Sorting by Piles

Last night I watched the movie The American President written by Aaron Sorkin. I wonder how many actors were in both that movie and Aaron’s later project, The West Wing. I think I recognized at least four. Martin Sheen got promoted from Chief of Staff to President. Fun stuff.

Today has been a fairly productive day, all things considered. Luckily, SM wrote me in the morning and asked if I wanted to go out to dinner and a show after all or if I wanted to stay in. The weather is brutal outside in terms of temperature. And we got a few inches of snow. So, no, I really didn’t want to go out. And this is the first full day that I have the house to myself, and I wanted to relish it. SM was understanding. I wonder if she will go to the show on her own. I am not terribly upset about missing a high school production of Singing in the Rain.

I eventually got out of bed, but not before I had some thoughts about one of my campaign speeches. More on that below.

For lunch, I had the last of my 8 pieces of chicken from KFC. And some olives, coleslaw, macaroni salad and some salt and vinegar potato chips. Hmm, sounds a lot like yesterday’s lunch.

I think I am going to try an experiment. While the waeather remains frigid outside, I will let the house sit at around 60°F and use a space heater in my room to keep that, and me, warmer and toastier. I don’t know if I will save any money, but I feel like I will since I am not heating the whole house to 68°F. No boarder!

After lunch, I worked on two projects a good bit. And actually started the book about the Finnish Prime Minister, Hope in Action. One project was for the campaign and the other was the Alice Tea Party movie.

I exported the movie again and made more notes. Overall, it is fine the way it is. I did find a few places that I could make a few changes that might make the piece a bit better. But it will take a good bit of effort to make those changes. To change or not to change, that is the question. I am leaning towards making the changes. Time will tell.

How I help things to get with like things

Augustus for President: I think I am getting closer to a decent draft of the 50+1 Capitals Tour Steps Speech. At least the first one, the one for Washington DC. Once I have that one done, I will work on Richmond and see how much tweaking I will do in subsequent states and capitals. Reading the speech aloud helps.

Last night, I ordered an inexpensive windows laptop for the campaign. I am going to set it up as a business computer and inititiate anything to do with the campaign there. Where I need to, I will also mirror stuff on my personal computer. The reason for a new, pristine computer for the work stuff, is that I want a clean delineation between me and the campaign. So when I have staff, it will be easier to hand it all off. And because I don’t know what all I have touched with what information. In order to have a fresh start on the various social media platforms and blogging platforms and such, a new computer set up around the campaign, ought to be a good thing.

Any thoughts on whether or not I ought to sign the campaign up for a twitter/X account? Rumor has it it is now a cesspool of right wing craziness. Do I want to inflict myself with that sort of crap?

I think I will just do coasters and stickers for the 50+1 Capitals Tour. And maybe make them both the same design, just slightly different sizes. I will save pens and other things for the future. 250 of each is still the plan. Maybe I will work on that tomorrow.

360° – I will be testing this

Another mildly productive day here at the chalet. Mostly I did stuff related to the campaign, so that section will be fairly robust today. Besides working on that, I haven’t done much. I ate some lunch, more of the pizza. And I thought about spritzing rain-x onto the windshield of my car. Only to discover that it had frozen. The Rain-X container is inside and will be thawing. Tomorrow I will spritz it on the windshield and see if it actually works. I would think it would…

The highpoint of the day, such as it was, was picking SM up from the Rochester Airport. She had two smooth travel experiences, which makes me happy. I didn’t, though, go up early enough to get boxes for JC and EC. I will head up to Rochester again at some point soon to get boxes, if they don’t drop boxes off first.

Now I am home – a quick evening Duolingo and then dinner. I think I am eating the last of the frozen lasagna that has been in the freezer for quite a while. I will add fresh steamed asparagus, garlic cheese toast and a side salad to make a full meal. I am getting a little peckish.

Augustus for President: Thoughts they keep a thinking. One thing I would like to do before hitting the road early next month, is to set up social media for the account. I am debating getting a campaign only dedicated laptop so I don’t cross pollinate between private life and public life. I want to sign up for each of the sites fresh (Facebook, YouTube, X (ick), (Ok, maybe not X), Threads, Instagram, BlueSky, TIkTok)(what I am forgetting?). I guess I will have to start using TIkTok as it is still very popular. I will need a second address from the campaign website as I need an email address to sign up for each of the sites I think. It has been so long since I signed up for a social media platform…Maybe I will call that one Webmaster or Tech Maven or something.

