Running Bear's August 2023 Coffee Shop

[TLOC]

Good morning from a cooler WIsconsin. The high today is mid-80’s but we are going north and west to the truly neat Minneapolis, Minnesota. Volleyball on the campus of the U of M for 3 of a 4 game weekend. Because rooms at the hotels we would normally use are full Saturday and Sunday nights we will leave after the Badger game on Saturday. We will head north even further to Duluth. We are there Saturday and Sunday Nights. Monday at this time is up in the air. She will try to get us a room on Monday night on Mackinac Island, which really is a nice step back in time! No we will not stay at the Grand Hotel! I am not cheap but I don’t have a need to wear a jacket at dinner. After that Cleveland for an overnight. The Rock and Roll HOF and a couple other things are on the list. If there are no rooms on Mackinac we will cut off the route around Hurley, WIsconsin, stay overnight in Northern WIsconsin or the UP making our way home by at least then Wednesday. We are wanderers when car traveling, rarely has anything been set in stone since I retired.

Temperatures here and in Minneapolis today should top out around 84. So a good traveling day and it will not be unpleasant to get out and stretch our legs around the 1/2 way mark. The travel is straight up I-94 and traffic should be ok once we are beyond the WIsconsin Dells exits. We won’t be in a hurry as the 1st game is at 4 and it’s only a 4.5 hour trip! Plenty of time.

enjoy the day

 

[kbkchooch]

Good morning gang!

Welcome to half day Friday, where I get to escape work at 1p.m.! Not sure what is on the agenda yet for the afternoon but it ain't work!

Musical rant coming up. My wife controls the music in the car; we have Sirius Radio and we also have it on Alexa at home. I'm generally OK with whatever she selects, although in the car, if the disc jockey begins to give a 15 second background spiel on a song, she switches the channel. So I end up hearing the last minute of a lot of stuff instead of whole songs! But my real rant is when we have '60's rock on the Alexa. I might be enjoying several songs from Spencer Davis, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Deep Purple and like tunes, when they throw a Neil Sedaka or "I'm Henry the 8th" in there and spoil the mood.
End of rant.

Wife is happy with country or rock, my musical tastes vary a bit more, from cool jazz to heavy metal to acapella and everything in between. Usually it's a Youtube play list, or XM radio.

Speaking of acapella, here's one for Troy, Geoff Castelucci's final note is sub-human!

BBL

 

[santafewillie]

Good Morning All. Clear and a warm 83°, might get to 107° later on. Yesterday was a bit cooler at just 102°. NWS is still predicting just double-digit temperatures beginning Sunday, but with triple-digits returning for the Labor Day weekend. Meanwhile the heat advisories go on. The AQI is stubbornly remaining in the moderate zone at 59, but that's mainly because there hasn't been any wind to speak of.

Pulmonologist visit yesterday went well, won't see him for another six months. Pleased to note that next week, I only have a dental hygienist appointment, but three medical appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday after Labor Day, so I get a 12 day break. One of the doctor visits is just a routine follow-up to the cataract surgery; should be my last one there. Another is a follow-up to the stent placement from last year, then I'm back to just routine scheduled visits for a while with PCP. Some of the specialist visits will be pending.
Weekly grocery trek went as planned, I was able to get everything at the one store and didn't have to go elsewhere. We did however go look at Canon printers at Best Buy. As expected, the one that my grandson recommended at $299.95 looked good. Salesman looked up the # of pages that could be printed with the cartridges and came up with 2500 for the color and 3500 for black. I already knew from looking up the replacement cartridges that they are $80 each, meaning replacements would cost more than a new printer when the time comes. However we only print 100-125 pages a year, so the printer/cartridges might outlive both of us!

Out in the train shed yesterday, I looked at my "to do" list and came up with this. In January 2022, I built this structure and finally planted it in November. It is a Walther's Antiques Barn.

It needs a fence. I planned a chain-link one and debated which way to go. Using the Woodland Scenics kits was too restricting and that route was going to be expensive due to the length needed. Scratch-built was going to be real time consuming. Then Chet threw a brand new Walther's chain link fence kit into the box with structures earlier this year. I still had a half kit from over 30 years ago, so that is my answer.

OK, the plastic used is a different color in the newer kit, but that is easily fixed by painting the old stuff.

I did all of my measuring yesterday and I will start drilling fence post holes today.

