Early 2 Rise

Happy July Fools Day. Aka Canada Day. aka my middle sister's anniversary. This month's calendar pic is a flying bumble bee.



Set the alarm half an hour early, but as usual I did not need to. Traffic was not stop and go - Lawrence was close to 50 mph all the way to Kaiser, with fewer than the usual stop lights. Commuter tags meant I did not have to worry about which lane I was in. On Lawrence, the diamond lane is the one on the right, which is stupid because you have to slow down for all the merging traffic, and people have to stay out of it till the last minute when they want to exit so they cut in front of you.

Had half an hour to kill, just hung out in the cardio waiting room. Pacemaker check took 5 minutes, all is well, 12 years left on the battery.

As planned, across the street to Starbucks where I got a latte because the barista didn't know how to make a mocha, apparently. Tiny shop, no indoor seating free, but lots of tables outside. Fired up the laptop for a bit.

This shopping center has a massive Korean supermarket, so I went in search of Korean beef ribs and marinade. Bought a lot of beef, not enough marinade.

Home, brought in the garbage and garden bins, the recycled bin wasn't collected till about 6 pm.

Put two small packets of sliced beef in the fridge freezer and set up the ribs in a glass pan to marinate in bulgogi sauce. Smells yummy.

Tivo had two Lone Ranger episodes, and one To Tell The Truth. There were storm chasers being rained on heavily in Twitch.

Lunch was a Marie C beef pot pie. I need to adjust the microwave settings down a bit,

Lots of calls from Indian pimps, all for the same job in Irving, TX.  I gave them all a hard time about not reading my auto-reply messages which says I'm looking for things in the south SF Bay area. And no pimps third parties.

But the big project was unpacking the Arlo camera setup. It's a base unit which plugs into my router, each of the two cameras had to have a battery installed and charged. Double-sided Velcro on the back of the two magnetic mounts worked fine. The mounts have a non-magnetic flat back, and a dome-shaped very strong magnet the camera snaps onto. Positioning the camera is tricky because of how strong that magnet is, and the shape of the back of the camera wants to fit straight on with the dome.

In order to do anything, I had to log into the arlo site or the phone app. It kept sending me in circles - said my password was wrong, but when I asked for a reset it said my email was not registered. They don't make it easy to find the support phone number, and once you do it's a 15-minute wait on a line where the music is at a low volume but the "your call is important to us" prompts are at 200%. Once I got someone on the line, she figured out that the trouble is I have a netgear login, and Arlo (a netgear company now) has the email addresses but not the passwords from when they used the same database. So I had to create a new arlo.netgear presence. Which took about 6 steps more than it needed to.

The base is very slow to connect to the cameras, but once connected they stay in contact. The cameras have a built in motion sensor, which triggers them to start recording, so I will probably take the Samsung motion sensors off the carport and front porch. The base can store stuff on a USB drive, but I had to use an online formatter to get my 128GB drive in FAT32 format. Windows wants to use NTFS or ExFAT, which the Arlo doesn't recognize. Their support site incorrectly says they don't support USB 3.0.

After the final garbage truck came through I put the bins up in front of the shed, and pulled the car to the end of the driveway, so the mobile cat groomer can pull her van in behind me tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I was not sure if she needed Spook to be in a carrier or not, but just in case I searched for the soft sided one I'd gotten for Spot, which ought to be easier to get Spook in and out of. I looked everywhere over the course of several hours. Finally found it in the hall closet where I park the vacuum cleaners. Sprayed it with pheromone and put it on the livingroom floor.

Spook has been a lot quieter with the spray/diffusers. And she has been grooming herself more too. But she still isn't a lap cat.

For dinner, nuked a packet of rice, arranged 5 of the ribs on a cooling rack over the glass pan, put the rest of the ribs & marinade in a freezer bag and into the freezer. Baked the ribs for 10 minutes on one side and 5 on the other at 450° and they were perfect. Strawberries with only a little cool whip for dessert.

Watched some boxing. One match the winner pummeled the loser into submission early in the second round, the other match went all 12, with the loser being hit>300 times compared to about 25 he landed. The opposite of a glass jaw.

TMZ finished my Tivo evening. Miley Cyrus is way too sexy to have been Hannah Montana. Taylor Swift's eyes are like searchlights. And I don't understand tattoos covering a whole body. In multiple layers. Why do people do that?

One of the mistakes of the orthodox judaism I was brought up with was a prohibition on all piercings and tattoos. Turns out the prohibition was against getting those as a shout out to other gods. So Jesus tattoos are out, and Jesus earrings. But butt antlers and "Mom" would be fine, as well as the emerald and sapphire earrings I gave Mom.

Plans for tomorrow:
11 am, Nancie's online on FB with Tuesdays at Two. She's in NC, three hours ahead of CA
1 pm, Cristina and the mobile cat groomer van.
And the rest of the day letting Spook show how mad she is at me.