Another notable exception was tangling with a small-minded manager at a car dealership who thought it better to engage in petty power games than promote the adoption of electric vehicles.  Below follows a brief message I sent off notifying that I had made it down, and referencing my post about the incident to the EV forum.

Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2022 20:21:00 -0500
Subject: made it in..

Despite a certain nonzero asshole component...

   https://www.insideevsforum.com/community/index.php?threads/awful.15180/

I arrived this afternoon, and am sweating it out in Mom's sauna once again.
At least I can open the window to some *nice* outside air this evening, as
opposed to in summer..

_H*


##  The rest is summed up by a post I made into the tarot-cards forum, and
##  then another small handful of outgoing email messages over the rest of
##  December.


   >>  Posted:  December 14  in The Tarot Forum

   *Long* overdue update on Mom.

   In a very complex process over the rest of September and October, Mom
   gained back just about all of the strength and ability as before the
   episode, and possibly then some, as she looks even more confident and
   steady on the walker now as we stroll around the facility campus
   together than she did six months ago.  Her brain is clearly adapting
   better to the diminished physical condition.

   I am back in FL again after a shortish time back in Boston, and this
   time it's the *real* routine visit over the holidays-time that would
   happen for me normally, as opposed to the three extra trips this past
   year.  [Other than one recent year off for Covid, we've been together
   *every* Christmas/etc time since I was born, and we both think that's
   pretty impressive.  We did 2020 over Zoom like everyone else...]

   We arranged for a minimal but adequate schedule of private-duty home
   care to handle some minor things that she can't anymore, reconfigured a
   bunch of finances to be more automatic and remotely-manageable, got rid
   of various unused stuff, and most importantly got her back into her
   own independent home rather than doing some big stressful move to
   assisted-living.  So basically, everything's back to normal.  Other
   than, of course, that her tarot deck collection is no longer here.

   The card inventory is being slowly whittled down as I've gotten a
   smattering of orders, and I've gotten a colleague involved who does a
   lot of convention-circuit sales of relevant-interest miscellany, like
   costume stuff, books, adornments, etc.  They will likely have more
   solid sales channels than I could establish, so as things get sorted out
   and start going to events in selected batches, more of that stock could
   now meaningfully move.

   But the most important thing is that Mom's back to basically fine
   health, all except for the leg neuropathy which will never go away, and
   has been re-settling in to a decently content lifestyle like before.
   And part of that contentment is me being able to come hang out with her
   in a *relaxed* fashion this time.

   _H*


Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2022 07:35:02 -0500
Subject: fl status

Finally, a cooler snap here.  50F this morning...

Mom's doing really well, back to doing her half-mile-plus loops around the
neighborhood on the walker with reasonable confidence, working endless word
puzzles. and reflecting on the past.  It feels almost too normal, like last
summer was just a bad dream.  But then why would Comcast be texting me about
the xfinity bill being ready to view online...

_H*


##  I had a bit of back-and-forth with a friend who's also wrestling with
##  some parental-care issues, as well as handling utility billing for her
##  household.  Now being more familiar with Comcast, I could offer some
##  slightly more informed speculation.


Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:16:44 -0500
To: [friend who had asked about Comcast and parental-finances stuff]
Subject: Re: fl status

On Crapcast ... I'm push-paying them through Mom's bank now, and I think
they have one of those linked arrangements that allows faster EFT payments
in the backend.  What I do notice is that notifications [email, txt] about the
next Xfinity bill due around the 6th of the next month starts arriving on like
the 15th, very early before the duedate.  So, dunno, maybe they *know* their
actual processing line sucks so they advance the billing dates to make up?
I could also make it "auto" but I've got her account particulars in enough
other places for auto-withdraw that I want to keep a lid on how many other
places I cough up a routing/account number to.

If you visit the store, is it like a warp-tunnel to the Philippines or do
they actually have some clue there?

If you could put most of your mom's routine stuff online, you could still
access and manage it "as her" without having to have trusts and PoAs in
place, in theory, as long as you weren't deriving any financial benefit for
yourself.  In fact today I'll be discussing the tax implications of having
the arrangements I do now with Mom's accountants, as I need to be super
careful about what gets transferred where so it doesn't constitute a
"taxable gift".  The only issue might be receiving related email, but Mom
can always forward relevant stuff to you.

Anyway, if you still need to go there in person, you probably want to time it
for maximum effectiveness WRT various regular billing intervals.  For example,
I always waited till after the 13th or 14th to log in and do mine, since my
own bank posts interest around the 13th and I wanted to include that in my
own balance-sheet figuring, which meshed reasonably well with bill duedates.
[I wasn't getting paper statements from them anyways, but I treated my self-
set interval as though I was.]

