A Fire
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What I Want to Say
is not what I said.
What I said was this:
I am writing to inform you that the only reason I have re-enrolled in the HP Instant Ink program is in order to use the cartridge you sent me and for which, over the course of 2 months, you billed me $35 in your so-called “free” program.
Understand this: I have no interest in participating in the program, and I will un-enroll as soon as this cartridge is empty. Do not send me another cartridge. If you send me another cartridge, I will refuse delivery.
Furthermore, if you bill my credit card a single dime, I will report it as a fraudulent charge, and I will file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
I trust you can determine my account simply from the associated email address.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
What I wanted to say was a little harsher.
A Ride and the Creek
In the morning, a ride with the kids:
In the afternoon, some creek play.
Flint and Steel
The Boy wanted to try to start a fire with his flint and steel from the survival pack he bought earlier this year. He didn’t get it started, but he enjoyed chopping at a half-rotten (but dry) log to get small chips to try to catch a spark.
I tried to explain to him that that would not be sufficient, that he should try other methods. We tried using a small planer to produce some thin strips, but nothing worked.
In the end, he just got some matches.
Tease
Nature is teasing our family. Perhaps mocking. But I’ll be magnanimous and say “Teasing.” We were supposed to leave for Poland today.
We should be on a journey that ends tomorrow with hugs, rosół, and views like this:
This post should not be possible. Yet nature made it possible by making the trip impossible.
And as if that were not enough, today was a perfect example of what polskie lato can be like: it never got above 60 degrees today.
Croft and Berries
A little bike ride to start summer adventures:
And some blueberries.
The Refund
The flight was canceled. One would think getting a refund in such a case would be a fairly simple process. After all, a service paid for was never delivered. Still, we’d booked the flight through a middleman, so to speak, and Lufthansa said we had to deal with this third party. So we dealt with the agency that booked our flights. They informed us that they could not refund all of the money we’d paid for the tickets. For each ticket, Lufthansa would impose a $185 fee and the agency would impose a $100 fee.
I remembered, though, an email I’d gotten from Lufthansa, which read, in part:
The expanded route network offers you, our valued customers, more options for rebooking existing or canceled tickets to a variety of travel destinations, in accordance with the applicable conditions. As I wrote in my last letter, any ticket booked until May 15, 2020, which was affected by a flight cancellation, can be rebooked one time free of charge. You can also apply the value of your booking to a new ticket at a later date. Additionally, your travel date and destination can be changed in our route network. In this case, the rebooking must be made by January 31, 2021 and your new trip must begin by December 31, 2021. For a new confirmed travel date up to December 31, 2020, we will give you an additional € 50 toward bookings changed by August 31, 2020. Should you prefer a refund, this option is also available. We are increasing the capacities in order to process refunds more quickly.
I called back and forwarded the email to the agency as we spoke.
“Well, sir, that was just an email Lufthansa sent out to all ticket holders. Your ticket was purchased with many restrictions.”
“I don’t recall being informed of any such restrictions. The email doesn’t indicate that tickets purchased with certain restrictions are not eligible,” I replied with surprising calm.
I’d done a little research about them before calling and found the following notes at a review site, all published within the last week:
One star is too much for this company. Sure, the agents that book your trip are friendly and the prices are cheap. HOWEVER, this company is dubious. They are now charging people to cancel flights, as necessary due to the pandemic. I had a trip booked to go to Greece, and the airline required me to cancel it through the travel agent —-. —- charged $150 to my credit card, without my consent, just to cancel my flight. I’m working with my credit card to stop the payment, but —- is fighting back, saying I agreed to this term. LIARS! Save yourself and NEVER use this company. It’s incomprehensible that they would attempt to profit from the pandemic. Shame on them.
Another also seemed to have issues with getting refunds: “Horrible horrible con-artist at best. you are taking a chance using this company, refuse to give back refunds approved by airlines.” And then there was this long story:
As many others said, i am also having issues receiving my refund! My flight to Europe was canceled, i was willing to change the flight, but they said the airline has no other flights this month. So i requested a refund. I purchased another flight with another agency, surprisingly they had flights with the same airline for dates i wanted. I called —- today for an update on my refund and Owen said that the airline put a hold on all refunds. That was odd to me. Right after, i called an airline directly, and they said they did not put a hold on any refunds and they are processing refunds, but they were unable to help me because the agency is the one that has to request a refund from them. I emailed —- rep who told me the airline put a stop to refunds and told him what i was told by the airline rep…no response… Im disappointed on how they are handling this.. They are very nice when purchasing the flights to get your business but this is unacceptable! I refuse to have almost 4k stolen!!