Sherrel - Some of the medical visits have been entirely voluntary on my part. The cataract surgery for example has required 8 visits so far with one more to go. Fortunately some of those visits were early on the grocery trek days, so the trips were twofold. The ones that bother me were at the pulmonologist because he botched two oximetry tests and the four days in the emergency room/hospital when they never found out what caused the blood loss. Those were all wasted time to me. The vascular surgeon might be mainly to say that there is nothing wrong, just symptoms of aging. That's what he told me the last time my PCP sent me over to see him.
Troy - Back in the days before the fellow who ran the LHS retired, he told me that only AMEX charged him 3%. Visa and Mastercard charged him 1.5%. So I started paying him cash only so he could make a little bit more. Then he started to throw in some freebies here and there, like a bottle of paint or glue; or an extra 5% off an engine. It's too bad that he retired.
I do have Bluetooth on the hearing aids, but I don't carry the phone unless I am in the car.

RE: the music rant. Wife changing stations is easier than getting into an argument. The Alexa thingy is just a convenience thing to her. I have over 80,000 mp3's on the computer, with over 20,000 on my iPod in the train shed, so I can listen to whatever I want. I mainly listen to hard rock; cannot stand talk radio. Not sure that the new Lexus has a CD player.

Everybody have a great day.

 

[Patrick]

Almost going home time as all my Fridays are short days.

Next Friday I'm off, but will have to work Saturday. I know it's a holiday weekend, but we aren't going anywhere anyway. The following Friday is the start of Vacation. Still tossing about where or if we're going anywhere. Looks more likely, I'll be at home painting the inside.

Have a good weekend!

 

[troyphoto]

Well, howdy there internet people,

It's !*@$#$%^* Troy again

It's one of those days with annoying little crap setting me off.

Wife came down last night to ask if cell service was down. I checked the website, yep... Should be fixed today. Maybe.

Headed out to Kroger this morning with a list. Went to get my diet Dr. Pepper.... and the soda aisle had new shelf tags with QR codes.... scan and preload this coupon to your Frequent Shopper app... I don't use the Frequent Shopper app, and I don't even remember my password to even attempt it... so I grabbed a 24 pack cube that looked like it was a decent price without the #$%!@#$ scan to save requirement.

Yes, I have the savings user card on my keyring. Just let me swipe that and give me the discount

Get to the self checkout, and nope... it doesn't drop the price. And, being Friday, all the checkouts are backed up... @#$%@#$% FINE! Take my money. It's not worth wasting other people's time to get a clerk over and back out the purchase before I pay. (Hey, the debit card worked... should have tried the credit card just to see if they were going to add 3% too )

Got home, and realized I left one of my bags on the little carousel... !*@$#$%^*

Go back, and stand in line at the customer service desk for over 15 minutes as two kroger employees go over this woman's receipt with her. She'd preloaded all of her coupons to her app on the phone, and had about a dozen items that didn't get rung up with the coupons... three of them weren't in the system at all... despite her saying she loaded the coupons to the app.

(Yes, my bag of chocolates and can of peanuts was waiting for me.)

Her experience, plus my own generated an email off to Kroger. I'm not the type to preload a bunch of coupons. I make a list, I go shop, knowing where everything is. Yes, my list is built in shopping order. Efficiency. Get in, get out. I'm not about to take time to scan codes and add stuff to my phone app. This is grocery shopping, not a video game.

I just set up a frequent shopper account at Meijer, (think regional WalMart) just down the road the other direction - About half a mile closer than the Kroger. Their barrier to entry for getting grocery deals isn't as steep as Kroger's is becoming.

So, I'm going to chill by painting some little toy soldiers... or maybe work on the display board diorama for this army. I'll put on a gaming podcast and forget about Kroger for a while.

 

[Boris]

can’t handle talk or media programs on politics at all anymore.

Tom: I can still take reading the NYT or WAPO on line, because I can bypass really offensive articles. With pod casts or TV News, it's harder to react, and I get unnecessarily angry. That's why I try to stick to sports and other business news, and even that sometimes gets crazy.

I don't know if you have access to the Athletic, it's owned by the Times, and behind a pay wall, unless you have a subscription to the NYT, but Rosenthal's article about the Orioles and the Angelos family fits right in with what you were commenting on a few posts ago. Possibly, the tide is changing, (I doubt it), due to the recent behavior of ownership in Oakland, Milwaukee, Chicago and Baltimore, as well as other sports. You don't get to play unless you are a multi-billionaire, and they all cry poverty, and hide behind the "Principles of Capitalism". The reality is that they are bullies that threaten to take your past time away if you don't make financial concessions to them and enable them to get richer...

 

[Bruette]

Sherrel, I like CDs too!

No CD player in my Equinox. I use YouTube on my phone connected through the radio, I love it! YouTube has just about everything, and it assembles playlists based on my past picks. It does have commercials, but most can be skipped after five seconds.