Another tool in the arsenal

I bought another gadget to use while on the road. This one is supposed to track my face as I move, which ought to be interesting. Tonight and tomorrow, I am going to test out all the gear and see what happens. I need to figure out the optimal distance from me to the phone/camera so that I can have a decent looking image to use. I think a medium closeup would be good. Maybe a little less than that. Waist up maybe? I can use my laser tape measure to check out what that distance is once I have framed myself well. The next question is – landscape or portrait?

My meeting with the travel people was very short. I misread their website. I thought they booked business travel. They do not. They provide a portal that puts up bumpers for employees who are booking business travel. What I need/want is a travel agent. I sent an email to an agent in Canandaigua. If I haven’t heard back from them by noon tomorrow, I will give them a call. If I can find a phone number. It looks like they have a lot of agents. Most of whom specialize in Disney related travel. So helpful. No Disney for me this trip.

Work continues on the travel slide show. Of course, wild ideas pop into my head – like making buttons on the map for each of the locations so that if one clicks on the location, the appropriate page will load. I am also thinking I would like to put the QR code on each page. And I would like to leave room on each page for a picture of me at each capital.

Every Rubel (eek!) Counts: If you are a Russian Citizen (only, dual Citizen with the US is ok, I guess) please do not contribute to my campaign. $10 may seem like a lot of money to give someone you don’t know, but I am easy – any amount helps. One the the statistics that people look at is the number of individual donors. And since this is a grassroots campaign, the more the merrier. Even if that contribution is only $1.

End of an Era?

Ok, not really, but when I went into my local branch office, my favorite teller was no longer working there. Oh well. Life is that way sometimes. Luckily, I like all the tellers there! Phew!

Fall St. Brewery

Another early day and long drive for me. I hope to never have to do that again. I really don’t like setting an alarm. And getting up earlier than my body wants to. Luckily (?) my body wanted to wake up around 6 am. Which gave me lots of time to mellowly move into a place of willingness to get up and go about my business. Today’s early business was driving someone to Elmira. Not that far as the crow flies. But a lot of less than 55 miles per hour parts. So what ought to have taken an hour in terms of mileage took me closer to an hour and fifteen minutes. And then back again.

I got back in time to do some dashing. And chose not to. I had my mind set of doing a few errands. Like that bank that I mentioned above. And then the library to pick up two books. Then to the tire store. Where my favorite person there has also moved on. Yay change? I set up an appointment for tomorrow to get my tires rotated and my driver side front tire to be looked at for a possible puncture. I am of course prepared for it to not be fixable. That is my tire luck, generally.

Back at home I ate some lunch – a bagel with cream cheese. And in a bit of meta eating, I also used a little bit of everything bagel hummus for a few bites. Decent lunch!

Then, dashing. Dashing has not been as fiscally rewarding recently as it has been in the past. Part of that is because I am working less. I am quitting earlier and earlier in an attempt to a) have more time for me to putter, and b) to try to avoid the algorithm giving me a long drive for not enough money at the end of my shift – making me still not earn as much as I could be and also make me get home later than I really want to. And it gets dark so early! It didn’t seem to get this dark so early last year. But I am sure it did.

I am home now. Ready to eat more delicious hot dogs and baked bean stuff. And a side salad. Tomorrow, lasagna. And then Wednesday, more dog. Thursday will be turkey day! I am toying with the idea of doing something different with the turkey than just roasting it. Not deep frying, because other people will be eating it. We shall see how I feel come Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

Augustus for President: Thanks to advice from PvK, I bought a bunch of good, inexpensive pens. Woo hoo! But Staples didn’t have a clipboard/container thingy that appealed. Which sends me back to Amazon. I am not a fan of Amazon. Yet, I do have to spend my money carefully.

I found a place that lets people use a Tesla for a month at a time. I wrote them and they said they couldn’t guarantee FSD unless I gave them dates. And they didn’t, again, answer all of my questions. Poo on them. So I gave them dates. Will I get a response? Anything is possible.

