HOW WAS YOUR DAY

[Mongrel]

Finally got our first shots here. Pfizer.

[mharr]

Welcome to the escape pods, take a seat, enjoy the view and try not to listen to those sounds coming from below decks. I'm sure it's just our overstressed imaginations.

[Thad]

Going through old Mad Magazines; saw one had a photo of Mars on the cover that it credited to the USGS Astrogeology Team in Flagstaff. Always gives me the warm fuzzies to see them mentioned; I worked there my last summer of college (a little less than a decade after the issue in question was published).

Except it was credited as the "astrology team". Damn spellcheck!

[Mongrel]

While playing with computer components I managed to get an enormous splinter from our slowly disintegrating floor shoved under one of my fingernails.

Pros: It was big and fat enough that I was able to cleanly and easily pull it out in its entirety.
Cons: I don't think I need to explain this bit.

[Niku]

i woke up feeling like i was choking and struggling to talk and breathe

turns out it was just my uvula swelling up a stupid amount and i prolly have strep throat for the first time in my life! lozenges and soup and some prescribed antibiotics have it at least less constantly obnoxious right now but i still feel like there is a meat-loogie just hanging out constantly at the back of my throat

i have literally never consciously thought about my uvula this much ever before

[nosimpleway]

Now I am also thinking about Niku's uvula more than I ever have before

[Thad]

Went to the eye doctor today; asked about LASIK. He said the main drawback to getting it at my age is that I'm a few years away from needing reading glasses regardless.

Doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea -- I wouldn't need glasses for, say, sitting on the couch watching TV, or driving -- but before long I'd probably be back to needing them for the 8+ hours a day I spend sitting in front of a computer.

So I'm still thinking about it. Paco, you're a couple years older than I am, right? Have you hit the point where you need reading glasses yet, or not?

[Silversong]

fwiw Thad, my mother got LASIK when she was about 70. She mentioned that all the colors got brighter when she did. So I think there are probably bonuses to getting it older, as well as drawbacks?

[Büge]

Now I am also thinking about Niku's uvula more than I ever have before

uvu what's this

[Niku]

Third day of gagging on my own mouth after speaking more than two consecutive words.

[Thad]

Looks like we've got an actual monsoon season this year, which is a relief since we didn't last year.

Not-great parts: I still get a headache every time it gets cloudy, and the dog is afraid of thunderstorms. This morning she woke us up at 5 AM with her anxious panting.

[Mongrel]

Good: Electrician came to fix 15 years of accumulated overdue work on outlets, lights, etc.
Bad: He's a gormless moron and admitted superspreader who only wore a mask after I got on his ass about it (at least he didn't make any noise about that).

He was the "I've been all over where people were already sick with Covid! That means I'm immune! No shots for me either!" type of idiot. So I can only imagine how many people this literal mouthbreather has cluelessly put in the hospital.

Spent an hour cleaning and wiping shit down and ventilating the apt afterwards. Oh hey it's 4 pm, now I can have breakfast.

[Mongrel]

I have absolutely no idea WTF is going on, but when I was outside today the air smelled exactly like hot glue-gun glue, specifically the yellow heavy-duty ones.

[mharr]

Hey so, I think I've mentioned that for a while now my primary job has been carer for my partner? She's been living with a battery of gradually worsening chronic illnesses for circa fifteen years now, and our life has been a constant fight with the UK Department of Work and Pensions as they reject the word of various doctors, call her in for reviews (interrogations) and temporarily shut down one disability claim or another.

Things have been steadily improving on that front since we moved into Scottish jurisdiction, then two weeks back she had a harrowing hours-long telephone interview with a senior decision maker who ultimately set all her points into the maximum bands and stamped her case files 'genuine', 'degenerative condition' and 'do not reassess'.

The paperwork hasn't arrived yet, but this morning our bank account flipped from its usual state of scraping sparks along the bottom of the overdraft to containing several months worth of meaningful savings. I've also learned that Scotland actually pays carers without recovering the money from the other person, and that I can work part time here without hitting any poverty traps, just what amounts to a simple income tax increase.

I'm sure we'll be back to the grind when the Cummings puppet government enact their next sweeping systemic 'reforms', but for now... Holy shit I think it might be over.

[Thad]

Finally got the last of the big stuff moved into the new house yesterday, including my desk. Not quite done moving yet, there's still some little stuff to haul, but I don't have to drive to another house to work anymore.

I kinda liked it, TBH. I hate commuting, but when it's a three-minute drive, and you're not going to an office, just a mostly-empty house? I liked that separation; I liked being able to get out of the house for awhile without any of the bullshit that comes with driving across town and sitting in an office all day.

[mharr]

I was surprised that I liked my longest commute, because it was three hours a day through green space, mostly bordering a national park. It's the city driving that drains your soul. How long 'til the new den is good for showing off?

[Niku]

I hate commuting but I love actually whittling down my podcast backlog.

[Mongrel]

Second shots gotten.

[mharr]

When we moved up to Scotland five minutes before pandemic lockdowns began, we landed in the caravan holiday park inhabited by our local friends and contacts. The owner almost immediately handed us an absurd electricity bill she'd thrown together in Word, which was actually quite helpful because the local government glanced at that, then to Tansy's medical records and were like "fuck that we're finding you guys a real house", the commie bastards.

One friend didn't abandon the place because she'd already bought her caravan outright and also got a lot of cleaning work from the owners. This week we have discovered that her financial account with the site takes the form of a pickled egg jar full of cash which the owner's entire family have ready access to, that she received no real documentation when purchasing her caravan, that standing power charges are 10x the legal maximum and go to an Irish power company operated by the site's original owners, our friend's caravan continued to run up absurd power charges even after she moved out of it for a year, every bank payment we made to the owner went into a different bank account number, and the park is still doing a roaring trade despite the company officially closing down back in March.

We've spent the last couple of days assembling all written, phone and internet records of our dealings for attention of the relevant authorities. I hope for [redacted]'s sake she's managed to accrue Fleeing to Paraguay money because she is going down hard. Many of the people she's been fleecing there are sick, elderly or disabled and I know at least one still has violent local criminal connections.

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[Mongrel]

Put my vote in the mail today after double-checking my local Dipper candidate wasn't secretly awful or anything (actually she seems extremely capable, and it turns out it her views are such that I'm basically voting for Starr, lol).

This was the first time I've ever voted by mail, and the process was quite interesting. You get your vote slip itself, of course, but you put into three nested envelopes. The outermost one is just the regular mailing envelope. The middle one has your name and voter registration number and must be signed by you, so they can strike you off as having voted. The innermost one has no information about you on it, which then gets put into a vote box to be opened at the time of counting.

The premise is that the division between the second and third envelope is required to completely preserve your voting anonymity while verifying you did vote.

It's not all the surprising once you think about it, but I'd never thought about that angle before, which reminded me of the phenomenon of information being lost to history because no one thought to write down something so obvious and well-known.

Is that how mail-in ballots typically work for you guys?