Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Today the car is doing that thing where it picks up two stations at the same time and cuts between them depending on how fast the car is moving. It leads to mash ups like

Guy reading an ad: For more information,
Terry Gross: this is Fresh Air.

The house has cooled off nicely. There are too many cops out. Time for cat hugs.

One of today's spam messages with broken English and probably some kind of scam that I can't even tell what they're trying to sell me on had a physical mailing address at the bottom to try to look more legitimate. It's the address of the White House, so definitely some kind of scam that will be promptly deleted.

Spending a little time beautifying the purchase page for my upcoming book. Everything is in test mode and hidden right now but it should be functional for most of the world, supports the security features that are more common outside of the US, goes to a working page where you'll be able to download the book, sends an email receipt that has the link both as something pretty and something with the full URL spelled out so someone who prints their receipts has a thing they can type that works.

Apparently the fix was to jiggle the outdoor breaker back and forth a bunch.

I have a working air conditioner at home again.

Tomorrow I start training a new person. One of the few good things about the current set of reduced hours is that I can do stuff like that after the shop is closed instead of being in the way of other people actively trying to do the job.

Plan for after work:

1. Hug cat
2. Prepare and eat dinner
3. Work on the book

The real down side of this is that the cat did not get her usual full dose of pre-work cuddles.

Went into work too early because a machine stopped working and apparently I'm the only person here who can figure out that the power switch needed to be replaced and swap that part with a spare. I'm now down to 1 spare power switch so I should order more of those soon.

cat: stop cleaning the house. pet the cat instead.

April was a record month for online orders for both number of orders and total sales. May will not be unless a few more orders come in (it's currently down by 3 orders and a couple hundred dollars). I'm expecting this to trend down as places open back up and people get back to their usual routines.

Gallon bottles of chai are out on the shelf now. The hope is that people who buy multiple half gallons at once switch to that instead of wiping out our supply of quarts, but I also made signage with the whole use within 7-10 days of opening instructions very large as someone who doesn't drink 2 gallons of chai in a week should stick with the smaller bottles so it doesn't go bad on them. (it ferments in a not dangerous but also not delicious way)

Return shipping for pink boxes and giant shopping bags is apparently close enough to the value of the products that the company that sent those instead of test strips and cocoa powder doesn't want them back. I might haul the boxes over to one of the local bakeries and see if they want any free boxes appropriate for donuts and I'm not sure what makes sense for such enormous plastic bags. Maybe emergency trash can liners if someone fails to buy those?

Time for another trip to the post office. This time it's a regional rate and a flat rate box. I overestimated my need for large flat rate boxes a long time ago so I'm still sending out an old holiday design with a snow person on one side.

The cat is not good at Tetris.

*big yawn*

Finished my online workshop. I think it went really well but I'll see how everybody's feedback forms turn out. One thing that was interesting here is that for the 10 roasts that students tasted there was no consensus on what their favorite was, with the exception that nobody picked D-1 or D-2 (the things between my start of 2nd crack medium roasts and my not quite out to a French Roast) as their favorites. The cat was good throughout. So, I'll be doing this again next month.

Affectionate cat is affectionate.