![\"comic:](\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1679\/20190621122011-Scan.jpeg.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe surgery went well, though not being able to see properly or drive cramped Mom’s social life for a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for the crazy dental bill, I’m just trying to be responsible: teeth-grinding, tinnitus (and damaged hearing), bone loss and gum recession, apnea — when all this stuff is diagnosed and the dangers described, it seems like it would be crazy not<\/em> to do something about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, that’s the racket, but the alternative is worse than a big bill. And now that I own a home, big bills are a regular part of life: There’s always something<\/em> we should be fixing, insuring, or upgrading in order to be responsible and keep on top of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1) Good thing we would never risk letting another<\/em> potentially world-destroying disaster happen just for financial or bureaucratic reasons, now that we’ve learned our lesson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2) Windsor keeps coming up — in conversation, in an article about Steven Colbert growing up there (which I didn’t know), and in my memories. I feel now like it was a fine setting for my childhood, and understand why my parents chose our subdivision as a place to make our home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’d always wondered if I might have been “discovered” and had an easier time of capitalizing on my talents if I hadn’t lived in such out-of-the-way places. But that’s not a useful thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The e-mail alerts are achieving something I’ve wanted for a while but couldn’t figure out how to do: Finding out when my boss or his assistant are trying to contact me — like when we arrange to have a “sometime today” meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On those days, I often end up sitting in front of the computer with nothing to do, get nothing meaningful done, and my brain feels scrambled at the end of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sat down the other day, determined to figure out a solution — one that wouldn’t involve having a smartphone on me, which I do not want<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I discovered that my mobile phone company has an “SMS gateway” — meaning that you can send e-mails to “your phone number at service provider dot com” and they get sent to your phone as a text message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So all I had to do was create a rule in Mail.app saying, “If I get a message from one of my VIPs, forward it to this gateway address”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now I can turn off the computer, confident that this setup will let me know when I need to respond. It’s a small thing, but it’ll make a big difference in my life as a remote worker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been busy with work lately and haven’t had a chance to do any diary comics, but last night I managed to catch up a bit. The surgery went well, though not being able to see properly or drive cramped Mom’s social life for a bit. As for the crazy dental bill, I’m just trying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}