Yesterday the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning around 8 AM for my County, as there were strong thunderstorms in the area that were capable of producing a tornado, but there was no reported tornado. The cover was blown off of my grill, but the brick that I put on top of it kept it from blowing away and there was some damage caused to the new housing development nearby. My cousin gets these alerts on her phone which beeps every 5 minutes, till she acknowledges them and although I get a message on my phone, mine doesn’t beep. Every freakin 5 minutes for over three hours, because my cousin slept late, I heard her phone go, “Beep, beep, beep, beep”, and I got such a terrible headache from having to listen to that. I was busy with my Song Lyric Sunday challenge which went better than I expected, and I figured that she would eventually wake up and acknowledge it, but she must have needed her rest. I felt like smothering her phone with a pillow or putting it in the garage to dampen the sound, but I just let it keep beeping. I complained about it when she woke up and she got mad at me and stayed mad the whole day.
I am in a 3-person pool and at the end of last week I was tied for the lead, but this past weekend I did terrible and now I am 3 games behind the leader. It is no big deal, as it will only cost me $5 if I lose, but there are only 13 games remaining now. This means that I have to pick up 2 games in the Wild Card Round out of the six games that are being played, or else I am sunk. The #1 seed AFC Tennessee Titians and the #1 seed NFC Green Bay Packers have both drawn a bye for next weekend. All of the home teams are all favored, but I don’t have to pick them, because the pool that I am in goes by a point spread. There will be two games played this Saturday, three on Sunday and one on Monday.
The Sat 4:30 PM game has the (10‑7) Cincinnati Bengals being favored by 6.5 points over the (10‑7) Las Vegas Raiders. I like the fact that Las Vegas has beaten the spread nine times this season. The Sat 08:15 PM game has the (11‑6) Buffalo Bills favored by 4.5 points over the (10‑7) New England Patriots. Both teams have top ranked defenses and the Patriots rookie quarterback Mac Jones did not look impressive yesterday although he did have a good season and he will be facing off against Josh Allen who had a 63.3% completion rating and an overall 92,2% rating. The Sun 1:00 PM game has the (13‑4) Tampa Bay Buccaneers being favored by 9.5 points over the (9‑8) Philadelphia Eagles. Tampa with Tom Brady as their quarterback won the Super Bowl last year, but the Eagles’ last win over the Bucs came in 2013 in Tampa, and overall, the Eagles are 10-10 against the Bucs and 6-6 in Tampa.
The Sun 4:30 PM game has the (12‑5) Dallas Cowboys being favored by 3 points over the (10‑7) San Francisco Forty-Niners. Dallas has won the last three meetings between the two clubs and the Cowboys have racked up a lot of points this season, but the Forty-Niners did not give up many this year. The Sun 8:15 PM game has the (12‑5) Kansas City Chiefs being favored by 13 points over the (9‑7-1) Pittsburg Steelers. The Chiefs have an explosive offense, but they will be pressured by TJ Watt who is playing lights out, and the test for the Chiefs will be to see if their defense can hold down Big Ben. The Mon 8:15 PM game has the (12‑5) Los Angeles Rams being favored by 3.5 points over the (11‑6) Arizona Cardinals. This will be the third matchup of the year between the Rams and Cardinals, with the road team taking each of the first two meetings.
I am just a guy whose intentions are good, but there is seriously something wrong with me. I got mad at Linda Hill yesterday, because I have been participating in her challenges for over 4 years and I doubt that she has read any of my posts, so I have resolved to stop writing in any more of them. I think that the host of a challenge has a responsibility to read and comment on every post that is submitted to the challenge. I will not participate in any more Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompts, One-Liner Wednesday exercises or JusJoJan posts, because of the absence of feedback that I have gotten over the years while participating in these challenges. This will be like cutting off my nose to spite my face, and although Linda said that I would be missed when I told her that I would not be participating in JusJoJan this year, I have my doubts that she was being serious.
Maybe I am overreacting, but everyone has their own triggers for what makes them angry and there are plenty of other writing challenges here that I can take advantage of. Being angry isn’t always a bad thing and lately I have been regularly participating in Paula’s Monday Peeve where she encourages everyone to unburden themselves of an annoyance figuring that this will make you feel better afterward. To me writing is meant to be enjoyable, but blogging is also a social activity where you are able to interact with others and develop virtual relationships. Since if I have been writing in Linda’s challenges for four years and constantly being ignored, it is time for me to move on. 2021 is the end of my nose as I will try to live without one and it is very likely that nobody will even notice that my nose is missing. I guess it is possible that I could undergo rhinoplasty at some new date and come back with a completely new looking face.
