Rants

Jurassic Overload

We sign up to get Peacock so we can watch the Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana bicycle races. We even opt to spend the ten bucks a month to have the no commercials option.1 One of the big banners that show up at the top when you open the Peacock app is for the new Jurassic Park movie – Jurassic World: Dominion.

Hey, what the heck, I enjoyed the first movie way back when and its free, so I thought I’d check it out. I lasted 15 minutes before turning it off, Chris Pratt on a horse roping dinosaurs like a wild west cowboy… So this past Monday while the Vuelta cyclists were on a rest day, I talked Donna into watching the 1993 original movie.

Wow, amazing how much you forget in 30 years. Not the main bits that have become pop culture touchstones, the water class vibrations as the T-Rex approaches or the lawyer in the out house, etc, but the acting. Jeff Goldblum’s over the top smarminess, Lora Dern’s poorly acted wide-eyed innocence, Sam Neil’s character arc of kid hating to kid loving and Wayne Knight’s whatever.2 I did forget that Samuel L. Jackson was in it though and I kept waiting for him to drop a Mofo, but alas I was disappointed.

Anyway, turned out the first movie wasn’t as great as I remembered it was, so I thought I’d give to new movie one more try. This time I made it to right around the hour mark when the movie sort of morphed into the Star Wars cantina scene and then flipped immediately into a Jason Bourne movie which where it lost me…again.

Along with the latest Jurassic World: Dominion, the first 3 Jurassic movies are available for watching on Peacock right now, but The Lost World & The Lost World: Fallen Kingdom aren’t for some reason. I have a copy of The Lost World that someone gave me and I probably watched it back in 2015, but I can’t remember anything about it. I have seen the third movie, Jurassic Park III, and I seem to remember thinking it was OK, but that was 20 years ago.

That left the second movie, The Lost World. Jurassic Park, left to see on Peacock. Guess what? This one is another steaming pile a dino droppings. I made it about 45 minutes before hitting the stop button. The only thing remotely noteworthy about this movie was there was a young guy that plays a photographer that goes to the island with our core group of Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Richard Schiff that sounded a lot like Vince Vaughn. I had to stop the movie and check IMDB. Holy Crap! It was a 27-year old Vince Vaughn.

Third Times The Charm

We have been ordering Donna Celestial Seasonings DECAF Green Tea K-Cups from Amazon since before we moved to Oregon in 2019. There have been several different K-cup quantities over that period, but sometime late last year or early this year we started buying them in 96 count boxes. A few of months ago we couldn’t get the big boxes anymore so we found a seller that was selling the same thing, but they were listing it as 4 boxes of 24. This worked out well until early this month we repeated the usual order and when it was delivered it was a single box of 24…

We contacted the seller and they told us they even though they were the seller, the order was fulfilled by Amazon and we needed to contact them. Well, as you might expect, with Amazon there is no way to contact a real person by phone. Returns are dead easy, but because the tea is food item, returns were not allowed. After fumbling around their help center, I finally found a bot thingy and it took a couple of wrong selections before I did find a way to get it to refund our money or more accurately, added the total purchase price to a virtual gift card and we even got to keep the single 24 count box.

After the money showed up as a gift card in the Amazon account we reordered the 4 boxes of 24. It wasn’t two day delivery, but it was still free, so a few days later the order arrived. As you could tell from the title of this post, this second order once again contained just one box of 24 K-cups where we ordered and paid for ninety-six. This time when I found the bot there was no option that I could find to pick that would give us the purchase price and keep the money. I did find a way to have it put me in a queue to chat with an actual human. After a few minutes I was connected and after repeating my problem in a couple different ways, I got the same results as the first time, keep the 24 and the full purchase price in a gift card. Plus a guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again.

This time, thinking that the problem was the Amazon fulfilling part, we opted for a seller said that it was fulfilled by them not Amazon. We waited with baited breath to see whether we would get 1 or 4 boxes of 24, but when the packed showed up on our doorstep several days there was a large box that contained 4 boxes of 24 K-cups.

Was it the different seller or that guarantee from a chat bot? I don’t know, but we’ll see in a couple months when we order tea again from Amazon.

Lottery Ticket Fun

We’ve been buying lottery tickets for a very long time. But just a ticket for each drawing of the big guys. We started playing Powerball, but switched to Mega Millions when the Powerball lottery went up to two bucks a ticket. When Mega Millions went to $2 a ticket we just stayed with it. We’ve never won anything more than say $10 at it, but hope springs eternal.

Currently we spend twenty dollars and that covers us for 5 weeks of drawings. I have also set up a reoccurring event on the fun to let me know when it is time to buy a ticket. When we were in Santa Fe my phone reminded me that it was time to buy a new five week Mega Millions ticket as the one at home expired after the Tuesday the fifth’s drawing. I can’t remember where we were, but the was a lottery dispenser machine there and I had a crisp $20 bill in my wallet. I slid the bill in and selected Mega Millions. I selected quick pick, but when I went to select the next 5 drawings that option wasn’t available. The vending machine didn’t have a cancel button anywhere, so there was no way to get the money back, so I ended up with 10 sets of numbers for the Friday the 8th’s drawing.

