Friday, December 15, 2017

Today the Complete and Total Loser:

• Got notified by mail that his application for disability has been approved and he'll get a pretty nice payment soon. A secret: He doesn't really need the money. His parents left him stock holdings that would see him through the rest of his life, which may be as little as a few years anyway (see many whining previous posts to find out why). Most of the reason he applied was because he didn't just want to describe himself as an unemployed man, even though he really can't work at this time. He will donate a generous amount of this money to charities he believes in, which are educational in nature.
• Heard from his old boss, who he hasn't seen in many years but keeps in touch with by email. The boss, who is in his early 70s now, has had health problems of his own and they often share information about those problems as some of them are problems they have in common, like a pulmonary embolism. The boss said that like the Loser, he is in danger of having a leg amputated.
• Planned to go to the new Star Wars movie. He's a little old, at 59, to be a sci-fi geek, but given that he saw, and was disappointed by, the first one in a movie theater in 1977, he likes to see them all in theaters. He didn't go, however, because it began to snow and continued enough that he figured it wouldn't be worth it to risk a fall on a slick sidewalk. The movie will be in theaters for awhile.
• Retrieved an old VCR from a storage area with the intent of transferring an old videotape which has his father and mother on it to a digital format. He put in a different tape to try it out and the soft and hardware he purchased recently worked fine. He stopped the tape and hit eject. Nothing happened. He did everything you do when that happens and eventually opened the machine to try it that way. Zero success. To sum up, the machine is now in pieces in the garage, waiting for the next day his township has to take away electronic devices and dispose of them responsibly.
• Removed a dead mouse that had been killed by the mousetrap the Loser had set and placed in the crawlspace of his attic. It's hard to get a hand up there and it was even harder to retrieve the trap, which had been flung a foot or so when triggered. The Loser hates killing animals, especially with such a dirty trick, but mice gnaw in ways that can cause fires. It's them or the Loser.
• Thought a lot about his father, who died six years ago today. The Loser was the only one with him at the time. He listened to his father's breathes, and somehow knew when the last one came that it was the last one. His mother had died less than two months before this.

  

  Daisy Ridley is very good in this role, the Loser thinks.