収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

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 tezt 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.