I used to have an Amazon premium service for $24/year. I liked it because I could upload my own music. After I uploaded all my music, they discontinued the service! That still has me POed!

 

[Sirfoldalot]

I have over 80,000 mp3's on the computer,

WILLIE - That's 222 twenty four hour days of continuous music at 4 min per song - not counting the iPod! HoW the he** do you know what you want to listen too?

TROY - Every now and then I have one of those kind of days - I feel for you!
What drives me up the wall is to grab something like chips marked at $1.99 only to find at the checkout that it is only if you buy FOUR -- #$&^%(*&* !

 

[chadbag]

Radio: I don't listen to talk radio or politics. I used to 30 years ago. But now it just raises the blood pressure.

The only time I listen to the radio is in my car and now I am listening to an "80s, 90s, and whatever" station that mostly lpays "classic rock and pop form the 80s and 90s, but also regularly will slip in a 60s or 70s song and also regularly will slip in the occasionally more modern song. I listen to it mainly for the banter from the DJs and the music as background music. Both the daytime DJs were previously on a classic rock station I would have on in the car and moved to this new station after some intrigue. I am not always paying attention to the song but often will sng along with the oldies if I my mind is wandering while driving.

I also sometimes, when in the wife's car that has CarPlay, will tune into a German based online radio group that has a Prog Rock station -- Radio Bob (not to be confused with BOB FM, which is the "80s, 90s, and whatever" station that is owned by a nationwide radio conglomerate and I think uses that BOB FM tag on several of their stations across the US)

 

[PRR Modeler]

Afternoon All,

I started out today with a walk at 77F and slightly breezy. It was a slog to finish it after 10 days of not regularly walking. I did some inside and outside chores after breakfast. We were told (name withheld) that we may get a home visit from FWC to check on our animals. They are the state licensing agency for pet skunks. Youngest grandson is here now. I'm not sure what's on the agenda tomorrow.

I talked to Phil for a little bit today, and he said he would call Sherrel.

TomO- Great layout photos. We're the same here regarding politics so we usually leave it alone, but for some reason MOH feels it necessary to read stories to me about things.

Louis- Great photo. I have a tin plate of one of the train marshalling areas for an Army-Navy game.

Joe- That blows.

Troy- I would have raised a ruckus.

Sherrel- You should get a call from Phil today. I really liked ABBA back in the day.

Willie- Nice looking barn.

I hope everyone has a good night.

 

[Bruette]

Yo Louis: Exerpt Ken Rosenthal's article about Cheap John Angelos crying poverty (From the Athletic).
"
Don’t you just love it when major-league owners cry poor? John Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles’ managing partner, must think people are not paying attention, or are just plain dumb.

Angelos told The New York Times that Orioles fans can pretty much forget about young stars such as catcher Adley Rutschman and infielder Gunnar Henderson becoming long-term fixtures the way Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken Jr. were in Baltimore."...

Not surprising, eh? What a jerk.

Spoiled rich kids, you got to love them!

In fairness to the Angelos family, they can't forget Albert Bell, Bobby Bonilla, and others. All the money they spent trying to buy a championship and not one world series appearance to show for it.

I'm not surprised. This is part of the new reality of professional sports.

If all goes well with the Orioles' young stars, they project to be a two hundred million dollar+ team payroll. Baltimore cannot support that.

We must keep developing young talent and make smart trades to bring in more top prospects. The days of lifelong Orioles are long gone.

 

[TLOC]

Well, howdy there internet people,

It's !*@$#$%^* Troy again

It's one of those days with annoying little crap setting me off.

Wife came down last night to ask if cell service was down. I checked the website, yep... Should be fixed today. Maybe.

Headed out to Kroger this morning with a list. Went to get my diet Dr. Pepper.... and the soda aisle had new shelf tags with QR codes.... scan and preload this coupon to your Frequent Shopper app... I don't use the Frequent Shopper app, and I don't even remember my password to even attempt it... so I grabbed a 24 pack cube that looked like it was a decent price without the #$%!@#$ scan to save requirement.

Yes, I have the savings user card on my keyring. Just let me swipe that and give me the discount

Get to the self checkout, and nope... it doesn't drop the price. And, being Friday, all the checkouts are backed up... @#$%@#$% FINE! Take my money. It's not worth wasting other people's time to get a clerk over and back out the purchase before I pay. (Hey, the debit card worked... should have tried the credit card just to see if they were going to add 3% too )

Got home, and realized I left one of my bags on the little carousel... !*@$#$%^*

Go back, and stand in line at the customer service desk for over 15 minutes as two kroger employees go over this woman's receipt with her. She'd preloaded all of her coupons to her app on the phone, and had about a dozen items that didn't get rung up with the coupons... three of them weren't in the system at all... despite her saying she loaded the coupons to the app.