It occurred to me that adding a little note to the questionnaire asking people if they want to help with the campaign would be a good idea. So I added it. Finding a box to use for a check box was more difficult that I had thought it would be. I realized I only have one keyboard layout here on my computer. Maybe one day, Apple will make the keys on their laptops digital so that when you change keyboards through software, the hardware changes to reflect that change as well.

Free Money!

How generous!

People confuse me. For instance, I put my recycling out and when I picked up the bin to put it back on my porch, there was thais water bottle in there. One that is worth $.05. Not a penny. Five pennies! So exciting!! Free money! And there was still water in it. Which I used to make a bowl wet in the sink. Nothing wasted. Woo hoo! Now, if only I can get my house mate to rinse her recyclables and put them in the right place. Sigh.

Speaking of recycling, I think I will put the trash out tomorrow. After I collect all the trash from the rest of the house. It has been a while. I will need to check what my account is up to at this point. Last time I checked there was enough for a least two trash collections. I guess we shall see.

Today has been an odd feeling day to me. I have felt a little spacey, ever since I got up. I had pretty intense dreams from the little I recalled when I woke up. Then, I basically did nothing until it was lunch time. For lunch, I had left over pizza from last night. Easy and fast and pretty tasty. I think I might like the deep dish pizza I got the time before this better. I don’t recall how it was priced. It doesn’t really matter at this point since I will be having left over turkey dinner stuff over the weekend anyway. And yes, I looked in the deep freezer and I have enough cranberries to make cranberry sauce for four people. I think. Depending on how much people want to use. I think I’ll make it all and see what happens. If that is what I do, I will need to, at some point, buy some more frozen cranberries.

1:30 pm rolled around and three of my helpers were right on time. The fourth was, once again, around 10 minutes late. I wonder why that is the case. The three did painting. The back stairs are all done except for the railings going up. And the back entry way is one huge step closer to being finished. Now, if only I can get them working on the clothes…

My other worked laid out some planks for the pathway in the side yard. And then lugged all the not so good wood out of the basement and added it to the growing detritus pile (luckily nothing too heinous or unsightly (though I will have to go out and check his work at some point)) in the backyard. He was feeling low energy, I was feeling low energy. So I decided that would be all he would do today. No plumbing for us!

Now I am at a crossroads. I am leaning towards going to Seneca Falls and visiting the Red Brick Pub again. And maybe the Fall Street Brewery. We shall see. First, I have to do some duo lingo and eat a little something. I don’t want to try more Buffalo chicken egg rolls tonight.

Augustus for President: I got all four of my workers to fill out the questionnaire. I hope I can read their responses. Two of them had extremely small writing. I have also ordered a few clipboards with pen holding attachments so that when the time comes to have meetings with people, I can give those out which will give them all something to do. Yay. The clipboards and pen holding attachments are supposed to arrive on Monday. I also asked them to look at the poster and two of them suggested that the font for the main text needed to be something more impactful. Two of them liked the Font “Impact.” The third liked “Apple Chancery.” I might take posters and forms with me tonight and see what happens. Maybe ask for more input on the poster and ask people to fill out the forms.

Fall Down, Go Boom

A friend fell today. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt so far as we could tell. Time will reveal if she did in fact hurt anything. It was kinda scary, as most falls are. She fell in the middle of the road, having missed the fact that she was stepping off of a curb, thinking she was continuing on the same plane. Cars stopped, people came to help. We got her back to her ride and hopefully she is lying down and has taken a lot of pain medication. No bueno.

Actually there was a notable event yeesterday while dashing. My first dash of the second shift was a two parter – a pick up from Walgreens and a pick up from CL Luffy. The money wasn’t great, but I didn’t care. I accepted. Then a note popped up about the Walgreens order. I went to hit “agree” but the car bounced and I hit something else instead and the order went away. And I got a ding for not “completing” that order. Grrr. If I cared, I would call Door Dash and complain. But I have done that in the past to no avail. So, why bother. It is only one. And in a hundred more dashes it will be erased. I still think that I ought to have gotten a lot of credit for the days that I have had 100% acceptance. Whatever. Door Dash is not the best organization to work for. But it does allow me to only work when I want to work. Which is great!!

