Thanksgiving: Great! Wonderful afternoon with my son’s excellent friends, their beautiful children, their charming grandparents. Wish I could socialize with these folks 365 days a year.
Dog: Still alive. More or less.
Paying work: Some pending but none active, thank God.
Phones: Blissfully silent!
The NoMoRobo system that Cox finally, after years of lobbying, made available to its customers has been in place for two days. And it’s been two days of peace and quiet! One, count it (1) scam call got through, this one with one of the weirdest Caller IDs I’ve seen. On two lines:
V123119420100687
1602875-9937
The second line evidently is a spoofed local number. The top number is emitted by a system called “V-dialler,” commonly used by crooks. Why it wasn’t blocked? Possibly because the series of figures represents a kind of time & date stamp (down to the second), which would mean there would many thousands of V-numbers to get registered in the blocking system. At any rate, that particular series got sent off to NoMoRobo. Unknown whether that’s useful, but typing the figures into NoMoRobo’s web form takes all of about 30 seconds…so, voilà.
Another nuisance call came through at ten after 9:00 this evening. It was intercepted. The bastards call at all hours, so the fact that the call is intercepted and forwarded after one ring is a problem: it doesn’t stop them from jangling you up, interrupting whatever you’re doing or even waking you out of a sound sleep. You could probably stop that simply by turning off the ringers on the phone (though I don’t think mine can be completely turned off). But that would mean you’d miss calls from friends and family, unless people could be trained to speak into your voicemail and wait to see if you hear and pick up.
The little dog survived Thanksgiving Day. Most of today she’s been sorta OK, though in the last hour or so she’s had some slippage. She just walked over to the chair where I’m sitting and fell down. And now she…what? She gets up, walks into the corne3r, and appeaers to be lost. She’s sniffing the floor like she’s trying to track something. And there she goes dowbn the hall, fo0llowed by a very puzzled Ruby. I’d better get up and see what’s going on now.
….
Hmmm… Having some kind of episode. She’s very weak. These passages come and go, evidently in response to the emanations or not of the adrenal gland’s hormones. Now she’s shivering. Poor little beast.
Carried her out to the backyard, where she peed and then fell over trying to take a dump.
So, however you look at it, the future is brief for this little dog. We can let her limp along, I guess, as long as she has more good days than bad. That, I expect, will not be for much longer. This is the second day in a row when she’s had an episode that brought on collapse or near-collapse.
…
But it’s late. I tire. Tomorrow is another day. I guess.