When Did I Find A Monkey’s Paw?

At about halfway through this year, I started to think that I had picked up a monkey’s paw. The basic premise of the Monkey’s Paw story is the paw can grant you wishes, but they all have hellish consequences. Here’s why I thought I had picked up a monkey’s paw.

As spring rolled on towards summer, a lot of things were happening at once. I was trying to decide where Tansy was going in retirement and tying up those loose ends. I was hearing about more and more people getting dogs and I was hearing they weren’t getting much notice. At the same time, GDB, the guide dog school I have chosen, made a request for updated medical information, which meant they might be considering offering me a class date. Plus, our company conference was fast approaching and I wasn’t sure if my dog plans would conflict with my conference plans. I said to myself “I just wish things would slow down.” Boom! Steve and I got COVID. That sure slowed things down, but not the way I would have wanted.

A couple of months later, I was not feeling ready for a presentation that I had to do on September 19. I was wishing for a reason to put it off for a bit. Then, my dad ended up in the hospital with a mystery illness, so I asked for more time. Then I was guaranteed more time when the Queen passed away, and everybody at the place where I was presenting took the day off on September 19. So…the presentation was postponed. I was hoping for the reason to not be so sad, but there goes the monkey’s paw again. At least the presentation ended up going well.

A little bit later, one of us joked that we wished we could have some free food randomly appear. Well, one night Steve went to take out the garbage and we found some random takeout food at our door that we didn’t order. It was cold, so it had been sitting there a while, so we know that who ever ordered it had probably had it replaced. But it was from Burger King, and we know Steve’s feelings on Burger King. Thankfully, nobody died from eating the food.

I had started to think I was in the clear, because I thought the monkey’s paw only gives 3 wishes. But when I read the story again, it gives four! So, if anyone hears me say “No, Monkey’s Paw, that’s not a real wish!”, you know why.

Christmas Music And Grammar. Two Of Everyone’s Favourite Things, Together AT Last

I’ll confess. Until I listened to this, I had given exactly no seconds of thought to God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’s proper comma placement. In fact I’ve seen it written so many times without one that I wasn’t even sure one was necessary. But I also see a lot of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”, so there’s that. But is it right?

And now we know, assuming these guys aren’t wrong.

Happy Booirthday!

I have to write about this, because I ran into two creepy instances of this in two days.

Yesterday, when I was finally updating the singing screen readers post, I was trying to look up Chris Skarstad’s name. I knew the probability was good that I would screw it up. I stumbled across his Twitter account, and saw this robot thing posting on his behalf that it had been 15 years since he joined Twitter. It did that in October of 2022. Hey, robot thing. He passed away in 2017. You might want to stop posting. I know that someone has to delete the Twitter account for the robot to get the message, but it’s still creepy to see things like that.

Then, today I awoke to see Facebook telling me about the birthday of Trixie’s raiser. It just told me it was someone’s birthday, and I was trying to think of who else’s birthday it could have been. So I clicked on it and saw it was Trixie’s raiser’s birthday. I never posted about this because I could never find her obituary, but Trixie’s raiser passed away in April of 2021. Seeing her birthday notification was jarring and sad. I know, I could just unfriend her. But that feels weird too.

It really makes me glad that I don’t have anything proclaiming my anniversaries on any social media, and it makes me want to make sure that when I do kick the bucket, someone will let Facebook know that we don’t have to notify anyone of my next birthday.

Gees. Where did that sad bit of stuff come from? It’s New Year’s Eve! I should be bouncing. Well, hopefully I’ll have happier stuff to write later.

I Got Ripped Off 0.8 Seconds Faster! This Is Awesome!

You probably know this already, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Even if you’re certain you’ve heard the stupidest thing you’re ever going to hear, there’s always going to be a stupider one waiting for you just around some corner somewhere.

Today’s example comes to us by way of the good folks at Mercedes, who are hoping that they can get someone to please pay them $1200 a year for basic engine functionality that amounts to essentially nothing.

The new Mercedes ‘Acceleration Increasse’ subscription costs $1,200 USD (roughly $1,607 CAD) annually and shaves 0.8-0.9 seconds off the car’s 0-60 mph time in Dynamic mode. This subscription unlocks more power already available in the Mercedes-EQ EQE and the EQS electric vehicles.
The update page on Mercedes’ website suggests that the upgrade will come to all EQS EVs the company sells, but the “performance boost at a glance” section only mentions the 350 and 450 trim lines. The more expensive, and faster, EQS 580 isn’t on the list. This suggests the subscription brings the slower models up to par with the flagship, but even that isn’t the case.
The top-of-the-line 580 has a 0-60 time of 4.1 seconds. The slower 450 can only be upgraded to hit a maximum speed of 4.9 seconds. So if you care about speed, you’d still need to shell out the cash for the 580 anyway.