And yes, it was clear from leafing through Mom's checkbook that she'd had
trouble balancing things since about 2019, and kept being frustrated that her
register kept being a few pennies out of kilter with the statements.  It didn't
help that she had a flakey old calculator that missed half its keypresses,
and kept insisting that it was fine.  But she's just as happy that I'm doing
the bulk of stuff now and she only has to cut a check for one-off paper stuff
that comes in the mail.

_H*


##  One morning I was inspired to figure out why my previous solution block
##  for Wordle wasn't anywhere close to the answers Mom was getting each
##  morning.  She had been consistently solving it *every* morning without
##  fail ever since she got started with it.  Now, in the next phase of
##  however the New York Times kept perverting the puzzle, the answers
##  were hopping around all over the place and not following the original
##  progression at all.  See the referenced file and the URL within for
##  the technical  details.


Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:10:24 -0500
To: [another Wordle enthusiast]
Subject: Re: wordle again

Yeah, what Tracy Bennett [the new NYT "curator"] likely did was take the future
remainder of the array, randomize the order, and stuff it into a database that
an API can pull off the web.  The big internal wordlists are now just one,
only for determining what are valid words or not; the solution is found online
instead of being internally calculated.  And its span is limited; queries way
back in 2021 or earlier fail, and anything past about mid-Feb 2023 fails too.
So it will be incrementally provisioned, I imagine, based on this new order.

Anyway, I gave my mom a bookmark for today which she can modify the URL of,
*and* a q&d shell script called "worday" that will take abbreviated dates
or the full date as an argument, and fetch the solution.  So if she ever gets
stumped, which hasn't happened yet, she can look it up.  As long as NYT does
it that way -- if too many people start doing that they'll probably scramble
to do something more obscure.  Wardle's original intent was that the thing
is entirely self-contained, which I guess it isn't now.

The present schedule of Mondays-only private-duty help for Mom is setting her
back only $160 ish a week, instead of the thousands we were in for before.
That's enough for a grocery run and a shower, she's handling everything
else including fetching the mail out front and getting out for mostly-daily
wheelie-walks around the campus sidewalks.

Speaking of campus sidewalks and other features, I've started to lay in the
new roads and ponds and whatever else shows up in Maxar imagery for the new
"Northside" expansion here:

    https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/27.2506/-82.4563

The house outlines will have to wait until they're actually built, but four
family-entities have already moved in up there.  We also took a tour of the
new "wellness center" building, which doesn't show up yet, but it's nice in a
too-modern way.  In the "90+ lounge" they have a game box called "Tovertafel",
look it up, that they're all proud of having installed.  When the tour came
to the 90+ lounge I pretended that there was a force field across the door,
stopping abruptly like I'd run into a wall and emitting loud "bzzzzt!" sounds.

And today is a good day for indoors and comfort food -- as cold as it was, some
folks were out and about, all bundled up in their "deep-freeze" gear.  I took
a lovely slam around the long loop, including a nice tight up-and-back track
at the east end to map where the new wall is next to the road into Northside,
and finally laid in the gravel path behind the apartment buildings [which may
not show up quite yet depending on when you chase the URL.  Zoom way in].

I'm hoping that next week's warmup extends far enough up the east coast that
I'm not stuck for like 2 hours at every charge stop and the overnights are
still doable.  Targeting Wed morning to start back, so I should be there
for NYE and any "first day" hikes that happen.

_H*


##  By way of explanation, a deep and excessively-newsworthy cold snap had
##  settled in over the entire eastern half of the US, and it was about 37F
##  outside on the morning of Christmas eve.  The recordkeepers were referring
##  to that weekend in general as "the coldest Christmas in FL for the last
##  30 years".
##
##  I entertained myself with more website debugging on Christmas morning,
##  embedding my conclusions in holiday greetings to a few potentially
##  interested / sympathetic folks.


Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2022 11:18:48 -0500
Subject: a curmudgeonly Christmas

You'll be pleased to know that *this* FL trip I'm on now is the usual holiday
one, and everything is back to feeling almost normal.  Still with Mom's bum
leg, but that's life now and she's gotten pretty used to it.

This morning's little present to her and a few other caring souls around the
internet was ... a bit of a rant!  Including to said e-card sender...

    http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/random/xmas22/

Hopefully your holidays are being bright?  Stay warm!

_H*