The toys in the claw game seem to be Christmas related. Weird.

Today was one of my Saturdays. Woo hoo! When I was lying in bed, I was thinking that I really didn’t want to do much of anything today. And I didn’t. But I did. Weird, right?

Mostly, I just kicked back until about ten when I set my morning reminders to go off. I had a few and took care of them. Like printing out a few documents that I wanted JC to peruse and give me feedback on. More on that in the Augustus for President section below. I also did things like thaw some chicken wings for dinner tonight.

Eventually, I made it out of bed and headed out to run errands. First stop was the car wash. My car hadn’t had a bath in a while. And honestly, the car wash didn’t do so well on the bird poop. I don’t really care though. It is good enough for the time being. At the car wash place, I washed my two front mats and also did a little bit of vacuuming. Go me!

Next stop was Sweet Acres Creamery. I had seen something there that I thought might make a fun gift. There was no price on it, which was a red flag. And the actual price was definitely a red flag. I didn’t buy it. A trip for nothing. And I forgot to look and see if the cheese tasting bar was out. Poo.

Off to Harbor Freight. I wanted to get a spool for my long extension cord so if I use it, it doesn’t get tangled up again like it did before. I had one of these when I was using a corded electric mower and it wasn’t that useful. This one is for a cord if I end up having to use 120volt charging for the Tesla. 100 feet is a lot of extension cord! I need to see if it is better to put the plug to the wall on the inside or the outside of the spool. Thoughts are appreciated. I just watched a YouTube video that helped a lot!

Last stop for this set of errands was Wegman’s. My main goal was to get a frozen pizza. I ended up with a Newman’s Own as it was rated pretty highly by some online pizza pundits. And of course, I ended up buying a lot more crap. But I got out of there for under $50 which is always good.

Back home, I ate some lunch and did more little things from my reminders. Gosh I love them. They really help me to feel like I am doing stuff. Though I will admit that sometimes I put things on there just so that I can cross them off.

My next goal was to spend a little time with EC and JC. Turns out that they were peckish, so we met at Grounded. They had lunch, I had a hot chocolate. We talked about Thanksgiving. I think the plan was changed from eating at Geneva on the Lake, to making some sort of meal at their house. I will provide turkey, my favorite brussels Sprouts dish and a few other little things. They are providing appetizers, some sweet potato dish and wine. I think TC will be joining us. A productive and fun time!

At home again, I did more of my reminders. And suddenly, poof, it is time to do Duolingo, right the blog post and then cook pizza, wings and a little salad for dinner. Yippee!!

Augustus for President: JC is looking over the three docs I printed out for him, a draft of a possible poster for upcoming events here in Geneva, a potential letter to all the sitting Governors, and a draft of the Trip Question Form that I hope to use while doing the state capital tour next year. I also asked him to answer the questions on the Trip Question Form. Lastly, I created a small Filemaker DB for the answers when I start getting them.

Other things I accomplished – asked some questions of my campaign money guy (Hi KSR), looked into the best way to use a Tesla for the Capital City Trip, spoke with a person at Wegman’s about the campaign, tweaked the poster for the upcoming events in December (I hope to have three – all in one weekend),and added more thoughts to my thoughts and questions and actions database. Sounds like good set of accomplishments to me!

IRS Lives!

Another night of less than optimal sleep. I hate setting an alarm. I get so anxious about not waking up on time. Sigh. When I am president, I think I will have my assistants call me or knock on my door when I need to get up. I think that might be less intrusive than an actual alarm. I also think that the alarms that have large lights on them that just get brighter and brighter until one wakes and turns them off are pretty cool.

I did get to her house on time this morning. A little early of course. She was late. Life is that way. She also sat in the back seat, which was a little surprising. Not that I really care. But if she had told me ahead of time, I would have cleaned out the back seat for her. I think my car is too old to have heated seats in the back. And I didn’t know where the cup holders were – turns out there are holders in the door pockets. Lastly, she needed to borrow my charging cable because my car didn’t have a USB-A port which is what her cord needed. It was a long way to Olean. But it went pretty quickly. Easy drive. Nice weather. Lots of beautiful views. We really do live in a great part of the country!

