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Bliss

I think that is so sweet.

May 11,2026

Betty

It looks as if they will get that pool table after all?

Another surprise was our electricity going out at 9:40 last night. We have plenty of flashlights and batteries, but the things I liked best were two camping lanterns. I bought them last December after Sandra (MadSnapper) wrote about battery-powered lamps. Thanks, Sandra!

Amazon

They were a lot better than flashlights, so I ordered two more today.

I also decided to check out our emergency radio. They kept telling us to have one to tune into the local county station in case of wildfire or other emergencies. Apparently blackouts don’t count, but it was a good idea to remember where the radio was and to try it. The station came in loud and clear and kept saying there was no emergency now.

Amazon

The electricity came back at 11, which was another surprise. I expected a much longer blackout.

May 10, 2026

Betty

Bub is nicer than Betty sometimes is. She is lucky to have him.

Here Cosmo gets an aswer he wasn’t hoping for:

Shoe

May 9, 2026

Betty
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I hope Bub doesn’t get upset because Betty is good at pool and he isn’t. He’s so sweet I want him to be happy. I’m amused I feel so protective of him.

On the other hand, I’ve been mentally celebrating all day. I’m chuffed because Andy’s flip phone is again connected to the internet up on the land. I set that up for him a long time ago, but recently it didn’t seem to be working. Sometimes we can connect by phone when he’s in the house, but sometimes we can’t.

Kaitlin and Torben have set up Starlink there, and that is working fine — so I used his phone down here to review how to connect to it again. I was so confident when I went up yesterday that it would be a piece of cake. But I was stopped for a minute when I looked at the keyboard.

I seldom send texts from the phone so even though I remembered how to type lower case letters, I couldn’t remember how to type the capital letters and symbols that passwords need. Arghh! But I sat there for a minute and it came back to me. Use the * button for symbols, the # button for caps. Then I fumbled a few times trying to get the password in because, of course, it wouldn’t tell me what I had already typed. I kept making mistakes. So I had to get pen and paper and methodically write down each individual character I put in, and that worked. So now Andy can do WiFi calling from the land again.

Ok, is that really profound enough for me to be chuffed all day? Yes! The other day a friend of mine — who knows I have trained myself not to get frustrated when problems come up — asked me how I do it. Answer: constant positive reinforcement. I celebrate every little thing I handle well, and if I don’t handle it well, I figure out how to “fine tune the system.” I cheerfully admit it sounds silly, but it works for me.

On the same note, when I was searching through old posts for a quotation I wanted, I came across this post from January, 2008: Are You Enjoying the Process? I had been trying to resolve a problem with health insurance for seven months and was starting to make progress. It was time to phone and try to move things along a little more.

That, of course, meant time-consuming interactions with automated voices asking for information, being put on hold for long periods, and dealing with agents who weren’t trained to deal with the problem in question. Patience with bureaucracy has never been my strong suit, so it was a great chance to devise a better method of dealing with it. And that was the key…focusing on my own performance rather than letting my mood depend on how this interaction turned out.

That was 18 years ago, and I do seem to be getting better at it. Sometimes silliness pays.

May 8, 2026

Betty

Ziggy

May 7, 2026

Betty
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But Andy and I can definitely relate to this comic:

Moderately Confused
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And this one is another reminder that we can’t believe everything we think. It’s best to check our assumptions.

The Other Coast

May 6, 2026

But first: Bub is happy about this. 🙂

Betty
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Back to Spanish:

Garfield en Español
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Garfield
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Peanuts en Español
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Peanuts
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Peanuts en Español
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Peanuts
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Peanuts en Español
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Peanuts
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May 5, 2026

Yesterday was a quiet moodling and exploring day.

So you see, imagination needs moodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
–Brenda Ueland

I read about what is going on in the U.S. and the world, of course, and puttered around some while I thought about it.

I also wanted to order a couple of things from Amazon and wondered if I could spend some of my accumulated reward dollars (I use their credit card) in spite of the fraud problem. No problem. I could even still use their card — I don’t know what my new number will be, but they do. They showed me the last four digits, but I’ll have to wait until the card comes for the rest of the information. That was a surprise.

I also went to the credit card site and saw that the fraudulent purchases were still pending. I’ll watch that from time to time.

Then when I was reading some posts, I read this one that, among other things, talked about Maurice Sendak’s final interview with NPR, which was warm, loving and sad. Sendak said he had hated his parents when he was young, but his artistic brother had saved him. Now he loved life even though he was grieving the loss of most of his friends. That made me curious about his background — why he had hated — and I found this Guardian article, written about the same time as the interview. It was an eye-opener because it was more about Sendak’s anger.

I asked Claude about the stark difference in tone, and its answer concluded with,

The Same Man, Two Different Masks
What’s most interesting is that both interviews are clearly authentic — Sendak isn’t performing for one and being genuine in the other. Rather, the two pieces together give a fuller portrait than either alone. The NPR Sendak is real: the man who loved deeply, feared isolation, and found beauty in his maples. The Guardian Sendak is equally real: the man who named his dog after Herman Melville, did a monster jigsaw puzzle, and called the Ayatollah about Salman Rushdie. Together they capture someone who was, simultaneously, one of the most tender and most cantankerous figures in American letters.

All in all a satisfying day. It reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes’ final cartoon. (Click on image for higher resolution.)

Calvin and Hobbes

Hurray for moodling and exploring!

May 4, 2026

Betty
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I also liked these comics:

Ziggy

Pickles
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Pickles
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May 3, 2026

Betty
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So Betty and Bub are having an adventure looking at smart toilets. My adventure here is of a different sort.

As I was getting ready for bed Friday night I received an email, supposedly from my credit card company, about a fraud alert. I didn’t open the email but went to the site — sure enough, someone had just ordered over $600 of Amazon purchases. I called the card company and they canceled the card and are sending out new ones. They won’t get here for 5-10 business days, and eventually I need to change the card information for any recurring charges. I do need to give companies the temporary number from a different credit card if the charges occur before the new card arrives.

But when I tried to use a second card as the temporary number, I noticed that it expired the end of April. So I phoned that company and they will send out new cards in a couple of days. They estimate they will be here Monday. It’s good I checked because we had planned to use that card grocery shopping today. We do have a third card here at home for a backup, and it was nice to know about it before we went to the store.

Also when I phoned Andy up on the land he said he was bundled up because it was about 35 degrees outside. And it had snowed a bit.

Life keeps conspiring to keep us on our toes.

May 2, 2026