No, you are not reading that wrong. For the small price of $1200, which bears repeating is an annual fee, you too can go a little faster a little faster.

Who this is for is quite frankly beyond me. Unless you’re planning to drag race it or have a frequent need to speed away from things with a slight head start, less than a second of acceleration is going to make literally zero difference to your quality of life. That $1200 a year, on the other hand…

On the surface, this is little more than an example of the old saying about a fool and his money. But it also strikes me as a test case to see what the limits are to how much subscription creep people are going to put up with. If it works, they can literally monetize whatever they want. Remember, this is performance that already exists in the expensive car you’ve bought. If you’re fool enough to pay for that, I don’t want to hear any complaining when you have to subscribe to whatever the rolling down the windows subscription is going to be called.

I Got Home for Christmas

I made it home for Christmas and made it back here! I even made it back here on the day I was supposed to! Phew! This Christmas, that was no small feat.

I headed out to my brother’s place on Christmas Morning, not sure if Uber was going to ding me with a surge price. I was lucky and it didn’t even think about it. It tried to ding Steve as he headed out to his own family stuff, but he closed the app and that seemed to make it think better of that plan. So we both got an Uber that wasn’t crazy expensive.

I forgot how much stuff you have to pack when you have kids. When I showed up at my brother’s, I knew he had a 7-passenger van so I felt a little bad that I didn’t bring Steve because there would have been room after all. Um, about that. When I got into the van in the back row of seats, the rest of the seat I was on was stacked high with luggage of all shapes and sizes! Oh my! There was extra food, pillows, toys, books, and who knows what else? There was definitely only room enough for me.

We had a pretty quiet trip home. The older nephew kept asking if we were there yet and I laughed because I thought of all our long trips. But my brother now understands why I wasn’t keen on travelling on Christmas Eve. We drove by several abandoned cars on the side of the highway. I think we made the right choice.

When we got there, the kids went nuts. They ate dinner, and then tore into their gifts. Everybody seemed pretty happy with their haul.

Sukie was especially thrilled that he got a Dancing cactus toy.

I guess it’s designed for younger kids. They talk to it and it mimics them back. It can also sing songs, but its selection of songs is weird. He saw a video of babies losing their minds at it and desperately wanted the thing. Maybe it was this video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ZnG4H1dQo

Now he has it, and I think we all sort of want its batteries to run out. Oh well. I guess this is karma for all those years I had annoying toys.

We had a great time. The kids definitely had a great time running all over the place and playing lots of games. I think my poor parents are exhausted. We had lots of delicious food and chatted a bunch.

Then I started getting ominous messages from Via Rail. It started with the news that Via Rail had cancelled all their trains on Boxing Day. Hmmm. I was supposed to be on the train on the 27th headed back. Would they start cancelling trains on the 27th? We started jumping into planning mode because if I couldn’t get back on the 27th, I might have been home longer than I had ever planned because my dad had medical appointments and the rest of the people able to drive me wouldn’t be at the house much longer.

Then I got an email from Via Rail saying that I should expect delays on the train due to high congestion and train schedule changes, but it never said what those delays would look like, or whether the start time was delayed. It did offer me an opportunity to cancel my trip, and it also wanted me to click a link acknowledging receipt of this message, which was kind of weird. I guess they didn’t want to hear a lot of “I didn’t know!” all day long. So we just kept looking and hoping for a good update.

There’s something I have to figure out. I signed up to the Via Train Alert Service so I would know about major scheduling changes. But for the last two trains I have taken, the alerts never came. In the case of my train at Thanksgiving, I thought maybe they amended their policy and the alerts only go off if there are delays. But I had delays for my most recent train and I never heard a peep. I even checked my spam folder. I wonder what’s up and how I can fix it. I really appreciate that service.

We got to the station and everything was running on time. They put two trains together that were going the same direction and just covered all their stops. But as we went, we were more and more delayed. I think we ended up being delayed by about 2 hours, but we got home so I won’t complain. Plus people were really nice and took care of us. I felt sorry for them. As we went, they got more and more apologetic. I also felt sorry for anyone who was headed to Sarnia. I don’t think they were supposed to get in until 11:30 or so that night.

Even with all the struggles, I’m glad I made it home. It was a good, memorable Christmas.

I’m Home…For Now


I know we’re supposed to be done with Christmas music, but don’t even try telling me you’re not hitting play on Deck the Halls sung to the tune of War Pigs no matter what time of year it is.

I’m back from part one of the Christmas vacation, and Carin should be walking in any time now. At the moment she’s having trouble finding a cab at the train station, of all places.