(Yes, my bag of chocolates and can of peanuts was waiting for me.)

Her experience, plus my own generated an email off to Kroger. I'm not the type to preload a bunch of coupons. I make a list, I go shop, knowing where everything is. Yes, my list is built in shopping order. Efficiency. Get in, get out. I'm not about to take time to scan codes and add stuff to my phone app. This is grocery shopping, not a video game.

I just set up a frequent shopper account at Meijer, (think regional WalMart) just down the road the other direction - About half a mile closer than the Kroger. Their barrier to entry for getting grocery deals isn't as steep as Kroger's is becoming.

So, I'm going to chill by painting some little toy soldiers... or maybe work on the display board diorama for this army. I'll put on a gaming podcast and forget about Kroger for a while.

Our Kroger owned store, called Pick and Save have gone to 15 self serve checkouts and 1 manned with a bagger. They have 3 staff standing there to help the self check out people. Most of the morning weekday shoppers make Terry and I at 71/70 feel young. Everyone goes to the the manned checkout and bagger. As I told a lady trying to move me to an open self checkout, for another 10%discount I will use those lanes, until then, I can wait in line. She huffed away…

 

[TLOC]

Afternoon All,

I started out today with a walk at 77F and slightly breezy. It was a slog to finish it after 10 days of not regularly walking. I did some inside and outside chores after breakfast. We were told (name withheld) that we may get a home visit from FWC to check on our animals. They are the state licensing agency for pet skunks. Youngest grandson is here now. I'm not sure what's on the agenda tomorrow.

I talked to Phil for a little bit today, and he said he would call Sherrel.

TomO- Great layout photos. We're the same here regarding politics so we usually leave it alone, but for some reason MOH feels it necessary to read stories to me about things.

Louis- Great photo. I have a tin plate of one of the train marshalling areas for an Army-Navy game.

Joe- That blows.

Troy- I would have raised a ruckus.

Sherrel- You should get a call from Phil today. I really liked ABBA back in the day.

Willie- Nice looking barn.

I hope everyone has a good night.

Curt

Terry will occasionally read me a political article and then says what, When I give her the stare!

Thanks on the pictures, that’s the previous layout

 

[Bruette]

Radio, my wife and I never argue. We listen to the BBC early, NPR until they play an annoying story. Recently it has been the "50th anniversary of hip-hop" Sorry I don't give a flying f%$#! I spell rap with a C at the beginning. Bloomberg radio is usually pretty good. If the radio goes off YouTube takes over.

Music, my wife likes all kinds, especially classical. For me it's "hard rock or no rock" I do deviate a little sometimes.

We agree 100% on politics and still we both would rather avoid it!

 

[TLOC]

Spoiled rich kids, you got to love them!

In fairness to the Angelos family, they can't forget Albert Bell, Bobby Bonilla, and others. All the money they spent trying to buy a championship and not one world series appearance to show for it.

I'm not surprised. This is part of the new reality of professional sports.

If all goes well with the Orioles' young stars, they project to be a two hundred million dollar+ team payroll. Baltimore cannot support that.

We must keep developing young talent and make smart trades to bring in more top prospects. The days of lifelong Orioles are long gone.

Not going to argue about if the Orioles can afford a $200 million dollar payroll. Their share of the National TV money alone should cover that and that includes playoff and World Series TV!

Then they have their local TV money that they keep, it’s not shared with the league, plus all the local advertising is money they keep. There is a reason why the MLB team owners are multi- billionaires

 

[TLOC]

Good Morning All. Clear and a warm 83°, might get to 107° later on. Yesterday was a bit cooler at just 102°. NWS is still predicting just double-digit temperatures beginning Sunday, but with triple-digits returning for the Labor Day weekend. Meanwhile the heat advisories go on. The AQI is stubbornly remaining in the moderate zone at 59, but that's mainly because there hasn't been any wind to speak of.

Pulmonologist visit yesterday went well, won't see him for another six months. Pleased to note that next week, I only have a dental hygienist appointment, but three medical appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday after Labor Day, so I get a 12 day break. One of the doctor visits is just a routine follow-up to the cataract surgery; should be my last one there. Another is a follow-up to the stent placement from last year, then I'm back to just routine scheduled visits for a while with PCP. Some of the specialist visits will be pending.
Weekly grocery trek went as planned, I was able to get everything at the one store and didn't have to go elsewhere. We did however go look at Canon printers at Best Buy. As expected, the one that my grandson recommended at $299.95 looked good. Salesman looked up the # of pages that could be printed with the cartridges and came up with 2500 for the color and 3500 for black. I already knew from looking up the replacement cartridges that they are $80 each, meaning replacements would cost more than a new printer when the time comes. However we only print 100-125 pages a year, so the printer/cartridges might outlive both of us!

