I had planned to go visit my parents next week. However, I have been informed that there is Covid in the assisted living facility. Fortunately, not my mom, or my stepfather, who visits daily. They are allowing him to continue visiting, although it would not be their preference, they're making an exception for him, but they are limiting his visiting ( Read more... )

Books: strangely, goodreads didn't have this as a big button this evening. It had it as a big button a few days ago, so I'm sort of surprised, since today and tomorrow are particular days in which you would like to have this URL available. However, I was able to construct it by using last year's. https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2021/ ( Read more... )

Note to self: do not forget to sign up on the bay area fastrak website BEFORE you return your rental car. Because, you can only pay tolls until the future, and so I have just signed up to pay my toll over the weekend, and also tolls by whoever rented the car next until right now. I wrote a complaint to them, so if it happens, hopefully I will not ( Read more... )

So I got this iPhone, with the idea that "everything would be great because it is new and modern". It turns out that it's so modern, that it really really really wants to figure out some other way to produce sound than it talking. So far, I have had to tell it not to use Bluetooth to give me directions (the radio was not playing in the car, so it ( Read more... )

I am in California. I have the world's worst rental car. Sometimes when I am going to see my mom, if it turns out that it doesn't cost much more for a compact SUV, I go for it, because it's so much easier to get her in and out of such a car with a high front seat, and usually that gas mileage hit is not all that huge - they get in the low 30s, and ( Read more... )

Normally when I start a post with "the boat is broken" it's not a good thing, but this time it's "the boat is broken-in"! We've gone the requisite 10 hours, and we actually did follow the rules, pretty much. In any case, we no longer have to restrict the length of time that we run at full power, or dork around at slow speeds for eight minutes in ( Read more... )

I just came back from a complicated California trip!

I started out by having a day in San Francisco, where we (me and the friends I was visiting) walked around and did touristy things down on the waterfront, walking from the hotel to fisherman's wharf and all the way to the ferry dock, and then taking the cable car back to the vicinity of our hotel ( Read more... )

Another parental visit. Bracketing it with fun and a different parental duty: helping ensconce Jocelyn in her dorm.

The fun is hanging out with friends in SF Saturday and a small square dance event on Sunday. Stupidly I'm flying to Sacramento because it would cost an extra $400 for the one way rental to drop off in Sacramento. However it turns out ( Read more... )

We went to Connecticut to visit a childhood friend of Ken's. He's a teacher at a private high school, where he teaches physics and theater. The excuse for the trip is that he has a pretty good theater set up with lights and backgrounds and so forth, and Jocelyn wants to try to make a professional looking demo reel of her circus skills. We struck ( Read more... )

I had an exciting return trip. Got to the airport in plenty of time to drop off the rental car and get through security (pre-check line very short - regular line very long. All these vacationers who are "amateur travelers"…)

About 15 minutes before we were due to depart, we still hadn't started boarding, and they finally admitted that we weren't ( Read more... )