Yep, we even have a dog!
Well, hell. After feeling all smug and stuff about reading about tow truck drivers, I somehow managed to click the switch to turn my headlights on and walked away from my car. When I went back out, the battery was dead and my stupid ignition thingy wouldn’t give my key back so I could open the trunk and have a friend give me a jump. Couldn’t use the button because it was locked up as well. Rather than make my friends go home and come back I was all “No, its fine, I’ll just call XXX company, they will be here post haste.” Yeah, I waited for an hour and then it took him half an hour to get my car started.
Bonus points if it’s an old hound dog. 
Does he have to be called Red?
Her whole life is a country song. He was a raging alcoholic (been on the recovery side for about 30 years now), divorced her mother, blamed his children, and went on about a ten year binge, married a couple of other women so he’d have a place to stay for the winter, estranged our sister when she tried to talk some sense to her, blaming her for estranging his own children. She and her brothers grew up in a shack with no running water (he hauled water in jerry cans from a local river), and then later in a finished basement with no house above it (water came from a well that the basement had been built over).
One of his boys became a druggie and a scam artist, the other joined the military to get as far away as possible. His daughter ended up marrying a decent guy and became a born-again Christian. Then her mother, who had finally found happiness with a good man, died of aggressive cancer. He and his daughter have reconciled to the point of speaking regularly over the years, but it’s a tenuous relationship. The oldest son never came back, the other one was on friendly terms for awhile, but has walked away. He finally married his current wife, who got sober with him after drinking with him for a few years, and she managed to poison the well between him and our parents and now between him and me. When our sister was dying, he couldn’t be bothered to come to the hospital, nor did he give two shits when my mother was dying of cancer.
I’d say she could cut several albums and still have material left over.
Yes, but the dog? The one in the parking lot? Priorities, man!
j/k I don’t give two shits about Chefguy’s sister-in-law’s (right?) dog. 
The dog has decided that a life as a wandering troubadour would be preferable to living in that house, packed its doggy guitar and hopped a freight for Wasilla.
This is more “amused resignation” than ranting but what the hell. The in-laws are in town for a few days (always a good start) and, while they’re nice enough, they’re convinced that their little daughter is the most overworked mommy in the world while I sit around drinking beer and doing nothing.
So this morning I get up early and do the usual routine: make oatmeal, get clothes out, iron them, wake the kids up, get them dressed, rustle them downstairs, feed them, brush their hair and take the older one’s temperature as he’s not feeling well (99.5). The wife is still getting up.
With one kid sick and the other one going to a special late class, I don’t need to drive them to school today so, amazingly, I can go to work early and catch up on things. It’s going to be a hot one, so I put sunscreen on the kids but since they’re still eating I have to wait for them to finish and wash their faces before doing anything above the shoulders.
Here’s the amusing part… As I’m leaving, I tell my mother-in-law that the kids have sunscreen everywhere except their face and necks and she replies…
“I know. I saw her put it on them.”
Somehow, she’s convinced herself that it was her daughter who was doing all the work. It doesn’t really bother me but it’s just so bizarre to know that there are people who can so easily rewrite reality to fit their predefined view of the world.
Hope you and your wife are on the same page, then (re: who does “more” work around the house) since that’s the kind of thing that could easily morph into HER feeling the same way. Other possibilities include that she already feels that way, bitches to them about it (“I do *everything *around here! I swear, RadioWave is the laziest dad!”) and now they’re validating and reflecting that back to her.
This is half rant, half funny.
I like my neighbor a lot. He’s a crazy old man, but he’s damn interesting and has a lot of experience in just about everything. But goddamnit, he just showed up to wave a dead turkey at me. A really big, dead turkey.
I’m working from home and dropped the phone to answer his pounding at the door only to find him standing there with a giant dead bird - about 30 pounds. He was really, really proud of it. Part of me is thinking, “What the fuck?”, but part of me was trying really hard not to start laughing hysterically.
