The scene: Our apartment.

The time: 3:20am.

The temperature: Too dingdanged high.

I’d turned the big AC unit off at quarter to 11pm last night to conserve power (and reduce noise), but by 4am I’d already turned it back on again. We have another couple days of near-100F high temperatures to get through, and maybe afterward we can “enjoy” the rest of the summer.

Remember when the Portland Oregon metro area was (rightfully!) known for being rainy most of the time? I sure do, but those days are long, long gone. Hundred-degree heatwaves are no longer notable rarities but expected trials, year after year.

And I hate it.

During my last eye exam, the doc advised picking up a pair of readers. As in, non-prescription eyeglasses with just a bit of magnification to help with reading stuff relatively close by. I rolled my eyes a bit, but followed his advice anyway because it made good sense. (The eyerolling was because I have a strong “you’re not the boss of me” streak, not because I disbelieved his verdict.)

In fact I bought two pair: One regular off-the-shelf pair of 1.5x cheapo readers plus a moderately pricey pair of extremely lightweight “blue-blocker” readers (same magnification), ideal for helping make sure I can get to sleep not too long after reading stuff on my tablet before bedtime.

(As an aside: The age of the monocle is long past, yet we still refer to buying reading glasses in pairs, as if we might some day decide to only buy just the one eyeglass. Huh. It’s like the idea that someone would buy just one pant.)

Over the last month or so I’ve gone from using the readers only for actual-reading (like, e-books on my tablet) and looking at stuff on my phone (because some apps use very tiny fonts, am I right?) to wearing them pretty much any time I’m reading text on any screen, including the monster 4K displays attached to my desktop PC.

Just look at what getting old entails, y’all. And now I fully understand why people buy bifocals, after donning and doffing my readers five times in the span of ten minutes this morning as I got set up for work.

(No, bifocals wouldn’t actually help me in my particular environment. But I get it now.)

Not a lot of posting this month? Blame the weather. Summer heat means I’m not on my computer as much, nor doing as much to write about.

I have a big Satisfactory project in the works… or will, once things cool off a bit. 90F+ temperatures aren’t exactly conducive to computer-centric projects.

At any rate, I hope wherever you are, you’re staying cool (or warm, if you’re in the southern latitudes).

Dealing with financial stuff is already on my list of least-favorite activities, but when you pair that with a security breach at the Oregon State DMV, it’s just doubly frustrating. See, it turns out that identification information for 3.5 million Oregonians was being shuffled around on a file transfer platform called MOVEit, which recently had a series of security vulnerabilities disclosed.

(Let’s just pretend I wrote a very lengthy rant asking why, in the name of all that’s holy, ID info for millions of citizens was being shuffled around on the Internet without being, oh, at the very least, encrypted in some meaningful fashion. It’s late and I’m tired and if I get started, before long I’ll just be keysmashing in fury. So let’s not and say we didn’t.)

The point is, the State of Oregon has basically said, “Welp. Guess you need to start watching for suspicious activity in your credit reports. Have fun!” But what we actually did, in this household, was freeze our reporting.

Mind you I didn’t even know that was a thing until this event. On the upside, the three credit reporting agencies seems to deal with “freezes” fairly regularly, as evidenced by the fact that all of their websites seem to lead with, “Are you here to freeze your credit reporting? Here’s a big friendly button.” It took me about forty minutes all told to get signed up at Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion… and that included some general puttering around trying to get a feel for things, not to mention some concern & annoyance over one of the services’ “security questions.

At any rate, theoretically it should be more difficult for identity thieves to use our names to ruin our credit by doing whatever-it-is they do with the information that the State of Oregon DMV so carelessly mishandled. Yay.

On March 8th, Eric T Carra lost his final battle against the ravages of ill health.

I found out about this over the weekend, when I decided to check his website in case there’d been any updates on his condition. (The news is in the comments thread of the final post.) If you read the slate of posts during the calendar year 2022, entered as he had the time, opportunity, and energy, you’ll see a litany of indignities (including COVID, but that was well after the initial problems had commenced). Through it all, when he could, he tried to inform and entertain in his clever, self-deprecating style.

It must’ve been hell. I can dimly imagine all the posts he didn’t complete, drafted then scrapped, about the ongoing interminable misery his life had apparently become.

To me, he’ll always be the one of the biggest fans of my silly webcomic project, Quacked Panes. Heck, early on I sent him the twin to my cast-iron duck, Rusty. I always looked forward to his reactions to my latest bad joke, and enjoyed following his interests on his blog (even if I’ll never understand the appeal of Formula 1). It’s no exaggeration to say that without Eric and a few other dedicated fans, I’d not have lasted four months at the webcomic project let alone four full years.

We shared similar-enough tastes in music, anime, and other odd bits of common culture to sustain a kind of distant friendship. Never close pals, but always cordial and supportive. Now I wish I’d been a better friend overall. Regrets, eh?

A font of knowledge and humor has left this world, and I’ll miss him always.

“Next episode: More zombies?”