With the first umbrella I can remember ever paying more than $1 for, and with waterproof boots in place, I am ready for the rain. The new umbrella will be bigger than any I’ve ever owned. 53 inches, I think? I will use it to walk from Fulton Street to City Hall, just because I can.

I am totally killing it at this job now. All reviews are 100% A+. It’s fun to think that I anticipated this would be a 6-month gig, but then I kinda fell in love with the job. Then I started hating it. Then they hired me for another division, and my faith was restored… until it took 8 months for the transition to occur. I nearly quit 4 times in that 8-month span but stayed on because I would regret quitting. And also, no one here even cares if you quit. Nothing positive would come from it, but then nothing positive could be said for the last few weeks I spent in the previous position. I was at turns awesome, then awful. I lost my nerve to just go home using the FMLA get out of jail free card. So I plowed through things in virtual blackout mode.

Boo, no one wants to read about some asshole’s job. I will add, however, that this being the first job job I had in almost exactly 20 years does make its presence in my life a bit of an elephant in the room.

For months now I’ve willingly let myself get addicted to Bing’s daily check-in thing, where you accumulate points and get Amazon gift cards. It’s a comical waste of time but it’s also gotten weird. I had something like $11.00 cash back I tried to cash out but it won’t let me, saying there was an issue with SMS verification some years ago. Something like that.

I was also enjoying the Bing AI chat but the censorship and dumbing down of it all makes it more of an irritant than anything else. I also have 2 accounts which caused troubles with Skype. Getting support from MS is hopeless. So I give up. Back to the big G, which is, needless to say, a considerably better search engine than Bing.

Yikes, Google has news stories on its top page now. Never spotted that but I rarely land on google.com. I read discussion on how Google refused to sell ads on its top page deeming it inappropriate. Or something.

…………….

It is later, after the firsts use of the mighty new umbrella. It is, indeed, much more comfortable to have that much coverage. It opens easily with the press of a button but it takes some muscle to pull it back into compact form. It also seems to deflect water more than other umbrellæ I have known. I shook it off lightly and felt OK putting it in my bag, with just a few droplets of rainwater upon it. Normally I’d let it dry out but that didn’t seem necessary.