“Remoted” – Day 498 (Tuesday)

Rice, chicken, beans. queso,
salsa and a dash of guilt.

After work there was supper. It was beans, queso, and salsa, with some chicken and rice from the food prepped for the doggy plain diet. It started out tasting good, then began to feel like bowl of guilt for eating the ingredients for the special diet for the ailing canine. I cheered myself up with the thought that the dogs aren't the ones doing the working, earning, shopping, and chopping, so danggit, I deserve a few grains of rice and some bits of chicken if I want it. It also means there is that much less for upcoming dog meals, so I'm the one who loses in the end with having to go to the store.

After the guilt-seasoned bowl of grub, there was a trip to City Hall, having learned that it is open until 8:00 on Tuesdays. This good news offset the irritation on Friday when I called the Assessor’s office at 1:00, only to be reminded that City Hall closes at noon on Fridays. The Assessor’s Office was visited tonight to complete the abatement form for the Honda no longer in my possession. It looks like I’ll get half the excise tax back in about four to six weeks, and the new excise tax bill for the Jeep will probably be in by then. Too bad they couldn’t just apply the refund to the new bill.

The excise tax abatement feels more satisfactory than the refund received from the RMV for the registration. The plates renewed for two years in February at a cost of $60 and were cancelled in June. A refund check arrived from the state with no explanation for the amount. I called to ask about it and received a rundown on the refund calculation. Call me crazy, but that would have been super helpful if it was included on the check stub. It would have saved me a phone call and the state worker answering the line from having to answer that call and I would bet I’m not the only person who calls with that same question. 

Basically, the explanation was that they take a $15 fee before refunding a portion of the unused portion of the registration fee. Even though the registration was active for four months and three weeks, the refund wasn’t even half of the 24 month fee. The refund of $22.50 of the original $60 left me feeling a bit robbed. Luckily, my memory is short and I’ll likely forget all about this in next to no time.

Before the little jaunt to downtown, a stop was made at Family Dollar for the usual dog biscuits, infant diapers for the dog pee wraps, and replacement lightbulbs for two sconces in the bedroom. One bulb burned out a couple weeks ago, and the last time in a store, because nothing is ever easy, there were two different sizes of screw socket and I didn’t know which I needed. Today I knew the answer, new bulbs were procured, and the light near the bed works again. 

Oddly, tonight and the last several times I've been in Family Dollar, an uncomfortable amount of shelf space has sat bare. The chips and many shelves in the grocery section, half the diaper section, and more were expanses of emptiness. It's been like the truck forgot to show up for weeks, but unlike the early pandemic product shortage time, there was plenty of toilet paper and paper towels.

Another stop was made at the Post Office to mail the payment for the gutter cleaning. They don’t have online payments, so was super old school and a paper check, which I still have, and use maybe four a year. The stops were factored in to eat up 20 minutes until the parking meters became free at 6:00. I wasn’t feeling lucky about parking outside City Hall and the Police Department and risking a ticket by skipping the pay station, and I also wasn’t keen on paying the minimum one-hour rate of $1.50 for an errand that would take ten minutes. That $1.50 equals half the cost of the box of dog biscuits. Priorities.