At the Store
I was going through the frozen food section, toying with the idea of buying ice cream. This was definitely an impulse thing. Although several interesting flavors called me, I wasn’t sure I was going to buy any.
A couple shopping behind me had some frozen object in hand. He said, “This says it’s three and a half servings.”
“Three and a half!” The woman laughed. “No way. I’ll just eat that myself.”
She tossed the item into their cart and they moved on.
I smiled. We’ve all been there.
Floofstalgia
Floofstalgia (floofinition) – 1. Emotional distress caused by worry about an animal. Origins: 2005 article, “Floofstalgia: a new concept in human and animal anxiety”.
In Use: “Brenda didn’t see Murder M, automatically triggering floofstallgia because this was not like Murder M at all.”
2. Fond reflections about a previously known animal.
In Use: “While searching for a pen, Wade discovered the purple collar Bella used to wear, soaking him with floofstalgia.”
3. Yearning for a time before living with animals, especially housepets.
In Use: “Sweeping up pet fur after cleaning up food bowls, floofstalgia raged in Carey — cleaning wasn’t as time consuming when she didn’t have pets!”
Till When
Just goofing around. “Linger” by the Cranberries floated into the mental music stream. I recalled my youngest sister once saying that she loved that song, and thought about how she had changed and how life had changed. This came come out whole a minute later.
And here’s the sweet song, “Linger”.
Cheers
The Morning eMail
My wife heaved a sigh. She’d just come into the home office with her tea and settled down on her computer to check her email.
“My NYTimes is again in my junk folder, along with Ashland News,” she announced. “Two pieces of junk mail are in my inbox.”
“It’s probably the AI that’s supposed to be so helpful,” I answer. She laughs.
Complaints about her emails have been going all week. She uses Hotmail, which is now Outlook. Or maybe it’s the other way. Whatever you call it, she’s displeased with its performance. Every day, she has to check to see where her trusted emails have gone and delete the spam that now hits her inbox. As a product, the Hotmail/Outlook app seems to be going backwards.
It’s not consistent, either. It first started with her saying last Monday, “I didn’t get my NYTimes newsletter.” Then she said, “I found it in my junk mail.” That continued for several days before it went back to her inbox. That’s when Ashland News went to junk mail.
“I don’t understand,” my wife said. “Why is it doing this?”
A search of the net suggests many ways to try to fix this problem. None of them mentioned why the problem began. I decided to use AI to see what it said. ChatGPT blamed new adaptive AI which Microsoft introduced last year.
I passed that on to my wife, who laughed. “Great. AI is screwing up my email. What a perfect metaphor.”
I laughed, too. “I don’t know how much I trust of what one AI says about the other. It’s like wondering, what does your wife think of your girlfriend?”
Michael Seidel, writer 