I passed this store:

…and I thought, finally.  I am so sick of going to a store, reaching for a greeting card, and having it jump out of my grasp and skitter away down the aisle.

Anyway, the big news since my last minutiae post is that I moved up the road to El Cerrito.  It was the first time I had moved in over thirteen years, and I was dreading having to reorganize and transport over a decade’s worth of stuff.  One nice thing about moving less than three miles is that I could move things in small loads over the course of a month.  Per­haps unsurprisingly, I discovered that even with ninety per­cent of my stuff gone, my old place still felt like home until it was finally time to move the computer.  Anyway, I thought I was just about done when I suddenly realized that there was a whole drawer I had forgotten to clean out⁠—it was the drawer in which I kept the instructions to everything I had bought in the past thirteen years, plus an assortment of other documents.  At the very bottom I found an envelope.  I looked inside.  There was a check made out to me from the father of a tutoring student for $250!  …and it was dated April 23, 2010.  Turns out the value of a 13½-year-old check is zero.  Had he paid me in cash, when I finally found the money it would be worth 29% less due to inflation, but that’s better than 100% less.  (Had he paid me in bitcoins, my find would have been worth about $88 million.)

I knew that the popularity of hardwood floors was on the rise and that, correspondingly, that of carpet was declining, but it wasn’t until I went apartment hunting for the first time in thirteen years that I discovered just how far out of favor carpet has fallen.  It was hardwood everywhere, inclu­ding at the place where I ended up.  And at first I was pretty jazzed about it.  No more vacuuming!  No need to worry about stains!  If, heaven forfend, one of the cats should pick up some fleas, no carpet for the fleas to burrow into and lay their eggs!  But after moving here I quickly found my way back to Team Carpet.  Hardwood is just too, well, hard⁠—as noted, I tend to be glued to the computer and don’t walk around that much, and yet in just a couple of months the bottoms of my feet have become callused and rough, and I hate it.  Even worse, even with frequent sweeping, I feel like I can’t take a step without feeling grit underfoot.  You can argue that, sure, in a carpeted apartment I wouldn’t feel the grit, but it would still be there, accumulating in the carpet fibers and never entirely gone even with frequent vacuum­ing, and is that really any better?  The answer is yes.  It is better.

I have been told that the solution to my complaints about hardwood floors is just to get lots of rugs, but rugs that are pleasant to walk on are expensive.  This one came highly recommended, and I liked the pattern:

…so I decided to order it⁠—but in the smallest size, both to fit the area where I wanted a rug and because even the smal­lest size was quite pricey.  What I would have realized, had I given it a moment’s thought, was that they’re not gonna shrink down the pattern for the small rugs⁠—they’re just going to cut a smaller piece!  So this is what I got:

…which is not great, Bob!  At first I was really disappointed, particularly in the asymmetry of light and dark areas, but as time has passed I’m not as miffed about it, because it actu­ally is much more pleasant to step on than the other rugs and certainly more so than the hardwood.

This place is a townhouse built in the 2010s, attached to the back of a house built in the 1920s.  The 1920s house had a detached garage that has since been turned into a third unit on the property.  Now, the ’90s are over, so I’m not going to post my address on the Internet, but let’s say that the ori­ginal house is 55 Xyz Street, our townhouse is 57 Xyz Street, and the garage is 57A Xyz Street.  I can see how that would be slightly confusing.  But there are big numbers next to the doors indicating which unit is which.  Perhaps more to the point, if you are in the delivery business, then as the meme suggests, You Have One Job: drop off packages at the right address.  And so far delivery people have proven astounding­ly incompetent at this One Job.  We’ve had very important packages of ours get left at 55 and at 57A⁠—both of which have big gates out front that make the packages hard to retrieve.  (Then on top of this issue is that of delivery people who just flat-out lie in their reports⁠—one package I was expecting was marked as having been “handed directly to customer” seven minutes prior to the moment I checked for an update.  My memory isn’t great these days, but I do think I would remember being handed a package seven minutes earlier.  Apparently the deal is that the delivery driver didn’t want to get out of the truck and walk down the long drive­way in the rain, and so picked an option that would not require a verification photo.  The package eventually arrived at a later date, after the rain had stopped.)

One reason I wanted to stay in the Bay Area instead of moving somewhere cheaper, since I can do my day job from anywhere in the forty-two states where the company has a license to do business, is that for the past thirteen years I’ve gotten my Internet service from Sonic, widely regarded as the top provider in the country.  When I was scouting for apartments, I used Sonic’s address lookup to see whether I could get service there.  And a big part of the reason I was willing to go with this one is that when I entered the ad­dress into the Sonic form, it cheerily replied that here I could get “America’s Fastest Internet!”, ten gigabit fiber.  So after signing the lease, I called up Sonic to have my service transferred over to the new place.  The representative’s reply: why, we’ll be happy to do that once construction is complete in 2024!

Whaaaaat?  But the page said I could get the ten gigabit fiber at the new address—

“And you can!  We didn’t say now.”

I thought I must have skipped over the fine print, but no⁠—there was no fine print, and they really are going with the “When we say you can get this service, we mean at some unspecified point in the future” argument.  Oh, and as for that point in the future: the projected date at which they will start doing installations in this neighborhood (not even the projected date for my address in particular) has already slipped from January to July.  The moral of the story: All Corporations Are Bastards.

