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Up and down week.
On the plus side, I got Chinese take-out last Saturday, I did my first Zoom with an ATPo friend yesterday, and the weather went from record high, high temperatures last week, to a record low, high temperature this week. The cold snap plus the event I describe below, caused my cat to snuggle up in bed in the mornings keeping my legs nice and warm.
On the minus side, the political ads on TV and the net are getting depressingly vicious. There is a Republican group calling itself "Defend Arizona," that everyone suspects is funded entirely by Californians, which has been running ads every day for months full of half truths and down right lies about the Democratic candidate for US Senate here. The Democrats have tried to keep things on a higher plane, but keep hitting our Republican Senator on her two-faced attitude toward health care. Trump ads have started implying that Biden is a foaming at the mouth socialist, who is politically somewhere between Pol Pot and Kim Jong Un. Don't get me started on the gun lobby. It gets sickening every four years, but this time is worse than usual. I may worry about next Tuesday, but at least come Wednesday all those ads will be gone.
Big on the minus side, my furnace thermostat died the second evening of the cold snap. It took the circuit breaker with it. I went out in the dark with a flashlight and threw the breaker I thought it was on, but obviously it did no good. Early the next morning before I tried to call for repairs, I tried to do a load of laundry and the washer would not work either. I went out and flipped that breaker off and on. No luck. I decided I didn't want to spend extra buying a circuit breaker from a repair man. So I went out to the hardware store and bought one. I came home and replaced the bad breaker, got my laundry started, then called the repair men. I was pleasantly surprised they showed up that day in the evening. I told them exactly what happened. They immediately went not to the thermostat, but to the furnace, which is the intelligent thing to do in their position. Then they came in to look at the thermostat and after about ten seconds and a single test, one of them speaks up and says "bad thermostat." I reply, "I'm not surprised." Just like every other item from China that we've let ourselves get dependent on, thermostats are in short supply here in Tucson. So the only one they had to offer me cost way more than I'd agree to under ordinary circumstances. But hell, I hadn't spent any of my stimulus money. So it essentially cost the US the extra amount not me. *Thank you all for your tax dollars.* Any way, I have a far too fancy, working thermostat on the wall now, and don't feel terribly guilty about it.
On the plus side, I got Chinese take-out last Saturday, I did my first Zoom with an ATPo friend yesterday, and the weather went from record high, high temperatures last week, to a record low, high temperature this week. The cold snap plus the event I describe below, caused my cat to snuggle up in bed in the mornings keeping my legs nice and warm.
On the minus side, the political ads on TV and the net are getting depressingly vicious. There is a Republican group calling itself "Defend Arizona," that everyone suspects is funded entirely by Californians, which has been running ads every day for months full of half truths and down right lies about the Democratic candidate for US Senate here. The Democrats have tried to keep things on a higher plane, but keep hitting our Republican Senator on her two-faced attitude toward health care. Trump ads have started implying that Biden is a foaming at the mouth socialist, who is politically somewhere between Pol Pot and Kim Jong Un. Don't get me started on the gun lobby. It gets sickening every four years, but this time is worse than usual. I may worry about next Tuesday, but at least come Wednesday all those ads will be gone.
Big on the minus side, my furnace thermostat died the second evening of the cold snap. It took the circuit breaker with it. I went out in the dark with a flashlight and threw the breaker I thought it was on, but obviously it did no good. Early the next morning before I tried to call for repairs, I tried to do a load of laundry and the washer would not work either. I went out and flipped that breaker off and on. No luck. I decided I didn't want to spend extra buying a circuit breaker from a repair man. So I went out to the hardware store and bought one. I came home and replaced the bad breaker, got my laundry started, then called the repair men. I was pleasantly surprised they showed up that day in the evening. I told them exactly what happened. They immediately went not to the thermostat, but to the furnace, which is the intelligent thing to do in their position. Then they came in to look at the thermostat and after about ten seconds and a single test, one of them speaks up and says "bad thermostat." I reply, "I'm not surprised." Just like every other item from China that we've let ourselves get dependent on, thermostats are in short supply here in Tucson. So the only one they had to offer me cost way more than I'd agree to under ordinary circumstances. But hell, I hadn't spent any of my stimulus money. So it essentially cost the US the extra amount not me. *Thank you all for your tax dollars.* Any way, I have a far too fancy, working thermostat on the wall now, and don't feel terribly guilty about it.
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