{"id":12448,"date":"2022-02-06T12:55:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-06T19:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/?p=12448"},"modified":"2022-02-06T12:55:00","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T19:55:00","slug":"activities-and-weather-are-improving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/?p=12448","title":{"rendered":"Activities and weather are improving."},"content":{"rendered":"

I am one of the people in the USA that have had little impact or inconvenience from the Covid Panic. Still this cartoon provides a good summary of my feelings. \"\"
\nThe cartoonist is Stephan Pastis and the comic strip is Pearls Before Swine.
\nThis appears in our local paper in gray-scale form. I went to the web to get the color version.
\nhttps:\/\/www.arcamax.com\/thefunnies\/pearlsbeforeswine\/s-2625459
\nOn the left is a scroll list of other comics. I always look at Breaking Cat News, by Georgia Dunn. The cats are often involved in a story line that may go on for a week. Also, some other characters come and go. To appreciate the strip, one has to be a regular visitor, and learn the cats and there personalities.<\/p>\n

Local stores have \u201cwear a mask\u201d signs but the patrons seem half-hearted about it. Many just don\u2019t bother. I carry a mask and put it on when and if I have to talk to or be near others. Otherwise keeping a physical distance {social distancing} is quite easy in the community. I\u2019ve been told the big cities and more formal settings in Puget Sound towns are more masked-up than the EBRG area. <\/p>\n

On a similar vein, I read of a candy shortage with Valentine\u2019s Day approaching.\"\" This is not apparent in the EBRG stores. Shelves are over flowing with everything imaginal. About this difference my hypotheses are (a) candy is priced too high for our local folks, and (b) we are higher-order procrastinators than others.
\nMaybe heart shaped boxes are very costly to produce, but $20 for a 20 ounce indulgence seems excessive. That\u2019s in an inexpensive general merchandise store. Some are much more expensive but most EBRG stores never stalk those. The one shown here is $21.95 for 5.8 ounces. I\u2019ll never know if the pieces taste good. That\u2019s over $60 per pound, before an 8% tax. Wow!<\/p>\n

This week I was expecting a call from the CPA office that has been working on taxes. Thus, all week I stayed close to the house telephone \u2013 I carry a handset when outside \u2013 it works for about 200 feet. The call did not come. On Saturday I went to town for a multi-purpose trip. (Note below for Friday.)
\nI made 6 stops and got home about 1:00 o\u2019clock. At 3 I got the call from Scott, the CPA. I went back in (gas costs me about $6 per trip), signed my name 3 times and came home again. Next is working on last year\u2019s taxes. The filing date in 2022 is April 18th. The 15th is \u201cGood Friday\u201d, so \u201cTax Day\u201d is delayed to Monday. I found the following on the web:
\n\u201cA rampant virus, skeleton staff, ongoing legislative changes, and flailing funding all make for a decidedly bumpy tax season ahead. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is battling backlogs with a grossly understaffed team (20,000 fewer employees than in 2010) and the delays and complexities engendered by stimulus check deliveries and advances in Child Tax Credits.\u201d<\/font>
\nI\u2019m not betting on an early response, although I think the back-year submittals may go to a different office than current year stuff \u2013 and it is all electronic. Will that help?<\/p>\n

Friday:
\nPhyllis and Cameron scheduled a trip over for Friday \u2013 work and lunch.
\nThey brought metal shelving and an outside weather station. I figured we could work outside for an hour with a temperature of near 40\u00b0 only if we were quite active. Well, last Oct\/Nov we sorted and filled boxes with papers, books, and old magazines (+more) and stacked the stuff at the front of the Big Brown Shed. Thursday I shoveled the snow from the area in front of the swinging doors.\"\"I backed the truck as close as I could get to there (~10 feet) and I got in under the canopy and Cameron carted boxes. I stacked things to the roof. Leer claims this canopy has 40% more volume than a standard \u201ccab-height\u201d model. I can\u2019t find a number for that, but it holds a lot and we filled it top-to-bottom and side-to-side. I ran out of space before Caameron ran out of boxes. I think one more (smaller) load will mostly clear out the accumulation of 50 years of books & papers & magazines & personal documents.
\n Saturday I went to the transfer station (aka \u201cdump\u201d) and unloading, without help, took nearly a half hour. OK, 20 minutes. I weighed out at 1,920 pounds lighter than when I went in. The dump fee was $121. With the prior trips either with or without a smaller canopy I was only carrying half that weight and the fee was closer to $50. Without a canopy the load has to be secured. That was a pain and limited the bulk. \"\"
\nThe two images above show the under-roof part of a solid waste transfer station. Once things are on the floor the machines place it into a large concrete trench. Then it is compressed and baled and loaded on to trucks to be \u201ctransferred\u201d to a far off burial site. Most of the area\u2019s solid waste goes to East Wenatchee, about 80 road miles away.
\nMy spring project will be dismantling the Pace Arrow motor home. <\/p>\n

About senior moments and my iPhone:
\nI got my i-12 via Consumer Cellular and, perhaps this is normal, it had almost no documentation. I got started but easily lost the information about codes, passwords, Apple ID Code, and Verification Code. Later I bought a $12 book \u201cfor Seniors\u201d that hasn\u2019t been a lot of help.
\nWell, my desktop computer doesn\u2019t have a camera and I wanted to get a ZOOM ability. The iPhone seemed doable. I tried but needed the various codes that I didn\u2019t have. I had to request a recovery appointment.
\nI did that on January 26th. The return message was that in a few days I would get a message telling me when I would be able to do a recovery. That message came 4 days later; it said:
\n \u201cYou will receive a text or a phone call at this number when your account is ready to recover on February 5, 2022 at 9:04:48 PM PST.\u201d <\/font>
\nLast night at 9 PM I got ready with an open text document and the phone turned on at 9:04:30 PM PST. Apple-recovery was a few seconds late. I really didn\u2019t know the difference between an Apple ID Code and a Verification Code – – and I was getting responses via the internet and via the phone. What great fun. Apple Support (digital) and I finally got all this straightened out. Monday, I think I\u2019ll call my computer guru and find out what it will take to get a camera & whatever on the desktop to do video, like ZOOM. Also, my friendly Adult Activity Center director, Katelyn, is knowledgeable about iPhones and answers questions for us old farts every Monday at 1 PM. We were stymied last week \u2018cause I didn\u2019t know the codes. <\/p>\n

From the Naneum Fan
\nJohn<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am one of the people in the USA that have had little impact or inconvenience from the Covid Panic. Still this cartoon provides a good summary of my feelings. The cartoonist is Stephan Pastis and the comic strip is Pearls Before Swine. This appears in our local paper in gray-scale form. I went to … Continue reading “Activities and weather are improving.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-issues"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p72iNf-3eM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12448"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12453,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12448\/revisions\/12453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}