This year I had a whopping 16 trick-or-treaters. 2024 was 56, 2023 was 60, 2022 was 45. It was sprinkling rain off-and-on, so maybe that's why. Oh well. More candy for me. Not that I should be eating bags and bags of candy at my age, but maybe if I just eat one piece two pieces six pieces a day it will all be fine.
And now, this... something I posted on Facebook a few hours agao
As we yede into All Hallow's Eve, a blessing from me to thee...
Maye thy trick-or-treaters be sparse so the candy bounty left for thee be heavy.
Maye thy pets be not alarmed by the many intrusions unto thine house.
If the weather be not pleasant, maye it not intrude upon thy home when thou openest the door.
Maye wicches and devels and the foul forces of the orange satan passe thee by, and blessyngs be upon thee and thyn this night.
Amen.
It's tough to have Halloween without thinking back to nine years ago when I very foolishly scheduled a colonoscopy for November 1st ("We're wide open, so you can have whatever time you like!"). Which meant I had my clean-out on Halloween. When I was trying to pass out candy to trick-or-treaters. And having to sit on the toilet every five minutes. What I remember most is not wanting to get anybody sick with pink eye or whatever, so I was washing my hands as usual, but in scalding hot water before grabbing the bowl of candy. My hands were raw for days. Which was worse than the colonoscopy. But not worse than the clean-out, of course.
Today was payday! After turning out the lights at 9:00pm as the rain picked up, it was time to place a grocery order for tomorrow morning.
I am single.
I don't eat a lot.
I am vegetarian so I don't buy expensive meats.
I grocery shop frugally. Very frugally... only buying things that are on sale, and I purchase a lot of in-store brands instead of name brands.
Doesn't matter.
I just bought groceries for the next two weeks... the total was $206 ($12 over what I should have spent because I splurged and bought two packages of "fresh" pasta and a box of donuts, all at discount). My savings from shopping sales and special offers was $83. Meaning that the retail price for feeding one person with a low food intake for half a month is $289.
For half a month!
How can a family of four afford to eat any more? What happened to "lower grocery prices on Day One?" This is fucking abhorrent. People are having to use credit cards to finance food to eat while grocery store chains rake in billions of dollars in profit. People are going hungry while the government is financing multiple private jets, ugly million dollar marble bathroom renovations, and an even uglier golden ball room to entertain the millionaires and billionaires that own them.
How the fuck are people okay with all this? We've been completely sold out while the people who represent us rake in billions of OUR MONEY. It's all grift and scams from here on out.
Happy Halloween. For the USA it's 100% trick and 0% treat.
It's the busy time of year for me! I start work at 4:30am, head into the office at 8:30am, then head back home at 3:30pm, grab something to eat, then work until I fall asleep.
The problem is that I am so exhausted when I go home to eat that every little thing feels like too much effort. Just look at the number of times I dreaded having to do something menial...
But anyway...
Eddy is back, and this time he's entering psychosis with CHATGPT...
How does this not scare the ever-loving shit out of people? He did this for fun, but you just know there are thousands upon thousands of people going through this for real.
I have turned off every AI option I can find on all my devices and have done what I can to eliminate AI with the services I use (including Google, where you can search with "-ai"). I do this not just because it's rarely helpful and a waste of time, but also because I don't want to contribute to AI farms stealing resources and destroying lives.
Maybe AI can destroy my life so I can stay in bed tomorrow.
Last night I went out to dinner with some friends that just got back from Vegas.
Back before pandemic, they went almost every year. But now they say they’re probably never going back.
Every drink they had was watered down. There was no meal they enjoyed, even at the expensive restaurants, because the quality of the food has taken a dive and the portions are much smaller. Slot machines don’t pay out. And there are extra charges, mandatory fees, and additional taxes on absolutely everything.
My friend’s wife said that it was impossible to enjoy their vacation because she spent the entire time counting the outrageous amount of money they were spending on a mediocre vacation.
As somebody who went on work trips to Vegas a few times a year for a decade, this is strange for me to contemplate. People flocked to Vegas to roll like a millionaire on a modest budget. Without that, what’s the appeal? Unless things seriously change soon, I wonder how Las Vegas can survive.
In other news...
Today I had my annual eye exam. The first since my cataract lens replacement. I have 20/15 vision. Which means I'm seeing better than I probably ever have in my life, since my eyesight was less than good even as a kid. Now I want to have another surgery. I'm going to try and trade up to 20/10 with X-ray vision next time.
A shame I need readers, but even there I'm told I only really need 1.25× instead of the 1.5× I've been using.
Such a nice surprise to have good news about my eyes for a change.
There was once a man who was being chased by a ferocious tiger across a field. At the edge of the field there was a cliff. In order to escape the jaws of the tiger, the man caught hold of a vine and swung himself over the edge of the cliff. Dangling down, he saw, to his dismay, there were more tigers on the ground below him! And, furthermore, two little mice were gnawing on the vine to which he clung. He knew that at any moment he would fall to certain death. That's when he noticed a wild strawberry growing on the cliff wall. Clutching the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other and put it in his mouth.
He never before realized how sweet a strawberry could taste.
—Zen Buddhist parable
As our world continues to continue its descent into madness and ruin, don't forget to look around and find those simple pleasures which still make life worth living.
