Master of disaster and the birds don't care

It has been an interesting day, a mixed blessing. Leslie bought me some Smuckers grape jelly and I hollowed out a half an orange, filled it with the jam and stuck it on a metal point on my bird feeder last night. The hooded orioles went crazy for the stuff. When I went outside this morning they were on the tree next to the feeder.

I ended up buying an oriole feeder on Amazon with spare credit card points. Going to take a while to get here. Will try to snap some pictures of the beautiful birds in the interim.

These are pictures of a little bird that are called scaly breasted munia. It is a finch, first described in 1758 by Linnaeus. They only started hanging around my feeder last year.

Natives of India and southeast Asia, they started to be seen in California sometime in the 1980's. Very cute little guys.

Everybody is happy in the yard, including the lesser goldfinches.

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I went into work this morning hoping to cut through my application nightmare on disaster relief. I had no success with unemployment. The EDD online portal asks you for your last W-2 and I haven't had one since 1993. So even though they now are supposed to grant benefits to the self employed, the web portal simply isn't set up to. So I will wait, hopefully someone is fixing the problem. I know I am not the first but I dashed off a couple letters to them anyway.

I managed to get ahold of someone at SBA who knew what they were talking about. The good news is that she found my EIDL submission, which had a first number that started with 2. The bad news is that it was never assigned to a lender and was now effectively moot. So nice to talk to someone in government who was knowledgable and that I could rely on, for better or for worse.

So the very nice woman held my hand and directed me to the proper place and I refiled my application, which now starts with the number 3. (If you filed previously and have a number starting with 2, forget about it. It is dead. refile) Here is the app link. She was emphatic in making sure that I wrote the number down that I was assigned at completion because there is no email confirmation this time (not like the last one did any good.) You give them your banking and routing number and presto, supposedly if all is copacetic, money ends up in your bank account. Warning: You cannot file both EIDL and the PPP at the same time. One or the other according to the rep. Try it and you might just get them both tossed. 

Anyway hoping someone out there can benefit from my troubles and tribulations. That is why I am recounting my journey. So now I am refiled, have my number, have my fingers crossed and we will all see what happens.