast, but Mama Violet is again making herself scarce. On the other hand, a couple of days ago I saw another orange cat, a block away. He crossed a dangerous road and continued straight past me. I thought it might be Monty until I saw his tail was shorter—and he wasn't neutered.

D.O.P.-T.

A curiously cloudy and humid day, but so far no rain ... The park was pretty much deserted in the early afternoon. We'd seen three people when we finally came upon a couple sitting in a corner of the playing field on lawnchairs. The squirrels and crows were busy busy.

Swooping through

Hi all! Haven't posted for the longest time, have no excuses really. I'm okay, my new hip is better than the rest of me, and my mood is more on the copacetic side than it's often been in the past.

Take care, you critters!

Skapi

D.O.P.-T.

That vine that reached over the fence to embrace a tree got cut back, but it still spills over the fence.

I was wondering why it didn't seem to be producing any grapes, so today I paused my walk and looked closer. I think it may be a luffa vine.

D.O.P.-T.

Bi-weekly grocery run. To my horror, on the way there we found ourselves behind a matte black Cybertruck tricked out with some sort of military-looking armature over the cover of the truck bed. I suppose it could have been for securing bikes or surfboards or something. But it looked more like Judge Dredd's latest. I was very glad when they turned out to be going to a different store in the mall.

When I returned from this evening's attempt to get the dog to walk, Monty emerged from a hiding place and shot me a look. The dog didn't notice, of course. Prudence was on the neighbours' shed roof. So I returned with food for them both. She started eating but he wasn't visible, either demonstrating his pique or waiting to be sure the dog was safely stowed.

Kagi - a search engine you pay for with money

susandennis recently posted about several technical things she's trying. She's much more bullish on digital tech than I am, and even enjoys shopping (!), but she's been a great source of pointers for me of things I might like.

Today's post included a for-pay ad-free, surveillance-free search engine called kagi. She says she's been hearing about it a lot; I on the other hand have been hiding under my rock, and only just noticed it. (I really should read Ars Technica more frequently.)

After thanking Susan for bringing it to my attention, I just spent some time looking at it, finding myself on the fence about trying it. This Ars Technica article from Aug 5, 2025 says much of what I might have said myself, only better.

( Read more... )

I'd appreciate other people's comments.

D.O.P.-T.

Yes, it was hot. Kind of oven-like on my afternoon walk.

Saw my first commercial Cybertruck. Home builders. I have to admit, it's suited to that kind of business. Presumably has good a/c, too.

Entry tags:

name and shame

Name and Shame: Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE)

The latest newsletter from YLE ended with the dreaded "Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app". I.e. they've gone blatantly freemium. Presumably if asked they'd say they need more subscribers to support all the "value add" that isn't part of their original fact-focussed take on public health in the US, then with emphasis on Covid. They "need" funding for more videos I don't watch, and heavens knows what all else.

They also included their take on gun violence, a subject they insist is part of public health epidemiology. Its inclusion was acceptable to some readers, wanted by some, and rejected by others, to the point that YLE provided an option for subscribers (paid and unpaid) to opt out of receiving such posts. I did so, but nonetheless received today's mixed post.

I have high standards for YLE, formed by their behaviour during the years of the covid lockdowns. Their current behaviour isn't even bad by the standards of substack posters, or modern businesses in general, let alone by the standards of politicians.

But I'm disappointed to see them reverting to the mean/possibly joining the race to the bottom.

And I wonder how much money is being taken home by the YLE principals, and how that compares both with other jobs available to young doctors and with my own best earning years.

To be fair - this was a quite meaty post, before the freemium bit, which seems to be about registering for a paid-subscriber-only live webinar on fall vaccines. (Live webinars are another "value add" I don't want; people who want them are welcome to pay for them.) YLE has a long way down to go before they reach parity with Paul Krugman, and much as I often complain about him, he's good compared to others from whom I've long ago unsubscribed.

D.O.P.-T.

It's supposed to get hot again starting tomorrow. Pity; I've been able to let the dog stay out a bit without the a/c trying to cool the back garden.

The first non-tiny green orange fell off the tree. Or was bitten off, more likely.