They're everywhere.
I ordered something that was shipped from Kentucky. It made it to a hub three hours from me... then got shipped to Ohio... then ended up in Illinois... and now is estimated to arrive on October 29th? It was due TWO DAYS AGO!
I swear, these automated package routing centers for all the big carriers make a shit-ton of mistakes, and once something goes wrong they just continue to make mistakes for some reason. Humans are out of the picture, so if there's a mark on the barcode (or whatever) you're fucked. Totally and completely fucked.
This is not the first time this has happened. It happened in July where a package coming across the country from Florida ended up in CONNECTICUT before being rerouted to CALIFORNIA. At that point it sat for two days until somebody bothered to take a look and get it rerouted to me. And of course UPS doesn't give a single fuck.
But of course the cost to ship packages just keeps going up and up, so you're paying more for shittier service, which sounds right on-point for where things are headed.
I have no idea where the days are going. The weekend passes so quickly it scarcely feels like it existed... then it's back to work where it's an exhausting blur until it's the weekend again. Months feel like weeks. I swear it was just July and here it is October. I can barely remember any of it. At this rate It will be New Years when I wake up tomorrow.
In the meanwhile, there's the here and now.
So there I was... scrolling through Facebook tonight and trying to avoid all the AI slop that is plaguing social media, when I see this...
A little scrolling later and I saw this...
Then I scrolled a little further and saw this, with both cosmic events in the same graphic...
Both of the maps showing that my neck of the woods had good visibility!
Except... it's Fall, which is to say that my odds of having "good visibility" here is not great.
And, sure enough, the night sky was completely obscured.
Oh well. There's always old reruns of Columbo to occupy my Thursday evening.
Our brave firefighters keep gaining ground on the wildfires in the area that have been burning for over five weeks, and it's looking like there's finally light at the end of the tunnel. Today the fire to the north reached 55% containment. And while the fire to the south was holding steady at 7% for weeks, today they announced that the crews there have managed to achieve 10%.
The bad news is that what kind of day I have depends entirely on how the wind blows, because the smoke is still pretty bad.
Every once in a while blue skies will arrive... for a while... which means my lungs won't feel as fuzzy, my eyes won't be burning as severely, my head will be less likely to start exploding, and I won't be coughing as much. I also won't have to take an excessive amount of allergy medication.
But it's always fleeting.
Which is to say that I still go directly to work in the mornings then go directly home afterwards. And still feel awful most days.
Thank heavens for grocery delivery! But even then, having to open the door to receive my order guarantees an instant headache until the air purifiers can get things under control again.
Can you believe that I honestly thought we'd make it through the Summer without a wildfire?
I wake up every morning and look out the window to see what kind of day I'm going to have. If I can see the surrounding hills, it's probably going to be a fairly good day (at least to start... who knows where the wind will take us). If I can't see the surrounding hills, I'm pretty much guaranteed a day of misery from the minute I walk out the door. And today was one of those days. We were socked in and I could smell smoke on Jake when he walked in, which means he was out in the catio.
But, as I lay here now at night? I can see a star.
Sure it's just one, but it gives me hope for tomorrow. It would be nice to be able to go outside instead of hiding in my house all weekend.
And now... for all the Swifties out there, today was the day...
The album that changed my mind about Taylor Swift was 1989. It was pop perfection and had the lyrical masterpiece that is New Romantics. Then she followed it up with Reputation and Lover and I was convinced that she was going to be on my "Best Of" list until I was dust.
But then she took a turn with Folklore and Evermore which lost me. Fortunately Midnights was a return to the Taylor I enjoy listening to, and I thought maybe... but then The Tortured Poets Department had only one song I truly liked (along with a smattering on the first part that were okay) and I thought "Well, it was fun while it lasted."
And now we get The Life of a Showgirl.
It runs the gamut, going from pop optimism and clever musical turns to a dis track on (assumably) Charli XCX and a bouncy song about her fiancée Travis Kelce's dick being as big as a redwood that opened her thighs.
In the end, this album is a partial u-turn back towards the 1989 era. Though it does get dragged down by a few tracks that won't be added to my playlists any time soon.
As for the others? Thank you, Taylor! I'm enjoying them.
The wildfire smoke has been so bad that I ended up taking the weekend off. From everything. Including blogging.
Despite the fact that I cowered in my home with air purifiers on full power... Saturday was residual misery from going to work in heavy smoke on Friday, and Sunday I made the mistake of taking out the garbage without a mask. In a city which I would later learn had the worst air quality in the entire country.
Fires to t he North. Fires to the South. And I read that some people are starting to wonder if the fires might merge. At which point I will be evacuating along with the rest of the city.
Personally, I think it's unlikely. As the weather cools and rain is forecast, fire containment by our firefighters seems the safer bet. Fortunately, it's not July right now, or I'd be pretty worried.
Well, more worried than usual.
My view on the way home yesterday felt like the End of Days.
A canyon outside of town is under immediate evacuation. Air tanker planes are flying overhead, shaking the house and freaking out the cats. The fire began 24 days ago. Now 31,000 acres are in flames. Winds are making containment difficult. We could really use rain... but I worry that it could come with lightning and start more fires...
I honestly thought we'd escape a major fire this season. Guess not.
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