shannon_a | Entries tagged with crappy companies

I ordered a new edition of _A Cornelius Calendar_ on January 10. I received a copy today. Whew.

I actually already have the book. But the newest edition has a few additional stories in it, and since I'm working on a massive overview of Michael Moorcock's interconnected works (and have been for many years), I needed the newest edition with the newest stories. In fact, I put my old edition to the side despite the fact that I was getting close to reading a story in it, _The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century_, because Michael Moorcock frequently revises his books. Maybe that novel has been revised since my 1993 edition, maybe not, but if I was getting the new book anyway, I figured I might as well read the most up-to-date content.

My January 10th order was placed to Blackwell's. I was _thrilled_ that there was a UK bookseller now warehousing & selling into the US. Their books were much cheaper than the secondary sellers offering it on Amazon US and their shipping was much cheaper than getting it from Amazon UK. Win-win.

So they sent out a box with that and one other Michael Moorcock book (_The Lives & Times of Jerry Cornelius_, which like _A Cornelius Calendar_ had more content than my previous edition). But they offered no tracking because their whole shipping system turns out to be pretty rudimentary, and a month went by with me having no way to see what was going on with my books. And then a piece of cardboard in a little plastic bag appeared that told me that USPS had at some point discovered the box was empty and so they were just sending on the shipping label.

I contacted Blackwell's, and they were totally cool and sent me replacements, in two packages as it turns out, one containing _Lives & Times_, one containing _Calendar_. _Lives & Times_ arrives and I'm able to get back to work on the Cornelius chapter in my book, for a few weeks at least. _Calendar_ hits Honolulu, says it's on its way to its next destination, and never moves again. It's April by the time I decide it's dead and I contact Blackwell's again ... and they cancel and refund my order and say I should reorder if I want.

Er, thanks?

I'm feeling at this point like, "Gosh, I hope they don't cut me off because it's hard to mail to Hawaii." Not really thinking about the fact that I've had probably hundreds of packages mailed to me since we moved, most of them media mail, and none have ever disappeared. Oh, three have arrived soaking wet, because our mailman doesn't seem to pay much attention to packages being left in huge pools or something, and two Amazon packages got reported as destroyed (both car parts oddly enough), but nothing like this with packages just disappearing. So I may be feeling like it's Hawaii's fault, but it's not really.

After a bit of angsting I reorder and even add on some short story collections to help round out my work with other current publications, plus one brand-new Michael Moorcock book, Caribbean Crisis & Voodoo Island. Four books including _Calendar_ get put in one box, the _CC&VI_ follows on its own a week or two later.

_CC&VI_ arrives. The box of four books including _Calendar_ ... does not. In fact, it gets to Honolulu, says it's on it way to its next destination, and is never seen again. I contact Blackwell's, they tell me to wait a week, and afterward they refund me.

Afterward, I have to sadly say it's not me, it's you. Because out of five packages they've sent me, only two have arrived, which says to me something is woefully problematic with their US distribution.

So I gave up. No UK booksellers for me. I ordered _A Cornelius Calendar_ from Amazon US. At about 50% more expensive. Probably an Amazon seller, not Amazon itself, actually, since they sat on it for three weeks and then sent it UPS, which is grossly stupid for Hawaii, and probably more money than I paid them for the inflated price of the book. (And I find it really annoying that Amazon hides when you're buying from sellers nowadays.)

I must admit I was on tenderhooks. I wondered if the book itself was cursed, since it had taken down every package it was in while others had slid by. But it arrived today. A little banged up because the idiot Amazon sellers threw it in an unprotected envelope. But not much, because it's a brick of a book. And there's no way I'm sending it back.

So now I can finally get back to the chapter of my book on Jerry Cornelius which I'd expected to close out in March or so.

(Pictured: the fabled book and Elmer burying his head in disgust at shipping problems.)

SHOT IN THE DARK

I have been super tired since Saturday. The culprit, I assume, is the new XBB booster. I got mine on Thursday and on Friday I felt a bit achey, but no biggie, and definitely not a biggie like some of the early COVID shots. But then I was very sick Friday night, like 36 hours after my booster, and I've been fatigued on and off since.

(Hopefully I'll be doing better tomorrow, as I have a full day of client work.)

FAREWELL TO FITBIT (AGAIN)

I've had another Fitbit die. My Versa 2 died just before my trip to Germany, the result of ever increasing fritzing of some sort. I went back to my Charge 2 from 2017 or so and it's failed in the last week. I think its weaker water resistance finally failed entirely: as first got some condensation inside the screen and then the button stopped working and then it fritzed entirely.

The Versa 2 was retired to the garbage can after it went red-hot on its last charging and thoroughly burned in its screen. No firey Fitbits for me, thanks. I'm still hoping that the Charge 2 might get the water out of its system, because I liked have it as a backup watch.

Meanwhile, K. and I ordered Charge 6s the day after they announced them, as a preorder. They just haven't mailed yet! The promise was by this Friday, so no biggie yet, but not having a watch is driving me crazy, let alone the inability to get "credit" for my exercise.

Speaking of technological failures ...

NEED MORE POWER

Since I've been back from Germany, Julie (the Benz) has been really rough getting started. Sometimes she turns over one or two times before the engine gets going, sometimes several. I mentioned it to my dad on Sunday and he listened as we headed out and said it sounded like the battery had gotten weak.

I've done some research (of course; that's what I do) and most places say batteries need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Really!? (Well, longest I've ever owned a car before was two years, so ...)

Anyway, I have an appointment with my auto folks on Thursday, and hopefully they can resolve the problem. (And hopefully she'll actually start Thursday morning!)

BUSY WEEK

It's actually a busy week.

Today I ran the folks to the airport for a trip to San Jose (leaving me & Kimberly alone on the island for almost four weeks!) and then Kimberly to an appointment. Not quite a work-day bust: I was still able to do some client work in the morning and RPG editing in the afternoon, and almost got my receipts and invoices for the RWOT trip all together.

Thursday I need to run Julie into town (but I'll be able to sit somewhere and work, likely Kukui Grove or the library).

Friday I have a meeting with my financial advisor.

I've never thrilled with these weeks when I don't have a single day of uninterrupted work on my personal projects, but that's how it goes.

THE PERSONAL PROJECTS

I'm actually about to hit some major milestones on my personal projects.

I have a few chapters left to edit in my Traveller history, and then I turn it over to Mongoose, which will be my first history work to go to a publisher since I committed half-time work to histories in 2020.

I also have a few chapters left to edit in my fourth TSR history book, and then that goes .... to a second (or third) draft edit of the whole series, but nonetheless I've alerted that publisher that we are ahead of schedule for a 2024 Kickstarter.

Could I have five new history books out next year? Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, I need to get off my butt and get some fresh work done this month too, because of the unrelenting tyranny of having a Patreon. (It's really been serving its purpose in keeping these books going though!)

...

My twisted ankle is still hurting some. We have yet more new neighbors. The Winchester Mystery House behind us has been under construction for more than a month now. So much to write about, never enough time!

FAREWELL TO A FITBIT

Not long after I arrived in Hawaii in 2020, I dove into the ocean at Poipu and a minute or two out realized that I was wearing by Fitbit Charge 2. Whoops! It was not graded as waterproof at all, though I believe that had to do with the last generation causing rashes if you showered with it all the time. Anyway, I got it back to shore and it was still alive, but that same day I ordered a Fitbit Versa 2, which was not only advertised for swimming, but specifically flagged for swimming in salt water.

Well aware of how harsh the salt-water environment was, I wondered how long it would actually last, and the answered turned out to be 2 or 3 years. Somewhere around the two-year mark, after a swim, I saw that its screen was all kinds of weird static. It got better after a day or two, but thereafter there was always a weird background of previous screens on any watch screen I was looking at. The tracking still seemed to work though.

Then, on Thursday, I went for a last swim before my Germany trip (as Friday through Sunday were jellyfish days), and when I came out my watch was totally dead. I plugged it in to make sure it wasn't a charge problem, and when I retrieved it in the evening I found it so red-hot that I almost burned myself. And the screen was even more burned in. So, farewell to the Versa 2. Its battery had also gotten really bad after three years, lasting 3 or 4 days, which was half what it started at.

I'd generally say that Fitbit makes poor quality products, but much of that is a reflection of my early models. I swapped out my first Fitbit two or three times before its warranty expired because its arms kept ripping off or apart (and in those days there was no way to replace them). But, I actually still have my old Charge 2. It's barely been used these last three years, except times when I was charging my Versa. And, it's been in the ocean a second time, on one of those days the Versa was charging. But it's still working. We'll see how it does on my trip to Europe, as I have no idea what its battery looks like any more, as I haven't worn it for more than several hours in a few years.

Despite that qualm, I'll probably replace the Versa with another Fitbit. My top contenders are the Versa 4 and waiting for a Charge 6, which is expected next month. I've liked the smartwatch capabilities of the Versa, but the Charge is most likely my next watch, in large part because Fitbit is no longer saying their watches are salt-water-resistant, instead saying that if you swim in saltwater you should wash it in fresh water thoroughly afterward. That doesn't surprise me given the increasing failures of my Versa 2 seemed to be due to saltwater exposure, but it means I should likely get the cheaper watch if it's just going to die in another 100 swims or so.

So, I guess I'll see if my Charge 2 holds up until a new release. (And if I can manage to avoid swimming with it again.)

LUCY FINDS FREEDOM

We took Lucy in to the vet today, and the vet said that her healing stoma looked good, so she got her gauze and collar off, returning her to what I've always called the "Lucy the Barbarian" look, after she destroyed a few collars when she was a kitten and we gave up.

She seems pretty happy to have the collar off. The incessant scratching has mostly stopped!

Meanwhile, the mediocre eating seems to be ramping up. I offered her and the Orangies some Fancy Feast this afternoon, and Lucy was the one who kept going back to the plates until they were empty (and demanded more several hours later, resulting in more Fancy Feast being put on plates). Oh, and there was some dry food eating too which I offered her some of her old lady food.

Could we actually be at a point where we can just leave out food and Lucy will eat it? It seems too much to hope for, but my fingers are nonetheless hopefully crossed.

THE TRIP LOOMS

Man, I feel so totally unready for my upcoming trip to the Bay Area and onward from there to Germany. I haven't really done *anything* to prepare for the trip in the larger picture, so I just hope that I have everything I need.

I did do some laundry today, so that's a plus. But I need to mostly pack tomorrow before we go into town to get resources for Kimberly while I'm gone, just in case there's anything I need too.

And I still haven't prepared all of the work I want to do. And there are taxes to pay. And invoices to write. And ...

Sigh.

(My dad says the nice thing is there's a deadline, so I'll have as much prepared as I can by Sunday night, and then I should have a few relaxing days with my Mom and Bob in San Martin befor eI fly out to Germany.)

At least there's now the hope that Lucy will continue eating and things will maybe be normal when I return home. Some normalcy is badly needed after this summer.

CARMAGEDDON DAY 31

Two weeks ago I was enthused when our local mechanics at Destination Auto called us up to say that Mercedes Benz of Honolulu would have be on island today to inspect and repair cars affected by their stop-drive-order that could result in total brake failure. After initially jockeying around an 8.30am time, which was apparently when the mechanic was arriving, we settled on 10am, a time when I was more willing to go into town, post-rush-hour traffic. Mind you, that date was still 16 days away at the time, after 14 days of not having a car previously, but I had a date. All was good.

Today I took my car in. Destination Auto was jammed full of cars as usual, to the point where I couldn't totally pull Julie into their driveway. (Maybe I could have, but the line of cars to one side and the palm tree to the other created a narrow enough gap in their driveway to intimidate me, as I decided I was headed toward the palm tree after pulling partway in.) But inside it looked like no one was even working. I handed over my keys, figuring I was going to need to walk over to lunch and sit around for an hour or two, as that's how long they'd told me it'd take, but it turns out the Honolulu mechanic was just sitting around, with no cars to look at. I was told it would be quick and I should stay put, so I sat down in their office (mask on), and worked on my computer for 10 or 15 minutes. And then Julie was back, with a certificate saying she'd been inspected, a warning that I'd get a message in a couple of years saying she needed a new inspection, and the OK to drive.

Finally.