On the way home, I stopped and charged for a bit at a Tops. It was good to have a rest from driving. They didn’t sell Pepitas. So I didn’t open the package of them that I have in the car as a gift for EC (and JC if he wants some and EC is willing to share). Sigh. The route I took home, sent me through Naples past BVT. I still have bad memories of that place. I know it was my fault. I oughtn’t to have said yes. I was just so excited to be doing paid work in the theatre. Long frustrating story that, if you go back far enough in these posts, you can find out all about it. Not my best moments.

At home, I had some lunch. I finally, after months it seems, finished my bag of sweet potato chips. Woo hoo! A weight has been lifted.

Gosh, my hotdogs and baked beans last night were about the best version of that I have made and had. This time I added sauerkraut, sour cream and mustard (dill) and boy howdy was it tasty! I also counted how many pieces I cut each hot dog into so that I can more better keep a decent ratio between hot dog and not hot dog. I think I will have more of that tonight.

I am not sure how appetizing this looks to anyone else, but…

I did a second shift of dashing and it wasn’t too bad. I ended up declining one because I didn’t want to drive to Lyons yet again for way too little money. Soon after that, I got a well paying offer to Seneca Falls. It might have been about the same distance, but the $ was completely different. I took that one and made it my last for the evening.

While I was waiting at Char Burrito, I noticed a message from the woman I delivered to Olean this morning. She was asking about trips to Rochester. And then she called me and told me that she wasn’t able to get an uber back to Geneva. Honestly, I am not surprised. It is a terrible ride. And I doubt there are many Uber drivers in Olean on a Wednesday night. I opted not to drive another four hours, in the dark, to go get her. That was around 5:30 pm. If I had gone, I wouldn’t have been back until around 9:30 pm. I feel a teeny bit guilty. I hope she figures it out!

Now I am home and falling asleep as I type this. But I want to eat a bit before going to sleep. Not that I am particularly hungry. I think it will be the last of the leftover pasta tonight instead of the delicious baked beans. I want to add some sort of sauce, but I am not sure what at this point. I found the shells with chick peas to be a tad dry for my taste.

Augustus for President: I had a reminder set up for me to call the IRS again today. I had put it on daily repeat, figuring that the IRS wouldn’t get their act together for another week. I was surprised when the message said my wait time would be between half an hour and an hour. It was about half an hour I think. I had a very nice person to help me. She said that a letter was in the mail and I ought to get it. Eventually. It really should just take three days, but I am not going to be expecting it for at least a week. But then I can finally get my bank account for the campaign going and start collecting contributions. I like that word better than donation. The campaign isn’t a charity. It is a group on a mission to make the United States and hopefully the world a happier and better place. Not great again, by the way…

Other than that, I did have a lot of thoughts that I added to the database. And I have decided that I will start a separate presidential blog post from this, my personal one, beginning in January of 2026. Tortoise steps rule!

I may change the start date of my tour to all fifty state capitals to Wednesday, February 11 2026 as that will be exactly 1000 days until the election. Thoughts are welcome!

No Apples for Me!

Today I did not pick apples. My friend SM asked me to help her get a few more apples off of her apple trees, the apples that were too high up for her. I was going to go help, but ended up not making it out of the house.

First, there was the whole, it’s Saturday, let’s get up late thing. That turned into – let’s read out fun book. And that led to lunch. Yay lunch!

I had leftovers from last night for lunch. I don’t know what sauce CL Luffy use in Gyu Don, maybe just teriyaki or a variant, but I find it delicious. I still have enough of that dish to have if for lunch tomorrow as well.

After lunch, three of the four helpers showed up. The guy who had been so enthusiastic was a no show. I will give him another opportunity next week but this is not looking good.

The women did a great job on the back stairs. They are almost done. They want to do another coat on the steps and maybe another coat on the railings. All of this means that I will have to get off my mental butt and start cataloguing the books that will live again on those shelves. And because I am slightly insane (in a good way), all I can think about is getting a few of the containers of crap from the tool bench and environs and bring them up into the living room and start putting like with like. I am so weird.

The ladies left at around 4:30. I had lost and then found my new fancy bookmark. And that meant (while it was lost) that I ought to keep reading.

Tonight I think I will do my accounts. After I do my evening Duolingo.

