Two Hypotheses on Sudden Delivery Problems

My household has has had a "Walmart Plus" membership for a couple of years now. Since we do probably 2/3 of our grocery shopping at Walmart, the "free delivery on orders over $35" seems well worth the annual membership fee, even setting aside the included streaming media platform subscription (you can choose between Paramount Plus and Peacock). It saves us both extra trips into town and the time we'd spend in the store.

It usually works out just fine. Occasionally an order will be missing an item (and Walmart cheerfully refunds out money). Also occasionally we'll get stuff we didn't order because the driver got mixed up. That's even better because Walmart won't take the stuff back, they just tell you to keep it, and it's usually stuff we do use.

But the last few days have been interesting. We placed an order for delivery Sunday evening, and it didn't arrive. "Delayed due to driver availability issues." Reschedule or cancel.

We rescheduled for Monday evening. Same outcome.

This time we canceled, waited a few hours, and did the same order (plus more stuff we had put on our grocery lists in the meantime) from scratch. I decided to set the delivery time frame to daytime and see if it would actually happen, otherwise we could make a physical evening trip to the store.

It arrived.

Nothing like this has ever happened before with Walmart Plus, for us or for anyone we know who's mentioned using the service. Off the cuff I suspect we've ordered for delivery close to 100 times, with only one "delay" ever and that by only a couple of hours because a driver's vehicle broke down.

What's up with that?

Well, Walmart uses a mix of employee and contractor drivers, and evening delivery seems to lean hard on the contractor end. Considering that, I have two hypotheses:

1. It's college graduation time in Gainesville, Florida. In fact, University of Florida graduation was last weekend. If a lot of the evening contract drivers are students doing it part-time, there may have been a sudden exodus of graduates (and non-graduates going home for summer) that Walmart couldn't replace in a timely manner. 
2. Gas prices are up by 50% since Trump shit the bed in the Middle East. Which means the contractors aren't making as much money unless they're either getting bonuses to help cover the higher price of filling their tanks or are able to increase the number of deliveries they make per trip. Late evening delivery is probably less popular than other time frames, meaning less ability to stack a larger number of orders into one trip.

Any other ideas?

Wordle 1782 Hint

Hint: When you point out a resemblance.

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First Letter: L

Non Sequitur, Vote By Mail Edition

Los Angeles Times letter to the editor headline (paywalled, so I can only go with that headline claim, not any other facts of the writer's situation:

I’m in my 90s and I’ve given up driving. Voting by mail is my only option

Yep, only option.

Except for Uber.

Or a taxi, if those still exist in the writer's area.

Or asking a friend or relative for a ride to the polling place.

Or calling up the local party organization or political campaign of your choice, if they haven't already called you (in urban areas, election day is usually characterized by multiple phone calls offering voters transportation to the polls).

If you're 95 years old, there's a very good chance you live in some kind of "retirement community," ranging from "people have their own houses/apartments but there's infrastructure to support their needs" to full-on "nursing home." Many, maybe most, of those places provide transportion on both an individual basis ("I need to go to the doctor for my appointment") and group basis ("the van leaves for the mall at noon and returns at 3pm") as part of the package.

So it's highly unlikely that this writer's only option is to vote by mail. It's the most convenient. It's the least expensive. It's arguably more secure. But it's not the only option.

Interesting Easement Situation

As I mentioned recently, our household decided to switch from Starlink to Cox fiber Internet. I was happy with Starlink, but the gamers in the house wanted higher speeds and lower latency.

On the initial installation attempt, the contractor said we were just too far from the main node to connect, so we thought it was over. No biggie. But then another contractor came back and said "no, it's fine." He ran the fiber from the node to our house and told us they'd be back to bury it later.

Yesterday, there was a knock on the door that I missed, so I hopped on my motorcycle to go see if they were working on it down at the main road. They were, kind of ...

The gentleman who lives at the corner was telling them they couldn't bury the fiber because the path was on his property.

They kept trying to explain that they were burying it right at the edge of the road, well within the utilities easement.

He insisted that there WAS no easement, that in fact the road ran through his property but belonged to him, and that he just allowed the 10 or so households down it to use it out of the goodness of his heart, but that they couldn't bury the fiber there.

It's a road with a county name and a county street sign, and I showed one of the guys the county works the survey posts where the path for eventual paving are placed (the road as surveyed does not QUITE follow the path cars have actually been traveling, presumably for at least 20 years, but we had our property surveyed last fall and I found the posts in some trees just outside our survey flag).

