Inside Stuff...

A peek behind the curtain… while it appears that the brilliant stuff that appears here just flows from the Feeder’s brain, the sad truth is that particular organ is showing effects of age (where are those keys?) and I have taken to be a “lister” making notes that are on sticky’s which are affixed to doors mirrors etc.   “Take out the trash; meeting at noon today” stuff like that.  And that carries over to constructing the blog.  How many times have I hit “Publish” only to remember that I wanted to say such and such (an example will appear under the Mexican Restaurants entry below.

So to combat this, I leave a little pad about and make notes of stuff I want to yak about.. It usually is in the vicinity of the laptop (with a reminder of things of the past)

So today we’ll just work our way down the list.

Phishing/Laptop

Technology always gets you.

Phishing:  the other day, MFO and I decided to try the new hot dog place up in San Souci for dinner, so I suggested she go to the website to look at the menu.  Immediately after clicking “website” on the google screen for the place we were greeted with

From “Windows Defender Alert”, and you could not close the screen by clicking the “x” or close window.  Well, that smelled kind of funny (figure of speech) but still it gives you pause for thought.  So instead of calling Microsoft Technical Department I called our IT guy who was in the area and came over and verified it was indeed a Phishing hoax, brand new apparently.  He said if you actually called they would want you to give them some Bitcoin to “fix” it.   I suppose people fall for it.  Amazing

Laptop: “accepted” the repeated “suggestions” to install Windows Creator 10 (Beware!!) on both the laptop and the desktop.   Seemed to go okay, except that the laptop slowed to a crawl.  A minute to open Word, 10 minutes to boot up, typing ahead of yourself, and so forth.  Again a housecall from the IT guy, who said the hard disk sounded like an “espresso machine” and would most likely need to be replaced. He took the machine back to the shop where he performed a “checkdisk” operation, where it found several sectors were damaged and were repaired.  No need for an investment.  Now it hums along. 

Shadow Box

A very nice (late) Father’s Day story.  One of my father’s passions was fishing.  Since we lived in Michigan where catfish were considered trash fish and the rainbow, speckled, and brown trout ruled the streams such as the (legendary) Au Sable in the upper lower peninsula.  Opening day of the season would find him in crisp white shirt, black bow tie, waders and hand tied flies for the fly rod in the middle of the stream..  DFT?(Trout?).  He would also take trips to Canada for Lake Trout, Northern Pike and so forth.  So over the years, he amassed a fairly large amount of equipment and tackle.   It wound up in our basement, and has languished there for years.   MFO has recently (I think I posted about this) taken to organizing all Dad’s “stuff” from the fishing gear to the official records and photographs from his WWI experiences (wounded in France) and so forth.  In fact, she has contacted various WWI museums and some are interested.  Stay tuned.   Anyway, on Father’s day last, she brought a rather large wrapped package out for cocktails (our traditional time for exchanging and opening gifts).  Upon opening it, I found a beautiful display of some of my father’s cherished lures and tackle.  Do you know which is a Daredevil?   A Rapala minnow? a Flatfish?

The little document at the right is MY fishing license from when we still lived in Michigan.  I’m sure Dad was looking down and smiling, dreaming of may fly hatches on the river.  Quite touching.  MFO is a treasure…

Okay, we’ll pick up the pace now with some (nearly) one-liners:

New Phone: I traded in my aging SamSung Note 4 on a Google Pixel XL.   Quite a nice instrument, and getting into the Google world is a good thing.  As part of the deal I got a free Google home assistant.   More later

Google Doodle: some nice ones lately

Mexican Restaurants:   I find out that Plaza Tolteca and Los Guayabos are co-owned, hence the word for word description of dishes on their respective menus.  And my memory jogger referred to above was that besides noting the absence of Chiles Relleños, on the menus, “Street Food” shows up as a category of dishes.

Steve Harvey: a complete idiot.  In the same league as Matt Lauer

Rachel Ray:  somehow it does my heart good to see she is now selling her own brand of dog food.

On Star:  MFO is on the road, and somehow her phone goofed up and would not articulate the driving directions through the Bluetooth.   Although we have paid for it for years, yesterday made it all worthwhile.

Well, that kinds of cleans out the list.  Riveting stuff, eh?  I’ll have more interesting things (IMHO) coming up.

Historic St. Mary’s City Beer Fest 2017 tomorrow.

And I’ll be there giving out beer glasses:

DFB(eer)