Modern Vespa

retirement is when you want it to be, not some arbitrary number someone thinks that's the date. So with proper planning you can quit work anytime.

Can't get gluten free apple fritters

I've got 670 weeks

Mine was 685 weeks ago..

A*bit* too soon for a countdown calendar....

1040, almost to the day here!

And here i was only 8 and a bit ago.....

But i'm still 44 so there's that. 🤪

The school I'm attending online for my bachelor's degree seems to have a pet project of indoctrinating informing their students about Climate Change, which is fine and all. The thing is, as I've had to write various papers about it over the last few months, and I keep running across various versions of the statistic of "100 corporations produce 70% of all global emissions" and the argument that an individual's efforts won't amount to much due to that "fact." So I looked into it.

All of the various articles stating that "statistic" are citing the same study done in 2017. The thing is, the study only accounted for industrial emissions. It did not include emissions from land use, land use change or forestry, or from sources such as landfills, agriculture and farming.

Some researchers have refined the figures to be more accurate, and have estimated (there's that word again) that corporations are responsible for about 12% of emissions, while the other 88% comes from consumption of products. Which means that yes, an individual's attempts at curbing climate change can be effective.

(source)

Apologies for the delayed post, I tend to only visit MV when I'm at work.

I was off work all last week for the Thanksgiving break. I spent Monday at the car dealership getting my wife's car serviced (oil change, alignment, tune-up, transmission service, fuel line service, and two open recalls). Tuesday I'd intended to spend the day doing my school work that was due on Sunday, Dec 1, so that I could spend the rest of the break relaxing. I had to take Digby to the vet for a checkup that morning first, and had planned on doing school work when I got back.

I ate a late breakfast when I returned from the vet and was about to get out the laptop when the internet went out. I opened the app on my phone and check to see if there was an outage in the area. There wasn't, so I chatted with an agent via the Spectrum app to trouble-shoot the issue. They determined that a tech would have to come out and scheduled an appointment for that day between 3 & 4pm.

I thought about tethering the laptop to my phone since I have unlimited tethering and unlimited data, but AT&T's data speeds were painfully slow, and kept buffering. So I used the time waiting on the tech cleaning the living room (which needed to be done, anyway). I texted my neighbor to see if his internet was also down, and he said that he wasn't home, but that he'd seen a Spectrum truck working on the line outside our homes earlier that day, at about the time I lost service. That reminded me that a technician had been working on the line once about a year ago and had disconnected our line and left it disconnected for no reason. So I went outside to check, and sure enough, our line was no longer connected. I took a pic and called Spectrum to let them know I found out why my service was out. They escalated it to a supervisor so that the tech who disconnected me would be "retrained".

While cleaning up, I found a wasp next outside the front door, so I got out the wasp spray and doused it. As soon as the spray hit it, the number of visible wasps doubled. I drenched them all, and got rid of them.

All of the above to say that I was unable to do my homework, and ended up spending almost all day Saturday getting it done.

Forgot to mention, Digby peed in his carry bag on the way to the vet and it soaked through the canvas and transferred to my sleeve when I picked him up to carry him in. Had to run an extra load of laundry when I got home because of it.

Some pics of the day:

I here there's a guy in S. Dakota that might have been able to arrange a rescue...

Wasps are your friends! They are an essential natural pest control.

True, that. Although IMHO yellow jackets (or what I refer to as picnic wasps) are a PITA and Bald-Faced hornets are of the Devil, the fellas monogodo had to deal with are pretty benign. I've painted right up to their nests years ago, and recently even watched a video of a guy pinching a nest off of it's attachment without being stung just by slowly approaching it from above. So they're pretty hard to freak out over if you have them around. What's been uniquely interesting is rock climbing around Indian Summer when wasps get dopey and sun themselves on the rock. It's a balance behind finding a good handhold quickly and being sure *someone* isn't already using it-although the aforementioned dopiness gives humans the advantage.

Same goes for snakes and cats, but none of them are allowed in my house and are subject to being swatted, sprayed, ejected, or eaten (depending on my mood) if found there.