From NYT:

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the temporary closure of airspace over El Paso on Wednesday morning, abruptly reversing course after grounding flights hours earlier for what officials said would be 10 days.

“There is no threat to commercial aviation,” the agency said on social media. “All flights will resume as normal.”

The brief shutdown was related to a test of new counter-drone technology by the military at Fort Bliss, a nearby Army base, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Ahhh, the joys of federation! When viewed from my instance, the most recent post in that community is from 4 months ago!

I think this is the post: https://awful.systems/post/7222752

Yeah, I think there was some regulation passed to ban the sale of gas powered leaf blowers within my city or county, but anyone who already owns one is still allowed to use them, and anyone who wants to buy a new one just has to travel to the neighboring city/county to buy one. I’m not sure what happened with that, but I can tell you for sure that the city parks department is definitely still using gas powered leaf blowers.

Oh yeah, you’re right. I was focusing on just where the first day of the week lands, not the full month calendar.

If we had had any snow days here this year, that would probably have been my one day of peace!

Correct! Void is the sweetie and is always happy to greet everyone, and is even pretty welcoming to the constant stream of fosters. Tabby is my snuggle buddy, but is a jerk to almost everyone else.

OMG, yes! I swear there’s someone outside my building using one 8 or 9 days per week.

No, since there’s only 7 different possibilities, then over a sufficiently large sample, the probabilities would all still balance out to 1 in 7.

Can you guess which one’s which?

• Cancer treatment
• Trying to find a job
• All the stupidity in the world around me

I started out fostering cats (mostly kittens) a few years ago. I switched to a different organization a little while back, and started also volunteering for a variety of administrative tasks in addition to fostering. I love the cats, but would like to get more regular in person human interaction.

Would a billion be enough?

Seedbox. I’ve had mine for over 10 years and I’m still paying the same $15/month, so it’s effectively gotten cheaper, and they’ve actually upgraded me at least twice in that time to give me more storage & bandwidth.

I’d like to talk about the awesome employment opportunity they have for me that pays decently, has good benefits, and is doing something beneficial for the world, hopefully nonprofit.

If that’s not an option, I guess cats.

Nah, just means the females are all homozygous for orange, and all the males are orange. The gene for orange is on the X chromosome, and since XY males only get one X chromosome, they’re either “orange” or “not orange”. XX females (and XXY males) can get one copy of “orange” and one copy of “not orange”, and that’s how you you get torties/calicos, and why torties/calicos are almost always female.

What was wrong with “omnivore”?

But then what would I do while out for a walk, be alone with my thoughts and observant of my surroundings??

Sent from my smartphone while out for a walk.

Find some organizations you’d be interested in volunteering with and pull up their websites to find out what they need. Some will list it on their websites, but for others you might have to send an email or submit an application first. Yes, some organizations will ask their volunteers for a minimum commitment since training takes effort, but others will have opportunities for you to commit one day at a time.

A friend of mine volunteers at a local food bank and also a tiny home building group, and just signs up for random shifts here & there when their availability matches the scheduling needs. Me personally, I’ve been volunteering to foster cats for years now. The organization I’m with also needs volunteers for a variety of administrative roles, driving/transportation, and trapping (TNR). There’s another group I’ve been meaning to check out that just does some park maintenance once a month, and their info page says “no RSVP necessary”, so you can just show up.

Oof. A good while back, I worked in a US-based company with offices globally, and they upgraded to a global ERP system. At launch of the new system, documents (such as purchase orders) printed with dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Thankfully, my suggestion to change that to DD Mmm YYYY (eg. 31 Jan 2026) was quickly implemented without any pushback, but it totally blows my mind that a company operating globally would default to such an ambiguous date format.

Huh. I’m unemployed & job hunting right now, and have had a few interviews via Teams. I’m running Mint and using the Teams web app in Firefox, and for some reason, the sound has never worked properly, so we’ve ended up switching to phone each time. The sound works fine in Zoom. My next interview expects to conduct it via Teams video, so I found a friend with Teams to help me troubleshoot later today. I was thinking maybe it was a Firefox problem, but it works fine in Firefox for you?