My lovely Friday Morning

 

Friday morning looked already to be a hectic day.  I had 2 appointments, and a major winter storm was approaching.  After getting my opening duties done (Bible, bathroom, Misty, etc), I settled in to look at the morning round of e-mails.  Wouldn't come up.  Tried again rinse ring repeat, no dice.  So I sent a message to my sister: "Happy birthday, o ancient one". Got back: "You're that far behind, slick".  Think she missed the "not", but whatever.  Tried e-mail again, it would load the screen, show you the list of 'em, but you couldn't open them.  If you tried long enough, it would stop showing them, but would tell you:

Unable to connect to mail server. Possible reasons: The mail server is (temporarily) down or there are network connection problems. Please try again in a few minutes.

Or:

An error occurred inside the server which prevented it from fulfilling the request

So I say, this sounds like Xfinity is down, thus I contacted DownDetector. Nope, not according to them. Oh well, time to go to my eye appointment.  Road not bad yet, but sleet is falling.  Some little bits frozen on the windshield.  I get down our street to just past the bark park- and my wiper, driver's side, flies OFF the car.  I swing into the lot, run out into the street to pick up my wiper, found the plastic pin that holds it on missing most of its head.  No time to deal with, I throw it on the seat and head to the Mall.

At this point, I'm thinking, I can just zip-tie it on when I get home until nice weather returns (which was projected to be not before next Wednesday.  So, I call Laurie- or try to- to look for zip ties I thought we still had. My phone says, "No bars, emergency use only".  What the actual, is AT&T down too?  Trying to drive with sleet on the windshield, busy Friday morning traffic, trying to watch my phone for bars.  Get a couple, try to call.  "Connecting..."  No, no you're not.  Three tries later, I get a ring!  I can hear Laurie- Laurie hears, "Hey, I se;cn,jkhrteoijhdxc.dfnlh", followed by nothing.  I slam the phone down, continue to Mall.  

I pull in at the proper door (all the way around back, of course).  Sleet/snow still coming down, wind in the 30 mph range. I have full bars now, but as I get out of the car and try to get with Laurie, I get interrupted by a couple sitting in their car: "Do you know what the latest weather report is?"  Of course I do, I had to do something while I was waiting for my e-mail to not work.  "Worst comes in the afternoon," I yelled over my shoulder as I tried calling Laurie.  Finally, get through clear.  I tell her the situation, but as I approach Pearle Vision, the phone starts breaking up again.  Three attempts at saying, "I'll call you later," I grab the door handle at PV exactly at my appointment time.

Door's still locked.

They let me in, apologizing, and I get my appointment started.  My phone makes the "You just got a phone voice message" sound- mind you, without bothering to ring- while I wait for the doc. I listen- Laurie, telling me she found some wire, and her and Misty were on their way- thanks to the garbled phone- to the bark park, where they believe I am waiting for them. "No, I'm in the Mall, waiting for the doc."

On to the appointment.  Some signs of possible Macular Degen, so she wants me to come back in 6 months.  Don't NEED need new glasses, yet.  "Baby cataracts", whatever that means.  Tells me to start eating more ( as in any) leafy greens to help my eye health.  Suggests she'll put me on supplements if I don't.  My answer: "What's a couple more pills, bring 'em on."

Call Laurie back.  Make a wasted trip around the Mall to see if they have a store that might possibly sell something to hold my wiper on.  Back to the car, thankfully the sleet/snow has stopped for the moment.  Find an O'Reilly's Auto on the way home, fix that.  So the co-pay on the eye exam plus the cost of the wiper will now just edge out the co-pay on the upcoming PT appointment- conveniently timed to hit right as the main storm has had an hour or so to dump more crap on the road.

Back home, the phone is back to functional, but not so much the e-mail.  I seem to have a lot of luck doing the Xfinity help chat on Twitter/X, so I contact them, while I ascertain the level of FUBAR on the e-mail.  Now it will give me the e-mails, even let me read them- but I can't DELETE them.

The connection to remote server http://imap-central.ge.xfinity.com was refused or timed out while attempting to connect. Please try again later.

So she has me do some stuff, logging out and in, asks me questions.  Suddenly I can't post a new message because "X is over capacity, try again later."  Several attempts later, X becomes un-capacitated, and we continue.  In the meantime, I go to DownDetector again- and this time it is full of messages cursing Xfinity's "awful service" and comparing the company to all things bright and wonderful.  About the time I mention this to my chat-helper, it all starts working again.  Or shortly after.  I was getting a bit blurry by this time.

On to the PT appointment, and the easy end of my travails. We now have literal slop, a couple inches of snow mixing nicely with an equal amount of rain.  Fortunately, my PT place is quite truly a drive around the block in a circle, so other than not slipping into parked cars, it wasn't a challenge.  What IS a challenge, I found out, is the fact that lying down, putting my hands behind my head, and pulling elbows toward each other is EXCRUCIATINGLY painful.  I love my body....