I had fun. Seppa got an air hockey table for Christmas, so that’s where a lot of Saturday went. We still have to teach him that you don’t play with all of the extra pucks on the table at once (that was pretty fun though) and that the game doesn’t end just because he’s losing and annoyed about it, but all in due time.

I also tried Flamin’ Hot Mountain Dew. I expected it to taste awful because I’m not the biggest Mountain Dew fan, but it was fairly alright. The strangest, most notable thing about it is that it isn’t spicy at all until you swallow it. After that it gives you an odd, low key heartburn feeling, but it goes away after a minute if you stop drinking it. I kind of wish I had saved it to see how it paired with the Tabasco chocolates I also received, but there was no way I wasn’t making the rest of the family try it. They’re not spice people at all, but sometimes there’s a price to be paid for being curious.

The rest of the trip was pretty standard. Tons of food, a couple drinks, presents, laughing at old stories, you know how it goes. Now we get to lay low for a few days and then head out for our New Year’s Christmas Eve party.

Hope you all had a fun one, that game aside. Ahh well. There’s always tomorrow.

I Saw Carin Kicking Santa Claus

The night before I went to get my CPAP machine I affectionately call Santa Claus, I had a dream about what the training session would be like. In the dream, I was in a big room full of older folks and we were all learning how to use our machines. We had to watch a video about Sleep Apnea and why we were getting the machine. In the video, there were these other old people, I think there was a woman and a man. Each asked a question like “My doctor says I have Sleep Apnea. What does that mean?” And then the announcer would come on and go into a speech explaining what Sleep Apnea is and what it can cause. Then we got to one where the older lady said “I don’t like the idea that this machine can tell when I use it, and can send information to my doctor. Convince me that you’re not trying to put spies in my bedroom.” I forget what the announcer fellow said in response, probably something about how it only sends very specific data to your doctor and it doesn’t have a camera or a microphone, or something like that. And then the older man said “How can I trust these things? Are you sure they’re not trying to kill us by filling our heads with foam particles?” This little bit must have come from learning about a recall of Philips CPAP machines that were causing foam particles to go into people’s noses through their mask and tubing. As you can tell, my mind was super busy. Most of the dream was totally silly, but I have to admit that I sometimes wonder if Santa is spying on me. Here’s why.

As I have said, the machine has an app where you can check your progress. The provider of the app also sends regular emails with tips about CPAP. Some of them can be very creepily timed, as if it truly is observing my thoughts, words and actions. I know it isn’t, but it feels like it.

The first time I slightly thought about it was after we got my mask fixed and the next day I got an email that said “Congratulations! You started your therapy!” But I figured that one was because the machine finally saw me use the mask for the full 7 hours.

But then they got weirder from there. One day, I was saying to Steve that I was worried that I wasn’t doing something right because I was still feeling sleepy in the day and he said Rome wasn’t built in a day. The day after that, I got an email that said “Did you know that people start noticing less daytime sleepiness after 3 months of therapy?” It was like it heard me and thought it should answer my question. Again, I’m sure the emails are well-timed, based on people’s progress and common points where people get discouraged.

But the weirdest was one morning, after I had emptied the water chamber and stood it up to air out, for no reason at all, it fell to the floor and came apart. Thankfully it was intended to come apart, but I thought I broke it. The next email I got from the app was entitled “Are you being kind to your CPAP equipment?” I nearly jumped. Did it see what happened? No. The email was all about how to keep it clean, and was reminding me of things to do to make things go smoothly.

Now, today I was worried I had broken my mask when I gave it a thorough cleaning a week ago. That must be why I’ve been more tired yesterday. Steve had to remind me that I have been stressed with all this Christmas-related chaos and that was probably all it was. The next email I got was called “How are you feeling?” and was telling me about reduced daytime sleepiness. Eek!

I have at least one piece of evidence that it’s not spying on me. I got an email that congratulated me on reducing my risk of causing a car accident now that I was less sleepy while driving. Um, I don’t think Santa is going to allow me to drive. He’s good but he’s not that good.

Oh Tansenbaum

Tansy on the deck looking sadly at the patio door
Let me in! Let me in!

It seems that Tansy is enjoying her new home. I asked for some pictures so I could give them to her raisers, and here’s what I got.

Closeup of Tansy on her dog bed near the Christmas tree
This is the life!

I would say she’s one happy dog, even though she looks a little sad in the picture up top. My mom commented that her dog bed looked huuuuge. She’d be in her glory.

Tansy near the Christmas tree next to a cat.
Sure, kitty cat, you can share my giant bed.

And look at the cats snuggled up with her. I hoped they would get along, but you never know.

Tansy lying under the Christmas tree.
Snoozin around the Christmas tree…

I probably won’t see her over Christmas, but maybe that’s a good thing since it will give them even longer to bond without me sticking my fat schnoz in the mix.

