Package Tracking is nice, but it can be overdone. I got four emails today for one package: Seller: Hey! UPS says it's on the truck. UPS: It's on the truck. UPS: It's on your porch. Seller: Hey! UPS says it's on your porch. And that doesn't count two dogs losing their minds at the UPS truck.

It was a good week. Nothing is wrong in the house. We have enough to be comfortable. Yesterday was calm and full of things for which we can be thankful. Today I was able to make a substantial payment on the loan we needed to pay for the retaining wall.

Heh. I just blocked some squab (whom I don't know from Adam's cat) because he was hassling a well-known author about the emotional impacts of impulsively blocking people. He (the squab) wouldn't shut up about it.

Hmm, at this morning's weigh-in, I seem to have gained a little.

Dealing with bureaucracy today: "For of the doings of thy left hand, thy right hand shall know nothing, and the acts of thy right hand shall be obscured from thy left. The drumming in thy right ear shall not keep time with thy left. Rumba shall dance thy right foot while thy left foot cha-chas."

If you DON'T go shopping tomorrow, it's just Friday.

Fresh out of the oven.

The final step.

I'm thankful that I can sit on the front porch with the dogs, enjoying a peaceful, breezy afternoon in the hammock with an Ann Cleeves Vera Stanhope novel and the dishwasher running. As we cooked earlier today, we enjoyed 1966 Batman and Thanksgiving classic Blazing Saddles.

Today would be a great day to make a big batch of fudge. Alas I'd only eat it.

For those interested in such things, this log plot of the Dow Jones Industrial Average shows features that are obscured in the linear graph you get from Google. www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jon...

Happy Thanksgiving!

In NYC today, winds 15-20 mph with gusts to 33 mph. High of 43, with a wind-chill around 34. Rough day for a parade with big balloons.

Some of you are the black sheep of your families. I get that. I can even respect that. Git out yer banjos, folks, 'cause I'ma gonna sing about how Meg and me becomed the white sheeps of our famblies.

Meg and I cooked a lovely, moist, flavorful turkey and some of the side casseroles today. (Meg has the culinary expertise. Me Igor.) Tomorrow we'll finish up, then see Facebook pictures of a dried-out, overcooked, burnt horrors produced by my slightly estranged family. It's a family tradition.

Ni izvestia v Pravda. Ni pravda v Izvestia.

Ah, that moment when someone says something dumb in the comments, but you can't fix the stupid with a sound bite. If it takes more than 300 characters to explain the complex flaw in their rationalization, I'll let someone else have a turn. (Reminder to self: "You are not the jackass whisperer.")

I recently bought a window punch from a fire department supplier. Now my feed gets lots of ads for axes, helmets, and other protective gear. Some of the gear is posed on mannequins that give off a seriously 70's B-movie SF vibe.

I forget what book I'm waiting for. "The Winds of Stone"? "The Doors of Winter"? Something like that.

An airplane just throttled down near my house. Every time it happens, I check flightaware. www.flightaware.com/live/airport... A drop in RPM is usually a flying lesson (several flight schools nearby), but sometimes it's my idiot neighbor preparing to buzz his house.

I just caught myself editing a Bluesky post on my desktop while reading a Bluesky post on my phone... I should be editing.....

Digging back into 80s television, we're watching the "Father Dowling Mysteries." We've only seen two so far, but it looks like Hollywood said, "What if we team up Father Brown with an adult Punky Brewster?"

<cranky-old-man-yelling-at-sky> There was a time when I could go to intuit's website and see all the options for buying turbo tax. Now when I go there, they obscure the download options and push their online/live service. Screw that. I'll buy from Costco. </cranky-old-man-yelling-at-sky>

"Oh, no! The Market's collapsing!" No, it isn't. Stop licking the minor fluctuations of a random process. It'll give you brain cancer. And quit licking your guns while you're at it.

Argh! It's another one of *those* wordles. In the second row, I had 4 greens out of five. (Yes, luck was involved.) I only needed to guess one letter, but there are at least 7 possibilities, and I didn't guess the right one in my four remaining tries.