Out in the train shed yesterday, I looked at my "to do" list and came up with this. In January 2022, I built this structure and finally planted it in November. It is a Walther's Antiques Barn.
View attachment 173362
View attachment 173363View attachment 173364
It needs a fence. I planned a chain-link one and debated which way to go. Using the Woodland Scenics kits was too restricting and that route was going to be expensive due to the length needed. Scratch-built was going to be real time consuming. Then Chet threw a brand new Walther's chain link fence kit into the box with structures earlier this year. I still had a half kit from over 30 years ago, so that is my answer.
View attachment 173365
View attachment 173366
OK, the plastic used is a different color in the newer kit, but that is easily fixed by painting the old stuff.
View attachment 173367
I did all of my measuring yesterday and I will start drilling fence post holes today.

Sherrel - Some of the medical visits have been entirely voluntary on my part. The cataract surgery for example has required 8 visits so far with one more to go. Fortunately some of those visits were early on the grocery trek days, so the trips were twofold. The ones that bother me were at the pulmonologist because he botched two oximetry tests and the four days in the emergency room/hospital when they never found out what caused the blood loss. Those were all wasted time to me. The vascular surgeon might be mainly to say that there is nothing wrong, just symptoms of aging. That's what he told me the last time my PCP sent me over to see him.
Troy - Back in the days before the fellow who ran the LHS retired, he told me that only AMEX charged him 3%. Visa and Mastercard charged him 1.5%. So I started paying him cash only so he could make a little bit more. Then he started to throw in some freebies here and there, like a bottle of paint or glue; or an extra 5% off an engine. It's too bad that he retired.
I do have Bluetooth on the hearing aids, but I don't carry the phone unless I am in the car.

RE: the music rant. Wife changing stations is easier than getting into an argument. The Alexa thingy is just a convenience thing to her. I have over 80,000 mp3's on the computer, with over 20,000 on my iPod in the train shed, so I can listen to whatever I want. I mainly listen to hard rock; cannot stand talk radio. Not sure that the new Lexus has a CD player.

Everybody have a great day.

For a CD player if it’s not on the media console check inside the glove compartment

 

[Bruette]

The Orioles, owned by Peter Angelos, had an operating income of $83 million last year on revenue of $251 million, according to Forbes.
Last year's payroll - $60,327,739

 

[ctclibby]

Good After/Evening All!

70F @ 50% and looks like rain.

Music: I have been a rock baby since I saw Merrilee Rush and Iron Butterfly in concert - hmmm 1968ish. Music is usually Sirius 60's to 80's while doing anything; in car, in shop ... etc. I have something like 600 CD's with somewhere around 400 vinyl albums. Sometimes I throw on a stack of CD's as one does get tired of the supposed commercial free Sirius stuff. Isn't a DJ hawking Sirius on Sirius a commercial? I have been working on rip'n the vinyl things to mp3's. Takes time.

Thought that you might get a giggle outa this one. Went to the little credit union to get cash for the Frontier and found this on one of the hundred stacks.

Later!

 

[santafewillie]

I have been working on rip'n the vinyl things to mp3's. Takes time.

I have done that to the vinyl that is still in pristine condition; I have around 1300 vinyl albums before I switched to CD's in the mid-80's. While I have not really checked, the vinyl must be worth some money these days, as my son has requested them in my will, or sooner if I see fit! Last time that I moved in 1981, I filled a pick-up bed with albums when moving them.

 

[Boris]

Spoiled rich kids, you got to love them!

In fairness to the Angelos family, they can't forget Albert Bell, Bobby Bonilla, and others. All the money they spent trying to buy a championship and not one world series appearance to show for it.

I'm not surprised. This is part of the new reality of professional sports.

If all goes well with the Orioles' young stars, they project to be a two hundred million dollar+ team payroll. Baltimore cannot support that.

We must keep developing young talent and make smart trades to bring in more top prospects. The days of lifelong Orioles are long gone.

No, I don't have to love spoiled rich kids, and neither does anyone else. Angelos family is no better than Snyder was in DC.
Be prepared for more mediocre teams and rebuilds. Last Championship was the fall before I transferred to Baltimore from Morrisville, and that was 40 Years ago. Not quite as bad as the Toronto Maple Leaf's Stanley Cup drought, but still 40 years.
If they don't win a series before Cheap John sells them all off, I won't be around to see it. In fact I'm losing interest now.