Patches finds my lack of cable management infuriating.

The forecast for this entire week has been rain.  It started raining on Sunday and here we are on Wednesday and it’s still raining.  It’s going to rain tomorrow too, and tomorrow is Halloween.

Methuen has had an EEE scare this year so we were already messing with the trick or treat plans.  We were holding it on 10/31 from 4:30-6:00 instead of the usual 5:00-7:00.  The idea being that we wanted everyone inside before it got dark and the mosquitoes came a-callin’.  We haven’t had a hard frost yet so they are still a worry.

Then today, 10/30, at about noon the city announced that trick or treating has been rescheduled again.  28 hours before the start of the holiday festivities.  I guess 28 hours notice is better than no notice at all… I guess.  We are now running things on Saturday 11/2 from 4:00-6:00.

Why is this a problem for me?

Well I work from home on Thursdays so, despite the super early start time, I was going to be able to participate.  I was planning on filling up a big bowl with candy, opening up the front door, and hanging out with my laptop so I could work while I waited for trick or treaters.  My step son was planning to come over a little early so he could help out.  It was going to be cool.

I had two chores to do before hand though.  First, we have a birds nest in the outside light over our front door.  If I turned on the light, the nest would light… light on fire, that is.  I went out this morning and pulled most of the nest out of the light fixture.  I did this while reaching around the screen door because I didn’t know if any birds were still hanging around in there and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked.  It was okay.  The nest was empty.

The other chore involved buying a metric tonne of candy.  Our neighborhood doesn’t have many kids in it, but we draw them in from all over town (and other towns too) and we get some pretty serious crowds.  No matter how much candy I get, we always seem to run out before it’s all over.  This morning before work I stopped at CVS and bought a ton of stuff.

I was ready for Halloween.  We, as a household, were ready for Halloween.

Halloween isn’t on Halloween though.  It’s on Saturday.  My step son will be working.  Jen and I have plans and we won’t be home.

I bought all that candy and we’re going to be stuck with it.

Bad news, weight watchers.

So there I was, laying in bed.  I was still 80-90% asleep.  It was a couple of minutes before 5:00 AM.  The alarm was about to go off, but it wasn’t quite time yet.  I woke up because my nose was itchy.  I reach up to scratch it, looking forward to some sweet relief and also hoping to snag a tiny bit more sleep before the alarm…

…and all I can scratch is the CPAP mask.

Denied.

Damn.

 

Traffic was garbage this morning from the minute I left the driveway, all the way to work. I had to detour around traffic before I even left my neighborhood.

Interestingly enough, my detour out of my neighborhood actually brought me back to my old neighborhood. I got to drive up Ashland Ave today, right past our old duplex. I asked Jen to marry me in the back yard of that house. Ah, the memories.

Now while that is our old building, our half of the duplex was the other side. The side facing the camera was our neighbor’s. When their kids were home alone one night and they had a bat somehow break in and they knocked on our door looking for help, it was this side of the building that I went to to remove their bat intruder. Man, that bat was not happy to see me.

Ah, memories.

I started using WordPress.com (on a different account) in December 2012.  At that time I was also messing with an app that doesn’t exist anymore, Posterous.

Posterous was a cross posting, email uploading bliss machine.  You setup an account and it gave you an email address.  Sending emails to that address would convert them into blog posts.  You could send text and images and… video?  I can’t remember for sure about video, but definitely images.  Then you could link your account to other blog hosting sites, like Blogger and WordPress.com, and your Posterous blog posts would be cross posted to the other hosts.  It was pretty cool.  After a while Twitter bought them out and then folded them up (at least that’s what I heard).

The end of Posterous created exactly the problem I was thinking about in a post a couple of days ago.  What happens if I host all of my images at Flickr and Flickr goes under?  I would have a blog chock full of broken image links.  I actually already have that because a ton of posts from 2012 or so had images hosted at Posterous and those images are long gone.

Last night I started a mini project, trying to figure out which images I had used in those posts and replacing the broken links with Flickr links.  I was able to use the Camera Roll page on my Flickr account to match up the dates of the blog posts and see what pictures were taken on those days.  In most of the posts I looked at I was able to figure out which image to use based on either the text of the post or sometimes just the title.

I started with the creation of my first WordPress.com account and after a few weeks of use the image hosting seems to have changed from Posterous to WordPress.  Those images links were never broken.  I am not sure how long I was using Posterous to post to Blogger, so I have to look backward in time from the start of WordPress too.  I just haven’t done that yet.

I also noticed that there are a lot of images hosted by Google.  They were pics I uploaded to Blogger using their mobile app.  I had a public and a private blog back then and I kept using Blogger for the private one for a while after I stopped using it for the public page.  Posterous was public so I wasn’t using that service for private stuff.  Those links still work too.  Maybe there aren’t as many dead images as I thought there were.

It’s kinda cool to look backward in time though.  I mean, what else is keeping a blog for?

 

13 days, 17 hours, 14 minutes, 6 seconds until Disney Plus debuts.

Trump at game five of the World Series last night. This is the moment he realizes the stadium full of Washington fans is booing him.

I haven’t been this happy in so long. This is truly beautiful.

There is a hidden danger to eating quinoa.  I didn’t see it coming at all.

I took a mouthful of quinoa…. and then sneezed.

Dozens of tiny little projectiles flying in all directions.

Deadly.

 

I have a pimple on my left ear lobe.  It’s one of those tiny little buggers that hurts like a mutha.  Any time I touch my left ear it hurts.  It’s annoying the crap out of me.  Worse, the strap for my CPAP mask goes under my hear, but it’s just thick enough that it barely touches my ear lobe.  The zit pain made falling asleep very difficult last night.  I ended up having the mask off for a good percentage of my sleep time last night.  My wife never complained about snoring, but I definitely feel more sleepy that I would have expected given the total amount of time I was sleeping.  Am I feeling an immediate effect of not having an apnea treatment last night?  Is it all in my head?

Further bad luck, or maybe it’s just bad timing, is that my clothes dryer picked last night to stop drying clothes.  It still runs, and it still fills up the lint screen, and I checked the vent this morning and it’s all clear.  I think we jinxed it this weekend.  Jen asked me if I thought we should replace the washer and dryer soon.  I said no.  The washer works fine.  The dryer needs to run for a really long time, but it gets the job done.  Or at least it did prior to last evening.  It’s almost like the dryer heard us talking and is now throwing a temper tantrum the only way it knows how.  What a jerk!

On a happier note, the orange pile of fascist goo made an appearance at the World Series game in Washington last night and the fans booed him.  Some of them even chanted, “lock him up.”  Over the last few years about 50% of the population of my country have made me feel pretty hopeless about our future as a nation.  Every once in a while though, the other 50% do something that restores a little bit of my faith.  Good on you, Washington fans.  It makes me sort of wish that I’d picked the Nationals to win the World Series instead of picking the Astros.

Next time.