Oh, hey, one reason they might have had no cars today? When Kimberly initially talked with the Destination Auto people two weeks ago, she learned that were doing an initial day of work on Kauai cars, I think it was that Thursday. Apparently they did the older model cars first. Which is fair enough, as older models had more time for their defective brakes to corrode. But it was yet another thing that Mercedes Benz had never told us: that they were starting to resolve the problem, and that we just needed to wait for the second batch. Anyway, from their turnout today, that was most of the affected Mercedes Benz on island. We apparently did not do a great job of being squeaky wheels (except it sounds like we got the very first call for the second batch).

After the whole carless month-long ordeal, I am pretty pissed at Mercedes Benz who has been revealed as a typical soulless corporation who puts themselves above their customers. Again, it's not about the long wait; it was going to take as long as it took on-island. Instead, it was about the fact that Mercedes Benz issued the top-level of safety recall, a stop-drive-order, and literally told their customers not to drive their cars, and that they might be liable for any accidents if they did. They chose to do that to cover their own asses, but at the same time their dealers and their mechanics were telling everyone that it wasn't a big deal, that we should go ahead and drive, that in fact we had no other way to get our car inspected but to drive it in. They put their customers in a legal hotspot, and in a situation where they might not have a car and then had their representatives saying that they'd essentially done so fraudulently, that the problem wasn't as they described.

But we have a car again.

SEEING OTHER CARS

Over the course of Carmageddon, I drove my dad's car into town three time (and over to Koloa once for some badly needed tasty dinner at Savage Shrimp).

It was very kind of him to lend me the car.

And I am *so* happy to have Julie back.

My dad's car is actually the only car other than Julie that I've driven in the last 30+ years. But I was still surprised how uncomfortable I was driving it. Part of it was just that all the controls were in different places, so I never got comfortable with the windshield wipers, let alone the cruise control. But it was also that it was so much *lower* than Julie, who is an SUV. I felt like I couldn't see anything! (The lack of a back-up cam didn't help).

So happy to be driving my own car.

LEARNING HOW TO DO CONTRACT WORK RIGHT

Another little revelation in recent weeks!

I've beens struggling recently to make time for things like invoicing my clients and filling out tax forms (most recently, for my Hawaiian excise taxes, which got delayed considerably because of Hawaii's long-time inability to get me a Taxid, until we finally were able to finalize our 2020 taxes near the end of 2021.)

It was just hard doing a day of work, and then going into my office sometime in the evening to do more.

Duh! Invoices and taxing are part of my contract work! They should be done in regular work time!

So the last few Friday's I've scheduled part of my days for dealing with ephemera, everything from making my plane reservations to the next Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop to filling out forms for four semi-years of excise taxes. (Mostly done now!)

Now the trick is to make sure this administrative work doesn't overcome my real work.

A TRIP TO THE NETHERLANDS

So the next Rebooting Web of Trust is in the Netherlands, at the end of next month.

This is our first design workshop in 2.5 years, so that's exciting.

It's also (obviously) our first since COVID, and obviously there's concern in getting sick just before the trip or getting stuck in the Netherlands or who knows what. (So all of our tickets and hotel are refundable, and I need to finalize with some Traveler's Insurance, to pay costs if I get sick out there.)

I'm really looking forward to it though. When we moved to Kauai, part of my gameplan was to have twice a year trips off the island for RWOT work, and clearly that didn't happen. But now I also get the trick of learning how to make that work with my contract work. RWOT is technically one of my clients, but I'm also going to be losing 2 weeks with everyone else.

And, oh, figuring out those plane tickets was tricky. I'm making a stopover in San Jose in the way out, and I managed to a flight back all in one day, but none of it was easy. Hawaiian has talked about starting to have direct flights to Europe in a few years, on some new big planes, and I *really* hope that happens to make this easier!

THE STATE OF LUCY

I haven't written much about Lucy this year. She's been in at the vet quite a lot. There's nothing acutely wrong with her, except the fact that her 3 years of weight loss are starting to hit a dangerous level.

So, we've done testing, showing nothing. Good thyroid, good kidneys.

We gave her some appetite stimulant for a while, and even after going off of it she's demanding food every few hours, but pretty much only eating wet food, rather than free-grazing her dry food, and that's getting tiring.

So, I dunno. We've got another appointment on Monday. We're going to check her weight (which hasn't dropped since she started eating more, but hasn't starting returning either), and I also asked the doc to look at her teeth, to make sure there's not something there making her more reluctant to eat.

THINGS TO DO

The deficit of having Julie back? I can now start doing a lot of things that I wasn't doing because I had no car.

And some of that is car related. Something's wrong with her A/C. I think/hope it's just the freon pressure has dropped, since it seemed slightly gradual. And new back tires were on my TODO list for about now. I don't mind the costs. That's part of having a car. It's just a pain to get her into a shop and then get back home with us living out of town and being a one-car household.

Annoyingly, her "auxiliary" battery may have died from a month of non-use. It was definitely warning when I went out this morning, but I'd hoped it had maybe just discharged and would get back once I ran the car. But I'll see for sure when I turn her on for whatever I do on Saturday.

And I've also got a bunch of health stuff to take care of, but that's all later in the month. I put off my second booster so it'd be pretty fresh for the trip. I think I read that a month was the maximal efficacy, but I need to check that. If so, I should get it in about two weeks. And I have a shingles vaccine on my list for the same time.

And I need to do a fasting blood draw sometime before the end of the month for an appointment in September.

Was the annoying month without a car a way to give us a quiet break? I dunno. Very happy to be able to spontaneously leave the house again though.

Kimberly got upset today when talking with a friend about our car problems, and then decided to immediately call Mercedes-Benz afterward. She was able to successfully channel her upset, because she got someone to call back for the first time in 14 days (and 5 calls). And then after said employee went and talked to his manager he called back a second time with a date for our car fix. Go Kimberly.

Said employee apparently asked if we'd been driving our car when Kimberly talked with him. Kimberly said no. He said it was no big deal, that they just had to issue a "stop drive order" for liability reasons, and it wasn't really a problem. Except said-employee clearly is young enough (or naive enough) not to understand how the world works. Because as soon as they entered into legalese, we had to respond with legalese. (We often had the same problems on internet sites I've run, where people didn't understand that when they invoked the specter of legal action, we had to respond in kind, which meant that friendly discussions were out the window.) To put it another way, yes, they had to issue the "stop drive order" for liability reasons, and in doing so, they transferred the liability to us if we drive. So we have to respond as if it's meaningful, and not just CYA garbage.

In any case, we're going to have a mechanic on island on August 4. Interestingly, they said he's going to be at Destination Autoworks, which is the mechanic on island that deals with Mercedes Benzes. And which is 12 miles over in Lihue. So are they expecting us to drive there? If so, we're going to get a very clear statement that they are _telling us_ to do so. (The safety-recall order we got said they'd be towing cars to the shop, but we shall see.) We should get more info as we get nearer.

And yeah, that's a long ways away. Another 16 days on top of the 14 to date. But that I can accept as a price of living on a little island. What I wasn't willing to accept was a business that wasn't even willing to return a call, especially after they *told* us they would (and especially when they're deal with *their* problem). That wasn't about living on a little island. That was about basic human courtesy and/or a really badly managed business.

And thanks to everyone who was kind enough to LIKE and RETWEET my Twitter thread from yesterday. It garnered somewhere over 3,000 impressions, which was the sort of thing I'd been hoping for, to give it attention. And MercedesBenz on Twitter totally ignored it, despite being tagged. Good thing Kimberly managed another solution today. But thanks anyways for the support, it's appreciated! (We just had to keep throwing things at the wall until *something* stuck.)

Kimberly has made 3 calls to Mercedes-Benz of Honolulu, talked to a receptionist each time and never gotten a call back. After they missed their newest deadline (this time imposed by us) of calling back within a day, I call the main Mercedes Benz USA phone number for dealing with the stop-drive-order they've issued due to the possibility of massive brake failure in a million of their cars.

It rings, I'm put on hold, and then I'm bumped over to a customer support rep within seconds.

I explain that we've now called our local dealership three times over the course of a week, and they haven't even called us back, let alone set a date for inspection/repair. I tell her that we're 10 miles out of town (and don't bother mentioning that I'd die if I tried to bicycle on the highway, as most people wouldn't even consider biking 10 miles into town an option) and that we have no other cars in the household.

REP: Well you can get reimbursed for a car rental under this program. You just present the receipts when they inspect your car, as long as it's less than $80 a day.

ME: Hawaii is a very expensive rental market. Car rentals can easily run $200 a day. (I've since found that the cheapest rentals on Expedia are about $125 a day.)

REP: Oh my gosh!

[No suggestion is made that there's anything they might do about that.]

REP: Let me talk with your local dealer.

REP: I'm calling up Hellabula.

ME: What?

REP: Hellabula.

ME: Oh, Mercedes-Benz of Honolulu. Yeah, that's right.

[I'm put on hold for 5 minutes.]

REP: OK, I've got your local dealership on the line, and they'll take care of you.

[I'm switched over. Rather miraculously, no one "accidentally" hangs up on me this whole process.]

LOCAL ADMIN: OK, let me check your information and that I'll PUSH your ticket through.

[It sounds to me at first like maybe he's suggesting he's giving it extra effort, but I come to realize as he keeps reusing the word that he's just using PUSH as a synonym for send, probably to *suggest* that it might get extra attention.]

[I help him verify my info.]

LOCAL ADMIN: OK, I'm going to PUSH that ticket through now. XXX XXX will call you back.

ME: When will they call me back?

LOCAL ADMIN: I don't know but it'll definitely be XXX XXX. They're your rep.

[They think a moment.]

LOCAL ADMIN: Or it could be someone else. But if so they'll be just as good as XXX XXX.

ME: [not caring who XXX XXX is and not really caring if they're good because they just have to take bags off my brakes and verify there's no corrosion]. OK. We're 10 miles out of town and we have no other car.

LOCAL ADMIN: I will definitely PUSH this through.

[I throw up my hands, because I'm not sure this has done any good, because we've ended up just calling Mercedes Benz of Honolulu a fourth time. But maybe LOCAL ADMIN will PUSH it through because it came from the USA office. I figure it's good enough to wait another couple of days to see.]

ME: OK, thank you very much for your help.

[I could probably get a Turo for $80. And wouldn't that be delightful.]

Funny thing about living on an island. Resources are limited. So, during the pandemic we had to wait 6 or 12 months to get a chest freezer for our garage, to hold all that excess Costco goodness. Kimberly has noted that vegetables are limited though fruits are abundant. It's difficult to get certain types of batteries or chargers because they have to be brought in by a store. Similarly, furniture can be limited.

So this Tuesday, a few hours before we're headed out for our regular grocery shopping in town (already a day delayed because of July 4th), I get a letter from Mercedes Benz in our mailbox.

(Yes, we have a Mercedes Benz. Not because I ever thought I'd be the type of person that would own a Mercedes Benz but because it's what was available in our price range when we arrived. She was actually a *great* deal. A 2010 model, sure, but in almost immaculate shape because she was owned by a realtor. Her name is Julie. The car not the realtor.)

So, letter from Mercedes Benz. I open it up and discover it's not only a safety recall, but a "stop drive order' which are apparently the rare, top-class ones. I read the specifics and learn that Mercedes Benz put some ornamental cover on their brakes for many of their ten-or-twelve-year-old vehicles (yes, including Julie). And this can cause corrosion in brakes when water is involved, I assume because the covers somehow retain water. This can caused slowed braking and (here's the kicker) if hard force is applied to corroded brakes, they can shatter. (Breaking brakes = no brakes and probably no breaks.)

So, stop drive order.

No, I don't really think our car has suddenly become a death trap. I read about it, and see they discovered the problem because someone in Germany noticed his braking was slowing down. No deaths. Yet.

But I'm also aware that we now live in a wet, corrosive environment, so if there's a place that brakes are going to get corroded because of the design flaw, it's probably Hawaii not Germany.

From what I read, a "stop drive order" doesn't have the force of law (that I can find) but it does have the opportunity to mess with your insurance, presumably if you get into an accident while driving under one.

So various levels of not good.

Now it looks like the government pushes hard on forcing corporations to fix safety recalls like this. ("THAT's why we have a wizard." Uh, government.) The letter talks about how Mercedes Benz will either send out a mobile inspector or have our vehicle towed to the dealerships and then they'll repair the problem.