I am making pizza and wings again tonight. The pizza didn’t get a crispy crust last time. Maybe what I will try is after a good bit of cooking time, taking the pizza out and move it around the pizza stone a bit and see if that helps the crust to crisp up. The debate, as usual, is whether or not a salad will be part of the dinner equation.

Augustus for President: Well, that’s incredibly frustrating. It seems that some people’s answers/responses aren’t being captured by google Forms for whatever reason. PvK said she had answered some of the surveys. And one of my helpers said she had as well. But neither person’s answers showed up. So I wonder how many people have filled out the surveys and not had their responses show up. It is very strange. Grrr. So, I will either have to go premium with some survey app, which is expensive in every app I have seen. Or use Survey Planet maybe which looks mostly free. I don’t know. It is irking me though. In other words, don’t try to fill out surveys until I get this figured out.

My friend EL helped me get Powerpoint and Filemaker. I am excited to work/play with both!

Well, I was having problems with my html table that I am working on for the campaign website. And my friendly tech support guy there fixed the issue quickly. Some script problem on his end. Woo hoo!

Tesla Was Misinformed

Seen at a rest stop along route 86

So, I called Tesla to make sure that I could go to a place, drive a car and buy it the same day. The person I spoke with even checked with their manager and the answer came back: Yes. Yay! I tried to call the Oneida pick up place directly, but I didn’t find a way to do that. (Turns out that they have no direct phone number for whatever reason.)(This would have saved me a trip as it turns out.). The morning dawned…

First order of business, try to fix the windshield. I have done this a few times and it has worked ok. This time, the results were not optimal. Maybe I will try it again. I don’t know who to ask about it. Maybe Andy has something to say about it. Or the people at Advance Auto Parts. The kits aren’t cheap – $21 I think. Which is way more than I recall it being last time I did this. Anyway, I followed the steps and as I said, it turned out ok. Not great.

Next up, a quick trip to Turning Stone Casino. Why there? Because that is where the nearest Telsa Delivery center is. I have seen part of their parking lot filled with Teslas before. This time, when I arrived, they were all gone! I don’t know where they are parking them now. I went inside and there was no one at their little booth. I asked a man who looked like it was his (self appointed?) duty to guide people to what they were looking for. He took me up an escalator and into what seemed like a back hallway to a set of doors. He poked his head inside and spoke to the people inside. Eventually, two people came out.

The manager and who I guessed was the sales person spoke with me for a bit. I told them I had a 2 o’clock “test drive” but before that happened I wanted to make sure that I had not been given faulty information. It turns out that I had been given faulty information. Grr and double grr. They told me that the process took about a week and that didn’t include the ability to drive the car before purchasing it. The woman eventually left me alone with the sales guy. We went through a few scenarios and honestly, I was confused. It seemed like nothing we did lowered the monthly payments to a level that I felt was reasonable. And the lease option that was offered also was way more expensive than I had seen on the website. What’s more, my trade in couldn’t be used as a down payment in either case – though with some fudging, it seemed like it could have come off of the lease – but it would only lessen the number of payments I had to make but did not lower the amounts of the payments. Car buying sucks. Even through Tesla.

Which leaves me with my old car. About which I am not thrilled. They did say that I could (probably) drive to Mt. Kisco and get one same day. And I think they said Brooklyn. So frustrating. Oh, and my trade in isn’t going to be worth nearly as much as I had hoped. All in all, quite a disappointing experience. Moving on.

Before totally moving on, perhaps I will lease the new car and then sell my other car some other way. We shall see. I wanted to do a trade in because that was supposed to be easy. Hahahaha.

This is all new to me. Being able to think about the car buying experience. Or not just being able to think about it, but to ruminate. Usually, I am buying a car basically because I have to for one reason or another.

Since I was at the casino and it was lunch time, I opted to have lunch there. I had a pretty good, but ultimately messy burger. And decent, but lukewarm fries. Nice enough service. On my way out, a man at the bar asked if he knew me. I didn’t think he did. I told him I was running for president. He said, I thought you were in Georgia – or something like that. (Augusta is a city in Georgia, in case you didn’t know.) And I said, no, Maine! (Augusta is the capital of Maine)

Now I am home. Yippee.