What I suspected was that they were planning on pocketing that money for themselves. I suggested that legal action might be required.
“I am just informing you of your options,” the man replied, completely non-plussed.
In the end, though, he told me he would do what he could and called back much later saying that he’d talked to the airline, and they’d agreed to waive the fee. “Bullshit,” I thought. “Your manager agreed to waive that fee.” However, they insisted on the $100/ticket service charge. Now, we’d been working on this all afternoon, and we’d called other friends who’d been in the same situation (one of whom was also flying Lufthansa), and they’d had no problems getting refunds and their cancelation fee was non-existent or only $50. At that point, though, I was just tired of the fight. We’d been working on the issue for five hours, and I just felt exhausted with the whole thing.
I think that’s what they were counting on.
Polska Resolution
It’s been a trying couple of weeks, trying to figure out if we’re going to Poland this year. The problems were myriad — so much uncertainty, not the least of which was the simple question, “Is this even a smart thing to be considering.” The main issue driving all this was the simple fact that we haven’t been in three years, which means the kids have not seen Babcia in three years, and K has not seen her mother in three years.
Then a couple of weeks ago, all the plans got turned upside down: Aunt D, with whom Papa was going to stay while we were gone, went into the hospital herself with non-COVID issues. She’s still not moving much, and we knew immediately that plans would change even if we did go to Poland. We made the decision that I would simply stay behind and K would take my ticket (with the proper adjustments from the powers that be, of course).
It seemed a good solution. K would now have six weeks with her mother, and the first two weeks would be dedicated time with her as there is a mandatory quarantine for anyone arriving from outside the country. But then we found other things out: it was likely that the visit would be limited as Poles are taking this much more seriously than Americans. The fear was how many people would be unwilling to meet due to COVID concerns? After all, even Babcia and her neighbors distance themselves and limit contact as much as possible.
All this depended on actually making the trip, though. The flights, according to all the information we had, were not canceled. If the flights were not actually canceled, it turned out, fees would apply to everything: changing dates, cancellations, changing seats (joking there). The fee to cancel would be $300 per ticket. That’s almost an entire ticket just to cancel all four.
So all these concerns bearing down on us.
And then today, the flights were canceled and all our options simplified.
Babcia was naturally heartbroken; K was sad but relieved; E, who has been talking about the possibility of the trip incessantly for a few days, was disappointed; L, who is thirteen, shrugged and said, “Oh, too bad.”
It was a struggle, to be sure. He had a fair amount of difficulty just getting on the bike, but once on, he insisted that he’s ready for just such a bike.
Cycling
The Boy and I started our summer cycling season in earnest a couple of weeks ago. We’ve discovered a few things along the way, including a lake within a couple of miles of our house that we didn’t even know exists. But the Boy is itching for a new bike. His current bike is at its limits: the seat cannot go any higher, and he’s able to out-pedal the fastest gear. “I need more gears!” he consistently insists. This evening, when we had fifteen minutes before his bedtime, the Boy asked if we could go out and adjust L’s bike so he could ride it.
Friday Thoughts of Poland
Within a couple of days, we’ll have full resolution to the question: Are we going to Poland this year?
Playing in the Creek
Cycling with a Friend
In 3s
Things go wrong in threes. That’s what they say, right? So if that’s the case, we’re done. First, the roof. A leak. Fortunately, insurance wrote us a new roof.
Second, the lawnmower. Two hundred dollars to fix it. I could have bought a new lawnmower for that. Of course, it would have been a cheap piece of junk, but the fact stands.
Then the dishwasher. We paid a repairman $75 to tell us what I thought I knew: the main board was gone. So we went to a few places looking for a replacement, including a local appliance store that sells the crazy cabinet-depth $20,000 Sub-Zero refrigerators. You’d think that’s the last place to find a deal, but we did indeed find a deal. The real deal: they had it in stock. Big-box stores didn’t, and we’d still have to wait weeks for delivery.
So we got the dishwasher installed, ready to go. We’re waiting on the roofing company to catch up with their work that’s been thrown off schedule with all the rain. And I’ve already used the mower once. Are we past the threes? Who knows.