Which pretty much involves taking off the fancy-looking brake bags and saying "No Corrosion!"

(Hopefully.)

I look up on the Mercedes Benz recall site for where our closest dealer is, but honestly I was already pretty sure I knew the answer. It's on Oahu. Which is the next island over.

And we don't even have a ferry for cars any more because protestors got it shut down a few years before we moved here.

(Not that it was going to be successful. Who wants to spend half-a-day going to Oahu on a boat instead of taking a 30 minute plane ride? Some people, but not most.)

Yeah, so at that point I hand some phone numbers to Kimberly because I'm in the middle of a client workday.

She calls Mercedes Benz of Honolulu and once they figure out what recall we're talking about and verify our car is in the class tell us no problem, they'll call us back within 24 hours and probably fly out an expert bag remover.

Wow, German efficiency.

24 HOURS LATER. Kimberly calls again. Oh my gosh, they are so frazzled and overwhelmed by the recall that we're just going to have to be patient and maybe they'll get back to us in a few days.

Now, we definitely live outside of the cities (as they were) on Kauai. I definitely couldn't bike to any of them because the only road is the highway and it's a deathrace-2000-type-dealie for biking, and I say that as someone who biked the hard roads of Oakland and Berkeley for decades.

So we're mostly stranded at home, albeit with a golf course right next store for exercise. And parents who have offered to lend us a car when we need one.

But, kind of inconvenient.

And we're being patient at the moment, because given my beliefs about the general demographics of Mercedes Benz owners I have to guess that MB of Honolulu is dealing with the Mother of All Karen-storms.

But tomorrow will be Day 4 with no transportation, and my patience is wearing thin. We're going to need to start talking to them hard about when they're going to be doing something, and how they're going to recompense us with transportation alternatives (also discussed in the letter) if it's not really soon.

On the bright side, we've managed to go three days past our usual grocery store trip with no emergencies.

Because we have a chest freezer in the garage.

I had such a good day last Sunday, having a great lunch at Tip Top, swimming at the Y with Kimberly, and starting to put our toes back in the water (as it were) for getting involved in the Kauai community, something put off for nearly two years by the pandemic.

But the week since has felt like a nightmare. Literally, in the sense that the days blur together, I'm losing sense of time, and it feels like we're doing the same actions again and again.

Callisto, it's mainly been about Callisto. Poor Callisto. For a few weeks now, maybe close to a month, she's been picky with her food. Eating maybe half of her dinner most nights and often getting distracted, staring off into the distance and then wandering away. I'd actually wanted to call the vet two Saturdays ago, to get an appointment scheduled, but then that didn't happen, and she ate her whole meal that night, and then the next five nights or so. But this Monday we'd had two more days of her not eating well, so I called the vet. I just figured maybe she needed another anti-nausea shot to shake off her lizard-eating (or whatever) from her last visit. I hadn't realized it'd actually been two months(!) since that.

So I took her in on Monday, especially after she started hiding from me during the day(!), and she saw Dr. I., her regular vet, and Dr. I. came back to tell me Callisto was running a fever(!) of 103.5. They shot her up with some antibiotics and anti-nausea med and scheduled her for a follow-up on Wednesday. Wednesday, the fever was still there, now 103.7, so they did a blood work-up, and said she had high white-blood cell count (like two months ago), low red-blood cell count, and pancreatitis (though the doctor was iffy on that, because she and a tech interpreted the result differently). They gave her some anti-nausea meds again, and I came home with steroids and antibiotics.

And it's just gotten worse since then. She's stopped eating entirely at times, she's been increasingly lethargic, she's been hiding much of the time.

After not eating at all Wednesday night, she was back to the vet on Thursday, because her fast breathing was deemed to likely be reaction to pain, so we got her some pain meds, and some fluids. They'd given her that on some of her other visits too, because we've been fighting her not getting much food or water all week. She seemed great Thursday night, begging for food and eating, then doing the same this morning. (I kept having to edit the days I was typing into this, because like I said, it all blurs together.)

And then Callisto laid around seeming miserable all day today. And now she's perky again this evening, and begging for food ... but not eating.

So I'm guessing tomorrow it's back to the vet for more anti-nausea (since I'm guessing that's maybe the problem, since her shot from Wednesday is now worn off, or at least I'm hoping, because what else is there to do??), and I bet more fluids. We should also ask if we can get fluids for home, because we've given it to cats before.

It so frustrating because she's perky and then she's miserable; she's eating and then she's begging for food but walking away. And giving her a continual sequence of opiates and bringing her in for constant fluids feels like we're just barely keeping her struggling on from day to day. Obviously, the hope is that the steroids and antibiotics will get the pancreatitis under control, and we just need to wait until that's the case, and that's cool, I can do that, but I've also read about pancreatitis needing in-house care, and so if it's a serious case, she's not getting that.

Poor baby, I want her to be feeling well and back to her life. She's such a happy and enthusiastic cat usually, and in particular she loves her food. So it's just killing me seeing her like this, let alone the exhaustion from constantly monitoring her, constantly figuring out when vet intervention is needed, and constantly going over there and sitting outside because we can't go into the vet office.

PS: Although not nearly the same magnitude as having a very sick cat, I've also been out of sorts this week because I destroyed my electronic tablet last week. I threw it in the laundry basket to take it downstairs with me, and then rather than taking it out to put it on the charger (as intended), I tossed it in the washer. Yep, that didn't end well, and yes, there was a lesson learned about carrying things downstairs.

Fortunately, I wasn't that broken up because it was an Amazon Fire, and I'd already decided it was pretty crap. The browser regularly locked up for long minutes before crashing. I couldn't put most apps on without sideloading them. The screen was a bit smaller than I liked (10"). A few months ago it stopped charging reliably because it complained about moisture in the charger. (There wasn't any.) And the official cover I got from Amazon, which I thought would be higher quality than the third-parties was crap too: it was all fraying and it stank from the humidity. So fortunately I'd just gotten some payments from freelance work, and I got myself a new tablet.

Well, I should say ordered myself a new tablet, because it's not here yet. And I've felt really out-of-wack not having my handy internet and comic-book access on hand in the morning when I wake up and at night when I lay about in the living room. And given that the new tablet was last seen in San Francisco, I don't think I'm going to have the new one tomorrow as scheduled. And I already know my new cover didn't show up today as scheduled, and in fact the second Amazon put it in the mail the arrival date jumped 10 days(!). (I was pissed; if they'd told me the much longer arrival date I wouldn't have ordered it, since there were many other options.)

I mean this doesn't stress me out like the very sick cat, I don't feel like I'm constantly called upon to make life-or-death decisions. But it's adding to my disorientation.

Sonoma was not one of the six Bay Area counties to declare a shelter-in-place order, and they had a good reason: they thought it would cause panic.

And, I think they were right.

San Jose reported that the panic buying of food has spread to panic buying of guns, and so began shutting down gun stores as "non-essential" services.

And as I wrote yesterday, a genuine existential fear seems to be at the heart of our stager deciding to throw her professional reputation in the toilet: an existential fear that's just not (yet?) justified by the current situation.

And we were even seeing overflow of that here in Hawaii, which has tight connections to California, as that 10% or so of patrons at Costco on Monday were jamming their carts full of water, then shuffling out as fast as they could, not talking to anyone, then tossing it into illegally stopped vans that had avoided the fence of carts that CostCo has put up to prevent exactly that sort of illegal panic buying and loading.

And it's equally obvious to me that those Bay Area counties have just the faintest idea of what they've done.

I wrote about the mad scrambling of the recorders offices yesterday.

Today I spent four hours on hold with the Berkeley Public Health Office, trying to get them to confirm that moving services are essential (and how could they not be? People could literally end up homeless during a shelter-in-place order because the counties didn't think to include moving in their essential-services list.) For four wretched hours I sat programming the thin-auth server for Skotos, trying to ignore the homicide inducing Berkeley hold message, looping every thirty seconds and telling me that they'd get to me shortly.

It was a relief when my carrier cut my call off at precisely four hours, though of course that meant that I didn't get my confirmation, and that I can't yet show our stager proof that she needs to do her job.

I've tried to follow-up with a few emails instead, and meanwhile my realtor is working on getting similar input from Alameda County, though they're not technically who's in charge of the shelter-in-place in Berkeley.

(Berkeley is in fact the only city in the six-county area going it alone. AS USUAL. And that seems to be working out aces.)

Yep, I'm in an annoyed, pissy mood tonight.

It's mainly having to listen to that infernal hold message for four hours straight.

But I'm also very non-plussed over the decisions now being made by Hawaiian politicians, which seem very wrong-headed and at odds with the rest of the US.

The governor's order yesterday was generally what we'd expect at this stage in the pandemic for a country that has woefully botched its ability to test for COVID-19. Shut down bars and clubs. Make restaurants go take-out only. There were two rather shocking bits: he closed down churches (which is a big deal in Hawaii) and he asked tourists to stay away for thirty days (which is going to devastate an already reeling economy).

But the thing at odds with current wisdom was that he also closed state parks. In other parts of the country that are being locked down, people are being encouraged to get out into parks and exercise (and at a respectful distance), so that they don't go crazy. Federal parks went free today. But the governor of Hawaii doesn't seem to get it and is closing down our open spaces instead.

Meanwhile, the really wrong-headed move came from Kauai's mayor, who today laid down a curfew saying that everyone must be in their residence from 9pm-5am every day. Wow. Does he think the biggest crowds are at night? Does he think that COVID-19 spreads worse at night? It's pretty hard to figure out what's going through his head when he finds it necessary to lay down one of the most fascist rules anywhere in the country.

I certainly won't ever be voting for Mayor Derek Kawakami, who has gone full-on fascist in my mind, and Governor David Ige has gone onto my questionable list, for such a dramatic misunderstanding of the human psyche, even if the rest of his order was just following the same unfortunate direction as the rest of the US.

It's an unfortunate direction because South Korea has shown us the proper answer, and it's testing and tracing, not extreme social isolation. And they're done great.

We can't follow in that direction, unfortunately, because of the entirely pathetic Federal response. We hoped for four years that Trump wouldn't have a crisis, because we knew he'd be entirely insufficient for the task, and that's now proven true. We had our first case the same day as South Korea's, and they've done a magnificent job of controlling the crisis without destroying their economy (or their freedoms) and we've had the president jumping up and down with his fingers in his ears.

He refused tests from other sources, he said it wasn't a problem, and now he's screwed us all.

Whoever asked to live in interesting times can bite me.

I woke up this morning to rain hitting the windows, just like I fell asleep to last night. I like the rain, I really do, and I like how much we can see it in this new house. I don't love the humidity that comes along with it, the way that we had so much rain here our first week that nothing dried. But generally, the rain is a balm.

What was shocking today was that there was a TORNADO warning for a town about 8 miles west of us. There was a lot of shocked discussion of that online, with some people asking whether this was normal and other people saying emphatically no, but it turns out that particular town (an old plantation town apparently, not that there's much there now), Kaumakani, does have them sometimes. But it's been 12 years since the last tornado warning in Hawaii.

My phrase for the day is "Kona Low". This is apparently an "extratropical cyclone" with a "cold core" which forms leeward of the islands.

It's what the storm that's hit us yesterday and today is: a strong storm coming from west of the island, rather than east (where most of our weather comes).

So I woke up at 7am this morning to my wrist buzzing, as I do. That's my Fitbit alarm.

But, I was still lying there 6 or 7 minutes later when it went off again, this time to notify me that my realtor was calling on my phone. I was impressed that the bluetooth worked given I leave my phone downstairs in my office. But, the bed is right above my desk, so that's that.

I walked downstairs, and called her right back, and learned there was good news on yesterdays possible closing traumas.

We'd heard from the plumbers who are doing the sewer work, and they were definitely on to do the work on Friday, finishing on Monday.

We'd heard from the city of Berkeley, and they were definitely going to inspect and verify compliance.

And we'd heard from the recorder's office that they're going to be recording titles for house but nothing else, or something similar. I don't remember exactly, it being 10 minutes after I'd woken up.

And after I talked to our realtor and hung up, my phone rang again, and this time it was one of my brothers, who's in the financial world. He told me that Santa Clara had gotten their act together and was doing recording via electonic means. it's good that they figured out a day late that they were a vital service, and they couldn't just let all contracts fail over the next weeks or months.