Augustus for President: Maybe I’ll have to do my 50 states in 66 days trip again. A few times. Maybe take longer and visit three cities in each state: the capital, the largest city, and maybe a smallish town. (I need a downward limit for the smallest town. 1000?) I think I’ll look and see if I can find the paperwork for …And the Pursuit of Happiness: One Man’s Search for the American Dream and get that written and published. And maybe publish a book that compares the thoughts I collected in 2002 to thoughts I collect on one of these more recent trips. And another possible book I could write at some point about the process might be titled The Cost of Becoming President (of the United (ha) States). (Dis-United? Un-United? Divided States of America?)

A Day of This and That

Today was a dashing day.

My first dash was how I would like all of my dashes to be: low mileage, high pay, little downtime. My second dash was also decent. I even ended up quitting around 6 instead of 6:30! Then I wasted my time futzing around on my phone instead of writing my blog post. So dinner will be latish. Again.

I just thought this was cool!

Other than that, not too much exciting to report.

I did get a nibble from the “Help Wanted” sign that I posted in the front yard. He wrote me this morning. I replied this afternoon, he replied soon after that and I just replied again now. The list of crap that I would like done (which barely scratches the surface) was fairly long. I will be interested to see what he says next. So, that’s exciting…

My car has gotten crapped on by some birds. Aggressively I think. I went to Byrne Dairy to use their windshield cleaning stuff and the liquid reservoirs were all empty. Later I went to the newest local Byrne Dairy and they didn’t even have the reservoirs or the sponge and squeegee things. What is up with that? Has there been a change to filling stations and what they provide? No more free windshield cleaning stuff? Not even water? Weird. And sad. But not surprising. Pennies add up in a capitalistic society. I guess I need to go to the car wash again soon…

For lunch, I had the second half of my chicken salad sandwich from yesterday. And tonight for dinner I am having the last of the chicken, I hope. The last of the broccoli, I’m sure. And a side salad.

At least one person has taken me seriously and is coming up with some slogans for my Presidential campaign! Thank you AH!! What are all the rest of you doing to help the campaign? Hmm? Baby steps.

Two Different Dashes!

I managed to get up, take a shower, do my morning stuff (mostly Duolingo) and get out the door at a reasonable hour. Go me!

For naught. Or basically for naught. It was a bad first dash. It started off with bad omens. I turned down a ride for $7.75 for 14.1 miles. Um, no. I might have done it for $10. But I said no. And then my next dash was a no tip dash, so I made $2 for 15 minutes of work. And the rest of the shift, I didn’t make much money and I drove a lot. Boo. I even got home later than I wanted because the last dash I accepted took me over to way out of Geneva. Grrr.

I got home, ate some lunch and called back a member of the GLO board who had contacted me thrice. He needed help because his printer wasn’t cooperating – wasn’t printing envelopes. I didn’t want to troubleshoot his printer, so I offered him the use of the one that GLO lent to me. That didn’t go well. I thought that his computer was already connected to that printer. I was mistaken. And we didn’t have the cable we needed to enable him to connect to it easily. Poo. I offered to take the printer and the envelopes home with me and print them out. He wanted to transfer the printable file to me on a card. I told him to just email it to me. Much simpler.

The printing went ok. I didn’t take the time to figure out how to print envelopes from the paper tray, so ended up manually feeding them all. It was only 90+ so it wasn’t too onerous. Then back I drove to SM’s house. All of which really ate up my lunch/rest period.

My second dash was diametrically opposed to the first dash. My first offer was for $20 and it didn’t really stop except for two little crappy rides before my last two decent rides. And the last two, well, what rarely happens, happened. I had a long drive for almost enough money when another offer was presented to a similar location for a decent amount of money. So the two added together were a great amount for that trip. Oh, and during the second shift I also got a cash tip because the order got to him so quickly! Rock on Char Burrito!!

Instead of heading straight home, I went to the grocery store. I had a longish list. It turned out to be an expensive shopping trip. But I have enough food to last me through the weekend at least. It will be Tacos on Friday, barring strange unforeseen circumstances.

Now I am home. I have eaten, I have done my duolingo. And now I am going to turn off my brain for a while. Maybe play in a little bit. Anything is possible.

One of my favorite shirts!