Wenzda’s Wandering Thoughts

I announced, “They want me to send them a photo.”

This aggrieved me. Everyone wants photos of things sent these days. I consider the trend of wanting photos part of the inexorable enshittification of modern society.

My wife was non-committal about her take on it. Sympathetic noises were made. I suspect she wasn’t paying attention.

Breaking down, I dragged out my phone, opened it to the camera app, and took a photo of our Lifepro Near Red-light Therapy belt. Yes, it took about twenty seconds. The time is not the point.

The belt had ceased working. We’d purchased it in October of 2023 through Amazon. It has a lifetime warranty.

The RLT impressed my wife and me. She used it to cope with painful back and shoulder flares caused by RA. I regularly used it to reduce swelling on my legs, ankles, and feet, where I’ve been dealing with lymphedema. I missed using it.

After the belt quit working, I went into my Amazon records and contacted the sellers. Happiness responded for them. Seeing that it was ‘happiness’ answering made me suspicious. We’re in a world where a documented liar calls himself the most honest man in the world, a world where the same man has cheated throughout his life but is supported by people as the Second Coming of Jesus. It has made me a little cynical.

Happiness asked for the order number and date of order. I provided that. Now they wanted a photo and directed me to a form.

The photo was part of an online form I needed to fill out. Grumbling about it, I put the order number in — again — click/copy/paste, filled out all the info, repeating many of the things already done, and then attached the photo. It took almost two minutes. Yeah.

Returning to email, I replied to Happiness and told them that I’d submitted the form. They thanked me and told me my issue would be reviewed and they’d get back to me in two to four days.

I expected to be given a return number. Told how to box it up and where to send it.

Instead, they sent me a new product. This wasn’t from Happiness but from Lifepro Support. Gave me a UPS tracking number and everything.

“What trickery is this?” I asked myself.

The replacement arrived yesterday. Brand new.

I wanted to verify some things for myself. I connected the new cord to the old belt. The cord has three separate segments which can be plugged in and unplugged, etc. This allows you to plug it into a UBS port or plug it into the wall. I always use the UBS port. Through my tests, I confirmed that it was only this segment of cord which didn’t work.

I wrote Lifepro Support to inform them that it was only the one piece that wasn’t working. That meant that I now had two working belts. Asked if they wanted me to send either back.

No, they responded. You can send it back if you want. or keep both. If you do want to send one back, tell us and we’ll give you the instructions. They thanked me for my honestly.

It was a good experience. Happiness and Lifepro Support always responded fast. They were friendly and professional, and the company stood behind their product. When I began, I thought I’d be chewing my nails in frustration by the end. I’m pleased that this wasn’t the case. Kylie, Jae, Renee, and Chad did a great job. The entire process took nine days.

And one photograph.

April 2, 2025 0

Munda’s Wandering Thoughts

One of the great things about the modern net is the ability to make friends. I have friendships with people I’ve never met. As I enjoy their social media posts and their blogs, I wonder what they’re really like. I’d like to be able to sit at a table with them and get to know them.

Conversely, I worry about them. Some are in Australia dealing with a cyclone. Are they okay? Some are in Ukraine, and I worry for their safety, sanity, and nation. Some of these friends are at risk for mental health or physical health. I worry about them if they’re absent from the net for a few days.

So, nice having friends around the world. I hope they’re all okay.

March 10, 2025 2

Wed-nezday’s Wandering Thoughts

There’s been a weather shift. From nowhere predictable (or, shall we say, it wasn’t predicted), sunshine and blue sky burst in on Ashlandia. Clouds flee like birds chased off by a cat.

Woo hoo, sunshine! Its warmth pushes the digits to 56 F. 56! I stand in a blaze, face up, sucking in fresh air and imagining sunblessed vitamin D pouring into me. Although…

The sun is the sun, even if it’s winter, almost solstice. I used moisterizer on my face. (Excuse me, I’m not a barbarian.) But does that moisterizer have any SPF rating?

Unable to recall my moisterizer’s nuances and protection, I hasten out of the sun.

This is modern life.

December 18, 2024 0

Tuesday’s Wandering Thoughts

It’s a complex world out there. You got to be vigilant. Take care of yourself.

This isn’t about me. This is about women and vaginal infections.

My wife related a Reddit story. A woman had a vaginal infection. She went to the doctor numerous times. Antibiotics were always prescribed. They always failed.

She suspected her underwear and shifted. New materials and styles were tried. Nothing. So she went commando. Nothing.

Sugar was removed from her diet, along with other foods. Nothing.

