First World Problems

Hola!  How are we in this time of impending dictatorship?  I am again reminded of the REM song, it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.  Actually, I don't feel fine.  Life at home has been sub-optimal these last few days.  Forgive me if it doesn't interest you, it does me.

On August 29, there was a coordinated crime wave in our neighborhood, and on the houses below us on the hill.  Even though we have a gate, people can climb over the wall, if they are very determined.  Anyway, two remote controllers that open the gate were stolen from cars.  One family lost power tools and a custom mountain bike from the garage.  Door bell cameras down the street revealed several masked people trying to get into cars to get the garage door openers.  Anyway, there are two neighborhood remotes stolen and out in the universe, which makes me very uneasy.  If you can drive through the gate, you can take big stuff.

So, Jim and I set off to plug the security leak by deleting the two stolen remotes from the gate's lookup table and programming four new remotes with different code. Sounds simple, eh?  HAH HAH, double HAH!  We got two remotes done, and the keypad in the gate controller died,  so no more programing was possible.  At this point, we could give each household one remote and call it good.  But we still need to get the codes from the stolen remotes deleted.  Problem with that is the old records of who has what code are questionable.  Give the wonkiness of the whole lash up, I would hate to delete someone else's code and not be able to put it back.  We have a technician coming out soon, who we hope can improve this.  Adding to my frustration is the fact that we have a perfectly good smartphone based app that will open the gate from anywhere in the world that has cell service.  We're an elderly neighborhood, so adoption of this has been slow.  

This is the gate controller, where we have spent many hours trying to get the wretched thing to work.

Then there was the over the oven microwave.  It died, each attempt to start it up flipped the breaker in the garage, immediately.  It had gone from accepting a breaker reset to being dead.  So,  a new microwave has been acquired, and now we wait for the men to come install it.  People who refuse the over the oven option are smart, remove and replace is so much easier with one on the counter top.  The NO! sticky is to prevent muscle memory from using that button.

Jim has pulled up lame.   I think I have previously mentioned how awful medical care in Spokane is.  We went to a walk in ortho clinic.  The PA-C said it's trochanteric bursitis after looking at an X-ray.  I don't know, it could be that, it could be other things.  So he did a steroid injection into the general area.  Instead of checking the "refer to physical therapy" box, he checked the "refer to surgery" box.  We've called, gone to the office, and asked would you please get him to check the physical therapy referral box on the form.  I am so pissed about this, two weeks later we have no response what so ever.  So, we've consulted the internet.  I gave the LLM (large language model) this prompt "how do you stretch an it band if it is made of connective tissue which neither stretches or compresses" and it spit out a good article with links and videos, so we're going to do that.  Maybe in Tucson we can see someone worthwhile.  We rode today, riding was good.  Walking is still not good. 

The wheels are falling off the planet.  Jimmy Kimmel is suspended indefinitely because the Magats did not like it when he said they (the magats) were trying to point the blame for the shooting of Charlie Kirk on a liberal.  They are doing that, Kimmel spoke the truth.  However, 47 has now decided that no one may say anything bad about him at any time.  So much for the first amendment.  If we had a functioning SCOTUS this would be a non-issue. Disney has lost $3.87 Billion (USD) overnight because of Jimmy Kimmel. People are pissed, and are boycotting the channel.  This whole thing is like when they fired Colbert, it was to advance another merger.  This one advances a merger that also requires a rules change to approve it.

In other news, Russia continues its incursions into Baltic and Polish air space.  I don't know why they just don't shoot them down.  Reuters reports: The Pentagon informs European diplomats the US will partially halt military assistance to Baltic nations and NATO states bordering Russia.  Marvel Studios has announced that it will be leaving Fayette County in Georgia and taking its 20,000 jobs with it to the UK. This will add to the 800,000 layoffs that have been occurring in the US so far in 2025.  Their reason for leaving is the cost of health care in the US.  This cost will get worse with the new proposed annual one time fee of $100,000 for an H1b visa.  Hospitals use quite a number of these visas to bring in foreign residents, because there are not enough native born.  Hospitals can't pay this for a resident.  So expect things to get worse if this takes effect.

Here is a Project 2025 Progress tracker.  Their overall progress is at 47%. 

Ukraine is wiping out Russia's oil infrastructure as well as rail.  Euromaidan has a good article on what they've been doing to hurt Russian rail. 

This is from the front page of the Washington post.  One wonders if they will close and/or destroy Manzanar.  I have several posts from when we visited there, if you're not familiar.

And finally, there is this.
 

So, that's it.  There's always more, but I think I will stop now.