It sounds like she’s settling in well. They’re starting to come up with their own nicknames for her. Awesome. I sent her some Christmas treats. Sadly, the place where I got them didn’t have any of those creepy furry rabbit ears. At least they had some yams. I wasn’t sure about sending her a shween. I thought I might scare the humans away.

So, if she could, Tansy would also wish you a merry Christmas…and maybe shukh at you too.

I May Have Dodged A Snow-Covered Bullet!

Everybody, sing along!

Having gridlock Christmas was almost my experience. The plan was to head out today and head for Mom and Dad’s place, about 300 miles away. But because the roads still sound like they suuuuuuuck, we decided to head out tomorrow.

This decision was made with no help from the folks at 570 News, who didn’t manage to have a speck of local news for us in Kitchener. No traffic, no weather, jack diddly squat! Thank goodness Rogers thought enough of Toronto to have live stuff coming out of 680 news, but that coverage won’t tell me the state of things in Kitchener, or between Kitchener and Toronto. It said things were improving, but there was a lot of talk of “0 visibility.” and “high winds.”

So I decided to call one of our local cab companies and ask if they were up for driving from here to North Toronto area where my brother is. They told me that it was up to the driver. Some are willing, but it’s their decision whether they’d take a trip like that. Then the dispatcher proceeded to tell me it’s safer to stay home. The cabs, the ones that never seem to be off the roads, encouraged me to stay home! Um, eek. I think that holds a lot of weight.

Since I couldn’t find any other reliable information, Barb went to Reddit and asked on the local Kitchener feed and soon got loudly told that I should stay the fuck at home. So I felt better about persuading my brother that we should make the trip tomorrow.

But for future reference, I learned about a website and Twitter account that totally slipped my mind for tracking road conditions. I will definitely keep that in mind for the next time the all news all the time websites decide that all of the time isn’t really a fair description.

If there is a big button-pushing dude upstairs, he kind of saved my ass this year. Usually, we take the train home and sometimes we go back on the train. But because I made the decision to go home at a point where trains were barely available, I asked to drive with family and then come back to Kitchener on the train. If I had gone from Kitchener on the train, I might still be stuck in Cobourg now. I know this train was Toronto bound, but eventually, they got stuck in both directions.

I still have hope that I’ll get home to see my folks if we leave tomorrow. It’ll be kind of nostalgic travelling on Christmas Day because we would always make the trip to my grandma’s place on Christmas Day when we were kids. Thankfully I won’t have to turn around and go back the next day. That’s what we used to do. Yug! I don’t know how my folks did that.

This year, I’m regretting not buying this charming children’s book for the nephews. It would have been funny watching my brother reading them a book called “Hookers and Blow Save Christmas.” My poor sister in law would have been mortified, at least until she realized it was all about a snow blower and a tow truck. I might also get disowned…hmmm…still. Would it be worth it? I’ll never know! But that book would have been very appropriate this year.

If I can get home and see Dad before his big surgery, I’ll be happy. And if it turns out that I can’t, then it is what it is. At least I can say I tried my best.

Everybody, stay safe. Let our good friends CTRL-SALT-DELETE, Clearopathra, and Melton John do their work. Merry Christmas, everybody.

A Song To Get You In The Mood For Something Or Other. Shoveling, Perhaps

If you’re looking for a little holiday music to get you into the spirit of the season, you know, just in case all the damn snow isn’t enough for you, how about a little José Van Haliano?

Music used in this mashup:
Jose Feliciano – Feliz Navidad
Van Halen – Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love

Guitar solo adapted and played by me.

Speaking of all the damn snow, we’re definitely getting it here in KW. We’re not sure what that means for our travel plans aside from a good altering, but we’ll take that as it comes. What else can we do, really?

Christmas Eve with some of my extended family has already been moved to New Year’s Day. Last year we did it in March, so that’s not so bad. It’s probably a good decision. The last prediction I heard for Kitchener was something like 15 CM of snow today, then another 10 tomorrow. All of that on top of the ice and the high winds and I’m not sure I’d even be able to get out of town and all the way to them if they still wanted me to.

Speaking of not getting out, I don’t have high hopes for poor Carin. Her trip involves a two hour drive to meet her ride in Toronto, then another four and a half to get the rest of the way home. I’m basing those estimates on a good day, which this most certainly is not. They haven’t made the call to put things off yet, but I think it may be just a matter of time if things keep up this way. Her family can be a little nutty when it comes to road trips, but there are limits to everything and at some point it’s just better to stay safe even if there’s an extremely good reason for wanting to get home.

So far, Christmas day with my immediate family is untouched, so if things start clearing up by Sunday hopefully we can make that trip.

Wherever you find yourselves, we hope that you’re all safe and warm. And all of you who were complaining about not having a white Christmas, I hope you’re happy now.