And please don’t stop (or worse, slow down*) for bikes.
You’re treating us like we’re fragile children, when we’re tougher than you are… (are you courting death at every intersection? Not in your Suburban Assault Vehicle, you ain’t). You’re holding up a dozen cars here, all for one guy on a bike.
*But the real problem is that we bicyclists can also do geometry in our heads and plan ahead. We’ve got our lane changes timed perfectly. If you DON’T hit your brakes in the middle of a straightaway, a biker can slip behind you in time to have plenty of room in front of that BulgiemobileXXL behind you, and the MuscletangGT in the next lane.
I almost yelled at a Not That Good Samaritan today: “WHY did you slow down? Dammit, I had the vectors all figured out, but now you’re suddenly going half the speed limit (because… you’re afraid of a bicycle? Or you need your Good Deed For The Day?)… and I’m in danger of being creamed by Joe Bulgie, who has NEVER slowed down for anyone!”
You have ONE job behind that wheel. Drive your car!"
To be fair, by me there are many ‘aggressive cyclists’ who, on two lane county highways with a double yellow line, ride right in the middle. Legally you can’t pass them and they passive-aggressively know this and enjoy taking their time at 20 MPH while leading an ever growing train of cars. Some will even raise one arm to make a signal:
My mom was a bus driver growing up. Her number one tip for defensive driving was to be predictable. Follow the rules because everyone else is EXPECTING you to follow the rules. Don’t be “nice” when you don’t have to.
My rant for today is that my son has a diaper rash and he’s absolutely miserable and I have to get him to a doctor again probably. This poor guy. On top of that, I missed a pump session and man this cow really needs to be milked.
Another rant - all of my rants will be baby related because I just had a baby and that is just about all I can think about.
ETA: @eenerms Oh no! Cancer is the worst. The actual worst. Not sarcastic worst.
The “Honey you’re going deaf” argument re: TV volume.
Her POV: “I come down to the kitchen every morning and when I turn on the TV, the sound is blaring. Are you deaf?”
My Response: First, this is the only TV in the house I can use. The one in the Livingroom has all of the kids gaming systems hooked up/linked to it and at this point it has become Borg Technology that I won’t touch. “Dad broke the TV again, I can’t play my ( fill in the blank ) game system.” I can’t use the bedroom TV because you always walk in and change the channel to Hallmark ( spit on the ground ). This is the only TV in the house I can use and it doesn’t even have a full cable box; just the free one that they provide.
Many of the programs that I like to watch are now limited to obscure channels. At night, those channels broadcast at low volume, so in order to hear them, I have to turn up the volume. In the morning, they have newer programs… and they broadcast them at a higher broadcast volume… so what was normal volume last night… rocks the house in the AM."
Basically I get called either deaf or a liar ( no explanation of why I can hear the TV at normal volume at dinner time). Eventually, I get pissed and explain that I really don’t appreciate her Gaslighting technique … and that if she’d ever watch a program that isn’t on Hallmark (spit) or CNN, maybe she could see ( or hear ) for herself.
Further, I’m almost Positive that John Oliver did a show about this and that I’d be very happy to see if I could research that and find her a link as obviously it takes a different voice to slowly, clearly, and succinctly explain to her why this happens… and in a way that could penetrate all but the largest clusters of calcium based biomatter.
Oddly enough, that did Not woo her away from The Hallmark Channel (spit).
I’m in the same boat as you, and it took years, but I finally learned to …
(everyone ready to take notes?)
… turn the volume down on the TV before I turn it off.
.
A corollary:
If I turn on closed captioning… which I do after The Spouse goes to bed and I’m watching at half volume (to be considerate)… I turn it off before shutting down.
Otherwise, when she turns the TV on and gets unwanted text, she’ll ask “Do you really need captions? Are you going deaf?”
I’m losing my hearing, and I acknowledge that fact. She’s losing her hearing but refuses to acknowledge it. She is the one that turns on closed captioning.