I had an evening out with some other moms. More like acquaintances than friends, but there is one mom I especially like. The evening was mostly good, except for the part of the conversation where all of the other moms agreed that they never let their kids out of their sight when outside because some stranger could come by and snatch them. The horror, there are actually parents who let their kids roam around outside, alone!! And we’re not talking about toddlers, we’re talking about early elementary school kids here. One mom said that she wasn’t even comfortable letting her kid go over to anther kid’s house! I was good and kept my mouth shut and didn’t mention that I let my third and fifth graders play unsupervised in the neighborhood for hours at a time. They probably would have fainted in horror. I try not to be judgy of other moms, but if someone criticizes my parenting choices out loud I feel perfectly OK with silently judging them.
Thinking about this is depressing - the primary reason I don’t let my almost 9 year old kid walk to his friend’s house (around the corner and down the street - less than 1/4 mile away) is because I’m worried that some “concerned neighbor” will have my kids taken away for negligence. I let him and his five year old sister play alone in our common area behind the house all the time. The five year old must remain within eyesight of the house within the backyard fence, but my son has more leeway. Much to my relief, most of my son’s friend’s parents do the same thing. Thinking of how little freedom my kids have compared to how much freedom I had at the same age is depressing.
Day 12 of serious neck and left shoulder pain. Taking 6-800mg of Ibuprofin + 10mg Flexerill every 8 hours plus a single Vicodin to let me sleep. Pretty much shaking with pain and nausea every minute today, even on those meds.
I have seen two different Chiropractors and walked-in to my doctor’s office on Thursday. No end in sight. Have another appt for Thursday where we’ll discuss whether or not an MRI is needed.
Most of the kids in my neighborhood are allowed to roam freely…they seem to spend their time playing chicken in the street with the construction trucks, riding their (expensive-looking) bikes down to the culvert, trying to climb over the fence to access the pool*, or intimidating the hell out of younger kids who want to use the playground equipment.
*I know it’s hot, but that water is NASTY. What kind of water treatment schedule is in place for an outdoor pool during the off season?
I wish folks would learn that it is a bad idea to give up the right of way in traffic, and it is an especially terrible idea to do so when you don’t control all of the cars around you…if you are on a multi-lane road, you might kill someone by kindly waving them through.
I was glared at by more than one kind person today in heavy oncoming traffic who stopped and tried to let me make my left turn to a side street. The problem they didn’t see was that they had another lane of traffic to their right (hidden from my sight). There was no way I was going to go through that gap based on their frantic hand gestures.
Not really…
…it’s so you can spend endless time and money fixing things.
Friday morning I went to dump some errant cat leavings in the litter box in the basement and found a quarter inch of water in it, far more than even two cats can produce. It was a pinhole leak in the hot water line.
Thankfully my contractor friend was available and he came over and fixed it over lunch and didn’t want to be paid for it (excellent contractor and even better friend).
Today I was in the downstairs bathroom when I noticed water all over the toilet lid. Slightly unclean water. The ceiling was falling apart and … I went upstairs to check for standing water in that bathroom but found none. Then I flushed the toilet and returned to the downstairs bathroom. Sure enough, it was raining filthy toilet water. The wax ring had apparently been breached.
My contractor friend came with his partner and they fixed everything. This time a bill will definitely be coming my way. But not until after their second visit on Thursday to replace the downstairs bathroom ceiling.
Notice how two unrelated water disasters happened a weekend apart. That’s what happens when you are homeowner. That’s what a house is for.
But of course you can fill it with books, girls, and kitties too.
Yes houses should be properly filled with cats and books! Sadly, they come with problems.
My rant isn’t so much of a rant but a laugh. I had my yearly physical last week. Got the call about my blood work today. I’m not eating enough SALT. Seriously, my doctor told me to eat more salt. I’ve been laughing for hours over this. If you folks knew how badly I eat, you would be laughing too. I texted hubs and his response was !!! seriously, with the way you salt your food!?! Goes back to lurking and laughing.
Why would you have a house if not to fill it with books and cats? My books won’t all fit in a small apartment, and some apartment buildings don’t allow cats.
OK, maybe I could see having a house if you have no cats but have kids, and they each need their own bedroom, and of course you need an office to have your computers in. Having kids and no books should be grounds for calling child protective services, so we won’t discuss that permutation.
Arrrgh. I found an article online, from a satire news site. I thought the article was really good, as it made an important point about a topic I feel strongly about. So I shared it on Facebook… and a couple of my friends started taking it literally. 
(More a minor annoyance than something I’m full-out angry about.)
Your next FB post needs to be this definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
See if they get it. 