Beware (the week of) the Ides of March

Just had to get this all out.

1. Last Monday was March 15, the Ides of March. It was also the 15th anniversary of me becoming CTO of DevExpress. That was the good bit. Cheers!

2. Also last Monday morning was the end of a big spring snowstorm. Over the previous 48 hours or so, we’d had around 14 inches of snow at our house. Denver had over 2ft with major drifts, and DIA was shutdown since they couldn’t clear the runways. We’d snow-shoveled our driveway and sidewalks three times on the Sunday and once on the Monday morning, after which I thought to take a picture of the house with a cleared driveway and piled drifts to either side…

There's two raised flowerbeds
over there on on the left...

3. …so I hit the remote control to close the garage door, and boom, the garage door opener motor died with the bottom of the door about a foot from the ground. At first I thought it was a fuse or the circuit breaker, but after a bit of experimentation I came to the conclusion that It was completely dead. Which is what the engineer said when they came out the next afternoon. So Friday lunchtime they replaced it with a brand new opener, which, it must be admitted, works way better than the old one ever did. For those four days it was broken though, I got some valuable exercise lifting and pulling down the double garage door.

4. The same day, Amazon emailed me to say that my usual monthly subscription for Starbucks Caffè Verona Verismo pods was out of stock and did I want to change it. OK, OK, let’s switch to another dark roast for next month I thought, but when I went online, Amazon had absolutely no Verismo pods at all. Wut? Some few minutes searching later, I discover that Starbucks had completely and utterly discontinued the Verismo pod line back in late December. The past couple of months I’ve been lucky with my subscription and had it fulfilled, but no more. Once I get through the few boxes of pods I have left, that’s it. Done. The Verismo coffee maker I have in my office will have to go in the trash, and I’ll have to buy some other one.

5. My wife’s car is still not fully repaired. The collision shop was estimating that it would be ready by last Friday (and I’ve been getting calls from the car rental place asking when they can have their car back, it’s been 7 weeks, etc), so I nipped over there on Wednesday to see how it was coming along. Still in the paint shop. New estimate: the end of next week. Which is what I then told the rental place. Really, my wife would just like her car back, pretty please.

6. Finally, finally!, enough COVID-19 vaccines made it to El Paso County that I was able to make an appointment to get my shots. Nowhere near where we live, I hasten to add, but 15 miles away in Fountain, which is just south of Colorado Springs. So Wednesday morning, I drove down there for my 10am appointment, and got my first Pfizer shot, with the next one booked for April 7. The only after-effects I had from this first shot was that for a couple of days afterwards it felt as if someone had punched me on the arm. By Friday, I was fine again. Let’s see what happens next time.

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