So we got stopgap service from another provider.  The problem is that, as I teach online in order to pay the rent, I need a rock-solid Internet connection, and the wifi signal from this other provider’s equipment was highly unreliable in the room with my computer in it.  (Of course, the Sonic guy who came to upgrade me from DSL to fiber during the pandemic couldn’t get wifi working at all.)  Solution: back to 2002 connectivity!  I broke out my old nail-in telephone wire clips and ran a fifty-foot ethernet cable up the wall and then along the ceiling across the house to my “classroom” and directly into the back of my computer.  The connection hasn’t dropped since.  High five to Ned Ludd!

This room has significantly more wall space than the corres­ponding room in my old place⁠—i.e., fewer windows.  There were vast expanses that were looking quite blank.  I had some posters from my old public school classroom that I theoretically could have put up, and even some of the lami­nated color photocopies I decorated my apartments with in the ’90s, but these days I prefer to hang real art (in frames and everything) and my own paintings.  My own paintings are not original⁠—they are based on the notion that if you go to a museum and find yourself saying, “I could paint that!”, then, hey, for the price of a canvas and a few tubes of paint, you can have that painting.  So, e.g., when I wanted a Mon­drian, I just made my own Mondrian.  When I wanted my own twist on a Mondrian, I made that too.  For years I’d had a vague notion that I wanted to do a large diptych using Palette 0 and Palette 1 of the IBM Color Graphics Adapter I had imprinted on as a child, and it seemed like the time had finally arrived.  But I didn’t want to do Mondrian again.  On my bookshelf next to my book about Piet Mondrian was a book about Roy Lichtenstein, so I did him instead.  The thing about these paintings is that they will probably never be truly finished, since I can always do more touchup to make the Benday dots more circular and less amoebic, more uni­form in size, etc.  And if I’m listening to a Youtube video and need something for my hands to do in the meantime, I will sometimes take one of the fake Lichtenstein paintings down and fix a few dots.  But I might keep doing this for weeks, months, years, so I figured that at some point I should declare them finished enough to post on my site.  So I did that.

When Ellie lived in Maryland, the cat tree she offered to the tiny kitten she plucked out of a hedge in a Baltimore County shopping center had a basket:

When she left the east coast, she didn’t want to try to fit a huge cat tree into the van when she could just get a new one in California, but I insisted on at least salvaging the basket.  I hung onto it even when Ellie moved to Portland and got a tree that was a set of leafy platforms, with no posts to attach the basket to.  But now she is back, and we attached the basket to a scratching post cobbled together from parts of the 2018 tree.  I didn’t expect the now middle-aged cat to actually use it, but to my delight, after a few days of suspi­cion, she hangs out in it all the time!

(And having posted pictures of a cat, I must now provide a link to Yahoo.  It’s the oldest law.)

I rarely drive much these days, but in the last few days of the year I decided to take Ellie out to eat in San Ramon.  We were entering Martinez when one of my tires blew.  I pulled over and turned on the hazards, and Ellie got out her phone so I could call AAA.  Her phone still has an east coast area code, so at first we got sent to a dispatcher in Florida, but that dispatcher transferred us over to the California branch, or so she said⁠—the dispatcher who picked up had a thick Southern accent.  She asked where I was.  I said that I was eastbound on California Highway 4, entering the city of Martinez, just west of the Alhambra Avenue exit. 

“Kin yew spell thait?”

“A-L-H-A-M—”

“Sorry… A-M-E-whut?”

“It’s Alhambra Avenue.  A, L, H⁠—”

“Yer on Al-uh-HAM-bray Street? How d’yew spell thait agin?”

“Alpha, Lima, Hotel, Alpha, Mike, Bravo, Romeo, Alpha.  And it’s an avenue.”

“Ah don’t see thait.  Is there a laindmark around?”

“There’s a big green exit sign that says Alhambra Avenue, Martinez.”

“…Kin yew git the GPS coordinates for yer location?”

I turned the phone over to Ellie, since I don’t know how smartphones work or how to pull up GPS coordinates on them.  She asked the dispatcher where she could find them.  “D’yew have an Aindroid or an Ah-phone?” the dispatcher asked.

“Android.”

“Open up yer compass app.”

Ellie did a search.  “I don’t have a compass app.”

“Ah-phones have a compass app.”

“I don’t have an I-Phone.”

It was getting dark, cars were roaring by, and Ellie was get­ting upset, so I took the phone back.  “Look,” I said, “can’t you just contact your local contractor near Martinez, Cali­fornia, and tell the driver that we’re eastbound on High­way 4 just west of the Alhambra Avenue exit?  I’m sure a local driver will know where that is.”  There was a lot more back and forth I won’t go into (for a while she got hung up on the notion that we might be at the corner of “Al-a-HAM-bray and Walnut”, even though I repeated a few times that we were on Highway 4), but eventually she said a tow truck was on the way and would arrive in about an hour.  She said we’d get texts tracking the driver’s progress. 

“Double check that she’s sending them to my phone and not the number on your account,” Ellie told me.

“Hey,” I said into the phone, “can you verify that those texts will be going to⁠—” and gave her Ellie’s phone number.

“Yes,” the dispatcher confirmed, “that’s the number where the texts will go.”

We got no texts.  When the tow truck driver showed up, he said that he’d tried to text us and got no reply.  When he tried to call… he got the dispatcher.  She hadn’t entered Ellie’s number.  She hadn’t entered my number.  She’d entered her own number.

Anyway, I guess that’s about it for 2023.  I hope you had a festive holiday season, or at least that it was more festive than this guy’s:

…or maybe his was too festive?