Tansy Says Hi After Retirement

So, Tansy has had a busy four months since she retired and moved into her new home. She has had more time romping with dogs and people than she usually gets, which makes me happy. She became good doggy friends with the beagle at her new home who she had played with at the dog park. She charmed a dog sitter, her new owner’s coworkers and boyfriend and whoever else she happened to meet on her travels because she is the Shmans. She went to the event where they let the dogs in the pool. She didn’t swim but she did her usual sniffing thing.

Plus, I got my wish of having her retirement party! We all got together at Waterloo park, and thanks to a few friends helping out by grabbing pizza and helping me decipher the map of the park to pick a good place to have the event, it was great. People all talked together, caught up with each other, and hugged and snuggled the star of the show. Tansy was pretty chill because she’d already gone for a romp, but I think she thoroughly enjoyed herself that day. We even got a couple of pictures of all the fun. It made me so happy. I couldn’t stop talking about how well it went.

A group of Tansy's friends all gathered around Tansy, with her facing away from the camera
I’d love to pose for my photo but I have so many people to greet!

The same group of people, now with Tansy facing the camera.
Ok ok ok, ya got me!

Another thing about that party that made me feel so good was Tansy was happy to see me. I wasn’t sure how she would react to me because for a while, Trix was kind of unsure about me after she retired. She would run gleefully to Steve, but she would keep her distance from me. I had to work to earn her trust again. But Tansy doesn’t seem to have any bad feelings towards me. She still gave me great big sloppy kisses, and that was reassuring for me.

It’s a really good thing we had that party, because life is a mean mean man, and turned violently on its head for Tansy’s new owner. Circumstances made it so that she wasn’t sure if she could keep Tansy. She didn’t want to wait until things were impossibly bad. That took a lot of guts, and gave me some time to talk to the other guy who had agreed to take her. Thankfully, he still could do it, so plans were set in motion for him to come and get her.

Like I said before, both choices were great, but he is far away from me, which would mean less opportunities to see her. That is the only reason I didn’t choose him from the start. But thank goodness he was still available.

On Wednesday, he and his wife came down and we went out for breakfast and talked all about Tansy. They were so excited and listened to all my stories about her history. We went and picked her up, and again she gave me some slurpy kisses, and ran to her new new owners like they were old friends. That friendly greeting made me feel happy.

After they dropped me off, they headed for home, and ever since, I have heard all good things. Tansy and the cats are getting along, Tansy is having a great time in the yard, and is the best-behaved dog they’ve ever come across. I think I can rest easy knowing this will be where she will stay. At least she is close to my folks so I might be able to see her when I next see them, and I know her new family will send me lots of updates. My dream scenario is to bring Tansy’s raisers to her new home city and bring us all together for some fun adventures. Let’s hope I can pull it off.

And just because Tansy always teaches me something, here is her new preferred song.

Apparently there is video of her grooving out to this one.

What A Wonderful, And Large, World

I can think of a few people for whom this $600, 60,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that Costco is selling would make a pretty cool gift. The problem is I have no idea where they would put it.

A photo of Costco's 60,000 piece puzzle made up of world landmarks.
I think we’re going to need a bigger house.

The sprawling What a Wonderful World puzzle is actually 60 interconnected 1000-piece puzzles to make assembly (somewhat) feasible. Each features a painting from the Dowdle Art Studio of a fascinating landmark from different parts of the world, like The Great Wall of China and The Eiffel Tower.

Once each section is completed, it can be connected to the larger canvas. When finished, the puzzle measures 8 feet tall and 29 feet wide. An included legend helps you keep track of which puzzle goes where in the literal bigger picture of things.

I’m Starting To Think I’m Being Taken For A Ride. What Do I Look Like, A Trailer?

I’ve never sold anything large like a trailer across the U.S. Canada border, so I’m not going to judge the idea that it could perhaps take a while to get things done or that there could be a few snags along the way too harshly. But there’s one line here that jumped straight out at me and kind of made the idea of a sale that started in 2017 dragging on into 2022 make a lot more sense.

According to the OPP, the victim, who was a resident of Perth East, had agreed to sell a trailer to a person south of the border.
They say the suspect reported a number of complications such as issues at the border that resulted in the victim sending the money over many years.
“He was also told he won money, so he had to send money to get access to it,” a police spokesperson told Global News in an email.

Bro.

They must have seen this guy coming from miles away.

“I know I keep asking you for money to help us free something *I* bought from regulatory hell, and it’s getting rough on you. I feel bad about that. But there’s good news. That lottery you didn’t enter? Well my friend, you won it! You’re paid back and then some! All you’ve got to do is send me a couple grand to square away the taxes…”

“Fantastic! Should I send that to your Nigerian friend like usual?”

In the end, the trailer never made it across the border. Hopefully buddy here at least got that back.

Amazon.nom

I know what Amazon is trying for here, but referencing “Fido”, “four legged customers” and paw print icons in your response to one of your workers being mauled to death by a couple of crazed dogs while delivering a package comes off juuuuuuuust a little insensitive, am I wrong?

On Wednesday Vice published a message sent to some drivers titled “Dog Awareness/Engagement” which blithely called on workers to watch out for, “our-four legged customers.” The message said Amazon would add a “paw print icon” in a driver’s delivery notes to inform them they should, “be aware of a dog at this stop.”

