Blog Entry: October, 2023

 Hello, All....

It’s been way too long. For this blog, and for many other things. It’s been a 3 – ring circus here for most of this year. But onward. Time to catch up. It’s going to be a long one, so grab a cup of coffee, tea, or whatever is your relaxant of choice.

I have good news, and I have bad news. Let’s get the bad out of the way first.

The last few months I’ve felt like this…

For some time now, we’ve been wanting to get out of this house, and especially out of this neighborhood, and general area. Where we live, we are surrounded on 3 sides by very busy thoroughfares. To our south are two major highways; I-70, and Missouri Highway 40. To our west is Sterling Ave, a very busy 4-lane roadway. To our north is 39^th Street, a very busy main roadway.

During the day it’s not too bad other than a few butt-heads here and there with their loud “boom cars.” Night is a different story. That’s when all the drag-race, loud / no muffler, and overpowered motorcycle crowds wake up – and do their level best to keep everyone else within 3 miles awake, too. And of course, there are still those fools with more speakers mounted on the back deck in their cars than Municipal Stadium has.

When we bought this house 20 years ago, this was a pretty decent neighborhood. Not so much, now.

Besides all that, we’re getting to that point in our lives where enthusiasm is waning for mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and/or spending thousands of dollars, and busting our butts on maintaining a house. I’ve just turned 75. Jo is 73. So yeah, all the above is not as much fun as it used to be.

We’ve investigated a few of those “retirement communities/apartments” in the area. But damn! Rent runs anywhere from $1700 to well over $3000 A MONTH!! And it seems they raise it every year. Our sister-in-law moved into one of those after her husband (Jo’s brother) passed away last year. She was paying $1750 / month, but she just moved because her rent was going up to around $2100 / month.

These people are nothing but a bunch of damn thieves stealing every last dollar from us older folks; getting all they can before we kick the bucket.

With us depending solely on our Social Security income, we’ve pretty much had to forget that option – as well as another house in this insane realty market (plus we’d still have to mow the lawn).

So, the search continues. We had some good news on the SS income subject, but more on that later.

We’ve been doing a lot of downsizing, but we still have a way to go. It’s amazing how much stuff you collect in 20 years!

In other news….

Our wonderful doctor that we’ve been seeing since our first house retired recently, and he and his wife moved to Colorado. We wish them well, and hope they have a lot of good years together. But we sure miss him – he was the best doctor we’ve ever had.

Let’s see…. What else… Oh, yeah. Computers…. 🙄😫😖

First, my favorite laptop died – well, sort of. It boots up fine, but (just to make my life more “interesting”) it will randomly just shut down. I have Poser 11 on it, and it does (did) a fantastic job with rendering. Now, it’s pretty much useless.

I contacted the company’s support (Origin – it’s one of those custom-built jobs), but no one returned my call. I had to send a rather irate email to get anyone’s attention.

To make a long story short, I exchanged several emails with one of their (supposedly) upper-level techs, and he concluded it was a faulty battery. Seems odd to me since it’s plugged into the 120V power 99.9% of the time – which I explained to him. Still, he says it’s the battery. I’m going to take it to Microcenter and see what they think. I’d really like to have this machine back in service.

And then….

For the last several weeks, it’s seemed like this main computer has been getting slower and slower with stuff like file transfers, file synchronization, and even opening certain files. So I did a scan.

Found a virus. It’s called Bundler:Win32/CandyOpen and it’s a nasty little bugger. And not easy to find or eliminate.

I posted an image on Renderosity (LINK HERE), and one of my buds found a video on YouTube which I’ve included here in case you need it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qif9idIoylw

Anyway, I followed the video, and managed to evict the little monster. Woo-Hoo!

But I must have pissed someone off, because the next day, I had like 14 – 15 SPAMS show up in my junk folder. Then I saw this one:

I deleted it – I don’t even HAVE a webcam, so I know this is just BS – one of those extortion SPAMs that seem to be popular lately.

Then, today, I got this:

Jeeze, guy… You wanna escalate? You’ve picked the wrong dude to “F” with, Homie…

Anyway besides this nonsense I’ve had tons of other crap to deal with lately. Most of it is just stuff with the house, cleaning up all the branches and crap out of all the trees in the back, getting cold pizza delivered 90 minutes after ordering it, and so on.

For some GOOD NEWS..

I was doing some poking around on the Social Security website and found out that Jo is eligible for “Spousal Benefits” that amount to half-again the monthly amount we already get, and Parts A and B of Medicare. Heck, I just have Part A – but that will change after the first of the year during open enrollment. I’ll be getting Part B as well.

Hopefully, things will continue to improve. We’re hoping to get out of here in the spring / summer of 2024. And hopefully, we’ll all still be here by Election time, assuming our world "leaders" haven't converted the planet into a smouldering, radioactive pile of rock.

Just a quick bit on my TNA story… It’s been a bit difficult to squeeze in a bit of writing and rendering with all this other stuff going on, but hopefully a new page (maybe 2) before October ends. Wish me luck!

That’s it for now. Hope everyone stays safe and healthy!

Until next time..

Rod