Uncle Sam has changed the timetable for updating my pension payments for next year. There's no explanation. Is it a mistake? Is it an unadvertised policy change? Who knows? I could ask, but by the time I got an answer, it'll either be fixed or fixed. (Gotta love the English language.) 🤷

Well... Tonight we watched The Phoenician Scheme. It was.... well.... <trails off:gets drink>

Today's PSA: When you meet an idiot or when someone who goes out of his way to misunderstand you, just block 'em. Life is just too damn short.

This xkcd cartoon makes a good point, but in my case it was two weeks screwing around with PostScript (on the company's dime) after getting my Ph.D. (They got their money's worth in subsequent years with the some surprisingly automatable data presentations.)

We've been watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents and pausing to look up actors. Tonight we saw one who died in 1960 at age 28 in an apparent 'locked-bathroom' suicide. He requested cremation and complained of money worries despite having steady work. There's more. My Columbo senses are tingling...

There are days when I catch whiffs of "something going on" on Bluesky and in the wider world, and one my shoulder angels (or "personality sprites", if you prefer that term) suggests that I comment. Another angel says, "No, study this more before commenting." Yet another angel says, "Don't!" 1/

Churchy Lafemme let out a WHOOP!! this morning when he realized that Friday The 13th came on Thursday this month, which is a very close call!

After deciding not to eat any more cinnamon bears, I bought two bags today. They were on top of the pile in the candy basket at Tractor Supply. I was weak.

Changed the oil in my car today. As much as I hate screwing around with jacking the car up onto stands so I can get under it, I've gotten tired of going to shops that screw it up. (The winner was the maroon who drained the transmission instead of the oil.)

Two back-to-back anniversaries this week: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Oregon Dynamite Whale. Both happened in my childhood, but in those days, that kind of news only spread in the nightly national network news (think Walter Cronkite) or the big newspapers. I didn't know about either event... 1/

It snowed a little in upstate South Carolina today, within 20 miles of the Georgia border. It was weird. And it didn't come down as proper flakes or hail or sleet. It was more like little pellets of furry ice 1-2mm across. Microscopic ice tribbles.

In a similar vein, if you work out the whole 1st cousin, 2nd cousin thing, you realize that your siblings are your 0th cousins. Even better, you are your own -1th cousin.

25 Dec is the 1st day of Christmas, ergo the 24th is the zeroth day of Christmas and the 23rd is the minus 1th day. My neighbor's tree is up already, on this lovely minus forty-fifth day of Christmas. Or maybe it's the 320th day of Last Christmas.

Friday night high school football. I was in the marching band. Sunday afternoon pro football. My grandfather always fell asleep in his chair. But the football memory that always surfaces when I think of the game is Hot Lips Houlihan chanting "We got a safety! We got a safety!"

TIL: Having Neanderthal DNA increased the risk of severe COVID-19. I mean, I knew that we were making great strides parsing DNA, but wow! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Day 11: Final touch. Straw and grass seed on the exposed dirt.

We watched The Tourist (2010) last night. Man, it was weird hearing Jarvis's disembodied voice while Paul Bettany's lips were moving.

Day 10: Two last views. What the retaining wall looks like from above and where the water comes out at the bottom of the hill.

Day 10: And that's a wrap. Finished the wall and all the drain pipes. It'll rain Saturday, which will give us the first test of the full system. Gotta go out now and make sure all the gates are locked.

Another truckload of fill dirt just arrived to go behind the retaining wall. www.youtube.com/shorts/Wu_Fx...

Day 9: We start with a high-angle view of the retaining wall to show how it will protect the pool. Then a closeup of the wall with gravel infill, then the completed wall. More grading behind the wall tomorrow. The distant downspout leads to the catch basin in the foreground.

For the Blues Brothers fans out there: "We had both kinds o' deliv'ries. Dirt *and* gravel."

The stock market has risen over 200 points and it's barely lunchtime. Tell me again how the Democrats are ruining everything. Yeah, freedom is good for the economy. It's fascism, greed, and selfishness that fuck things up.

"Remember, Remember the 5th of November!"

I'm very pleased with the outcome of the elections yesterday.