When my brother used to visit, he always turned the tv volume down to barely audible, if at all. To him, this was normal. It seems that in his apartment complex, people had been complaining about loud tv sound, so everyone had to turn theirs down. Now, I’ve lived in plenty of apartments, and none of them had walls made of tissue paper. But that’s the way he was.
Both of the people I live with are deaf. Hubs has hearing aids, which helps, but Mom doesn’t. She is thinking about it though.
I get so sick of having to repeat myself over and over. While I know that they are handicapped, I still get impatient. There is also the part about my 5 month old kitten having a better short term memory than Mom because she’s in her late 80’s and hubs because he’s a dumbass anti-vax idiot who lost a bunch of his compos mentis while he was sick.
His dick still doesn’t work either, which is OK by me because I’m still mad that he did this to himself. (COVID) I have a plug in vibrator, I don’t need him OR batteries!
I actually came to rant about people putting me in charge of things. Or me allowing myself to be sucked in. I got sucked into being a Nextdoor mod and now the lead won’t let me quit because she can’t get anyone else and cries if I try. Do I put my big girl panties on and walk away, or do I console her and agree to keep being a mod for 6 months while she finds someone else. I’m almost as big a dumbass as hubs.
Godammit, Alaska Air has changed our flight schedule.
There’s a terrific, smaller airport in Everett, Washington, which is awesome for us. Our favorite vacation areas are nearby, and we can fly directly from San Jose to Everett. It’s very stress-free.
I made the reservations a month or two ago (using flight credits we had from flights canceled a year ago due to Covid). I just got an email from Alaska saying that they had changed it so that we had to do layovers on both legs of the flights. San Jose to San Diego to Everett on leg 1, and Everett to Boise to San Jose on leg 2.
This is a big nope. We’re getting up there in years and we’re not going to sit around in distant airports during what should have been a simple two hour flight. Once the caffeine kicks in I have to get on the phone to Alaska and change the flights so that we fly into and out of Seatac instead, which is the only way to get nonstop flights. A Seatac arrival then means we have to drive through the greater Seattle area to get up north to the Skagit Valley. Gah. I hate huge seething airports and long drives on city freeways.
FWIW, if you ever want to debunk that “Vogue wouldn’t put Melania on the cover” story, the truth is they wouldn’t put her on the cover because she refused to sit for an interview or allow the magazine to write a profile on her. She just wanted her picture on the cover and a fashion spread.
If she had agreed to be profiled, like every other First Lady, she would’ve been on the cover, like every other First Lady.
This was discussed in Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s book Melania and Me.
Drivers who think the US highways are the Autobahn. In the 70’s the left hand lane was for passing and there was so little traffic this was possible. Those days are gone. It’s now 3 or more lanes of heavy traffic.
Yesterday there was a tanker truck carrying flammable liquids. He was staying in the left land and doing 7-10 miles over the speed limit. Not the brightest thing to do but hardly holding up traffic.
Enter a late model Impala that was late for the Indy 500. He had to blow by the semi at 80-90 mph and pull in close to the truck’s front bumper to show his displeasure. He almost lost control of his car because of the hard maneuver. You could see the body of his car shift out of CG and he had to swerve jerkily to compensate for it. Of course he had to flip the truck driver off. He then proceeded to weave in and out of traffic at the same speeds.
I hope Karma catches up to this person before he causes 11,000 gallons worth of fuel truck to roll over the median barrier and kill a gazillion people.
Or in my case the bicycle cops riding side by side taking up both lanes of the main one-way westbound heavily traveled road through downtown… when there’s a perfectly good bike lane!
Almost 3 weeks since the complex pool was closed down (due to a car driving into it) and nothing has been done, repair-wise. Well, not nothing exactly…they got the car out in about 40 minutes. But the fencing is still in the water and the dirt and engine crud is still sitting on the bottom of the pool. No word from the apartment manager whatsoever, which is very odd and disappointing.
I was making habernero jam and handling one of the hot jars when the base blew out and dumped really quite hot jam all over my hand, so fuck you thermal stresses in glass.