Which was great, the guy told me, but even if there WAS no actual pre-described "utility easement," there would be an "easement by implication" (due to the long use of the roadway without objection from the property owner) and/or "easement by necessity" (without that road, all those properties would otherwise be "land-locked").

So they ended up running the fiber. Which, presumably, the other guy will never have any reason to notice, since it's buried right along the edge of, and in, the cow path the county says is a "road." So now the kids have their fast Internet (since I use wifi, and it maxes out below the speeds of either Starlink or fiber, the only change I'm seeing is the name of the network I connect to).

Anyway, I can't really blame the guy for objecting if that roadway WAS actually within the survey lines of the lot he bought years ago. But it did seem like a mountain and molehill situation. It's not like they were using a backhoe to trench up the path to his driveway and keep him  from getting in and out for hours. They had a little tracked thing that looks like one of those bomb disposal robots you see on TV shows, and the only evidence it left behind was a thin line in the dirt. Probably blocked his driveway for about 30 seconds.

Wordle 1781 Hint

Hint: It holds the door shut.

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First Letter: L

Wordle 1780 Hint

Hint: What you are when you wake up in the morning.

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First Letter: R

Hypothesis: If I Don't Have Time, Just Add Weight

Around the beginning of March, I decided to re-commit to walking 10,000 steps a day.

Around the beginning of April, I jumped that up to 11,000 steps a day.

Good results so far. Slightly lower blood sugar and my weight is down by several pounds.

But for the beginning of May, I reconsidered the "add an extra thousand steps a day" formula.

Steps are time, and I already commit around an hour a day specifically to walking (above and beyond the steps I take in the normal course of getting things done). Usually in two 30-minute dedicated outings.

Unless I considerably pick up my pace, which is already fairly brisk, there's a limit to how many steps I can take in x minutes. Once I get below 200 pounds for the first time in 25 years or so, I may try to work some running into my daily step count, but between bad knees and an old lower back injury, I have to get the weight off first for it to be doable.

If I could figure out a way to get work done while walking, heck, I'd walk all day. It's been a few years since I did more than 15 miles or so at a stretch, but I'm sure I still could. I found out in the Marine Corps that I'm a genetic freak in that respect. If I'm in anything approaching good shape I can start walking and not stop until told to, with as much weight as I can carry hanging off me. But absent some kind of cool augmented reality glasses with a bespoke work setup built into them, when I'm walking, all I can really do is, um, walk.

So instead of taking more steps per day, I'm sticking to 11,000 steps ... while carrying  barbell plates in a backpack on those dedicated walks.

Just got back from the first, one-hour, 2.x-mile test walk with 22 pounds (four 2.5kg plates) in the pack. Not only am I none the worse for wear, but the weight tends to correct my posture such that my back is hurting less than usual (good) and my quads are complaining some (good).

Wordle 1779 Hint

Hint: Edemic in appearance.

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First Letter: P

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #17

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." (Taoism, Tao Te Ching 64)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

A well-known one, and an obviously true one. You can't finish anything without starting it. You can think, dream, plan, but until you actually do the things, starting with the first thing, the things won't get done. I can't think of anything more to say about that, or imagine anything that anything else needs to be said.

Wordle 1778 Hint

Hint: When you go somewhere and take something with you.

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First Letter: B 

I Expect Some Kind of Combat in the Persian Gulf Today

I could be wrong, of course, but here's why I expect it:

• While the war was wholly, completely, and unquestionably illegal from the start absent a congressional declaration of war, there's a fiction under the "War Powers Resolution" through which a president gets a 60-day free pass to do whatever he wants.
• That 60-day period ends today.
• The administration is claiming that the 60-day clock stopped with the declaration of a ceasefire.
• It's in the Iranian regime's interest to establish that no, the clock hasn't stopped because combat operations are ongoing, and the best way to do that is to do something requiring a US military response.

Wordle 1777 Hint

Hint: Consider solving today's Wordle a feather in your cap.

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First Letter: P

Thanks For Asking! -- 05/01/26

No lines, no reservations required, no waiting ... just ask me anything in comments and I'll answer in, or linked to from, comments (applies to regular people -- pseudonymous trolls/bots are required to ask interesting questions to get answers).