Her boyfriend didn’t have a rash. The two abstained from sex, in case it was something from him. No change.

Finally, she stumbled onto a Reddit post where thousands of women had reported the same struggle. The answer: toilet paper. She changed brands and the problem disappeared.

Sometimes it’s the most mundane and overlooked aspect of life. The edgier lesson was that in all of these thousands of stories from women, no doctor ever suggested, “Change your toilet paper.”

They just prescribed pills.

The end.

November 19, 2024 3

Wednesday’s Wandering Thoughts

When I returned from the coffee shop writing session yesterday, my wife related a story she’d read.

A man began a new habit of going to the coffee shop every Saturday morning. He enjoyed the atmosphere and would surf the net on his phone and text friends while nursing a coffee drink and nibbling a pastry. After a few weeks of this, he discovered he and the owner had once been friends. Then, life happened. This disconnected but now reconnected in a casual way.

One day the guy received an email from the coffee shop owner. The owner said that the barista complained that the man was ogling her on Saturday mornings and that the owner was going to have to bar him. The man refuted what was happening. Through a back and forth series, he convinced the owner that wasn’t the case.

Meanwhile, the barista was moved off Saturday morning to another schedule. Therefore, the owner said, the man would be welcomed back.

Fuck you, the man wrote back.

I wholly understood and agreed. That place would never be the same for him, and other coffee shops would probably be tainted for him as well.

Sad that it came to that. Made me wonder, as I sit in the coffee shop and people watch, what did that barista think she saw?

June 19, 2024 4

Lost Button

Where is my button?

I can’t find it now.

Don’t know where to eat, what to eat,

And I’m beginning to forget how.

Where is my button?

How do I get through the day?

What will I do when others come around,

Asking me to play?

Without my button, I don’t know where to go,

I have nothing smart to say.

Oh, where is my button?

How did I lose it this way?

People say they never used to have them,

But that cannot be true.

How did they know how to dress,

How to act, what to learn,

Without a button to show the truth?

Oh, where is my button?

It’s driving me insane.

How can I be me, without my button to say?

June 6, 2023 0

Two More Things Done

The bowed garage door has been repaired. The repair dude came, he saw, he did what I thought should be done, as he’s done to hundreds of other garage doors in his young career. A strut was tranversely attached via bolts to the garage door’s width. Repair dude used a stouter strut than I would have used mostly because I didn’t see one like it when I searched, but I thought it made sense when I saw the finish. He also tightened the chain’s tension to help compensate for the added weight. Although it wasn’t a DIY project, I was satisified.

The other repair event was the Mazda’s GPS, made by Tom Tom. I’d attempted to update the system before going on vacation. It went badly wrong. I asked for money back. Support reached out to me. I finally set aside time and followed their repair instructions. That didn’t work quite as they suggested, but I employed my own knowledge from my stone-age experience in tech support management. If one thing doesn’t work, observe what happened and try others. Following that perfected process delivered a good result. Didn’t consume much more than twenty-five minutes, too.

So, yeah, yea. Celebrate small victories, right? Yeah.

Cheers

July 21, 2022 0

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Sunshine prevails today. Tuesday’s sky can be described as mostly sunny or mostly cloudy. Both seem correct. While sunshine washes over everything in the valley, large clouds brood like waiting bears, shadowing large swaths of land.

Yes, it’s May 3, 2022. Our high is gonna be 64 F, they say, about ten degrees higher than it is at the mo’. The sunrise cometh at 6:01AM. The other end of the daylight session ends at 8:13 PM. Tomorrow, the weather ‘they’ say, we’ll see 79 F.

After a series of dark, messy, and splashy dreams, the neurons summoned a Nine Inch Nails song. Released in 2006, “Every Day Is Exactly the Same”, some of the lyrics go, “Every day is exactly the same.” Which sometimes is how my life feels, outside of writing. Feeding cats and taking care of them, house and yard work, the eternally aggravating question of “What’s for dinner,” dressing and eating, reading news, doing errands, reading books. Yet, in many ways, that’s how it was when working and in the military, too. The world is built on bureaucracies and routines. Sometimes, though, that tedium gets me. It’s funny, but I know this song because one of the QA guys who worked for me when I managed a tech support group introduced it to me. He no longer worked for me by that time, but sent me an email after the song came out, telling me about it, and mentioning, “It reminded me of what you used to say.” I still laugh about that.

Stay positive — yeah, who am I to talk? Test negative, etc. Here we go, music and coffee. Cheers