Or did the gods invent Mondays in the first place just to spite us?
Winter arrived yesterday evening and today we took our first dogwalk in it. That is, I stomped along determinedly while the dogs, in their rain jackets, stared at me aghast and demanded, “Can we go home now?”
While winter here in the NorthWET doesn’t involve six-foot drifts of snow or 30-below temperatures (ah, fond memories of Wyoming and Minnesota!), it tends to arrive as suddenly as if someone up there dropped it on our heads. Cold needles of rain are here to stay.
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And of course this is the day that the driver-side door handle on Old Blue decided to explode — firing springs around the cockpit and thereafter refusing to open anything. Yes, today is the day I have to start rolling down the window and reaching outside to open the door.
Until I can figure out the fix. Peferably not in the rain.
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It’s also the morning tens of thousands of identical spam messages decided to clog up my email. Literally tens of. Or so the counts and the sluggishness of the email works tell me. Repeated attempts to blacklist the sender and irretrievably delete the mails before their arrival succeeded only in sending them to the spam folder, from which I had to transfer them to the trash folder for a mass purge. After closing and reopening Thunderbird to kick it into gear again. And logging onto the the provider’s website when that wasn’t working.
Finally either something I did or something my provider did stopped the mailstorm.
So mary&^%$#@whoeverthehell!@yahoo.com, I missed out on your tens of thousands of attempts to send me millions of Nigerian dollars. And BTW, I am not your Dear One. Not even close, baby.
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Now pardon me if I go off and nurse my disgruntlements. Meanwhile, have a few good reads:
Nicholas Johnson and the WSJ bring a touch of honesty to the latest in victim disarmament.
Eric Peters talks about people who like to boss other people. (Big H/T LS)
And to end on a cheery note, the great Kevin D. Williamson talks about what’s going right with the world. And … um, what Rotarians and free markets have to do with it.
When did Garfield take over Claire’s blog?
What, Claire can’t enjoy a good lasagna?
Sounds like a good day to crawl into that wonderful tub with a glass of wine and just say @#!% it all for today. 😉
I used to have a Mazda RX-7 with a rotary engine.
Here’s something from the latest Risks Digest:
How to Protect Yourself from NSA Attacks on 1024-bit DH
Didn’t Old Blue come with a repair warranty? Are you past that period now? (How time flies.)
“Didn’t Old Blue come with a repair warranty? Are you past that period now? (How time flies.)”
Yep. Three months — which just ran out. (The seller’s original offer was for a year of free repairs, but when I got him to reduce the price we also reduced the warranty period. I expect he’d still tinker with this for free, but it’s such a minor thing I don’t want to bother him.)
Karen — Oh yeah to that. Or it woulda been a good day for that if I didn’t also seem to be coming down with a cold.
We’ll see. Doing the old salt-gargle-and-sweat-it-out thing my father used to do so maybe the cold won’t catch me. (Actually, Dad also added hot toddies to his anti-cold preps. Worked brilliantly for him; he was never sick. But I don’t think I could handle that. Maybe a virgin toddy …)
It is pro-forma for old cars to have door handles that fall apart.
The thing to do is gather up all the bits you can find, then take apart the passenger side door and study it. Use it as a model for what you need to do on the driver’s side (maybe a mirror image of that). In other words, take the inner panel off both doors so you can see the interior.
If you have lost any pieces, sometimes you can substitute (e.g., a nail for a machined pin), and sometimes you just run down to the local car graveyard and get another one. Worst case you can simply move the needed part from the passenger side door to the driver side, leaving the passenger side non-functional.
My old Passat had a rear window that stopped working in the middle of a Wyoming winter (and it stopped with the window down). I opened it up, determined pretty quickly that I was not going to be able to fix it (electric windows are pretty darn complex) and just took a stick of wood and jammed it in there and tied it up with wire so it held the window closed. At least I stopped freezing…
“Repeated attempts to blacklist the sender and irretrievably delete the mails before their arrival succeeded only in sending them to the spam folder, from which I had to transfer them to the trash folder for a mass purge.”
Microsoft email (hotmail dot com IOW) lets me block emails already in the spam box. Until just recently. Now, quite a few of the spam mails somehow have MY address attached to them (spoofed as if they come from me?) and the response I get is “you cannot block your own address!”
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?? Anyone else notice this?