So, all indications suggested that the necessary services we needed to close the house would be available. We figured no problem.

At the time.

And speaking of COVID repercussions, I forget to write yesterday that we went to Costco after my working day. After hearing about bare shelves across the nation due to panic buying and hoarding (and herding), I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with whether we'd be able to feed ourselves here on this island. So, it'd been a week since we'd been to Costco, and I wanted to see how things were going.

About 1 in 10 people were indeed hoarding, mainly filling their cards with bottled water, but the other 9 in 10 were mocking them.

And the store wasn't too ravished. I don't think there's been any toilet paper available for sale on the island for a week or more, and we also noticed shortages of pasta, marinara sauce, rice, and (believe it or not) vienna sausages.

But we were able to buy a responsible amount to refill our freezer and put a bit in our fridge. We even got some tuna (albacore) which I've heard has been in short supply elsewhere. (I also saw peanut butter, another staple that people have been hoarding in other locales, but we didn't need any.)

In other words, just minor disruptions from a minority of bad actors.

OK, back to our sale of the Berkeley house.

My second call from our realtor today had less good news.

We gave our stager the OK to remove all of her furniture yesterday, I think. Maybe it was earlier, I'm not sure. She'd requested it, even though we could have held onto it for another week or two, so that she could stage another house.

But despite the OK, she didn't remove the furniture by the end of the day yesterday, and instead we heard today, now that the shelter-in-place order is in place for Berkeley, that she refuses to.

Now from my reading, she's technically correct about the fact that she shouldn't, because I don't think moving is on the list of essential services.

It should be. I mean, if you're getting ready to move into a house or apartment, that's pretty essential. I have to assume that it's just another thing the six counties didn't think of, such as how to deal with their recorders' offices, because they're all doing this all by the seat of their pants (or half-assedly if you prefer; I don't understand why all these sayings have to do with butts).

And it sounds like this wasn't even entirely about the order, but also genuine existential fear. Thanks, media. You're not fear-mongering to sell papers and/or clicks at all.

So, that's another problem, though I count it as a lesser one. I don't think it'll keep us from closing, it just might require some finangling if there's still a house full of her crap when we're done.

And I'm especially annoyed that she could have done this yesterday. It's not like the shelter-in-place order was a sudden surprise at midnight yesterday.

And now we get to deal with her negligence instead. Yes, this is unprecedented event, or rather an unprecedented reaction to an uncommon event, but I'm still not thrilled when a professional we're working with chooses to make life harder for us when she could have done otherwise.

But she probably made us a lot more money in sale price than she's potentially going to cost us in dealing with her crap.

I'm doing my best to plan for the next steps in our life as if we close and get our money within the next 2-3 weeks, because I don't see anything else to do.

So I've got a contract sitting around for a solar power setup here in Hawaii. It's good until the 31st, which is tighter than I'd hoped, (They showed up within a few days of my requesting a quote, when I expected a few weeks, and then they gave me a quote that was good for two and a half weeks, when I expected a month.) , but I've got my fingers crossed that it'll still be possible.

And I've talked with a financial advisor to help us with our funds when we get them.

So: forward. Hopefully we'll indeed be going forward in 2-3 weeks.

I was supposed to fly to Buenos Aires this morning to go to the next Rebooting the Web of Trust (RWOT); clearly I didn't.

The Buenos Aires trip was always going to be an exercise in endurance (the trip, not the visit once I got there). It was 28 hours or so each way, aboard four different planes. It was shockingly hard to get a flight from Hawaii to South America, as they pretty much all went via the US, so that meant two hops to the US, then two hops to Buenos Aires.

It was also almost impossible to get a flight that only had one red-eye. I managed it; and I wouldn't have even planned to go if not, but I could only manage it by having Travelocity piece together three different airlines for me: Hawaiian, then American, then someone called LATAM to get there (and then something similar to get home, but I think with Delta instead of American). The whole flight was booked through LATAM.

So, the whole endurance-travel thing is one reason that I'm not totally bereft about not going, but I would still have preferred to.

But that's not the eponymous reason I'm glad not to be in Buenos Aires tonight (or rather, in about 16 hours).

Speaking of Travelocity: I haven't liked them any time recently, because it's always a mess getting your seat assignments and figuring out how you're flying on each leg. You pretty much have to call each individual airline, which is what I did last time I flew using a Travelocity flight, which I think was to Barcelona.

Because, unthrillingly, we had to use them for a while when we were getting RWOT flight money through a particular bureaucratic organization. But, we're past that, and I would have been making my own reservations, like I did to Prague last year, if not for the impossibility of piecing together an itinerary over three airlines to get to Buenos Aires within a day.

And in the aftermath, they've been suck at cancelling.

I mean, I (or rather RWOT) would have been totally screwed if I'd flown LATAM directly, because they had a no-refund, no-cancellation, no-anything policy, and even if you can transfer tickets, what would I have done with more tickets to South America?

Instead with Travelocity, they could theoretically transfer me to any other flight in the world, for a penalty of $300. So, I effectively could have gotten a $300 flight to Amsterdam (since it's cheaper than the Buenos Aires flight), where I hope to be this fall for the next RWOT.

Except RWOT couldn't commit to that until a day and a half before I was supposed to fly out. Which was right when Trump announced his idiot plan to ban trips from Europe. Suddenly Travelocity didn't have ANY European flights, and their phone lines were unreachable. I'd been contacting them via chat (after waiting on hold for a while in the previous week), so I used that to send a couple of requests to change my flights, and they were unsurprisingly ignored.

Which maybe will give me ammunition to try and make them do something, even now, after the fact.

But it certainly has reminded me why I don't use Travelocity. Yes, there's an unprecedented global hysteria that's particularly impacting their particular niche, but ignoring customers is pretty much business as usual at Travelocity from what I've seen.

So: Buenos Aires.

Today the President of Argentina announced a 30-day ban on all flights from the US. It's one of a couple of bans revving up in South America. (Thanks Trump; you started this.)

This is pretty much why RWOT had to cancel: because when the Argentinian government advised against gatherings of foreigners a few weeks ago, we realized that we didn't know what other crazy things they might do. Like banning all flights from the US.

Obviously, this has a reciprocal effect: flights TO the US aren't banned, but they're all getting cut.

It's looking like Monday is going to be about the last day you can get out of Argentina to the US without either having to wait (at least) 30 days or find a way into the US via some other country. Assuming that OTHER country flies to the US.

RWOT10 was supposed to start on Monday.

If I'd gotten on a plane today, I likely would have had to turn around as soon as I got to Argentina ... if I could get a flight out. Bleh.

I. The Gaming.

Last Thursday I just wasn't yet up to trying out a new game store in Hawaii. It just felt too stressful, at a number of levels: I'd have to park my large car, Julie, in a small parking lot; I'd have to meet a whole bunch of new people in an unfamiliar environment; and I'd have to make a long drive home in the dark on the two-lane highway. So after my dad and I rushed around to Home Depot, getting wood to build bookcases, and after I got home to find Kimberly still have major problems with seizures, I just threw up my hands and decided that I didn't want to go out.

Apparently, it just took me a week to gather my gumption, because yesterday I felt fully ready to brave the new game store, even though my dad and I rushed a bit to get some swimming in on a rare nice day in the last few weeks, and even though Kimberly was again having some cognitive problems due to her non-motor seizures. So, after some dinner, I headed out at about 6.30 for their 7pm board game night ...

I'm pretty comfortable driving to Lihue now. But, it was getting increasingly dark as I got closer to town, so I had to really pay attention here and there. So it was a little tense, but not bad.

I pulled into the parking lot, and the first (angled) space was free. No problem.

When I headed out later in the evening, I did find out that the parking lot is indeed kinda tight. Going down one of the main rows on the way out, all of the trucks and SUVs that fill non-tourist Kauai really were sticking out into the aisle so that I felt like I had to go really carefully. But, despite the tightness, the parking lot is overall larger than I'd thought (I'd only seen about a third of it on Google Maps), so hopefully it won't be an issue.

Into the game store! (8 Moves Ahead!) I was a few minutes before 7, but I saw a group of four people already playing Zombicide. I lurked for a minute or two, and the fellow who turned out to be the owner, Terence, asked if he could help me, and I told him I was there for the board gaming night.

Fortunately, Zombicide is a game where you often have extra characters to fill out a scenario, so I got handed off the archer and was able to dive straight into the game.

Yay! Very friendly!

So that was my first game of the year.

Zombicide drags a bit. I think the game probably ran 3 hours total, from 6.30-9.30 or so, but it was good getting to play again, and it'll allow me to write a Zombicide case study for Meeples Together. (I'd played once previously, but it was eight years ago, so though Zombicide is mentioned several times in Meeples Together, it wasn't fresh enough in my mind to write up a full case study previously.)

I was a bit concerned about a turnout of just four players (Terence, Derek, Jason, and one woman whose name I never caught), because that small of a group makes it harder to get your favorite games on the table, but Terence told me it was a quiet night and 8-12 players was more common. And indeed two more folks showed up before I left. So, yay.

Apparently the board gaming is more likely to start at 6.30 than 7.00, so I'll show up a bit earlier next week, and Terence encouraged me to bring my own games, so I will. (Actually, I have no games unpacked right now, other than the few I got for Christmas; but fortunately I've got clear labels on the boxes that at least highlight the big ticket items.)

One surprising problem: most of the game distributors don't show to Hawaii!

Terence says that he's currently working with Asmodee and GTS Distribution in Honolulu. Obviously, Asmodee gives them a lot of games, while GTS seems to have really erratic products from a bunch of different companies.

I'd saved up a small list of new games I wanted (Wingspan, Castles of Burgundy 20th Anniversary, Las Vegas Royale), so that I could purchase them at my new game store, and I passed them on to Terence via FB this morning, but I have a suspicion they're not available.

So I'll have to explicitly find a few things to buy there. They've got Z-Man under Asmodee, so that's probably my most likely choice. I'd love to pick up Pandemic Legacy Season 1 if I could find a group to play it through. We'll just give it some time ...

And it gives me an excuse to get Lovecraft Letter.

And one bit of unpleasantness: while we were gaming a somewhat disheveled young man came to the door and told the owner that he wanted to see him outside.

As Terence was going outside, the man ranted: "YOU CAN'T KEEP OUT OF YOUR STORE. IF YOU DO, I'LL PUT YOU OUT OF BUSINESS. IT MAY TAKE ME TEN YEARS, BUT I'LL DO IT."

Yeah, problem people in Hawaii. Yay.

But it's not like I'm seeing them every day, like in Berkeley.

But then we're pretty much out in the suburbs. Speaking of which ...

So, the drive home: it was OK.

I left 8 Moves Ahead at about 9.40, which is later than I'd generally planned. I'm going to bed at 11 nowadays, so I'd like to be home by 10 to have time to rev down and get sleepy.

But slightly late might have been good: as I'd expected, the later it got, the quieter the streets were. So, there were still plenty of cars on the highway, but I wasn't facing a constant stream.

I'm getting better with all the headlights in my face generally, but sometimes it's just as you come around a turn or over a hill, and it's still totally blinding. Bleh.

A month ago I couldn't have made that whole drive back from Lihue (just 11 miles!) without being totally exhausted, but I was OK last night.

Even though for the last few miles I had to contend with headlights and rain!

(It's Kauai.)

II. The Bed Breaking.

So, breaking the bed.

Back when Kimberly and I got married, we did a trivia game at the dinner, where individual tables could contest for how well they knew us. One of the questions was something like: "Shannon and Kimberly have engaged in this activity in every room of the house other than the kitchen."

The answer was a lot less salacious than the question: "reading".

And so it goes with our breaking the bed.

After feeding the cats and signing some more paperwork for our realtor, I managed to settle down at about 10.30pm, and read a bit of The Incredible Hulk by Peter David Omnibus and Smiley's People. I was actually feeling like I could sleep at 11pm.

So Kimberly and I wandered off to our ablutions and bed.

We both settled into bed and starting wiggling across our huge new King bed so that we could lie together for a bit while falling asleep.

And then ...