“If we know Fido is nearby, we’ll add the paw print to give you a heads up,” the note sent to drivers reads. “As always, contact the customer to help you with the pet, or ‘Driver Support’ in the Delivery App if you can’t reach the customer.”
The deceased Amazon driver was reportedly found dead in an Excelsior Springs, Missouri yard earlier this week, surrounded by two highly aggressive dogs, according to NBC News. Police from the Ray County Sheriff’s office arrived on the scene after neighbors reported seeing an Amazon van parked outside for hours. Deputies shot and killed the two dogs when they arrived on the scene.

Since I know you’re wondering, yes, the poor guy did manage to deliver the package to the two legged customer before the four legged customers took delivery of theirs.

I Wish I Worked For Skip The Squishes

I feel the tiniest bit for the guy who won’t be getting his lunch on time, but I gotta tell ya, this food delivery bot getting himself crushed by a train fills my blind heart with joy. It’s one less piece of electronic garbage polluting the sidewalk, which means one less unnecessary travel hazard for me. How does it feel to be the crime scene, ya little prick?

You Can’t Spell Pinellas Without PENIS

It says here that this fellow is a middle school social studies teacher. Not sure how any of this fits in with social studies, at least as I remember them. Perhaps he should look at switching to law. He may be a subject matter expert fairly soon.

Deputies said Schroeder was spotted by a neighbor while he was walking with no shirt and his pants pulled down towards his knees. The neighbor told authorities Schroeder’s sexual organs were exposed as he walked around her parked vehicle.

Schroeder then continued to expose himself as he walked out of the parking lot and headed towards an adjacent road. When he returned, authorities said Schroeder was completely nude.

Authorities said Schroeder could be seen holding and rubbing his exposed genitals on the railing of the condominium’s stairs and thrusting his hips against a pillar of the apartment building.

When asked why he was doing what he was doing, Schroeder allegedly told police that “I cannot explain it.” He should have just said “this is Florida, man.”

Another Letter

I have nothing to say here, only that Gill has spoken of this grandmother at least once before.

Doris Mildred Jean Macmurchy-Hewgill August 31 1923- June 22 2003.  This was my grandmother, and so much has changed in my life since she passed nearly twenty years ago.

Dear grandma
I am writing this to thank you for several things.

Thank you first for giving me a love for cooking, I never thought I was overly good at it, but I get compliments on recipes I have made.

Thank you also for making me curious about where our ancestors came from, and curious to travel back across the ocean to see the cities and towns they lived in.

Thank you for the snow globes you often brought me from places you had been, now in just over a month Heather and I get to go to a town ripped from one of those globes.

I am also thinking of a promise I made to you just before you died.  How happy you would be to know that not only have I accepted Jesus as my Savior, but I am also heavily involved in church activities.  I will confess it’s not the Presbyterian church like you brought mom and them up in, however it’s Jesus.  I thank you for your devotion, and how you just seemed to look to God even when the cancer got to its end stage.

I think of you the most whenever I am volunteer preaching, cooking, doing other church stuff. Heather also fondly remembers how you put something about Robby Burns in her birthday cards.

We all miss, and think of you.  Mom still whips up your “famous” sweet potato casserole, one of my favorite things.
Love Gillian Rose
PS In the new year I will be working on a committee that does charity work through my church.  The hats, socks, mittens, et cetera have inspired me.

Always An Adventure

If you came here earlier and noticed that the place had halfway fallen over, that should be fixed now. And for the benefit of anyone else running a WordPress website and also having problems at the moment, here is basically what happened just in case it might help.

I woke up this morning to a pretty good number of WordPress updates. Themes, some plugins, WordPress itself. Normally I can run all of those without any of you noticing anything, and I thought that would be the case today since the front page looked fine when I was done. But just to be diligent, I clicked on an individual post to see if anything had changed. Uh-oh. Changed it had, and not for the better.

Again, if all you did was come to the front page, read what was new to you and leave, you would have been none the wiser. But if you got here through a search engine or a link someone shared with you, you would have immediately figured out that all was not well. You would have seen the top of the site, the title of whatever post you wanted to check out, its author, its publication date and its number of comments. But where the post should have been, you were greeted by some text about a critical error. Below that was an advertisement assuming you’re not one of the ones who blocks those, and nothing else. No post, no comment form, no search box, no recent posts or comments or archives. Just…nothing.

Solving it was thankfully pretty easy. All I had to do was one of the first things you should always do in WordPress when something suddenly isn’t right. Bulk deactivate all of your plugins and then reactivate them one at a time. If you don’t know how to do that, you should now. Remember to load up a page on your site each time you re-enable a plugin. When things stop working properly, you’ve got your man.

Doing this, I was able to trace the issue to version 19.9 of the Yoast SEO plugin, which interestingly enough wasn’t on the list of things that needed updating today. I’m not sure what it’s conflicting with, but unless this is an issue 100% unique to us (possible but doubtful since it’s used on millions of sites), I imagine the Yoast folks are already working on a fix. Until that fix appears, disabling it should be enough to get you back up and running. Some of you might not be happy with the short-term hit to your traffic, but as someone who’s been down that road once or twice, trust me, it’s better than a zillion people thinking your site is broken and unreliable forever.