What a day, I have never been very mechanically inclined, and I got hardly anything done today. I planned on having the new bed frame set up today, so I could put my new mattress on it, as it just arrived. My cousin’s boyfriend is laughing at me, because he said that I would never be able to put this bed frame together. I threw the old bed out and cleaned the floor where it used to be, but now I have to sleep on the Murphy bed tonight. I got instructions for assembling the bed frame and it didn’t look all that difficult and I also watched a step-by-step video. It looked so easy in the video as the guy put everything together in a matter of 9 minutes, but I spent over an hour on the first step, and it still is not right. I tried the second step, but things just don’t seem to be lining up. Instead of having professional assemblers doing these videos, they should have amateurs that encounter problems, like what was happening to me. I am so frustrated now, but my cousin gave me the phone number of a handyman who I called and left a message with that I needed help. She said that he lives close by and that he did a good job attaching the vent on the back of her dryer and cleaning out the vent all the way up to the roof. I hope he doesn’t charge me too much money, but I have given up on trying to assemble this by myself. It is a very sturdy bed frame, but it is also extremely heavy, and I am totally exhausted from struggling with it all day.
I had this thing going on with my ankle since last week, which started out as a rash and I put some itch relief medicine on it, but it just kept getting worse. I sort of wrote about this today in my post for Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge although since the picture was of a woman, I made the story about my wife, which I don’t have one. It got really bad on Saturday and when I complained to my cousin, she told me that I better get it looked at on Monday. I called a dermatologist close by and they told me that if I am a new patient that they would not be able to see me till Thursday and I didn’t want to wait that long. I called my regular doctor and after explaining how serious I thought this open wound was on my ankle the nurse called me back giving me an 11:15 appointment.
My doctor thought that one of my cats had scratched me and she called in an antibiotic for me at my pharmacy. When I went there later, they told me that they did not fill the prescription because they thought it might cause an interaction with some other medicine that I am taking. I never had anything like this happen before and it was aggravating to me as I knew that without the medicine, I would not get better. My pharmacy is in the store where I go grocery shopping and today the store was so packed that it was difficult for me to find a parking place and when I got inside there were no carts, so I had to wait for the guy to push more carts in. It was like one thing going wrong after the next and I usually stay in a pretty good mood, but when I get cranky, you don’t want to be around me.
I waited a few hours, and nobody called me back, so I called the pharmacy again to see if this issue got straightened out, but I was only able to talk with the answering machine. I called my doctor to see if I could get any information from her and her office had just closed. My cousin asked me when I was going to get my prescription and I told her that I didn’t know anything and all I could do is wait for the pharmacy to call me back. She called the pharmacy for me and was able to get a real person and that said it would be ready in ten minutes. I hope the antibiotic works and that my ankle gets better soon. I appologize for ranting, but I actually feel better now. I was in a shit ass mood all day, so I should probably also appologize for not reading anyone else’s posts today.
I got my hair cut last Wednesday and when I sat down in the chair, I asked the lady if she was vaccinated and she said, “No”. I almost walked out, but my hair was so scraggly that I let her cut it and I have been double vaccinated and have also had my booster shot. She did a good job, but I won’t go back to her because I feel that the people who won’t get vaccinated are the ones who are allowing this virus to mutate. If it keeps on mutating, there is a chance that the vaccines will no longer work, and we will all end up dead. Last Thursday, I felt weak, I was tired, and I had body aches just like the effects that I felt from getting my booster shot, so I thought that maybe I caught Covid. I rested a lot that day and I was better by Friday. I think that all of my physical symptoms came from inside of my head, because I was obsessing on this lady not being vaccinated and I let her be close enough to me to touch me. I bought some of those rapid at home Covis-19 test kits so I can assure myself that I didn’t catch anything, that is if they don’t give me false negative or false positive results.
This is the third time this idiot light has come on in my car. I can ignore it for a while as it is an orange or amber light and it is on steady, but the blinking red ones that come with a beeping noise demand immediate attention. I think this is just a normal part of living in Florida, where your tire can lose about a pound of air pressure for every 10-degree drop in temperature. Thus, when the temperature drops at night, you get the low tire-pressure warning the next day. I looked at my tires and they all look fine to me and since I won’t be driving in the Indy 500 any time soon, this is just an annoyance.
