I mentioned in the post about the hearing aids that while I have a hard time understanding certain consonants, my actual hearing was almost as good as my young grandson’s, to the effect that I recognize some of the neighborhood dogs’ barks to the point of knowing if a bark is from a local or “just visiting” dog.
Sadly, one of the neighborhood dogs is not going to be part of the late night tapestry for a while, if ever. While waiting for sleep I heard a particularly long and loud effort that was cut short by 3 or 4 gunshots from a medium caliber pistol, followed a few seconds later by 4 more shots. If the dog was shot it was deadly, because I didn’t hear the high-pitched yelps of your typical wounded dog. What I’m worried about is the last 4 shots sounded like they may have been from a different gun, a larger caliber than the first gun but still not a large caliber weapon. On a slightly happier note those were the first gunshots I heard in the area for many weeks.
There were a lot of gunshots during the first couple of months of the pandemic. There were many weeks where I heard gunfire nearly every night. I’m not going to say there was a link, but some of my neighbors are not very bright and may have thought they could shoot the virus, or more likely instead of exercising their limited social skills to handle conflicts they just shot things or other people. But in recent weeks until the other night there were very few gunshots close enough to hear. Now I don’t know if that means the people shooting were “detained” or just out of ammo, or got anger management, or what, I just know that there wasn’t any shooting going on within my earshot, pardon the pun.
And on a Monty Python note (now for something completely different) we took delivery on a new couch this morning. It’s a collaborative effort between us and my son, which we are paying him back for when we get the mess with the inheritance trust straightened out. But, it is a really nice couch with 2 reclining sections that are each big enough to snuggle together on, not that Mrs. the Poet and I can do much snuggling in our conditions between her back and my hips and knee.
I’m pretty sure I mentioned this in an earlier post, but the costs of keeping the trust are now outweighing the benefits of keeping it. The last 2 years the costs of filing the complex tax return have exceeded the tax benefits of having the trust since there wasn’t much paper loss we could claim for taxes. The biggest issue is the trust is getting depleted to the point where we are mostly in bonds now instead of more liquid stocks, and those do not have the swings and drops that were giving us tax refunds on paper losses. But now we are just getting ready to transfer what’s left to what is laughingly referred to as a “high yield savings” account at my credit union. “High yield” in this case means almost 1% APR return. Yay 🏳️🏳️🌈🚩 In other financial news, the IRA account that pays my “allowance” will be able to pay that for another 20-30 years depending on how they do the COLA on my allowance, I’m getting $200/mo at the moment, which is subject to increase as needed. That $200 is the benefit used to predict the 30 year time span for the account, and obviously with getting SS my needs for an allowance are going to be radically diminished, so this is probably going to get passed on to my kids should it turn out that I am actually mortal. Also it turns out that $200/month is the new minimum amount I need to take out to avoid getting a huge tax penalty.
OK I’m back, I just took a TV break to see how the couch in the new spot does for watching TV during the day, which is the situation for most of the TV watching I do during the racing season. Daytime TV during the week is still as dismal as I remembered, but the watching experience outside of the program was much improved. We used to get a big glare from the dining room windows that washed out the picture on the flat screen. When we were watching on the CRT it wasn’t as big an issue because the curved screen didn’t have the reflection problems we have now with the flat screen, but with the new couch facing the TV instead of off to the side the only thing reflecting in the screen is us watching TV. And since I don’t glow or otherwise emit light (yet) there isn’t anything distracting from what’s actually on TV. And the new couch is very comfy even snuggling next to Mrs. the Poet.
And maybe there won’t be a post on my birthday tomorrow because I will be having breakfast at Denny’s and dinner at Red Robin and doing transit and Lyft all day, transit to Denny’s and Lyft to Red Robin because Mrs. the Poet is coming with me for dinner, where we will both get alcohol with our meals and maybe I’ll get lucky.
Witch on a Bicycle 