I should note, this is the bed that we waited FIVE AND A HALF WEEKS for. It looks like we ordered it on January 5, after we decided we weren't going to find one locally. It was part an immense $3.5k order meant to Wayfair to fill out what we then saw as our two most critical rooms: the bedroom and the living room. The living room tables arrived in a couple of weeks (including a coffee table that we rejected, but more on that momentarily), while the bedroom furniture was the only thing we've purchased to go on a boat, with commiserate delays.

Wayfair kept playing silly games with the dates, pushing them back from late February to late March over the course of a few days after our purchase, and then when the furniture got on a boat, the delivery dates moved up. We finally received the nightstands on February 5th and the bed and Kimberly's drawers on February 12th. Not bad.

The wood was all "manufactured", as has been the case with about half of what we've purchased in Hawaii and that doesn't always survive travel. One corner of Kimberly's nightstand was definitely damaged and there was a notable chip in the chest of drawers. I wasn't pleased, but they weren't problematic enough to reject them and wait more than a month for replacement.

And then ...

Wiggling across the bed, Kimberly and I heard some type of CRACK and the bed dropped. And then we started hearing CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK like bowling pins going over in slow motion. We were now doing our best to wiggle our way off the bed without putting weight on it, an almost impossible proposition.

After I got off the bed, I hefted up our mattress and found total chaos under the bed.

Keep in mind, we'd never seen under the bed before, because we had Wayfair assemble it.

But first up, there were just four slim slats of plywood making up the "platform" for our mattress. No center support, which everyone says that a King platform should have. It looked totally inadequate.

Each of those slats was supported by two legs under it. "supported" in quotes. Unfortunately, the manufacture of the legs was horrible. Even if the hex bolts going through the legs and slats were totally tight, the holes for the bolts were too big and they could move about 30 degrees off of center. Oh, and there was metal inset into each leg that the bolt screwed into, and those insets weren't affixed in any way: they could just pop out. Oh, and those hex bolts weren't actually tight: every single one was still loose, and so you could move the legs more like 45 degrees off of vertical as a result.

So there were legs all over, no longer attached to the slats and one of the slats had broken the sideboard that it was attached too, falling to the ground as a result.

As best as I can guess, our slight scooting across the bed had caused one or more of those legs to slip out from under the slat, and then when the weight came back down on it, had popped off entirely. Likely just one or two did that, and it set off a chain reaction.

Despite it being after our bed time at this point, I spent a while fooling with hex bolts and slats, before I came to the conclusion that even if the bed had been assembled tightly, the instability of the legs was just a disaster weighting to happen.

We are, by the by, extremely grateful that neither cat was hurt, because that was a real possibility. Lucy, in fact, was investigating under the bed the previous evening while I was laying down. If she'd done that again last night, she could have been badly hurt or killed when the bed came down.

(This possibility left me and Kimberly more enraged than the actual breaking of the bed.)

And, I was saying that we rejected a coffee table already from Wayfair. We got one with a lift-top and it wouldn't latch right, and so Wayfair gamely shipped us a second one, and when it had almost the same problem. We determined it was crappy design and/or application of that design.

Same problem here. This wasn't just one bad leg. It was the fact that they're manufacturing all of their legs in a way that they're not stable, with parts that just don't fit together quite right.

And by they, I mean the manufacturers that Wayfair works with, but the problem is that Wayfair clearly does totally inadequate quality-control of the products that they sell. The coffee table and the bed both had foundational manufacturing problems.

So, that's a problem for Wayfair.

I did worry if we'd put too much weight on the bed, because we have a sort of heavy mattress, but looking at it in the light of day I'm pretty sure that we had less than 450# on that bed, even with our heavy mattress. If a bed can't take that, it's *)(@#)*ed.

(I looked it up, and the bed says it has a 600# capacity.)

I managed to get the mattress up against a wall so that it wasn't a hazard in the night, and then Kimberly and I staggered to our couches to do our best to sleep.

Because there was a huge, broken bed in the middle of our bedroom and nowhere to put the mattress.

Those couches are from CostCo, I should note, not Wayfair. Everything we've gotten from CostCo has been great quality, if not always precisely what we would have wanted.

Before we slept, we talked about our "ask" for Wayfair in the morning.

My first take was "they haul away the bed and give us a complete refund for it and its shipping and they give it to us in cash, not a credit on their website, like they did when they gave us a partial refund on the coffee table".

But as we were lying on those couches, not sleeping, I said, "We should demand a refund on the whole bedroom set, because we got the rest of it to match that stupid bed." (And we were also unhappy with some of its quality and the damage.) Kimberly agreed.

It took me about two hours to fall asleep.

But it was that bed crashing down that was the problem, not my late gaming.

I'll give this to Wayfair: they have good customer support that works under the general assumption that they want to help their customers.

Kimberly called them this morning, presented our ask, and they agreed.

We're being refunded the $2200 or so that we spent on the full bedroom set and shipping.

The local people are going to come and haul away the bed.

We couldn't get them to haul away the nightstands and chest of drawers, but they said we should just give it away. So, we can use it for the moment while we're getting new furniture, and then give it away.

(We'll start out by asking the person that we gave the first coffee table to. Or maybe just drag it out to the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.)

And, yeah, now we probably won't had a bed until late March or early April.

But we've got a mattress again: I disassembled the bed and got it out of the middle of the room this evening.

III. Meanwhile in Berkeley

So it turns out that the attempt to steal the plants in our front yard really happened and was part of an organized plant-theft ring. A., one of our former neighbors, looked into it on Nextdoor and found several other locals who'd had front-yard plants dug up and stolen. And then they all appeared at a local laundromat in new landscaping.

She says that the laundromat has always been pretty scuzzy, and that it's not a surprise that the owner hired people that were stealing plants to do landscaping for him.

As I said to Kimberly: it's lucky I'm not in Berkeley right now, because I wouldn't take kindly to that sort of violation by a local business.

There have been continued minor problems at the Berkeley house. The biggest was that our realtor couldn't get our heater working. Which sorta freaked me out because we had the whole system replaced on December 19th, less than two weeks before we left.

Turns out that PG&E had turned off our gas AGAIN for work on the street (something that they also did a few days before we moved), but they came out very promptly to get the gas back on (this time), and all is well again.

The house went on the MLS on Wednesday, and Barbara had the realtor tour on Thursday. She said there were LOTS Of attention. and she thought the open house on Sunday would be really good. So, fingers crossed.

The whole system for selling houses in the Bay Area makes me uncomfortable, because you list at a price well under the comps, and then depend on bid-ups to get you to where the house should be. So, we're listing at a price that would be very disappointing if that's all we got, and it's like stepping out into the void, hoping there's an invisible staircase there. But, throughout my adult life I've done my best to defer to the experts who are there doing the work, whether it's the moderators on RPGnet, the storyhosts on Skotos, or my realtor. So she tells us what she wants to do, and we say OK.

There are supposed to be two open houses on the next two Sundays, then she'll accept bids afterward. And hopefully we'll get a great price in the range of estimates we've seen, and hopefully it'll be toward the top, because if so then I'll definitely have the ability to work on my lesser-paying projects, like more Designers & Dragons, if I choose to. (And that's the plan.)

Fortunately, with all that going on in Berkeley under our agent's oversight, I can't really get too worked up about it, because we're a thousand miles away.

So, the days slip by, and word comes in our from our realtor, and I just have a moment of the stomach dropping as I hope we have good news and not a problem ...

And in two weeks or so, we'll maybe be accepting an offer.

PG&E. Friday night, after our gas was turned back on 14 hours and 4 phone calls to PG&E after the problem was fixed, our house seemed to really be having troubles heating up. I worried that something might be wrong with our gas flow when I went to bed and I worried when I woke up ... and though I took my time coming downstairs, it turned out my worries were right, because the thermostat was sitting five degrees under the temperature it was supposed to be at.

PG&E had managed to mess up our natural gas flow, two days now after the problems started.

I didn't realize yet that they'd done so on purpose.

As I stood there in my bathrobe, I noticed there was a PG&E guy right outside. He had apparently just got the gas on for one of the condos next door who had gone a second night without heat, presumably because they didn't squeak their wheels as much as we did. So I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, but then remembering the four calls to PG&E the previous day, and the way that their customer support line seems to be trained to lie to, deter, and mislead their customers, I realized this was my last, best chance to solve the problem. So I rushed outside in my bathrobe and waved at the PG&E guy, who was now in his truck, a few minutes from driving away.

(He and I would never comment on my bathrobedness.)

Listening to the problem he came in and looked at all our gas appliances, which really wasn't helpful, and then he decided that he should measure the gas pressure outside, which was. He said it should be 7 inches water column pressure, and after he popped our gas valve off and put some tool up against it, he said it was just barely over. And then he said, "Oh, I see what happened." (Success!) (Success?)

Well, success until he started explaining. He said that our gas line was probably put in during the '60s or '70s (which fits with the age of our floor heater) and that it was likely put in at 8.5 inches water column pressure. He emphasized that we were only paying for 7 inches water column pressure, and said that since PG&E just had to pay $13.5 billion dollars for all the people they murdered and burnt out of their homes last year (he didn't phrase it exactly like that, but I translated in my head), they were trying to scrimp and save pennies whenever they could. So, they took the opportunity of our gas line emergency where we were all without heat in the dead of winter for 30 hours or so to also cut our gas pressure from 8.5 inches water column pressure to 7. Because, multitasking. (You can screw the customers while also screwing the customers!) And so the modern appliances like our stove and tankless water heater were mostly fine, because that was the gas pressure level they expected, but our heater wasn't.

Now fortunately PG&E guy had a solution: he said the heater should have a regulator which determines the amount of gas that goes into it. All I needed to do was adjust it up a bit. He said he couldn't do it, because PG&E refuses to accept the liability of adjusting gas levels in a house (perhaps remembering how they blew up San Bruno in 2010 and killed another 10 people there), but he popped open our stove, showed me the regulator there, and explained that I just needed to twist up the similar screw in the heater regulator. ("That's the scary part, though," he said. "Do you turn it a quarter turn or a half turn? Because you don't want to blow up your house.")

So after he left I crawled under the house to see if it was doable by me. It turned out that the whole flow mechanism for the heater was readily accessible (meaning that anyone could crawl under our house and blow it up), and though the regulator screw wasn't quite the same, I found a Youtube video that explained how to adjust it.

So I had to go buy a screwdriver (I knew I shouldn't pack it!) and then in the evening I crawled under the house a second time and tuned up the regulator an eighth of a turn, because I was willing to do it in little increments to get it right. And this evening the house is staying warmer. The morning will really be the test, but if I have to go crawling and adjust it up a tiny bit more tomorrow, so be it.

We have a screwdriver.

(And screw PG&E.)

Hiking. It was 57 degrees out and sunny, so I got one last(?) little hike in this afternoon, between my crawls under the house. Nothing big, just up the Derby Trail above Clark Kerr, then across Panoramic Hill, then down the Lower Fire Trail out to Centennial Drive. It's maybe an hour and a half hike, including the back and forth from our house (since the hills are about a mile east of us), but it's all stuff I've walked a lot in days past (and in fact I did most of that hike at least one evening a week in 2017 or so), so it was nice to do it again.

Cleaning. And our cleaning continues on. I got the Harry Potter closet cleaned out Friday morning, when I was trying to stay warm in our very cold house, and that closet had our last bookcase in the house, which is now gone.

Then today I was hoping to get the kitchen reorganized after Kimberly managed to get rid of our microwave cart yesterday (which I did) and to get my office the rest of the way cleared out (which I did not, but it's close).

Once I get my office the rest of the way clear (hopefully tomorrow) we are getting very close to the end. We'll mainly have cleaning supplies, food, and other sundries which we haven't finished using and/or disposing of, and then the final furniture which we planned to use to the end. There are also still a few things which we hope Kimberly can get rid of in Craig's List and Freecycle posting, but that'll either happen or not.

So we thought that things would get a lot quieter once our furniture went out of the house two weeks ago now, and that hasn't really happened, but at least we're getting to the point where we'll be able to turn off the lights in the house and exit without a panic in the last few days.

Hopefully.

Because we've only got three days left.

This morning I woke to find it 57 degrees in our house.

Our gas went off yesterday morning, following the discovery of water filling the gas pipeline for us and our neighbors. And then PG&E was out there working throughout yesterday afternoon and into the night. High-powered lights went on as darkness fell and the friendly workers kept working, all the way up to our bedtime.

