5 Kinds of Eeekkk Today

It's been an unusual and unsettling day today...

1. The little kitten in the picture appears to be ill today.  He barely moves from the bed hubby made them when usually, as soon as the kittens hear the slider open they bolt out of bed and run around to the back of the house.  Since these are feral, unvaccinated kittens, I told hubby to stay away from them.  There have been reported rabies in cats in nearby areas so we want to steer clear of these cats if they seem to be sick.
2. I was on a meeting with some of our state partners today and I saw something that said read.ai on the screen.  I asked what it was and the host didn't know so she turned it off.  Imagine my surprise when after the meeting I get a written report from the meeting composed by AI, which, besides summarizing everything we talked about prior to being turned off (some stuff out of context), it also rated us on our engagement/attention during the meeting as well as our sentiment/how we felt about the meeting's content.  That is creepy AF!  I sent the report back to the state people and asked them to never use this again in the meetings I attend.  Yikes!
3. I got hubby a new monitor because his had a crack in the screen.  When I was setting it up, I clicked on display options and found that the laptop I had hooked up to it--the laptop with the "broken" screen which I tried everything from updating the bios to taking the laptop apart to ensure the screen connection to the motherboard was fine--suddenly had a bright, brilliant screen!  Seems the brightness on the laptop screen had been turned down to zero so, duh, it looked like the screen didn't work.  Hubby always says "this is broken, I didn't even touch it" when apparently he must have leaned on the key that decreases the screen brightness!  Now that half-broken laptop is good as new.
4. Then my order for a new TV for one of our guest rooms was canceled for no reason.  I went back on the website and it was still available for order so after copious live chat with customer service, they agreed to reorder the TV and send it with free overnight shipping.  It's still kind of incredible that a 32", 4k, very thin and light TV can be had for only $80; I still remember when our family had one very heavy, very expensive TV that everyone shared and we needed to "wiggle the bunny ears" to tune in the channels!
5. Finally, I think one of my New Year's resolutions will be to severely limit my YouTube watching/news scrolling.  The algorithms used by these websites seems to disproportionately show as much "doom and gloom" stuff as possible and goes very light on the happy, uplifting topics.  Media manipulation is just awful these days!

 

The State of Retail

This is me every time I go into a retail store lately...

I remember the days when stores would stock at night so shoppers would come in the next day and find a nice, tidy store.  These days, every time I go into a store there are stocking carts everywhere...

And don't even get me started on the price of...everything...these days! 

I just had to add a couple more photos from Dollar Tree yesterday...

5 Things from This Week

In no particular order...

1. I was at the Dollar Tree yesterday and found these books in the photo above.  Usually the books I find there are titles I've never heard of by authors I've never heard of but these are some of my favorite authors!  For only $1.25 each, of course I scooped them up.  One of my goals for next year is less scrolling and more reading real books.
2. An FYI for people on the west coast who use the military's TriCare health insurance plan, there is a new contractor that you need to sign up with by the end of the year.  I wouldn't have even known about this except for the fact that I was looking at the base website for something else and saw the notice.  So I called and signed up and asked why I didn't receive any notification about this either by email or snail mail and the lady just said she didn't know why but many people have told her the same thing.  Really, customer service everywhere is awful these days!
3. Christmas is just around the corner.  We only send money to the kids and grandkids so gift giving has already been taken care of this year.  Hubby and I plan to have a very quiet, very small Christmas which sounds just perfect to me!
4. I don't understand the sociology of cats.  The mom cat and two of the kittens absolutely shun the third and smallest kitten.  They don't let him eat with them (he doesn't even try to approach the food until everyone else has eaten and left), and hubby made two piles of blankets on a rack for them and the littlest kitten is often left on one pile of blankets by himself while the others are in the other pile of blankets.  I would love to rescue him and take him inside but all of the kittens are scared to death of people.  :/
5. Saturday will be the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  I'm definitely looking forward to longer days of sunlight!  

 

It's Been a Busy Week!

I can't believe this year is almost over!  It seems like the older I get, the faster time goes by.  We've had guests the past week and a half so it's been pretty busy around here.  In other news...

Our sunsets are still very pretty...

The kittens are getting bigger (don't let those cute faces fool you, the kitten on the right is mean and slaps the other kittens away from the food until he is done eating).

Our guests took us to the drive-thru "Glittering Lights" Christmas light show which was interesting.

And I went to the post office today and it was a mess--two people at the counter to help the more that 50 people who were waiting in line to mail stuff.  When I asked if they staff up for the busiest mailing week of the year, the guy just said no.  Ayayay

I hope your holiday preps are going along well!

10 Things from This Week

Some things from this week...

1. Obligatory cute kitties photo above...
2. About once a week I fall down a rabbit hole on YouTube.  This week it is listening to air traffic control videos.  Some scary stuff happens in the skies that we don't know about!  Also, I could never be an air traffic controller...or a pilot.
3. Semi-related...a channel that showed up on my feed called Pilot Debrief is fascinating (and usually grim as the guy shows in excruciating detail why and how aircraft crashes happened).
4. In shocking news, the United Healthcare CEO was ambushed and murdered this morning and the comments are not sympathetic at all.  "He's the CEO of a horrible company so oh well" type of stuff...eeekkk
5. In disturbing news, to me at least, is Chef AJ's announcement that she has had lung cancer for two years.  She is a well-known vegan chef and healthy living proponent and didn't want people know she had cancer.  To me, lying by omission, when you have established trust with your audience, is not cool.  I wouldn't think any less of her or her work if she let us know she had cancer from the beginning (even very very healthy people get cancer, die of heart attacks, etc).
6. In "yep I was right" news, the final congressional report on covid just came out.  After being downvoted to hell on social media, called all kinds of names, and generally hated when I posted about the lies the "experts" were blasting out to the public, pretty much everything I told people (and supported with non-biased research done pre-covid) was correct.  Masks are minimally effective (cloth masks even less so), the 'stand six feet apart' thing was stupid, the vaccine was so rushed it's no wonder Big Pharma wanted to keep its data secret for the next 75 years, and, most importantly, the NIH funded and developed the covid virus as a bioweapon...but of course no one will be held accountable for that.  Ggrrrrrr
7. From the 'I didn't see that coming' file...The South Korean president declared martial law yesterday.  This world is getting crazier by the day!
8. Here are some new Social Security changes everyone should know about.
9. I can't believe Christmas is only a few weeks away...this year has just flown by!  Here are some Christmas freebies.
10. Finally, from the 'how cool is that' file, here are some amazing food photos!

Cute Kitten Pictures

We are on cuteness overload here as we watch the tiny kittens turn into cats...

In these pictures the kittens are learning how to "play" fight each other...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving! Hubby and I will just cook a small dinner at home with our usual couple of slices of roast turkey from the deli instead of cooking a whole bird and I will make a few sides.  I also made pumpkin pies yesterday so that should keep us in food all day.  We have few relatives flying in tomorrow for a week or so, so this should be a busy start to the last month of the year.  I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday!