The Great Los Feliz Bake-Off, It's Not Me, It's You, Time Travel at work.
We have been watching a season of the Great British Baking Show. But not as a simple binge-watching activity. We have been baking along with the show. No, not the same baked goods they attempt on the show, but rather the cookies that my husband has the skill set to make at home: snickerdoodle with that cream of tartar taste, ginger snaps that mask the spicy burn with a sugar coating, and most recently date filled sugar cookies. It's not well known, but it was the ultimate cookie of my childhood. They are upwards of a 1/4 cup of date filling sandwiched between two six-inch sugar cookies. I suggested we fold one cookie in half to create a more manageable cookie size. However, it would help if you had an enormous surface area to get enough date-filling into the cookie. I do think Paul Hollywood would approve. It is less of a cookie and more of a date-filled ten-finger face pie.
At one point, my husband proclaimed that if we keep up with all this aking, we can take cake and cookies to the fire station. I am trying to lose weight, after all—(30 pounds down since June, and 20 more to go with a goal of March 2024.
Our internet has been blinking off. The day I usually write my blog was taken up with troubleshooting our connection. I thought it was because of the rain. Another issue could have been caused when I plugged in a wireless range extender so we could sit out by the pool and look at cat videos—somehow, that was too much. With three smart TV mounts, three cell phones, three computers, plus notepads and printers, I am quite sure we are pushing the limits of what our router can handle. In addition, I suspect most of our telecommunication infrastructure at the city and street level is on the cusp of total failure. We are one heavy rain away from everyone having to return to the office as work from home becomes unsustainable. At least, that is how I feel.
Trouble Shooting myself in the foot
Anyway, I took it upon myself to unplug everything in our internet setup to troubleshoot the loss of Wi-Fi Thursday morning. I backtracked from computer to router to modem for an hour until I reached the service provider, where I learned there may be a system-wide service failure. "It's not me, it is you." Had I started there, I could have saved the frustration of resetting the modem and router, which took most of my mojo for the day. I took a break and walked down to the gym. The ISP auto-called me on the way home to say the service was back live. I got my router reprogrammed and working just in time for dinner. Note to self: never push the reset button. We can catch more British Baking shows to celebrate a successful reboot.
Friends took us out for a belated birthday dinner Tuesday night. Thanks, Billy and Glen. We were talking about our retirement plans. Along with how much longer we plan on working. To hell with Congress pushing retirement to 70. We are spent at sixty. If I return to work from my disability, how do I answer the interview question, "Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?" My current job is part-time managing our apartment building. It's work from home that I can handle. Because I have come to realize being chronically ill is a full-time job. I spend about six hours a week getting hydration, another hour with my nurse, and more time hunting down prescriptions and supplies I must take and prep daily. I remind myself to say I get to do all this job. It keeps me sitting up straight. I am functional enough that it's not evident that I am sidelined.
What am I Reading this week?
The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer
This book is short but packs a massive load of content revealed in a series of interviews given by people who have been frozen for five hundred years. They are time-traveling at work. I thought that only happened after lunch and the last thirty minutes before quitting. The freezing process is fascinating. People who are frozen for this experience have their minds loaded into a simulation that can either speed up time or slow it down. Some popsicle people were colonists who thought they were on their way to another planet. Since they were going on a voyage that would take decades, time was modified so that only a few years passed in the computer simulation they occupied. Another group was convicts serving virtual prison terms. For them, time moved more quickly. They experienced twenty years of prison in what was only supposed to be ten months in the outside world. I like the idea of going into ten years of living in a simulation and coming out a week later trained on a full set of advanced skill sets. It would be like being Neo in The Matrix saying, "I know kung fu."
Things have gone wrong. The frozen brains and bodies are in the same complex, built to withstand any devastation. Robots kept everything running. The world outside is unoccupied. All the people are dead. They work out how to get along, deal with aliens of a sort, crime & banishment, impending doom, gender reassignment, and a robot revolt.
My audio version had a cast, including Brandon Fraiser. He has voiced a robot character on TV for a few years, so I immediately recognized his voice. I liked the whole production. It made me wish it were longer.