I'd been impressed at PG&E's understanding of how problematic it was to have gas out in the winter.

But now it was morning and they were ... gone. The streets were empty, with big metal plates covering where they'd dug five-foot holes last night.

We'd been promised that they'd get out gas back on when the problem was fixed, but there was no sign of anyone doing ... anything.

I called PG&E around 8am to ask for status and they said, "Well, the workers had to go home and sleep," like they weren't a multi-billion-dollar company who has 24,000 employees. And there were no updates in their status file following the discovery of water in that gas main yesterday.

I was frustrated and flabbergasted. We had no idea if PG&E had fixed the problem or if they'd be back after "sleeping". We had no idea if they were waiting for parts or if we were waiting for someone to come turn on our gas.

So, we waited. We were given no other option.

I asked Kimberly to call a few hours later, and she got little more out of PG&E. Then I talked to our neighbor J., which got me the first lie from PG&E about when things would be repaired: he'd been told somewhere between 8 and 12.

So, around 2.30 I called again, with the temperature hovering around 59 in the house, as it had been all day (but warmer in the dining room, where Eric, Sam, Mike B., and I were by now playing Curse of the Crimson Throne, surrounded by two heaters, both imported from friends houses).

The first person I talked to on our third call to PG&E blew me off and sent me back to their main menu for an option that didn't exist. The third, seven and a half hours after I woke up to an empty street, actually took the time to call dispatch and find out what was going on. For the first time we got confirmation that the problem had been fixed in the night (meaning that customer service rep this morning, who told me the workers were sleeping before heading back out, was another liar: I was starting to suspect that PG&E custom support lied reflexively rather than figuring out difficult problems, much as I discovered that Comcast did some years ago). And he said that dispatch said someone would be out in an hour.

That'd be lie #2 about times, and at least lie #3 for the day.

Yep, this was increasingly the PG&E who's murdered over 100 people in fires they set in the last two years, the PG&E who just got fined $13.5 billion dollars, the PG&E who was shutting off power all autumn to try and cover up their woeful maintenance of their grid in the last few decades.

The scumbag company I thought I knew before they'd actually worked diligently through the night.

Around 5pm or so, with another time come and gone, I asked Kimberly to make call #4. The Living Room had crept up to 60 or so by this time, with heat blasting in the dining room all day (and us paying a premium to PG&E for the privilege of using those electric heaters while they ignored us and lied to us).

And our fourth lie (at least) from PG&E was that they'd set up a service window with us for sometime between 8am and 8pm to turn our gas back on. Which if they did, they did without actually talking to us. (Not that waiting around all day for them to restore the gas they'd turned off would have ever been acceptable.)

But the truth was that someone finally showed up around 6.30, and in twenty minutes or so got our gas appliance all working again.

Four hours later, our house is hitting 68, but only because I've kept the more efficient of the two electric heaters (a radiator) on while the house heats.

So, basically, PG&E fixed their gas line problem sometime in the night.

And then they took off without doing anything about the houses whose gas they'd shut off, exactly as we feared, and exactly as they said they wouldn't do, and without so much as leaving us a note.

They left us without gas for an additional 14 or so hours, on one of the coldest days of the year, and crapped on us every time we called, either entirely blowing us off or giving us constantly shifting lies about when they'd get that gas back on.

But it took them (*@)#*)#@$ 14 hours just to get someone out for that simple act, even with us (and our neighbors) hounding them all day. I can't even imagine how long it would have taken otherwise. (Maybe no different, maybe another day.)

You need to eminent domain those scumbags, Californians. That's not a company who has any public interest at heart.

And that is how we spent our fifth to last day in California without heat.

But we played three games of Curse of the Crimson Throne while that was going on!

Last year I brought my Burning Wheel campaign to an end after the finale of Year One because we just couldn't game regularly any more, and it was frustrating to keep preparing adventures, then canceling them. But, we've been enjoying plenty of SeaFall and T.I.M.E Stories since, which still offer continuity, but don't require anyone to prepare things in advance.

But, after several trips down to San Jose this spring and summer, that has also fallen off this fall, due to trips and busyness of folks. Which is sad, because I don't get to see the last remnants of my college group, but happy because I get more time to enjoy the hills, parks, and seasides of the Bay Area.

So last weekend I went on a hike that I'd sorta been dreaming of for a long time.

You see, we have these hills backing the East Bay, and there are continuous parks across them, running north to south: Wildcat Canyon, Tilden, Sibley, Huckleberry, Redwood (and Roberts and Joaquin Miller in the same clump), Anthony Chabot, and Lake Chabot. You can walk from El Sobrante in the North to Castro Valley in the South without ever stepping off a trail, except to cross an occasional street (of which I think there are five: Lomas Cantadas, Fish Ranch, Old Tunnel, Pinehurst, and Redwood).

So I've dreamed of getting up early, taking a cab to the entry to Wildcat above El Sobrante, and walking to Castro Valley BART. But, that's probably 10 or 12 hours, and maybe 30-35 miles, so it's never going to happen. Nor is my idea of walking from my house to Castro Valley BART via the hillside parks, which is a bit shorter, but still not practical in a day.

But, a few times I've walked from my house to the Chabot Space & Science Center, in the northwest corner of Redwood and Roberts Parks, and then took the bus home, so I said why not start my morning on a different day with that bus ride, and then continue my hike southward from the Space & Science Center.

So when I had last weekend abruptly free due to gaming cancellation, that's what I did.

Sorta.

I wandered out to Cheese 'n Stuff on Saturday morning, and was delighted to find them actually open and making sandwiches during their posted hours for the first time on a Saturday in four or five months. But then I realized that it'd be 12.30 or so before I made it up to Chabot if I walked to BART, took BART to Fruitvale, and then the bus up to the Center. So I decided to splurge and just Lyft instead. I'm usually much tighter with my money when I could just spend a bit of time and/or effort instead, but I wanted to be able to really have time to walk, and I've been stockpiling my "allowance" lately because I haven't been wanting to buy much before we move.

So, instead I got to Chabot Space & Science before 11am.

Unfortunately, on the way up I discovered that sunscreen had never made it back into my backpack following September's trip to Prague (and the inevitable interactions with the TSA). Well, no problem, it was already late October ... but I decided to keep to the shadier creekside trails as much I could.

Redwood Regional Park is awesome. And the creekside trails are the ones I like the best, so that was a happy accident. Then I got out to Anthony Chabot, and I'd only walked along one little corner of that park, once before, so I really enjoyed walking the length of it: a zig-zag up a hillside above Redwood Regional, then a walk in the shelter of a westward hill that was unfortunately just a little too far above a creek to really enjoy it.

Unfortunately, the creekside walking cost me time, particularly in Redwood Regional, where I probably went close to an hour out of my way. So, as I was nearing the south side of Anthony Chabot I decided that I didn't want to walk all the way out to Castro Valley. Instead, I skirted the northwest side of Lake Chabot, which was beautiful and enjoyable, and then took a long walk down to San Leandro BART.

And that was kinda, sorta, my dream hike last weekend.

What I didn't have on my dream hike (or the medium-length BART ride back) was my laptop computer. I always take it hiking with me, and until things got very busy this year, I regularly did Designers & Dragons related writing while out. But last weekend, my computer was in the shop.

The big problem was the hinges on my screen, which had gotten so loose that the screen just flopped over or flopped closed unless it was balanced precisely. But, I also wanted to get the battery replaced, because it was saying that it needed service, and we're soon going to be on an island without an Apple store.

I was shocked to discover that they tighten up the hinges by replacing the entire screen half of the computer, which is grotesquely costly and wasteful. But, it's covered by a "quality" program, which is a fancy way of saying "we fucked up, and either we got sued or don't want to get sued, and so we offer free fixes". The battery was not covered by a quality program, but it's 2.5 years old, and was still holding a charge well, so I have no particular complaints there.

What I do have a complaint about is the insane bureaucracy at Apple. Basically, they seemed flabbergasted that I would bring a computer in for two problems. So they filled out two tickets. And they shipped it out to Texas to replace the screen (and hinges). And then shipped it back to Berkeley. And then they shipped it out to Texas AGAIN to fix the battery. And shipped it back. It took them an insane 8 days in all, which is why I didn't have a computer while hiking last weekend.

And generally, I was going into withdrawal over the lack of laptop computer. I didn't do much writing at night. I often had to run up to my office to note something. I couldn't even sit down on my sunroom couch to write during the workday, as I often do when doing something that is straight writing.

But I finally got the computer back on Friday.

And here's the funny thing: the scratches on the bottom of my case are gone. I don't know how much of the computer overall they replaced, but it clearly included the bottom of the case, which I wouldn't have expected. And there was no comment on that.

The keyboard and trackpad also feeler cleaner and tighter, but what wasn't fixed was the occasional problem with my "r" and "i" keys repeating.

risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk rreward risk reward risk reward risk reward risk reward rrisk rerwarrd risk reward rrisk reward

I looked this up, because it's annoying for the amount of typing I do, and guess what, there's another "quality" program out there for these early generation butterfly keyboards. Which I've always found to be the huge problem with this particular MacBook model, because a grain of dust gets in there, and the keyboard stops working ... and though I never eat near my laptop, I do take it out to parks, so grains of dust get in.

So apparently I can have the whole keyboard replaced for free, and it's supposed to be a priority repair.

It's just as well that I didn't request that it be fixed with the other problems, since they would have incompetently shipped it to Texas a third time, but I really should fix it before we leave. Maybe in December. Maybe sooner if I get too pissed off by the rrepeats. (I've gotten pretty annoyed at them while writing this; I think I've back-spaced over somewhere between 12 and 20 extra "r"s and a half-dozen or so extra "i"s.)

I will say I've been unimpressed by my last few Apple laptops. Obviously, they're pushing the boundaries of micro-design with these lighter and lighter computers, which has been what I needed for a computer I often take on hikes and bike rides. But the previous keyboard had big enough problems that it was the failure that caused me to get a new computer (and those problems were well documented by other people and the internet). And this one is similarly troubled, and it's apparently even more widespread since Apple was forced into yet another quality problem.

Well, with almost this whole computer being replaced (for the cost of just $200 for the battery), it should last me a few more years afterward, and then I can get a more normal sized laptop, since it will be thrown into a car as often as a backpack at that point.

So this weekend (with computer) I decided to head out to Briones Reservoir, in large part because my five year old EBMUD permit expires this Friday, the 8th. I could still get one-day passes if I wanted, but I found it likely this would be my last trip out to EBMUD lands at least on this side of the move. And Briones is really a treasure so I decided to return there for what I think was my third trip.

I took BART and my bike out to the Orinda Connector Trail, which is at the corner of San Pablo Dam & Bear Valley. Then I walked up from there to the Reservoir, and along its south side.

It's a lovely trail, pretty high above the Reservoir (so you don't see it as much as you might like), but through really nice forested areas. And every once in a while you get a gorgeous view. I've walked all around the Reservoir, and this is definitely the nicest side.

I had another hiking dream here, of walking through the Briones Reservoir and then into Briones Regional Park, and from there ever onward, to Pleasant Hill or Walnut Creek. And, once again, I sorta accomplished it. At the southeast corner of the Reservoir is the connector trail to the Regional Park, and I took that, and *poof* was walking alongside one of the entrances to the park. (I'd imagined a more romantic merging of one park into the other, but instead I exited the beautiful reservoir, and then found myself at a scrubby park entrance.) I didn't go far into the park, just to a picnic area maybe a half mile in, where I ate some chocolate.

I could have gone further if I hadn't biked out to San Pablo Dam. Heck, I considered going on and just taking a Lyft back to my bike, but instead turned around. Which meant I got to walk along the beautiful Reservoir on the best trail one more time.

One last time.

I think I got about three paragraphs of writing done on my laptop while on BART during that trip. Ah well. I often like to write at a picnic table while out, but with the huge hike from San Pablo Dam to Briones Regional Park and back, that just wasn't in the cards.

And now it's back to normal life. I signed off on our final shipping contract today, and just put together a check and contract for our stager, and moved some boxes around. And after today we've just got 58 days left.

Which is why I'm hiking like I'm running out of time. Non-stop!