When we got home on Sunday afternoon and finished unpacking and doing some laundry, we went grocery shopping where I could buy a Mega Millions ticket good for 5 weeks, starting on Tuesday the 12th. Before going though I thought it would be smart to see how well we did in the Friday drawing with our 10 chances at winning. Turns out all we had was the Mega Ball in one of our sets of numbers. Hey, two bucks is two bucks. So, on entering Fred Meyers I hit the machine and bought our new ticket and for the heck of it I scanned the ticket we bought in New Mexico. “Invalid Ticket” was the machines response, so I went up to the Service Desk and asked them to cash it in. The counter person got the same response as I did.

Turns out that even though Mega Millions is played practically everywhere, if you buy a ticket and it hits you only get paid out in that state. I guess I could mail it to Sally in Santa Fe and she could mail the two dollars back, but if I paid for postage both ways (two 55¢ stamps) I’d net only ninety cents in winnings. And probably that 90¢ should go to her for schlepping to the store and standing in line to cash it in. If we hit the big money we’d probably pack a bag and head back to claim it, but not for two bucks. Donna suggested we just hold on to it because we’ll probably be going back in the fall. Let’s see if we remember to take it, if it doesn’t get misplaced in the interim.

I pulled our old expired Mega Millions ticket off where we hang it and hung up the new one. I figured I’d check to see if the old one was worth anything. That is when I noticed that the ticket was good all the way until the 12th… This meant that we didn’t even need to spend $20 on a ticket in New Mexico at all. And now that the new ticket starts on the 12th that meant we had two chances on hitting it big yesterday.

We hit nothing on Tuesday, but when I ran the old ticket we did have the Mega Ball back earlier in March, so I guess that takes a little sting on not being able to get the two dollars from New Mexico.

Plug-In Hybrid Miata?

The current rumors surrounding the next generation Miata is that it will be a plug-in hybrid or all electric. This post is not about that car, it is about the 2002 that we currently have.

We were going to take the Miata to Moore Park yesterday for our afternoon walk, but took the Mini instead. The Miata wouldn’t start, its battery didn’t have enough juice to even turn it over once. Just a click and nothing else.

I know I vowed to take it out once a week, but I looked back and the last time it was driven was 11 days prior. It has been too cold and we had a couple days of a light dusting of snow, so that we hardly left the house. A mere week and a half and the battery was, for all intensive purposes, dead. So I plugged in the battery charger and for this afternoon’s drive to go walking it started right up.

There must a fairly decent dark current somewhere…

16.5 mile round trip to walk 1.8 miles.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 10

 

Home Depot Shopping List

When ever we head out to Home Depot to buy several items I will create a “shopping” list with what aisle and bay the items are in, because I’m a guy and you know how men hate to ask directions. And even if I’d didn’t mind, sometimes it is hard to find a orange vest when you need one. The list is created inside the Home Depot app that I have on my phone.

The first time I tried this method I was foiled by my lack of a strong enough signal on my Moto G7 from Cricket. It wasn’t just because I was in a giant metal building either, the store must be in a AT&T dead zone because I couldn’t even pull up the app in the parking lot.

The next time I created a list I thought maybe I’d just print it out, but unfortunately the app doesn’t have this function. This might have been a good thing because as I considered doing this I flashed on the Progressive commercial where a group is in the airport and Dr. Rick asks to see their tickets and they all have them printed on paper.

So my only real solution is to write down everything I wanted with their respective aisle and bay number on a post-it and put it my pocket. This feels just a little like Garndparentamorphosis…

13.1 miles on an cold morning cannabis run.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 9

 

Lost Mail?

Up until now I can count on one finger the number of pieces of mail of ours, that have gotten lost. But that number has tripled in the last month.

It is tax time and all the necessary paperwork has been rolling in, all except for Brian’s 2021 Economic Impact Statement letter. We got Donna’s in the mail a couple week’s ago, but mine hasn’t shown up. Not that we really needed it, we both got the amount. So I just doubled the figure on hers when I entered the info into the tax software and we didn’t qualify for the Recovery Rebate credit (whatever that is.)

We are now both getting Social Security, so I made a test tax return for 2022 that includes that money in addition to our small pensions and the IRA withdrawals. Oregon doesn’t tax Social Security, but the US government does and if we didn’t take withholding from it we would have had a pretty hefty tax bill next year. We both filled out a W-4V and mailed them to our local (Medford) Social Security Administration office.

We used separate envelopes and a week or so later I received something back acknowledging that I had asked for withholding. Donna did not and sure enough, there wasn’t any money taken out of her most recent deposit. Yesterday we mailed a second W-4V out, hopefully this one won’t get misplaced somewhere.

7.5 miles of errand running.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 6

 

Not Freaky Fast Today

We wanted to get some Jimmy Johns subs for lunch so I placed our standard order in the app and selected “as soon as possible” for a pick up time. It is a mere 10 minute drive to the store from home, with changing into real clothes and driving over it is typically waiting for me when I get there.

Today they didn’t live up to their motto of “Freaky Fast” at all. When I entered the store they were over a dozen people standing around awaiting sandwiches. There were only 3 employees working, where they usually have five, and one of them was taking orders of the walk-ins. I probably had a 15 minute wait compared to the normal, open the door, grab order and leave.

17.1 miles on a nice little loop.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 5