Posted on
by

The outside of the former Great Maple restaurant at Del Amo Fashion Center. It opened with the new upscale wing of the mall, and closed suddenly about a year later. (Like, people showed up to work and the door was locked.) Nothing’s moved in since then, and of course nothing’s likely to move in for a while now.

The outside of a building with several tall screens of square patterns in front of it.

The facade reminds me a little of the facade on the old medical building that used to stand near the corner. It was demolished for the parking lot that came along with the mall expansion. And I have to wonder if someone was actually trying to keep a little bit of the old building’s character alive?

A two-story building with tiles and several vertical screens with square-and-diagonal patterns and an awning.

Posted on
by

Waiting at home for a link to a video call is, in some ways, better than waiting at the doctor’s office. You’re home, after all! You can use your most comfortable chair. You don’t have to worry about getting sick from other people in the waiting room. You know where the bathroom is, you can bring your coffee in, you have all your own reading material.

But….

There’s always that nagging suspicion that the email with the conference link has been lost, and they’ve been waiting for you to connect for the last 10 minutes and will just move onto the next patient.

Which I’ve had happen.

Over the last few months we’ve dealt with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, several in-browser apps and at least one app that couldn’t figure out landscape orientation. Between school and health, we’ve had some setups where we log into an account and the system connects you to the right person, some where each meeting has its own code, and some where a week’s worth of classes will use the same code. Some send the code or URL by email, some by text message, some through a portal. A lot of them send it out right at appointment time.

None of them just, you know, call on the app when they’re ready.

I actually had to reschedule one appointment after checking in. The front office called me on the phone to do the check-in, and at the end they asked if I knew how to get onto their portal to get the Zoom link. I logged in, and waited…and waited…and waited… No new messages, and nothing in the appointment info about how to connect, only that it would be sent in a message. By the time I called back, they’d marked me as a no-show. It turned out they’d sent the link buried in a message (in their portal, of course), back when I’d made the appointment. “But it says you read this message!” Yeah…not recently.

I’ve got to wonder — if someone who does tech for a living has trouble keeping up with this stuff, how hard is it for people who aren’t used to it?

Posted on
by

I’ve been meaning to post this Kangaskhan at Gengis Khan Mongolian barbecue since… September? I forget exactly. Yeah, it’s a mall food court, so it’s definitely the Before Times. And it looks like the older Pokemon Go camera mode.

As for the Wynaut at ‘Y’ Not, that was a little more recent, on the way back from one of those rare outings to someplace farther away than the grocery store. But I had to stop for it.

Posted on
by

A couple of days ago I developed a cough and measured a fever. The cough has been very intermittent, and the fever went away after a couple of hours.

Still, I went for a Covid-19 test after measuring the fever, and we all went into lockdown mode just in case. No errands or walks. Just picking up the mail. Extra hand washing. Keeping physical distance at home. It could easily be a false alarm, but with cases surging, it seemed like a good idea to be certain.

All the drive-through centers in the area seem to be closed and I had to go to an urgent care. Instead of letting people in the waiting room, they were checking us in at the door, taking a phone number, and having us wait in our cars. An hour and a half later, they called me in. After checking vitals and symptoms, they actually had me swab my own nostrils with a q-tip and put it in a sample vial.

I got the results two days later through the network’s online portal: negative!

So with the cough and fever gone, and the coronavirus test negative, we can at least return to…well, whatever this is. It’s certainly not “normal.”

(This year has brought it home that “normal” doesn’t really exist – the world is in a constant state of flux, and what we consider “normal” are just local circumstances in time and space.)

But I can go back to daily walks (masked), drive-through and curbside pickup for errands (masked), and only having to keep my distance outside the house.

Posted on
by

A Pokemon looking at a door with a sign saying that the place is closed.

Sneasel is disappointed that the museum is closed.

A turtle-like Pokemon on a rock in a pond, near a real turtle on a concrete berm.

Turtwig has found a new friend.

(I had such a hard time trying to get it to face the right direction, which is why it’s still a little bit off. At least I didn’t need to worry about the real turtle wandering away while I set up the shot.)

A frog-like Pokemon next to a real statue of a frog.

I don’t have a clever caption for this one, but thought it was cool that I caught the Croagunk right there while trying to decide what to do with the frog statue.

Incidentally, the frog statue is a Pokestop. And so is the historical cabin in the Sneasel picture.

A spherical Pokemon with lots of protrusions next to a sign about Covid-19's ability to stay on surfaces.

I think Koffing is supposed to look like a magnified grain of dust or pollen…but it looks an awful lot like a coronavirus, too.