We had a number of people from Asia and Europe at Rebooting the Web of Trust, and they seem pretty universally aghast at our "health care" system here in the United States. One asked what I paid for healthcare, and I explained that I had recently switched plans to drop my premium from $800 to $500. A month!?, he goggled. He said, so a family with a child would have paid $2400!? No, I said, the premiums would probably be cheaper for the child.

I didn't hear the specifics of a few other peoples' complaints, but they're pretty obvious.

For-profit health insurance is a travesty. Not treating healthcare as a basic human right is an aberration. ObamaCare definitely made things better, because it guaranteed coverage, because it removed life-time limits, because it outlawed yearly plans and other scams (where you weren't covered for problems from previous years), and because it limited profits. But if you're not working at a company large enough (and moral enough) to afford healthcare for its employee, you're probably hanging on by your fingernails.

If you think I'm complaining about my travails with Kaiser and my kidney stone right now, I'm not. I did have stress in getting ahold of some folks to make appointments, when I was out of town. And the almost three-week wait for an ultrasound was totally unacceptable. If Kaiser screwed up the appointment for my ESWL this Friday, I'm going to be more than furious.

But without minimizing those problems, and without condoning them, I also have to say they're just the sort of thing that happens in bureaucracies. The three-week wait for ultrasounds is the only one where I feel like there's a notable structural problem that should be resolved — but it's a very distinct issue at Kaiser, different from x-rays (20 to 45 minute wait) or CT scans (1 day wait).

(I've be able to compare and contrast scheduling for the whole set in the last few weeks, though the CT scan was actually without contrast.)

And there's a lot that Kaiser does right. When I had my night of kidney stone pain, I was able to get in to see my doctor almost immediately. I ended up making my final appointment in the middle of the night with about 8 hours lead time. I never even had to make an appointment with a urologist: she just called me. Similarly, when we agreed to the ESWL they called me to (hopefully) schedule. Even beyond not having to worry about American stupidity like referrals, Kaiser does a lot of things efficiently, with minimal pain for the patients.

No, instead I'm complaining about Kimberly's insurance today. She has literally been fighting with our local hospital Alta Bates (and our insurance companies) for more than four months over an inaccurate bill.

The stupidest thing is that it's for hospital care where only the very first segment of care has been unpaid. No problem with the identical rest of it, but that first segment got misbilled or incorrectly declined or who knows what and so Alta Bates keeps trying to come after us for the $2,000. Even though our insurance company says that Alta Bates is violating the terms of their contract with said large insurance company by doing so.

So in February, Kimberly finally got her insurance company's grievance folks involved after (literally) 30-40 calls to various folks, starting way back on November 1. They contacted Alta Bates and got them to agree to resubmit the bills. They then sent Kimberly a letter telling her it was in process and to definitely not pay the bill.

Problem solved, yes?

No.

The ass****s at Alta Bates apparently decided to spit right in the eye of this whole grievance process and passed the bill off to a collection agency. Which means they've escalated from sending a fraudulent bill to threatening our credit rating. And there's a good chance that we're going buying new property in the next 2-4 years, after we move to Hawaii, and we may want a mortgage. So that's a borderline existential threat. It could cost us a mortgage or just a few hundred dollars every month due to worse interest rates. And it's based purely on the incompetence of Alta Bates (and/or the insurance companies, but they've at least claimed to be on our side and kept saying the right thing about us owing no money).

So today — after an exhausting five days of Rebooting the Web of Trust, before a Sunday of having to take our limping cat to the vet, before a busy next week of catch-up, medicals tests, and (if I'm a very good boy) a painful but hopefully helpful medical procedure — I got to spend my entire afternoon working with Kimberly to write an official letter to these debt collectors saying their debt was invalid, finding all the people to Cc: it to, and also taking the next step, of filing a complaint with the California Department of Managed Healthcare.

We made sure the letter was very sharp, we made it obvious that we believed that Alta Bates was acting very badly and that we had precise documents of the last three and a half months, and we suggested that Alta Bates might be incurring liability through their actions.

Fun times.

Also, this is not the first time that Alta Bates has screwed with us like this. I got a couple of CT scans two years ago, when we originally spotted my well-loved kidney stone. Alta Bates tried to bill me a few thousand dollars for the second, and it turned out to be because they'd never correctly sent the data about the test to my insurance company, and then ignored the requests for it. I also vaguely recall a $5,000 or so bill that Alta Bates incorrectly sent us 12 or so years ago, but at least that time Kimberly didn't get the run around to a half-dozen different people.

A more cynical person might say that Alta Bates collecting unwarranted debts from patients is a feature, not a bug.

Friday Night: Mauvais Genou. Hurt my knee. D'oh! Let a cat sit on it in an uncomfortable position. Lucy is made of lead. Then after I biked to Safeway and back, I discovered it was painful when I went went up the stairs. So I gave it ice and ibuprofen over the course of the weekend.

Saturday Morning: Acheter des Carrelage. Five years ago an incompetent builder remodeled our bathroom. When we asked if he could do it, he said that bathrooms were his bread and butter. He electrified our tub and installed our tiles such that they were leaking within a few years. Leaky bread and electrified butter.

So we've got a handyman who's going to redo it. We spent Saturday morning shopping for new tiles, up north of Gilman. We came up with one that's a little darker than we like, but otherwise OK. A little pricy, but for only 100 square foot of tile that doesn't make a big difference. Apparently rectangular, brick-like tiles are the newest fad, and we settled on one, but now I'm worried whether our handyman is going to be comfortable laying those in, which I have to assume is more complex, because you don't just create a square grid. If not, it's back to the stupid tile store.

(Also stupid: the city of Berkeley. Our local streets have had two-hour parking limits for non-residents for the last 20+ years, and it's been a constant thorn in my side whenever I have people over, and it's going to be a problem for our handyman starting tomorrow. I was hoping to get some daily visitor parking permits for him on Friday. Except the Customer Service Center where you do so is only open four days a week nowadays. Which isn't particularly good service. So I'll try Monday morning before work, as a bit of just-in-time getting stuff done, of the sort I hate.)

Saturday Evening: Ich Färbe Haare. Kimberly tried to re-dye her hair while I was in Cambridge, and just hurt her foot more. So she asked me to help now and we scheduled that for Saturday night. Oy! hair dye is pernicious stuff. Afterward, I felt like I spent forever getting it off of everything (other than her head). But I was successful. Then we wrapped her head in saran wrap and duct tape, so that she could leave the dye in overnight. We had blue duct tape, so she said it made her look like Marge Simpson.

She washed her hair out first thing Sunday morning, and I volunteered to clean the bathtub afterward, so that she wouldn't hurt her toe. I found blue on all the walls of shower stall, some of it in arterial sprays. It looked like she'd killed a whole tribe of smurfs.

The blue came out looking very nice.

Sunday: Klettere Jeden Berg Hoch. And on Sunday I rested. By going hiking.

The first step is always finding lunch I can bring up into the hills. This is more challenging on Sundays, but I opted for Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches, forgetting that they'd gone on my naughty list. The problem is that they've joined the list of bad San Francisco based businesses who began engaging in surcharge shenanigans when they were told to pay people a living wage (not that it's LIVABLE yet in the Bay Area). So Ike's has an "optional" surcharge to fund it, which of course isn't optional because they automatically charge it, and if you say otherwise workers might spit in your sandwich. But, it's false advertising because they list incorrect prices, and it's a passive-aggressive slap at minimum wage laws that invites customers to be at odds with the workers. I need to find a different sandwich place in downtown, because screw Ike. But today I had a very delicious if morally reprehensible cream cheese sandwich with an orange glaze.

I lunched near Jewel Lake, which I love, and then I did a hike out into Wildcat Canyon, which I love, up the hillside along the Conlon Trail, which I don't think I've ever hiked before, then across the Nimitz Way, and back down in Tilden. It was a terrific hike that warded away the cold of fall (winter is coming) and there were beautiful views due to the bit of rain we got last night. (The canyon was still quite wet, but the hillsides quite dry.)

Overall, a great day of hiking.

I didn't get enough R&R and downtime this weekend, but we definitely got things accomplished. Onward. There's still much to be done for Skotos, RPGnet, and Blockstream before year's end.

I had not known that Swiss Air was a third-class airline, but now I do.

They're on my no-fly list.

(Of course, so is United, and I accidentally flew them last week.)

The morning starts off good. I wasn't sure I could wake up at 6.30 and catch the 6.56 bus, between getting my toiletries packed up, getting myself out the door, treading the labyrinth of halls and elevators at the Hotel de Rome, checking out, scooting across Bebelplatz, and waiting to cross Unter der Linden.

But, making it to the bus stop, I see the sign says "TXL 2 minutes". Score!

The airport confuses me a bit, because the check-in decks are associated with the boarding gates, and they're all dynamic. And the boards out front don't go out to 9.25, my boarding time.

It takes about ten minutes, but my flight number shows up, and I walk out to gate A6.

As I go by A5, I think, "Wow, they have a long line". But as I keep going, I realize it's actually the line for A6.

Thunderstruck by the huge line, I go back to the end. Here begins what's literally 75 minutes of waiting, wondering if I'm going to miss my flight.

Much of the problem is that they have four check-in counters open: one for economy class passengers, one for baggage drop-off (which I couldn't do because I couldn't check-in online, presumably because it's an international flight), and twofor business and first-class; the economy line is moving inches a minute, because all of the effort is going to those high-brow customers, and they're just allowed to walk right up in their special line, effectively cutting in front of all of us. I've said it before, but if the populist revolution ever comes, and it should, it's going to start in the airports, which are the most egregious examples of extremely preferential treatment for the 1%.

Finally the low-brow line speeds up when all the online baggage, the business people, and the filthy rich have boarded, and the check-ins are finally shared equally. The proles are allowed to finally move.

I guess the advantage of the combined check-in/gate setup is that they weren't going to take the plane off since they knew they had an outrageous line for check-in, even almost two hours before the flight, and they knew those people then had to get through the gate's security. But I was still stressed for the whole 75 minutes. And we were late taking off due to all the tom-foolery.

So there's my first screw-you-Swiss-Air of the day, and it's just barely 9.30.

On the plane I note that I have a window seat, changed over three seats from the aisle seat I was supposed to have. I'm annoyed by the fact that Swiss has shown for a second time in as many minutes (hours) that they don't give a *()@ about my personal preferences, but whatever. I get to see the landscape of Berlin leaving and Zurich arriving. And Zurich is kind of surprising to me. There are huge, dark forests everywhere, and then as we come in to the airport, I see they're even right up against the tarmac.

But I also notice that Swiss has changed my seat on my long-haul flight from Zurich to SFO, giving me a middle seat, which is the biggest F-U of the day. I want to see if I can change it in Zurich, though that seems pretty unlikely, and it turns out not to be possible, because I'm forced to get my ticket stamped by San Francisco Passport Control before anyone ever shows up at the Swiss Air deck at the gate.

I consider chocolate in the airport, but most of it's ridiculously expensive, and much of it is just Lindt anyway. Oh well.

So I sit down on the gate, and I now get to hear Swiss Air announcing that they're overbooked business class, and they're looking for "volunteers" to downgrade to economy. The last announcement I hear is offering 1,750 Swiss Francs (about the same value in USD).

So that's about seven strikes before I've gotten on the long-haul plane: insufficient staffing at Berlin; grossly preferential treatment to rich passengers at Berlin; somewhat late take-off at Berlin; changing my Berlin to Zurich seat; changing my Zurich to SFO seat, very much for the worse; not staffing the Zurich check-in; and overbooking.

Oh, and we play out the same preferential game boarding at Zurich: one horribly long, none-moving line for the proles, and a swift line for the upper crust. The difference is that when the high-brow clerk finishes admitting her people, she's afraid to let in the proles, lest a businessman (or woman) come up to the entrance and be momentarily inconvenienced. So she just stands there, watching the gate with first-class eyes.

Oh hey, we're late taking off again, either because Swiss didn't have their boarding gate adequately staffed or because they overbooked and had to bribe people to give up their chocolate chip cookies.

That should be their slogan: Swiss Air — doesn't run at all like a Swiss watch.

I'm gritting my teeth at the fact that I still have to spend twelve more hours with these bastards.

But in my mind, they've already been fired.