The Boy’s Photos
Visitor
Sunday with Friends
In many regards, they might as well be sisters.
After all, our kids refer to each other as cousins, and they’re here for all the major holidays.
If that doesn’t make us family, I don’t know what does.
Typical Saturday
Work-Around
I figured out a work-around for the lack of storage that, upon talking to the local Lenovo service department, promises to be relatively easily mended.
So I spent a little time this afternoon seeing just how much faster the new computer is than the old. It’s fast. Blazing fast. The old computer was particularly sluggish in Lightroom when doing spot adjustments with the brush. Switching on the mask overlay could take a few seconds if there were enough adjustments on the photo. On the new computer, it’s instantaneous.
Review: Rules of Civility
I wasn’t sure what I thought of this book at first. There wasn’t much of a plot: just some randomly connected incidents pulled together by the simple fact that they were happening to the same character. She goes to a nightclub; she eats dinner somewhere; she does this; she does that.
Then I started picking up on the allusions. This book is jam-packed with them. While there are some allusions to music and art, most of them refer back to novels. And then I started to see that the structure of the novel was itself an allusion to a classic novel we’ve all read. And then I started to see how Towles was taking yet another novel, itself a modern classic, inverting the structure, and placing on top of the allusion to the classic novel.
And then came this passage between a rich New York aristocrat (with a good and pure heart, though) and the narrator, a working-class girl born to Russian Jewish immigrants. The aristocrat is visiting the narrator’s apartment and notices the books:
“You’ve got a lot of books,” he said at last.
“It’s a sickness.”
“Are you … seeing anyone for it?”
“I’m afraid it’s untreatable.”
He put his briefcase and the wine on my father’s easy char and began circling the room with a tilted head.
“Is this the Dewey decimal system?”
“No, but it’s based on similar principles. Those are the British novelists. The French are in the kitchen. Homer, Virgil and the other epics are there by the tub.”
Wallace wandered toward one of the windowsills and plucked Leaves of Grass off a teetering stack.
“I take it the transcendentalists do better in sunlight.”
“Exactly.”
“Do they need much water?”
“Not as much as you’d think. But lots of pruning.”
He pointed the volume toward a pile of books under my bed.
“And the … mushrooms?”
“The Russians.”
This is, at its heart, a book about books, cleverly camouflaged as something else, but it is in essence a giant hat-tip to literature. That’s not all it is, of course, but that’s it’s organizing principle.
I won’t mention what exactly the classic novel and modern classic are — that would be a spoiler. I fear in mentioning them at all I’ve given too much away.
For all it has going for it, though, this novel is clearly a first novel: execution doesn’t quite meet conception. Perhaps Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, which I read first, set me up to expect too much. This is a solid novel, though, and an enjoyable read even if it does drag just a bit at times.
Day 81: Frustration
Here are the specs for the order:
Notice: a 2 x 2TB hard drive for data storage.
Here are the properties of that drive (since it’s a raid, the two drives should appear as one 4TB drive):
That’s 2TB. Half of what I ordered.
I called so many people. I chatted with online help. Most of the conversations went like the online chat:
To say I spent most of the day alternating between laughter, fury, frustration, and resignation is a vast oversimplification.
This is the last time I will ever order a computer with customizations online. From here on out, I’m either building the machine myself or having someone else locally build it to my specifications.
All of that to say that we have this incredibly powerful computer that has a woeful lack of storage. I’m working on a short-term workaround, but the upshot is simple: still no pictures for today.
Day 80: Transitions
It’s almost embarrassing how long we struggled along with the same old computer as our main computer. I was the main user: Chromebooks, laptops, and now Nana’s old computer filled the void for the others. We finally broke down and bought a new computer, though, and it’s a beast: Intel Core i9-9900 vPro (3.10GHz, up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost, 8 Cores, 16MB Cache) with 48GB of RAM, a 1024GB solid-state drive for programs, and a 2 x 2TB RAID hard drive for storage. It’s blazing fast. Lightroom work should be so much quicker. But there’s the problem: I have 126,000+ image files constituting 1.25TB to move before I even think about installing Lightroom and beginning to reconstruct the LR catalog.
And so for today, I have nothing more than the thought that transitions between computers are probably about the easiest transitions there are. After all, the computers do all the work…