I'm still in "Get Mark's creamy new Mac Studio set up" mode.
"Fuckwit Year" is an apt description of 2023 for me, especially August on.
My workhorse Windows PC shit the bed in mid-August. Fortunately, none of the three hard drives crashed - it was just either the motherboard, the memory, or the CPU. So no data was lost. But with no other Windows machine to work with at hand, it left me in the lurch. I had moved much of my audio software and functionality over to my Macbook Pro, but there are some bits of software and data for which I have yet to find adequate Mac analogs, and in cases where I have, I am not totally up to speed with them yet. The Windows PC crash forced an accelerated transition process, which has chewed up a bunch of time. (In cases where I need to use e.g. Corel Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Audition 1.5, I commandeer Lili's PC. Since I bought her a mid-tier Mac Mini for her birthday in May, she bounces back and forth between her PC and the Mac - as with my office/studio setup, she shares her keyboard, mouse and monitor between the two machines via a KVM switch. I try not to interrupt her use of her Windows Machine too often though.) By around the start of September, I was about 85 percent transitioned to the Mac. As of December it's 95 percent. Still not 100 percent though.
The 2009 Altima I bought from Mark and Janet last year had become a bit of a money pit. It had belonged to Janet's brother David, who passed away in 2019. It then sat undriven in Mark's driveway for three years while Janet waited for David's estate to come out of probate. It finally did in April of 2022, they sold it to me for a song. I got about a year's worth of driving out of it before things started going wrong, requiring frequent repairs. I have a local mechanic who does great work and charges about 1/2 that of most garages, which has helped a bit. But yeah, a lot of repairs all through the fall. More on the car later.
In early October, the freezer drawer of our fridge decided to stop working. Sort of. By that I mean: it stopped, we moved stuff into coolers with bags of ice - then it started working again, we moved stuff back into the freezer - lather rinse repeat. While this was going on, Lili (who has complained about the insufficiency of the fridge for some time) looked into what Lowe's had available (Lowe's being the preferred vendor since Lili is a veteran and gets a 10 percent veteran's discount on purchases). I told her to be sure whatever she chose would fit through our doors, which are pretty narrow (our house is almost 100 years old) - I remembered the hassle the delivery guys had with getting our now-dying PC into the kitchen when we bought it some 7 or 8 years ago. She thought she had, and scheduled a delivery. On the day of the delivery, we had to get everything out of the fridge and clear a path from the front door and past the swinging-door doorway into the kitchen. We (I) didn't know it wouldn't make it through the doorway without removing the swinging door, a fraught process I couldn't complete in time before the delivery guys had to head out for the next delivery. So they put it back on the truck, we put everything back into the fridge, and I finally got the swinging door off its mount and out of the way.
A few more days pass, again transferring frozen food into and out of coolers and ice bags as the freezer worked intermittently. On the next delivery attempt, we discover two more snafus: not only would the new fridge not fit through the kitchen doorway, even with its own doors removed; the basement cutoff valve for the water line feeding the ice maker wouldn't turn. It was frozen, and I was warned that attempting to force it closed would likely break it causing water to gush out all over everything in the basement. The fix, I was told, required plumbing work we were not prepared to deal with, either financially or practically.
So Lili had to cancel the order and find another fridge that would fit through the door. Nothing at Lowe's fit the bill but she found one at Costco that would do. She placed the order and scheduled the delivery. Another few freezer load/unload procedures ensued. After fretting over how to circumvent the water issue, I came up with a much simpler solution to hiring a plumber or attempting to do the job myself: a couple of hours before the scheduled delivery, I would turn off the water to the entire house, open up all the spigots to let all the house water drain out from pipes, and unscrew the line connecting the downstairs water filter. After installation, we'd re-connect the water filter in the basement to the ice maker of the new fridge, close all the house spigots and turn the water back on. Easy peasy, worked a treat.
This entire process chewed up five weeks of time and effort. The good news is now we have a new fridge. The only lingering issue has been to deal with all the stuff in the house we had to move around to make way for the delivery of the new fridge - a process that is still ongoing.
Then in mid-November I got in an accident and totaled the car. (Thankfully, no one was hurt.) It was partly my fault, partly the fault of the other driver. The other driver had obtained security footage of the accident and gave it to Geico (the other driver's insurance company) and they called it 85/15 against me. My insurance claim handler at Travelers wanted to get his hands on the footage but Geico said they were having technical problems getting it to Travelers. (I have no way of knowing if the Geico person was technically incompetent or if they were deliberately stonewalling.) It took another few weeks of my trying to get the footage from the nearby convenience store, without success. In the interim, an adjuster looked at my car and, thankfully, since I had 2023 receipts for both work done at garages and for parts I gave my mechanic to install, was able to jack up the payout amount. But getting the money was contingent on my getting that security footage. I finally found out it was from a gas station diagonal to the intersection near the site of the accident, got them a USB stick to get a copy, and got the copy to my Travelers guy. They watched it multiple times and concluded that, contrary to Geico, the accident was 80/20 the fault of the other driver. While the claim will now go into arbitration and likely won't be settled for months, this loosened up the logjam and I finally got the settlement money the week before Christmas. I'm now in another car: 2018 Honda Civic, pretty nice. 24,000 miles on it. Lots of amenities. Great gas mileage. I'll be making fairly large (for me) monthly payments, but the savings in gas (this thing gets 12 miles to the gallon more than the totaled Altima), the 2024 SocSec bump, and a 2 dollars per hour raise at the pizza store will help offset the expense. I just have to drive as carefully as I can for the forseeable future.
All of the car mishigoss of course coincided with the holidays. I managed to get some online shopping done, and we bought a tree over a week before Christmas but the opportunity to pull all the lights and ornaments out of the attic (accessible via a ladder, not an easy process) and get the tree suitably festooned did not come until the night before Christmas (what with all the last minute bureaucracy and paperwork surrounding the car purchase).
IT.
HAS.
BEEN.
ONE.
THING.
AFTER.
THE.
OTHER.
FOR.
MONTHS!
Which brings us to New Year's Eve weekend. I'm still working to get Mark's new Mac Studio set up and loaded with all the music software and our audio work, a process that likely won't get completed until Tuesday. I hope.
So, how are things in your town?
-t