Swiss' seats have more leg room, which is a relief after the horrible United flight. However the seats are quite narrow. I mean, fortunately, that's only a problem if you're in the middle, and I clearly reserved a aisle seat.

For the few moments I just enjoy being able to move my legs, unlike on the United flight, not realizing how much I'll be hurting 11 hours later.

Swiss does not have a scam cart, where they try to encourage you to purchase food before they bring the free food. No, they just bring out food every two hours like clockwork. However, they do seem to have a cancer cart, where they tote around duty-free cigarette cartons.

Classy. And so socially responsible.

About nine hours into our flight we pass right over Kelowna, which was the site of last year's Blockstream offsite.

I'd thought the 10-hour overnight trip was the worst, because I was tired and (mostly) couldn't sleep, but the 11-hour daytime trip back is pretty bad as well. A lot of that is due to the uncomfortableness of the middle seat, which makes it hard to write. (I managed two histories, but I had to contort myself every time I wanted to write.) I also don't have the focus to read more than 150 pages or so of the very dense Forge of Darkness. I did well, however, collecting comics on my iPad from Hoopla, and I read through four trade paperbacks. I also manage to burn a couple of hours playing a mindless gem game; I should clearly find a few high-quality mindless games through Steam.

After the quick efficiency of European passport control, I'm bemused by the stupid FUD of the US. I'm checked five times total by US officials. They give a cursory look at my passport in Zurich (#1), as the first step in "San Francisco Passport Control". Then at SFO, I run my passport through a computer and answer some questions (#2). Then I pass the printout from computer and my passport and a printed list of questions to a passport control officer (#3), and he's the one that asks a few questions like the solitaire passport control in Zurich and Frankfurt. He stamps my printout which I show to an officer before I collect my luggage (#4). Then I show it yet again when exiting with my luggage (#5).

It's all relatively fast, but no wonder people are more reluctant to come to the US nowadays. We've become a positively xenophobic nation. And other than the idea of keeping people off planes on the far side, this is all entirely security theatre. Heck, that largely is too, since passports are also checked at check-in, at airport security, and when boarding the plane — albeit, not by US state officials.

It is a miracle of modern technology that I woke up at 6.30am in East Germany yesterday morning, and I made it home by 6.00pm in Berkeley. Plus nine time zones, of course; we were racing the sun the whole day.

Happy to be home, and done with traveling until May (possible February; we shall see).

No, I don't really do "relaxed" weekend.

And no, I still can't write a journal entry within a week of time.

Saturday was a gaming day. It's my Burning Wheel campaign, but the idea has always been to vary it up with other games that expand the overall world. So we started off with three sessions of Microscope over a few years time before getting into the regular Burning Wheel groove for almost ten sessions.

Then, this Saturday, I decided that I didn't want the stress of story prep intruding onto the holiday weekend, so I offered up the first of my interludes, a game of Kingdom. We learned about the Alchemist Guild deep in the past of Eligium. It went well. The roleplaying was more intense than usual, which caused some tension, and we were all pretty tired by the end. But it was an interesting game, and we definitely learned more about our history.

Sunday was a hiking day.

It began with my usual inability to find a sandwich in south Berkeley. I had found a sandwich-making place I hadn't found before called Tivoli Caffe. So I visited there to pick up a sandwich before I walked up the hill. But, they were closed for the whole Memorial Day weekend. So was Cheese & Stuff. IB Hoagies was closed and not opening until noon. Top Dog was closed. I finally ended up at Taco Bell again. Ah well.

Afterward I walked up Panoramic Hill to the fire trails, then up to the top of the hill. It was chilly and overcast, and I was literally walking up into the clouds. By the time I got to the top of the hills, I was in then.

I took a break at a bench on the Bay Area Ridgeline Trail, just over the top of the hill. It's got a beautiful view of the Siesta Valley Recreation Area, down to the teeny super-rich community of snobs in Wilder. I stopped there to write for a while, but that was about when the sun came out, and it soon became too bright to really read my computer. So I walked down through the EBMUD trails until I got to Orinda.

I'm always shocked by how short that walk is, from Berkeley to Orinda. About an hour and a half up the hill and about an hour and a half down the hill. I always think about walking the St. Stephens Trail on to Lafayette afterward, but Google Maps inevitably shows it as another hour, and I inevitably decide it's getting late and I get on the BART in Orinda instead.

So it was on Sunday.

Monday was hanging-out-with-Kimberly day.

Unfortunately, the Labor Day Salsa "block" party on the next block, which attracts huge crowds of people from Oakland to Richmond, and which results in hours of loud music shaking our house, has spread like a disease to also be a Memorial Day Salsa "block" party. So, we were definitely desirous of fleeing the house, but K. is too tired currently to want to go with far.

So, we waited until about noon and then headed out to grab some lunch (Taco Bell again!) and take it to campus.

Once there we ate, then read-aloud from Fool's Assassin, then did our own things for a while. (I had my computer, full of work, as usual.) Eventually some hellacious almost-inaudible buzzing noise settled onto the entire southeast side of campus, and we moved on.

There was then yogurt and drug stores and a haircut for me. Unfortunately, we still had a few hours of Salsa when we got home. K. and I both went to our offices to hide, but my office turned out to be not protected. It has windows on three sides of the house, and though the Salsa party was on the opposite side of the house from my office and windows, it still boomed through the room like a panel truck with its roll-up door flapping all around.

Monday was also the day we said farewell to our exercise bike.

Pretty much, Schwinn sucks. They manufacture crap.

More precisely, we got it a few years ago. It didn't work when we got it: the wheel had no resistance. So a repairman came out and fixed it and it worked. briefly.

Unfortunately for the next year, K. didn't really use it because she wasn't doing well and I didn't really use it because my doctor was keeping me off bikes.

So some 10 months or so after the repair, one of us sat down ... and found the wheel had no resistance.

Though the parts warranty hadn't expired, the labor warranty had, and Schwinn told us this was clearly labor, and so we were on our own.

But, it was an easy repair, they said, taking only a phillips screwdriver. The kind Schwinn liar even told us what pages in the manual to use to repair things.

So Sunday night we finally sat down to look at the instructions, which had been sitting around for a few months. And, they were horrible, and they had little to do with the bike we actually had. I fooled around with it for about an hour and came to the conclusion that a pedal wrench was actually needed to get things open.

We'd already decided that the bike's poor quality control meant that it wasn't worth bringing to Hawaii. Rather than having a non-functional bike in the house for a few years, we opted to drag it out on the street Monday afternoon with a free sign (and a clear statement of its condition and all the supposed "instructions" attached). Our theory was that we could at least benefit from the annoying Salsa party because there'd be people leaving and heading to their cars and one of them might pick up the non-functional bike and take it home.

Sure enough.

Mark that as our last purchase ever from Schwinn, once a sign of quality, now a sign of horrible manufacture and poor customer service.

That wasn't our only experience with crappy companies over the weekend. The other was Jack Richeson & Co., Inc. K. bought a very nice easel from them, and we tried to set that up on Sunday night after our failure with the exercise bike.

The instructions were atrocious. Worse than 10 IKEA books. There were no illustrations of many of the parts and very minimal explanations of what to do.

But, we figured it out and did fine until we got to the last part ... which required a bolt that they had not included.

So K. sent them mail and requested our '2 1/4" bolt'. They sent back the requirement that we fill our a four-page warranty form and send it back along with a receipt and a declaration of where we'd purchased it, in order to get our $2 bolt.

I did so, but I wasn't very happy about it, and I very politely told them their ridiculous bureacratia made me think poorly of the company.

So the next day, one of the owners mailed me back and apologized, but also explained why it was really wonderful that they had a system where I had to fill out and scan four pages in order to get a 2 1/4" bolt. Nonetheless, I was mollified, especially when they said they were sending the bolt priority mail, to arrive on Friday, along with some nice paint brushes for K. as way of apology.

It's Friday. No bolt. No paint brushes.

Crappy companies.

Don't even get me started on the self-righteous asshats at Spamcop, who darkened my door late in the week.

Suffice to say: I've learned that they're now buying dead domains and reusing previously valid email addresses as spam traps. Which is all kinds of morally and possibly legally wrong. Their excuse is that the domains are really old, but if they think data on the internet has expiry dates, they're fools.

(They're fools.)

So, if you're not a spammer, and you ever find the need to sue Spamcop for defamation and/or prior restraint of trade, I'm your man. I now know where the bodies are buried because an arrogant Spamcop engineer explained to me what they're doing as he tried to bludgeon me into believing he was right and I was wrong.

(And this complaint will just have to serve as a substitute for exposé that I want to write but don't want to get involved with.)

My goal in any holiday weekend is to revitalize myself for the wear, tear, and work of everyday life. I quickly discovered that I failed, because my Tuesday or Wednesday I was at wit's end about a variety of problems.

But that was due to the problems (and the ongoing stressors in our life currently) as much as anything.

Maybe this weekend.

I just plotted out a really cool hike.

My second Fitbit Charge HR died last week. And I really mean died. The two arms just popped right off the central watch and when you looked at it afterward, you couldn't see any indication that they'd been affixed in the first place.

It was no surprise and no shock. That Fitbit's arm bands started bubbling and getting loose a year ago, and even though it was slightly out of warranty I got Fitbit to send me a replacement at the time because it was just several months after my first Fitbit Charge HR did the same thing. But then B. over on FB suggested buying a sleeve for it. So I got one, and it kept the peeling armband from looking bad, and perhaps it kept the vulnerable components under from totally breaking, like was the case with my first one. And I got an extra year of use out of it.

So now I'm on my third and last Fibit Charge HR. Experience says it'll start falling apart in 5-9 months. And I'm sure I won't get them to send a fourth Fitbit because we're now like 14 months out of warranty.

I have really conflicted feelings about Fitbit. Their software and gamification are all spot on, but the manufacture of that Fitbit Charge HR was just awful. One of the worst consumer electronic goods I've ever bought, since two fell apart to the point where I asked for warranty replacement with 15 months or so.

Ah well. K's Charge HR II seems to be holding up, so I may be thinking about one of those come Christmas-time. If #3 lasts that long. I wish these devices could have held out for a Charge HR III though!

After work last night, I went out to buy some shoes.

I've got some gray tennies that aren't worn through all the way, but they've always been a little bit tight. And, since I started having some dull pain in my right foot lately that seemed (maybe) to get worse when I wore the gray tennies, it seemed like a time to replace them.

I biked up to El Cerrito to the discount shoe store there ("DB Shoes"). As I told K. at the time, I'm not going to get to casually bike out for this type of light errand when we live in Hawaii. But, there are pluses and minuses to every locale.

DB Shoes has been my primary location to purchase shoes for a decade or so. And, I was distressed when I got there to see big "Going Out of Sale" signs. Fortunately, the sale didn't seem to have been going on for long, as the shelves weren't yet picked clean. But everything was in complete chaos. Apparently, the sale brought in all the Ross and Wal-Mart shoppers, because they threw everything on the floor when they were done.

The chaos made it hard to find shoes, because the boxes on the shelves had little to do with the sample shoes nearby. It also looks like the tennis shoes of a year or two ago were going heavy on nauseating colors because I opened some boxes to see what they had and found florescent orange, puke yellow, red-white-and-blue, and other grotesqueries. (A few all red shoes actually caught my fancy, but not my size.)

I spoke with an older gentleman when I was there. He kept talking about how kids-these-days were ruining old fashioned retailers by buying everything on Amazon. And he could get shoes cheaper here! He told me a few times how his daughter had gotten him shoes for $70 off Amazon and they were $50 at DB Shoes. I agreed that sounded pretty dumb (and stereotypically lazy Millenial). But I said I really didn't know how you buy shoes online because the sizing is so inconsistent. He agreed with that too.

It's often hard to figure out the price at DB Shoes because they have marked prices, then marked discounts. It was even harder last night because there were multiple levels of marked discounts, and it was obvious many discount signs had gone missing and many shoes had moved. I finally found a pair that fit well and I liked, but it was marked $110. That felt like a no-go, even if the nearby 40% off sign was correct, but I brought them up to the register to check, and they were actually $40. Good enough.

I actually wanted to stock up with more pairs, both because of the sale prices and because I don't know where my next shoes will come from. But I couldn't find another acceptable pair in the whole store even with a fair amount of looking.

Farewell, DB Shoes. We sorta knew ye.