I volunteered to take over as the editor of my neighborhood newsletter this last February, as I figured that since I am at my computer writing all day anyways, how hard could it be. For this December’s newsletter, I finished it 10 days ago and I sent it to the Treasurer and the President of the board of directors for their approvals, so it could get printed. The writing isn’t all that hard, but because there are elderly residents living here, it needs to be printed, as they don’t have the internet or email. One of the delivery guys who goes around on a golf cart to put the newsletters in the media boxes enjoys his job so much, that it is the highlight of his month and he will be wondering why they are late this month. The Treasurer got back to me with her corrections which I made, but yesterday I had to contact the President again and ask him if he was going to make any changes and he told me that it had his approval and that I could take it to the printer.
I took it to the UPS store today and the girl who usually prints this for me had transferred to another store where she got a promotion. There was another lady there who had printed tis out for me before, but when I gave her the file on a USB drive, so told me that her terminal was having problems connecting to the printer that creates the newsletters. It is a monstrous printer that makes a two-sided folder paper that is composed of four 8.5 by 11-inch pages, so it is not like everyone in the store is trained on this. She told me that some guy came in to untangle a mess of wires in this cabinet just last week and she thought this was why she was having the connection problem. She has tomorrow off, so if it doesn’t get straightened out today, it is going to be late, but this is clearly not my fault.
I got a Fitbit Charge 4 about a month ago and I still have not learned how to use it. I thought it would be nice to have something that tracks my steps, as my doctor told me that I should be walking a mile every day. It is way too complicated and too frustrating for me, so I will try to give it away to one of my nephews. What I hate is that the display keeps turning off every few seconds and I guess this is done to reduce charging by prolonging battery life. I did text on my cellphone years ago, but I have fat fingers, so I was always hitting the wrong letters and all those tiny keyboards started to annoy me. This is the worst by far, as it has this slide feature to get into other menus and even when I push really hard, it does not seem to go where I want it.
It has way too many options that I would never use, which might be good for some, but I only wanted a step tracker, so this is complete overkill. Some of these features sound wonderful like the weather app, GPS tracking and heart-rate tracking, but I was not able to access any of them because my screen kept powering down every few seconds. I got stuck in this loop of guided breathing sessions and I don’t know how I got there and it kept telling me to breathe in and out and I wasn’t even wearing the watch at this time. I don’t have Spotify, so this app is totally useless and I am not interested in setting it up for Fitbit Pay, because if I go out anywhere to shop, I would have my phone, and I could pay for things with that, but I never have done this yet. It has some other features that tie into your phone and it may ask you if you want to accept a phone call or not.
I have designed and programmed may machines and I enjoyed doing this, because someone had to be responsible for telling these machines what to do, so I never shied away from working with any hew fangled gizmos. I reached my kobayashi maru (Star Trek word for a no-win scenario) moment with this device, because I quit and once you quit, you will never win. I still want to exercise, but not with this device, so I just ordered the Garmin vívofit 4, which looks like a much simpler device. This fitness watch has batteries that last for a year before you need to replace them and the display is constantly on, which I like. There are a lot of features on this watch that I will probably never use, but the user manual looks so much easier and that is what I want.
I bought a new Dell laptop about a month ago and I already wrote a rant complaining about them $7.77 for something that they called Support Subscription services and I got my bank to cancel this transaction where they deducted money out of mt checking account. Guess what, they are back and last Friday they hit up my account for two charges, one for $4.00 and another for $0.42 and now I have to contact my bank again. It is not a lot of money, but why should I have to pay for something that I never ordered and I don’t want. The laptop is working fine, and I am happy with Dell, but I feel this unscrupulous practice of deducting money from my account has to stop.
I called my bank and was asked to wait 15 minutes on hold to get a banker to resolve this issue. The girl was very helpful and she said that it might take up to a week to get the money transferred back into my account. Since this is the second time that Dell attacked my account, she suggested that I cancel the card and get a new number, but I have several things tied into this card and that will be a hassle for me. I decided to call Dell again about this and of course I had to wait on hold and then I was transferred to a stupid computer and I finally got someone to help me. She had an accent, probably someone from India, so I had to tell her to talk slower, so I could understand her. I explained the issue and she put me on hold again. She checked the charge for the $0.42 and then she put me back on hold again so she could check the $4.00 charge. She called these orders and not charges, but I never ordered this. It is hard to believe that these two charges of $4.42 took me all afternoon to resolve and now I need a nap, because this was so exhausting.
A Unique Title For Me 